Speaking English in this house is generally a no-no. However, people have been getting away with it for years, especially since Gets-Away-With-It was born. (My sister's maiden name). However, when the prospect of losing the mother tongue becomes apparent, drastic measures are taken. Several years ago, I was commissioned to invent a fun way to punish language offenders. I came up with a silly game consisting of only one rule: If you say an English word and don't immediately correct yourself, you have to come up with five synonyms in Russian, or else meet the dreaded "or else." You also get a point. At the end of the week, the person with the most points gets put up for adoption or crossed out in the will or has to wash dishes or something.
The game was an instant hit, and my sister struggled a bit and got back into the speaking Russian mindset. Then the game was abandoned. (strings come in, melancholy and mysterious)
Well today, a comeback was staged. Seeing as everyone in this house is just full of English words to say, there was really no other choice, if only to give our ears a short respite. The effects were immediate: dinner was highly anomalous. Contrary to custom, it wasn't Michelle's story-telling hour. Instead, we were treated to horror-movie silence, with everyone poised to pounce on each other's throats at the first non-Slavic syllable. I'm now suffering from a mild case of middle-school gossip withdrawal and cat-got-your-tongue disease.
Actually, being a gentleman of outstanding wisdom who thinks before he opens his mouth, I pretty much rock at this game. The other three however, live a life full of adventure. To even things out, they united against me this evening and made me read The Time Traveler's Wife out loud to them till their scores didn't look so pitiful.
My sister's been assigned a project on a most fascinating and fresh topic - why tobacco is bad. She needs the whole shebang - poster, slogan, a pair of fresh crispy-black lungs, and of course an essay. She came to me for ideas, her own being full of blood and guts and oral cancer. After throwing up all over her shoes, I gave her a slightly dangerous suggestion.
I figured that everyone's going to be writing about tobacco staining the back of your head yellow and making your toenails become self-aware and about oral cancer of course; everyone's going to be dragging in their uncle Carl who talks through a harmonica in his throat and the infant corpses of their unborn brother or sisters. Everyone's going to be showing off their collection of family tumors, and in that case there's really just a slim chance that hers is the biggest, especially since we only patronize hard drugs like sugar in this house.
So I told her to write about how it's too expensive a habit to maintain. Now I'm thinking it may backfire. On her. It seemed like a good idea at the time but knowing the conservative audience (her teachers), I'm starting to think I just signed her up for her first mandatory appointment with a psychiastrist. Oh well, too late now, we're not due to talk for another month.
By the way, there's an excellent article on writing that everyone should read before they write anything at all: "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words."
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Monday, March 16, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Day 1 of Many
Day 1 Morning Meditation:
Day 1 is always interesting, unless it's day 1 of being in a coma. At 7:30AM I was wide-awake, though my alarm was set for 8:45AM. I decided to wait for it to ring, and got another hour of fitful sleep in exchange for the return of drowsiness. I washed up and went downstairs. There, Gene was already running around with an incense stick, muttering like a monk in a movie. Ellen was tucked in under eight blankets on the couch, with a blissfully sleepy expression. We got down to business.
Note: I've meditated before, for an hour at the longest, but never regularly. Nevertheless, I've already tried the exercises/techniques described.
An important idea that I've read about concerning meditating is to avoid judgment calls. Saying things like "this meditation sucked," or "this meditation rocked," or "it was soooo hard," or "that was much easier than usual" works against you. Instead, you describe it factually and without a rating/review. Something like "I meditated." So here's how it went:
Lots of thoughts. Perhaps a total of 15 minutes of the hour was spent in conscious meditation. The rest divided up between several modes of thinking. But first about the 15:
I spent part of the time being humble and reverent to a higher power. Today it was Buddha because he's one of the milder Gods. In reverence, I tried to surrender various parts of myself to his omnivorous diet. Lust, possessiveness, laziness, inertia, pessimism, attachment, self-love, self-doubt, self-image, etc. each with its own personal array of associations. Depending on the level of suffering each one associated with, the difference in feeling after I offered it up to Buddha for chomping was more or less tangible. It's an interesting exercise, especially because it is its own remedy for disbelief. Disbelief emerged every once in a while, and when I caught it early, I tried to surrender it. Sometimes though I fell into disbelief and lounged there for a while. Disbelief sure has some quality couches for lounging.
