Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

    Nothing has happened around here. Nobody wants to hear me talk about repainting the house and I don’t want to remember it. I’ve already used a couple of entries to talk about my writing and mention my novel, so that’s done. The supreme court supported some interesting legislation legalizing gay marriage and supporting the Affordable Health Care Act, but I’m sure that if you wanted to hear about that you could got to your favorite media political pundits for biased opinions, rage, and/or crowing. Whether it’s a hissy fit or gloating depends upon whether you watch FOX or MSNBC.
    That stuff gets old. It’s the same thing every time. There’s little news reporting and lots of opinion and speculation and you can always guess what someone’s going to say so long as you know which channel you’re on. What I’ve found with almost everything in the entertainment industry, and yes that includes the news, is that the providers are always subscribing to their audience expectations and the audience expects tropes and stereotypes. Understanding that and you can predict almost every movie, show, and book plot and can anticipate what each political commentator is going to spew. It’s a little boring.
    Which is why I was overjoyed to read a book this week that at least tried to be unique. Author of “The Night Angel” trilogy and, most recently, the “Lightbringer” tetralogy, Brent Weeks has a problem with editing. I’ve read four of his books now and each of them has an almost embarrassing number of grammatical errors and various instances of awkward syntax. Regardless of those, he is still a fantastic storyteller and does a wonderful job of fiddling around with fantasy hero tropes. In “Night Angel” he creates a character who is born into extreme poverty and crime, commits murder to protect his friends and regain some dignity, and then becomes a mercenary assassin. Then the story becomes something similar to the typical redemption plot line with some fun magic and great plot twists thrown in.
    What I’ve found that Weeks does exceptionally, however, is showing how children are shaped by their traumatic experiences and how those determine who they become as adults. His thoroughly damaged childhood characters became thoroughly damaged adults. They either have an extreme drive to overcome their difficulties or have almost debilitating fears and obligations that they must uphold from deals made in a desperate adolescence. Sometimes they have both. Sometimes they become monsters. Sometimes you can’t even tell when a person is a “good guy” because the things that they do are so immoral or horrifying that passing a single judgement on them is impossible, even if those actions are entirely understandable and sometimes necessary.
    I’ve only recently finished “The Black Prism,” the first of the “Lightbringer” series, and I’m already having a ball. Okay, the syntax is still annoying, but he’s learning. I’d certainly hope he would by his fourth book anyhow. I think that he’s also picked up on how well received his stories about corrupted youths were. So here we go again with another story that begins with a loss of innocence. Okay, it’s more like the innocence was dragged out into the street, forced to watch everything from torture to a porno, set on fire, trampled, and then left out to dry with the crows pecking at its kidneys. We saw that sort of merciless realism with “The Night Angel” trilogy except that this time, instead of having the protagonist become a freakin’ magic slinging ninja, Weeks flipped the hero trope on its head.
