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Last week it happened. 26 out of 52, and all of a sudden, the magic glass of weeks of this wild commitment was half full. I started this project on January 1st, 2015 – the directive to myself was to write whole-heartedly, every week for the duration of this shiny year. It was a verbal homage similar to other projects, like the 366 Photo-A-Day Project, the mind-boggling pledge to taking one photo each day for the whole leap year of 2011-2012. My entire Life guided by the knowledge that through the happy or the rough, I could always release and out-pour through words – what would it be like to write one essay each week and really put it out there? Writing needed to be thanked for bringing me safely this far, and this was my way of thanking.
I sat down on New Year’s Eve afternoon, December 31st, 2014, and by 4pm, I had bought my domain. In the ‘If you build it, they will come.’ vein, once I secured my domain name and set up the design and infrastructure of my website, my writing project had legs to run! Everything fits into place at moments like those, like when you find the perfect font to go with your Quinceañera invitation – not too frilly and not too gothic – and then ideas for the music or the colors of the dresses just flow in (I am name-dropping, of course. I never had a Quinceañera. It wasn’t a thing in my family and in the days when I was 15 in L.A., but you get the idea.).
It is a strange endeavor to be accountable to something on a regular basis: ±1500 – 2500 word essays once a week. I joke with my friends that I am painfully aware of what calendar week of the year we are in, since my self-prescribed Wednesday posting days just seem to avalanche one over another. Inexorably. I once heard a friend tell a story about a case relating to the game of Tetris. One of the legal staff involved had a well-appointed, formal description of the game included in the deposition that said, “the pieces fall inexorably down.” It was a funny, stiff explanation for this goofy Gameboy game, but so true. That is how deadlines feel. They just keep falling on us and it is up to us to master them and turn them to our advantage into the perfect fitting nooks of our lives.
Why write? Writing for me is not going to be about Woe is me, but rather about “Hey, I survived this freaking thing, and I heard you did too about some freaking thing that is equally hair-raising! And we are going to pull through and laugh about Life together.” Writing neutralizes the bad. It is akin to when we were little, like say maybe in middle school, and I was so self-conscious and feeling left out about my humongous size 10 feet, and you thought your ears were awful, like taxi-cab-with-the-doors-fully-open awful. Someone would say their worst fear out loud, make fun of it with a ridiculous spin, in front of all their friends, and ta-dah!: traumatizing feature neutralized. “Yes, I believe my large feet can be used as skis in a pinch.” We forget in all our decorum and social paralysis moments, that we are all hoping for that irreverent thing, or that supposed over-share to be uttered to help us neutralize what is within us that is too painful to say out loud. That is why facebook thrives. It connects the easily connectable: yes, your photo and recipe of the fabulous Ukrainian potato salad is reminding me to make that similar Argentine dish I completely forgot existed! And it connects the tragically unthinkable: an ailing brother, only in his 30s, that needs community support to make it through the expenses of chemotherapy. Platforms like these allow us to be witness for each other. Never underestimate the power of witnessing. I know that we have become somewhat desensitized to the “Like” – but what does it really mean? Someone, a human, read or saw something that you announced and in a few seconds their brain and their index finger made the instant contract to say, I am with you. I think a part of us wants to dismiss things that come to us through technology as not being precious, but the reality is that even in the ubiquitous, internet-born Likes, there are people, loved ones far away, pooling together to nurture us through a simple act.
Of late, I laugh at the wild directions my writing has taken – the nuts and bolts of it, I mean (but the content…yes, that too!). I think of dear Mrs. Wilson, my English college professor, every time I let a fragment or run-on hang, just because of some I felt like it bravado. But in a culture that allows WTFs and OMGs as replacements for actual emotions, if run-ons and fragments are all we are worried about, we are going to be just fine. I know that we are supposed to cringe at sentences that end in prepositions, but most days I chock them up to practicing my free will. And speaking of will, if you have not noticed already, I will capitalize things at will. If we get to capitalize our first names, sorry Narcissus, but then Earth and Love and Life get big, fat, announcement-of-their-fabulousness starting letters.
I want to write happy, not write controlled.
And then there is the hyphen. To dance my way through the English language, I notice the abandon with which mega-adjectives have come into being. Because there are times when a single word descriptor just will not do. These gather-strength-via-connected-threads-of-qualifiers, bigger-and-more-complex-than-a-Medusa-head-of-jumbled-words-leading-to-a-clear-visual concoctions make me…laugh. Spanish has a few doozies of great words that explain things that in other languages would take a couple of sentences. German also. German is amazing in its complexity of the unbridled compound noun. I love you, German, and I love this phenomenon. On the small size, I remember Hauptbahnhof, the train station – German doing its thing, tacking three words in one – and then there is Streichholzschachtel for a simple matchbox, and mammoth words like Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften – meaning, insurance companies that provide legal protection. Yes, that is one noun, and 39 letters. If that is not German’s big F.U. to all conventions, I don’t know what is!
So go crazy. As long as you go. No matter how the words come to you and in what Tetris-of-inoxerable-avalanching-wildly-marching-in-or-falling-down-formation of expression they come, let them flow. We are all here to hear what you have to say.