I also spent some time trying to simply be conscious. Simply in the sense of simply-free-your-mind-Neo-and-jump-off-the-building. I watched my thoughts from a distance, only getting possessed by one every two or three seconds, and for no longer than 5 minutes at a time. I also tried to monitor my breathing. When I count breaths, I get distracted by thoughts a lot less, but I feel like that's cheating. When I don't, I end up remembering 5 minutes later that I haven't been monitoring for the last 5 minutes.
And now the distractions:
1. Narrating - my inner writer literally describes everything in complete sentences out loud in my head. He's pretty much writing a blog entry about the meditation, during the meditation.
2. Getting distracted by swarming thoughts - I may be saying in my meditation: "and now, dearest Buddha, I surrender my love for couch-warming," and suddenly I'll be daydreaming about warming couches somewhere in sunny Northern NJ. I'll wake up from the reverie eventually, but that's precisely it - eventually.
3. Thinking about what I'll write about in my writing hour - getting good ideas for writing is the strongest distraction. I start thinking the plot through, the dialogues, etc., and discipline is floating somewhere very far away, or knocking and waving at me through an opaque sound-proof window of the wrong house.
No grades. Just the facts: 2/3 days down.
We watched Vicky Cristina Barcelona yesterday. In every scene, Gene insisted on unveiling the Woody Allen in every character. Scarlett Johansson would whine about something pseudo-intellectualy sexual and Gene would yell: "That's Woody Allen!" then reach into my computer screen and rip off her mask. People would be sexually frustrated and unhappy and Gene would yell "They're Woody Allens!" and they would instantly all drop pretenses and put on an additional 60 years of whining experience. It was a mess. I don't think I heard a single word said in the movie for all of the yelling and flying masks and pretenses.
More compliments in my direction arrived yesterday:
Madelyn: yeah, you just found i was funny
Madelyn: your good at noticing obvious stuff
Day 1 is always interesting, unless it's day 1 of being in a coma. At 7:30AM I was wide-awake, though my alarm was set for 8:45AM. I decided to wait for it to ring, and got another hour of fitful sleep in exchange for the return of drowsiness. I washed up and went downstairs. There, Gene was already running around with an incense stick, muttering like a monk in a movie. Ellen was tucked in under eight blankets on the couch, with a blissfully sleepy expression. We got down to business.
Note: I've meditated before, for an hour at the longest, but never regularly. Nevertheless, I've already tried the exercises/techniques described.
An important idea that I've read about concerning meditating is to avoid judgment calls. Saying things like "this meditation sucked," or "this meditation rocked," or "it was soooo hard," or "that was much easier than usual" works against you. Instead, you describe it factually and without a rating/review. Something like "I meditated." So here's how it went:
Lots of thoughts. Perhaps a total of 15 minutes of the hour was spent in conscious meditation. The rest divided up between several modes of thinking. But first about the 15:
I spent part of the time being humble and reverent to a higher power. Today it was Buddha because he's one of the milder Gods. In reverence, I tried to surrender various parts of myself to his omnivorous diet. Lust, possessiveness, laziness, inertia, pessimism, attachment, self-love, self-doubt, self-image, etc. each with its own personal array of associations. Depending on the level of suffering each one associated with, the difference in feeling after I offered it up to Buddha for chomping was more or less tangible. It's an interesting exercise, especially because it is its own remedy for disbelief. Disbelief emerged every once in a while, and when I caught it early, I tried to surrender it. Sometimes though I fell into disbelief and lounged there for a while. Disbelief sure has some quality couches for lounging.