    In the acknowledgements section at the end of the book, Weeks said that before he started writing a friend of his had said offhand how interesting he thought a book might be if “the [fantasy hero trope] was turned into an [inverted hero trope].” In the first “Night Angel” book we watched an eight or ten year old boy grow to fourteen and then eighteen in the course of about ten chapters, becoming a morally conflicted killing machine and then an amoral killing machine. In “The Black Prism” we see a fifteen year old, obese, illegitimate son (literally a fat bastard) go from being a disappointing, disdained, and ignored village child to being the disappointing, disdained, and coveted bastard of an emperor while carrying an obsession with vengeance and having no combat or political skills whatsoever. The book takes place over the course of maybe a week or two and, while he certainly is heroic in many aspects, he’s not a warrior and not what most people would think of as a hero. He’s not Samwell Tarly either and is neither timid nor weak. He’s a screwup, but he’s tough. He’s not strong, but he’s smart. He doesn’t have much in the way of friends, nor is he good as making them, and mouths off at almost everyone who could help him. To top it off, his need for vengeance, his despair, and his desire to prove himself to his new father force him to exceed anyone’s expectations, especially his own. Even so, he’s still generally pretty useless in most cases and is beaten, insulted, and nearly killed repeatedly. The thing is, his character paired with the empire’s machinations made for a fantastic story!
    I often hear readers of such stories complaining about authors like George R.R. Martin putting their fictional children through horrors. Actually, more often than not those who condemn such authors are the people who have heard about a story but haven’t bothered to read it themselves. Typical. Anyhow, the point is that these people become enraged when they read about a child being tortured for sadistic pleasure or babies being murdered to preserve a political succession. That’s the point though. The point is to evoke rage and horror. It’s supposed to be sick. Why do you think that they put The Massacre of the Innocents into the Bible? It’s supposed to manipulate your emotions one way or another. The reason that these people get angry at the authors, however, is that they don’t want to believe that this sort of thing happens in the real world too. It hits a little too close to home.
    Perhaps it’s not something that we tend to see often in middle class or wealthy parts of the world, particularly not in America. Even so, I would be willing to bet that similar atrocities happen across the globe. We get exercised over the child labor laws (or lack thereof) in southeast Asia and genocides in Rwanda for good reason. These things actually happen and we feel rightfully sickened by them. At the same time, why do you think we put that stuff on the news repeatedly and make movies out of it? It’s sensational. It’s emotional. It’s horrifying. Call it what you like, be it realism or barbarous voyeurism. Deny it all you like, but you know in your gut that these things make fantastic stories.
    Some people are drawn to “Saving Private Ryan” because it’s gory and violent and violence is simple. You kill someone and your problem is over. It’s easier than real life. However some people, whether they realize it or not, are drawn to it to see Tom Hanks struggle to hold himself together and then are fascinated to see how Matt Damon turns out in the end.
    Horror and conflict and scars make for interesting characters, characters worth writing about and whose stories merit retelling. It makes for good stories because damaged and broken people are real and you never know how they will react and grow if the story is told well. If that’s not your kind of story, fine. Just don’t start damning other people’s storytelling. Unless you want me to start trashing you for watching “Jersey Shore” and “White Chicks” that is.