The Story of Rhabarberbarbara, a German language 'funny'
(Thank you, Jorge, for showing it to me many moons ago):
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OOLlmY2EFg
Wordy Rappinghood – by Tom Tom Club
www.youtube.com/watch?v=blBDWv1y7_g
I sat down on New Year’s Eve afternoon, December 31st, 2014, and by 4pm, I had bought my domain. In the ‘If you build it, they will come.’ vein, once I secured my domain name and set up the design and infrastructure of my website, my writing project had legs to run! Everything fits into place at moments like those, like when you find the perfect font to go with your Quinceañera invitation – not too frilly and not too gothic – and then ideas for the music or the colors of the dresses just flow in (I am name-dropping, of course. I never had a Quinceañera. It wasn’t a thing in my family and in the days when I was 15 in L.A., but you get the idea.).
It is a strange endeavor to be accountable to something on a regular basis: ±1500 – 2500 word essays once a week. I joke with my friends that I am painfully aware of what calendar week of the year we are in, since my self-prescribed Wednesday posting days just seem to avalanche one over another. Inexorably. I once heard a friend tell a story about a case relating to the game of Tetris. One of the legal staff involved had a well-appointed, formal description of the game included in the deposition that said, “the pieces fall inexorably down.” It was a funny, stiff explanation for this goofy Gameboy game, but so true. That is how deadlines feel. They just keep falling on us and it is up to us to master them and turn them to our advantage into the perfect fitting nooks of our lives.
Why write? Writing for me is not going to be about Woe is me, but rather about “Hey, I survived this freaking thing, and I heard you did too about some freaking thing that is equally hair-raising! And we are going to pull through and laugh about Life together.” Writing neutralizes the bad. It is akin to when we were little, like say maybe in middle school, and I was so self-conscious and feeling left out about my humongous size 10 feet, and you thought your ears were awful, like taxi-cab-with-the-doors-fully-open awful. Someone would say their worst fear out loud, make fun of it with a ridiculous spin, in front of all their friends, and ta-dah!: traumatizing feature neutralized. “Yes, I believe my large feet can be used as skis in a pinch.” We forget in all our decorum and social paralysis moments, that we are all hoping for that irreverent thing, or that supposed over-share to be uttered to help us neutralize what is within us that is too painful to say out loud. That is why facebook thrives. It connects the easily connectable: yes, your photo and recipe of the fabulous Ukrainian potato salad is reminding me to make that similar Argentine dish I completely forgot existed! And it connects the tragically unthinkable: an ailing brother, only in his 30s, that needs community support to make it through the expenses of chemotherapy. Platforms like these allow us to be witness for each other. Never underestimate the power of witnessing. I know that we have become somewhat desensitized to the “Like” – but what does it really mean? Someone, a human, read or saw something that you announced and in a few seconds their brain and their index finger made the instant contract to say, I am with you. I think a part of us wants to dismiss things that come to us through technology as not being precious, but the reality is that even in the ubiquitous, internet-born Likes, there are people, loved ones far away, pooling together to nurture us through a simple act.
Of late, I laugh at the wild directions my writing has taken – the nuts and bolts of it, I mean (but the content…yes, that too!). I think of dear Mrs. Wilson, my English college professor, every time I let a fragment or run-on hang, just because of some I felt like it bravado. But in a culture that allows WTFs and OMGs as replacements for actual emotions, if run-ons and fragments are all we are worried about, we are going to be just fine. I know that we are supposed to cringe at sentences that end in prepositions, but most days I chock them up to practicing my free will. And speaking of will, if you have not noticed already, I will capitalize things at will. If we get to capitalize our first names, sorry Narcissus, but then Earth and Love and Life get big, fat, announcement-of-their-fabulousness starting letters.
I want to write happy, not write controlled.
And then there is the hyphen. To dance my way through the English language, I notice the abandon with which mega-adjectives have come into being. Because there are times when a single word descriptor just will not do. These gather-strength-via-connected-threads-of-qualifiers, bigger-and-more-complex-than-a-Medusa-head-of-jumbled-words-leading-to-a-clear-visual concoctions make me…laugh. Spanish has a few doozies of great words that explain things that in other languages would take a couple of sentences. German also. German is amazing in its complexity of the unbridled compound noun. I love you, German, and I love this phenomenon. On the small size, I remember Hauptbahnhof, the train station – German doing its thing, tacking three words in one – and then there is Streichholzschachtel for a simple matchbox, and mammoth words like Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften – meaning, insurance companies that provide legal protection. Yes, that is one noun, and 39 letters. If that is not German’s big F.U. to all conventions, I don’t know what is!
So go crazy. As long as you go. No matter how the words come to you and in what Tetris-of-inoxerable-avalanching-wildly-marching-in-or-falling-down-formation of expression they come, let them flow. We are all here to hear what you have to say.
The Story of Rhabarberbarbara, a German language 'funny'
(Thank you, Jorge, for showing it to me many moons ago):
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OOLlmY2EFg
Wordy Rappinghood – by Tom Tom Club
www.youtube.com/watch?v=blBDWv1y7_g