I also spent some time trying to simply be conscious. Simply in the sense of simply-free-your-mind-Neo-and-jump-off-the-building. I watched my thoughts from a distance, only getting possessed by one every two or three seconds, and for no longer than 5 minutes at a time. I also tried to monitor my breathing. When I count breaths, I get distracted by thoughts a lot less, but I feel like that's cheating. When I don't, I end up remembering 5 minutes later that I haven't been monitoring for the last 5 minutes.
And now the distractions:
1. Narrating - my inner writer literally describes everything in complete sentences out loud in my head. He's pretty much writing a blog entry about the meditation, during the meditation.
2. Getting distracted by swarming thoughts - I may be saying in my meditation: "and now, dearest Buddha, I surrender my love for couch-warming," and suddenly I'll be daydreaming about warming couches somewhere in sunny Northern NJ. I'll wake up from the reverie eventually, but that's precisely it - eventually.
3. Thinking about what I'll write about in my writing hour - getting good ideas for writing is the strongest distraction. I start thinking the plot through, the dialogues, etc., and discipline is floating somewhere very far away, or knocking and waving at me through an opaque sound-proof window of the wrong house.
No grades. Just the facts: 2/3 days down.
We watched Vicky Cristina Barcelona yesterday. In every scene, Gene insisted on unveiling the Woody Allen in every character. Scarlett Johansson would whine about something pseudo-intellectualy sexual and Gene would yell: "That's Woody Allen!" then reach into my computer screen and rip off her mask. People would be sexually frustrated and unhappy and Gene would yell "They're Woody Allens!" and they would instantly all drop pretenses and put on an additional 60 years of whining experience. It was a mess. I don't think I heard a single word said in the movie for all of the yelling and flying masks and pretenses.
More compliments in my direction arrived yesterday:
Madelyn: yeah, you just found i was funny
Madelyn: your good at noticing obvious stuff
Monday, January 12, 2009
Spicing Up My Life. Quick! Where's The Water Fountain?
Today is one of those scary on-the-cusp days, sweet-taste-of-lazy-freedom before the sweet-taste-of-blood days. Tomorrow I'm starting another two 30-day trials.
The ones I'm doing currently are of course staying; there is as of yet no cancelling feature in my brain. But being on track with those lends a kind of excitement to my life, and also, they're just too easy after a couple of days. Crunches? Psh. No cursing? I'm cleaner than Sunday morning cartoons. Water was the biggest obstacle, but my method of dealing with it is working beautifully. For the first four days (I kept it a secret in case it didn't work), I'd drink water and accompany the action with appreciative moans: "Mmmm...this water...mmm...it's so good...mmm...wish I had more...no...must ration it...mmm...mmm...mmm." And now I think I've managed to convince myself, because water is actually starting to taste better! At least it doesn't taste like plastic anymore. Maybe it's just my tongue slowly being weaned off everything having sugar in it.
But onto tomorrow. Tomorrow, two new trials start, and they are both time-related.
The first is meditation. I will meditate for a total of an hour and a half every day - one hour in the morning, and half an hour in the evening. These will be done sitting with back erect (no snickering, this has been an adult blog for two days now), so as to promote the wakeful state, and will be flexible in theme. However, they will be personal growth meditations, not rated R back-of-the-eyelid movies. I will recap my experiences here, daily.
The second is writing for an hour. This can be fiction, non-fiction, editing already written stuff, putting graffiti on police cars, whatever; no constraints as to the content or form. The point is to get me writing more since I claim to like it so much. The one exception is that writing blog entries will not count as part of that hour.
Ok, so now I've pretty much taken on a part-time job. It's still only two and a half hours a day, but if I continue in this vein, I'll soon have to give up sleep. And all for free! I feel like a volunteer for the first time in my selfish life. Still completely selfish, but volunteering nonetheless.