Song of the Week: If that blog got a little morbid, here’s something to cheer you up! More cynical realism!

The World Makes Me Sick. Or Maybe It’s The Barbecue.

    Over the last few days I’ve had the usual post-birthday question “So what does it feel like being 20?” asked of me dozens of times. For the last few days I’ve answered that it feels like my stomach is trying out for the US gymnastics team.
    My birthday was the usual non-event. I don’t really pay attention to it myself and try to avoid the subject with my friends until after the fact because the pampering and attention feels bizarre. I even made the mistake of inviting a friend to sleep over the previous night, hoping that he wouldn’t notice my birthday. Of course, I forgot about Facebook’s notifications and his first words in the morning were “Hey, Happy Birthday man!” Curse you Zuckerberg. So, after hanging out with various friends and tunneling my way through a stack of barbecued ribs, I retired and did my usual geeky thing. A couple of days later I met up with my friend Billy, the only other American who had attended Ellesmere during my gap year in England. He’d finished his exams, graduated the school, and, wouldn’t you know it?, still lived near Boston! We met to go bouldering, which is a fancy way of saying indoor rock climbing without a harness and often climbing with your back parallel with the impact mat on the floor only fifteen feet below.
    He too asked me the question. “So, dude, what does it feel like to be twenty?”
    Of course he asked this while I was dangling from an overhang and swinging my body to try to get my legs back up to something I could press them into. Okay, “swinging” makes it sound more dignified than the flopping fishy movements I was making before I dropped flat on my back with a yelp.
    Billy nodded. “So that’s what a twenty year-old is like. Majestic.”
    I lay my head back and laughed as I tried to get my fingers to close into fists. My forearms probably didn’t have enough strength to let me hold my kitten by the time we left. He was way more experienced and his arms were sore too. At least my hands weren’t covered in blisters like his were.
    When I finally got home that night all I wanted was to sleep. I then realized that I’d only had a couple cups of yogurt to eat that day. Normally I would take full advantage of my voracious appetite’s absence and head to bed. Instead I decided to nourish myself out of respect to my body once I showered. As the hot water washed away some of my fatigue and weariness, I noticed that I felt kind of chilly, even though the bathroom could have doubled as a sauna from the hot water. I wrapped myself in a robe and by the time I was done with half a rack of leftover ribs I was ready to puke.
    I wore a sweatshirt to bed and used my bathrobe and an extra blanket as additional insulation when I noticed that my shivering wasn’t stopping. Long story short, chills, aches, and the nightmares that have been plaguing me every night for the last few weeks made for a fun evening. The next day I got a call from my Nana and I got the same question again. When another sharp pain had passed and I finished my impression of a Picasso portrait, I told her much the same as I’ve told you. So far, being twenty feels like being at sea. I couldn’t even think straight for most of Friday, so writing of any kind was out of the agenda.
    Miraculously I felt better again for the most part by nightfall and the next day I was goofing around outdoors again. However my appetite has not entirely returned and if I take so much as one bite over my limit I’m likely to hurl again. I’ve made sure to treat toilets, sinks, and other such receptacles with increased deference to keep relations friendly just in case I need to give them a very sudden and personal hug.
    Of course the nausea wasn’t helped much by the South Carolina shooting a few days ago. I’d love to see the right wing try to claim that racism isn’t an issue anymore after that massacre. Even John Stewart couldn’t bring himself to make any sort of joke to help people cope via gallows humor. He made a good point during that episode and now I’m wondering what the point is of going after ISIS or anyone else overseas when we are doing this sort of damage to ourselves. Are we bombing them in case they decide to attack if there happens to be anything left of us when we’re done over here? Good job doing the terrorists’ work for them, people. Good job.
    As if I wasn’t confused enough with my own career choices and disgusted already with much of American culture, this last bit has reminded me to seriously reconsider moving to England for good. As if the avaricious political agendas, ignorance promoting cultural figures, and some peoples’ asinine obsession with political correctness wasn’t enough, racism is the cherry-bomb on top of the gunpowder sundae. Even if I wasn’t sick my stomach would still be doing flips.
    The thing is that I can’t think of a thing we can do to remedy the situation aside from improving our education system and preventing racist or religious legislation from being implemented until people start cluing into the fact that black people deserve the same respect that every other human being deserves. While punitive laws like forcing the south to remove its Confederate flags and renaming its racially-biased streets would give the country a political and physical face-lift, it would also provoke retaliation and resentment. On the other hand, trying to be patient seems to be rewarded with more deaths like those we saw in Charleston on Wednesday. Gun control won’t fix the issue. Even if it lowers the body count some, fanatics will still find ways to kill people.
    During the shooter’s hearing, the family members of the deceased said through their tears and bitterness that they forgave the boy who killed their loved ones. Normally I would use their example as a shining beacon of what we need to practice to heal divisive relations. However, while forgiveness and understanding work between two wronged parties such as in a war, I doubt its efficacy in the face of maniacs. Victims on both sides of a war will feel rage because they have lost their homes or their fathers or their pride. Forgiveness and the understanding brought by an effort to learn about the other side’s perspective works in those situations because war is often brought about by rational, albeit morally questionable reasons. The rage can be assuaged because both sides can come to empathize and lay aside their swords so that no one else has to suffer a dead father or a burned home.
    Zealots don’t have that capacity. They are uncompromising, unrepentant, and desire to inflict misery to sate their own irrational obsessions. They might disguise the effort to others or even to themselves as a reaction to some imagined sleight. At their core, though, they understand that they hate a people not for what they have done, but for who they are. They dehumanize their enemy and for them it becomes an issue of “what” those of the enemy are. They do not even consider their targets worthy of compassion or reason or anything more than what a beast would get from a hunter or zoo keeper.
    I want to believe that the remarkable forbearance shown by the members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is the most effective way of handling the larger issue. I think that it is the right way of handling it, but I do not think that it is the best way or that it will even work. I fear that this display of mountainous generosity might only be perceived by the fanatics as weakness.
    So, to answer the million dollar question of the week “What does it feel like to be twenty years old?,” it feels like I’ve been brought into a world with a lot of potential and beauty in it and it feels like a lot of people are using that potential to burn and mar the beauty.