More excitement - I've roped another friend into the 30-day trial craze. Her first idea was ridiculous - to lose 2/3 of her body weight. Being of completely normal weight, I think the only way she could fulfill the requirement and survive would be to cut off her arms and legs. Make that into a 30-day trial and you'd have to use sandpaper instead of a saw. Bleh. Instead, we agreed that she would increase the content-level of eating time. Now, every time she eats anything at all, she must turn off all other input to her brain: people talking to her, TV's fighting for her attention, her mouth that wants to talk and eat at the same time, her eyes that try to seduce every passerby, and all thoughts that fight for control of her only-human brain. Sounds like fun, I might sign up in a few days.
Other good ideas for 30-day trials that I'm either not brave enough to attempt just yet, or are on the waiting list:
1. Communicating only in languages I'm learning - Chinese, French, Spanish (no Russian or English), except in emergencies - This one is extremely exciting, I think I will try it soon.
2. Give up sleep - This may never make it to 30 days. Maybe I'll do this one as the last 30-day trial of my life.
3. Recording dreams every morning - This is cake, I should really just tag it on right now, but I'll postpone it a bit.
4. Starting a new 30-day trial every day - Brilliant.
The ones I'm doing currently are of course staying; there is as of yet no cancelling feature in my brain. But being on track with those lends a kind of excitement to my life, and also, they're just too easy after a couple of days. Crunches? Psh. No cursing? I'm cleaner than Sunday morning cartoons. Water was the biggest obstacle, but my method of dealing with it is working beautifully. For the first four days (I kept it a secret in case it didn't work), I'd drink water and accompany the action with appreciative moans: "Mmmm...this water...mmm...it's so good...mmm...wish I had more...no...must ration it...mmm...mmm...mmm." And now I think I've managed to convince myself, because water is actually starting to taste better! At least it doesn't taste like plastic anymore. Maybe it's just my tongue slowly being weaned off everything having sugar in it.
But onto tomorrow. Tomorrow, two new trials start, and they are both time-related.
The first is meditation. I will meditate for a total of an hour and a half every day - one hour in the morning, and half an hour in the evening. These will be done sitting with back erect (no snickering, this has been an adult blog for two days now), so as to promote the wakeful state, and will be flexible in theme. However, they will be personal growth meditations, not rated R back-of-the-eyelid movies. I will recap my experiences here, daily.
The second is writing for an hour. This can be fiction, non-fiction, editing already written stuff, putting graffiti on police cars, whatever; no constraints as to the content or form. The point is to get me writing more since I claim to like it so much. The one exception is that writing blog entries will not count as part of that hour.
Ok, so now I've pretty much taken on a part-time job. It's still only two and a half hours a day, but if I continue in this vein, I'll soon have to give up sleep. And all for free! I feel like a volunteer for the first time in my selfish life. Still completely selfish, but volunteering nonetheless.
More excitement - I've roped another friend into the 30-day trial craze. Her first idea was ridiculous - to lose 2/3 of her body weight. Being of completely normal weight, I think the only way she could fulfill the requirement and survive would be to cut off her arms and legs. Make that into a 30-day trial and you'd have to use sandpaper instead of a saw. Bleh. Instead, we agreed that she would increase the content-level of eating time. Now, every time she eats anything at all, she must turn off all other input to her brain: people talking to her, TV's fighting for her attention, her mouth that wants to talk and eat at the same time, her eyes that try to seduce every passerby, and all thoughts that fight for control of her only-human brain. Sounds like fun, I might sign up in a few days.
Other good ideas for 30-day trials that I'm either not brave enough to attempt just yet, or are on the waiting list:
1. Communicating only in languages I'm learning - Chinese, French, Spanish (no Russian or English), except in emergencies - This one is extremely exciting, I think I will try it soon.
2. Give up sleep - This may never make it to 30 days. Maybe I'll do this one as the last 30-day trial of my life.
3. Recording dreams every morning - This is cake, I should really just tag it on right now, but I'll postpone it a bit.
4. Starting a new 30-day trial every day - Brilliant.
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