Song of the Week: An old one, but a good one.

Has Everyone Lost Their Minds?

    There are some things in this life that I will never understand. I’ll never understand the nature of the universe, the mind of a woman, or why I didn’t get my invitation to Hogwarts nine years ago. Most of all, I don’t understand how on earth “Mad Max: Fury Road” got a 98% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes!
    My father’s birthday was today and, after being subjected to the traditional song from a full café at lunch, he decided that we should go see this new film. He and I had read the rave reviews and promising ratings so we decided to give it a shot! After the sort of reviews “Ex Machina” had received and how spectacular that film was, we had high hopes and expectations. We were about fifteen minutes into the film before we found our hopes in a ditch, covered in petrol, and on fire.
    I’m a major fan of dystopian and sci-fi stories. “Blade Runner,” “Brave New World,” “1984,” you name it. If it’s dystopian, there will likely be something I can appreciate about it. The same held true for “Mad Max.” The concept is that the world was destroyed by at least one war, leaving the landscape barren, the people infertile, and everything ruled by essentially twenty year old Texans with Anglo-Australian accents. If everything were reduced to dust storms and toxic wastelands with some radioactivity thrown in for spice, I can definitely understand how the survivors would either be part of or subjugated by groups of vicious scavengers. As we saw with Afghanistan, if a war is brutal enough to kill off the majority of an adult male population (Afghanistan was left with the age of 14 for their average male after the US helped them kick the Soviets out), it leaves behind a country populated by angry boys with little guidance and lots of testosterone pumping into their systems as they hit the climax of their reproductive frenzy in their late teens and twenties. They are susceptible to whatever radical ideology promises glory and power because our base instinct is to gain those things and become alpha males.
    With that in mind, I could appreciate “Mad Max” because it appeared that the old generation was essentially gone and one of the remaining men had become a warlord who used a corruption of Viking mythology blended with modern, stereotypically American violent and consumerist culture to create an army of followers who worshiped him like a prophet or god. The art style followed suit as did some of the more ridiculous aspects of the movie, such as the heavy metal guitar player strapped to a moving platform of concert-grade speakers who was meant to pump up the young fighters. The film established fairly early on how everyone’s lives revolved around procuring gasoline and water, which was also appropriate considering how without cars there is no viable way of traversing a massive wasteland and, well, water is self-explanatory.
    After the world building and art style there is nothing worth observing in the film. There was no story! The reviews we read praised the film to the stars because it was a film with almost nonstop action and how there was so little dialogue to interfere with the violence. Well, guess what? There’s a reason why the plot pyramid was developed. You cannot have a story consist only of climactic events because it get’s boring after a while. I’m sorry, but nonstop action is not a good thing! Sure the special effects were cool, but after fifteen straight minutes of action not even ten minutes after the movie started I was considering leaving. To top it off, the film tried to cash in on sex appeal by creating the archetypal damsel in distress situation with a gaggle of scantily clad runaway “breeding” slaves. The first time you see the fugitive women they are washing themselves, despite how precious water is and how no one else in the film appears to have even heard the word “bath.” Naturally, they are also wearing little more than bandages over their more *ahem* ostentatious parts.
    When I saw that, I thought to myself Okay, I can understand the outfits because they were essentially sex slaves and would have been dressed by the warlord to appear as sexualized as he pleased. They’ll get more clothes in the next scene.
    They didn’t get more clothes. At all. Ever.
    There was little character development too. Almost none whatsoever in fact. The film actually had a handful of decent actors in it and one quite good actress who never got a chance to act. The plot, what little there was anyhow, also had enough holes in it to make swiss cheese reconsider its reputation. The only thing that kept me there was the thought It got such great reviews that it must get better, right? Heh heh. Wrong, boy.
    The thing is that I’m not even a professional film critic and I could tell that the film was awful. I’ve made a study of dystopian fiction on my own and I’m inundated with literature because I’m an English major, plus I’m a film student and know how to analyze a visual shot. I was doing my absolute best to find worth in this film, yet time and again I saw nothing that I hadn’t seen before that someone else had done better in one way or another. Heck, “The Scorpion King” and “300” had better stories than this and both of those were historically inaccurate and at least mildly racist.
    Which all begs the question “Why did this get such great reviews from the critics?” The audience on average enjoyed the film less, though they still gave it a 90% approval rating too. The critics are my usual go-to indicator of a film’s quality. Before this I’d only ever been led astray by them twice: Once for “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” which got a 92% despite being a boring and predictable film, and “Dracula Untold,” which got a 23% despite some decent acting, a great if understated vampire villain, some interesting cinematography, and just a touch of accurate historical references to boot. Even so, “Dracula” should have still been rated below a 70% and “Apes” should have been below an 85% if I were to be generous. “Mad Max” should not have even risen past a 50%. I get that things go wonky sometimes in popular culture, which is why I generally depend upon the critics. It is their job to look at a film from an objective, artistic standard and assess the piece’s cultural worth. I’ve been a little surprised by the critics before, but they really dropped the ball on this one.
    It’s not hard to make an action flick with a good story and interesting characters. I never thought I’d praise superhero movies before the new “Batman” and Marvel Studios films, but those are prime examples of action-based popcorn movies with some serious themes and conflicted characters while the stories aren’t especially original. Christopher Booker determined that there are only seven basic plots to begin with, so one cannot expect too much originality from anything to begin with. What makes a story good is how it’s told, the emotions it conveys, and how the characters grab your attention. It comes down to how humanity is presented.
    On the other hand, look at “Zombieland.” That was just a film that had a bunch of fun with killing zombies and making fun of the whole sub-genre. It didn’t pretend to be anything more than it was, yet still paced itself well and even had a scene that was a little touching. If a comedy about knocking off zombies can be good then “Mad Max” has no excuse for the atrocity that it has plastered across the big screen.

Song of the Week: The moment I left the theatre this song started playing through my head, probably just for the line in the third verse. You’ll probably know it when you see it. Anyhow, this is a good oldie. Enjoy!

Onward My Noble Steed!

    This summer I’ve alternated mostly between working on my book, reading, and goofing off with friends. I have to say that part of me is glad that my leg has prevented me from returning to my summer job. Okay, most of me. This is the most time I’ve had to develop my fiction since high school when I started writing my novel as a senior project. Besides, as a friend pointed out, this will be one of the last times in my life that I’ll have so much free time and so little to worry about. If I’m going to advance an ambition, now’s the time. However, I’ve found that a lot of my time has been sucked into the novel’s world building rather than the story writing specifically. I’m sure it’ll pay off later, more than it already has anyway, when I continue to write other stories set in this same fantasy world. I’m also a big enough nerd that the research and development involved might just be my favorite part of all of this right next to writing the rough draft.
    There’s that same thrill of creation almost untempered by technique or inhibition, like in writing a rough draft, except that world building can be as methodical or scattered as you want. As long as you’re focused enough to write notes and stay on pertinent topics, you can get away with it. I spent most of Wednesday measuring out the length of the continent that my stories occur on, equating latitudes between my imaginary places and real ones, which led me to research climate zones, which led me to plate tectonics, which led me to rivers, which led me to medieval sanitation. It’s kind of like that game you would play on Wikipedia whenever the teacher wasn’t looking. You know, the one where you and someone else starts on the same page and then have to get to another objective page as fast as possible by visiting other wikipedia pages. The difference is that there is no one set goal or page to find. There’s a whole slew of them. I’m a bit of a night owl to begin with, but working on my stories is one of the only things that will keep me awake until four in the morning. If it wasn’t for how annoyed my parents get at me for burning the midnight oil I’d probably stay up all night doing this. Maybe this manic drive to explore my subject explains why I like school so much.
    Nevertheless, it feels fantastic doing something that I’m passionate about again. I spent most of this last year just trying to get my feet underneath me at UMass and finding that I… didn’t exactly like where I was standing. I spent time writing when I was on holiday and that’s just not enough. For those of you who have something that you truly care about, you know what I mean.
    This vast disappointment with my lack of creative work sparked a realization. Well, my disappointment plus my parents’ insistence that I need to lighten up regarding school so that I can relax a little and, I don’t know, go to a party every now and again. Anyhow, I realized that, even if I had a perfect GPA and took twenty-five credits each semester, there is no guarantee that I would graduate at the top of my class. Even if that sort of thing did interest me, that will only be resumé worthy for my first employer. After that potential employers will only care about what sort of payed work I have accomplished. They won’t look at my university GPA. As long as I keep it above a 3.0 I’ll be fine. Instead I’ve been a little OCD about my classes. As much as I hesitate to be clichéd, I’ve been letting myself get caught up in the flow and haven’t had the presence of mind or the will to break out of it to do what matters to me. Sure I like academia, but I’m not going to be in school my whole life and there is something that I like better. I’m not the only one subject to this trend.
    Why not spend only an hour on each academic subject and spend the rest of the night doing what you love? If anything, the time you spend refining what you’re passionate about increases the likelihood of you finding a way to make a living at it. Pro athletes need to keep their grades up, but they spend every spare moment that they can steal training. Musicians sing or listen to music while they work and do everything they can to practice or improve. The same goes for any serious dreamer. If your dream and passion is going into investment banking, well good for you! That means that you get to blend your passion with as much academic work as you like while going down a path that will probably land you a job that will pay you handsomely. If I didn’t find things like insurance and office work to be so soul sucking I’d probably go into something like that as a second major myself.
    Despite this mad rush to work that somewhat resembles a cocaine addiction, even I recognize that everyone needs a chance to relax and let their brain go dormant for a while. At least, that’s the justification I use when I go meet with friends. I mean, there’s nothing to do in this town so mostly we just walk around and chat. It’s not like what’s drawing me from work is particularly magnetic. Still, it can be fun regardless. The last time we couldn’t think of anything to do my friend and I went to the beach with his younger sister. We walked out onto the jetty and sat on the rocks, looking at the far shore and grey, empty horizon while eating ice cream. It would have been a hypnotizing setting if the wind hadn’t felt like it was visiting from the Yukon. We didn’t stay long. So what did we do? Go to a movie? Fetch a pizza and soccer ball? Chill out in front of the TV? Of course not! We went to the playground at the other end of the beach because you’re never too old to ride a plastic chipmunk.

    Oh, and yes, I took that picture from on top of the swing set. Don’t ask me how I got up there. I’m not entirely sure myself. Did I ever mention that I’m afraid of heights?
    The next day I was given a refresher course on the difference between activities that are mind relaxing and those that are mind numbing. My parents are members of the town yacht club (apparently owning a boat is not a prerequisite) and they took me to a couple of events including a new members mixer… thing. Anyhow, I only went because there was the promise of food and the possibility of discovering someone my own age, a rarity in this town. I should have expected that everything they were serving was seafood and that no one my age in their right mind would willingly attend such an event. It’s just a bunch of people getting together and talking about boats or their families. I was out the door five minutes after I walked in and proceeded to wander around the village for the next hour or so. Indeed, I preferred limping around aimlessly to staying in that nautical den.
Note to Self: Never go to another yacht club event without bringing some sort of notepad and writing/sketching utensils.
    The only good that came out of these events for me was that my parents and I went to a workshop for designing a “burgee” to represent our family, except that instead of making a little flag we were painting a plaque, or planning to anyhow. That wooden plaque would be hung alongside the couple score of others that line the wall just underneath the club’s ceiling. Each picture and its symbolism is supposed to be unique and the function of a burgee is to identify the owner of a boat, as I understand it. So, bright eyed and bushy tailed, we went to this next event, each with some ideas of how we wanted to represent ourselves and we could not agree on a damned thing. Of course, we’re too polite of a family to openly say that we didn’t like each other’s designs.
    “Well…” My father looked at a draft that I’d sketched up at their behest a few years before. We’d been meaning to do this for some time. “It looks nice, but a burgee is supposed to fly from the mast of a ship and be identifiable from miles away through a telescope. I think this one’s a little complicated.”
    “Yeah, but we aren’t actually getting a flag,” I pointed out, “so we can do anything with the design that we like.” Besides that, one of the other club members said that a good number of these people use their burgee as a family crest of sorts. Looking around, I did happen to notice a few old heraldic crests from the late middle ages that families had inherited. Apparently some of these people even have those crests waving on their flag poles at home. I’m rather fond of flags so I got some grand idea of doing much the same and wanted to make a symbol that I would be proud to fly.
    “Why don’t we put some sort of music or skiing related thing in there?” My mother didn’t make many suggestions and, of three passive people in the argument, she was the quietest.
    “Well, music is kind of important to you and me at least,” I replied, “but it isn’t really integral to who we are. You certainly don’t ski often enough to say that skiing is part of what defines you.”
    “I’d sure like to make it what defines me!” We chuckled at that. Mother has been saying for years that if she wins the lottery she’ll buy a ski condo and do nothing else. She wants either that or to be reincarnated as a ski bum.
    I kept pushing for symbols involving the law or literature or medicine because, at least for Mother, medicine was part of what had made her who she is. At the end of the night we still had nothing concrete and my father had mostly resigned himself to letting my mother and me decide. He often does this when he’s fed up with indecision. By then he had started insisting that we put a horny toad on the flag to represent our origin in New Mexico and his thorny personality. We went back and I was determined to draft another design and had just finished the basics of a horny toad holding a plume quill pen when I realized that, yet again, I was allowing myself to do what was expected of me rather than writing. Not just the sketch, but the whole business. Whoops.
    It’s easy to get lost in a sketch and, long after I’ve graduated high school, I now understand the appeal of doodling in class. That kind of distraction does help alleviate stress and fatigue for me, even if I’m no good at it. The danger of any of these relaxing pastimes, recharging the batteries or not, is that they can prove too relaxing and consume all of the free time you need for working.
    I could equate this whole issue to a battle in my mind, but anything can be equated to a battle, so this isn’t the most imaginative analogy. Anyhow, the frenzy will drain you and if you push yourself too far you will be ineffective and could even get yourself hurt. When you reach that point is when you should retreat and lay down your sword and shield until you are recuperated. If you wait too long and hide in the rear lines as the battle progresses, however, you will miss your opportunity to strike and turn the tide in your favor.
    One of my favorite quotes about this is popularly attributed to Gothe: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
    I’ve got that quote sitting on a shelf above my desk, staring at me every morning and prompting me to action. Of course this is all easier said than done. That quote has been there for so long that it has become a part of the scenery, but every now and then the message sinks in. Every now and then I remember that, if anyone is going to claim their fate, they need to take the reigns and spur their mount in a cavalry charge of one against societal expectations, distractions, and their own inhibitions. Maybe that charge that you need to make every day, that little rally kindling the longer struggle, is enough to break the enemy lines and reach your goal. You never know until you mount up though.

 

Song of the Week: This is a pretty well known song I know, but it’s really applicable for this entry. Also, I’ve been on a big RWBY kick, so it was either something from that show’s soundtrack or this. Besides, this song’s a load of fun!