Drinking tea with honey and the rest of half of a lemon squeezed into it, and another slice of lemon, with the rind sliced away in a hexagonal pattern, leaving just the white tissue around the pulp.
Having stirred the tea, the lemon slice spirals around and around in the center of the mug, the points of the hexagon whizzing around like cogs of a mill wheel.
This is pretty good honey. Forgot I had it. I wonder what kind of honey it is. It smells a bit of plums and lavender.
Well, the best-laid plans are the first to go bottoms-up. I find it most prudent to approach life from a vantage of abject befuddlement.
I wish everything came in amaray DVD cases. Except for those things that come in digipaks.
I’d want sandwiches to come in amaray cases. So I could neatly stack them in the fridge.
I’ve a horrible record at remembering labels. Proper names especially, and nouns more generally. Most broadly, classifiers of any sort. Which is part of why I’m so bad at languages, despite learning the grammar and pronunciation almost immediately. When it comes to vocabulary, it’s like I’m tacking weak post-its over everything, and every time I turn they blow away. This probably also feeds into my trouble with mathematics (despite again understanding the concepts), and my inability to remember my phone number.
It always trips me up; I expect the words to be there, and then am unprepared when they’re not. I search for synonyms, and find that whole part of my lexicon misplaced. When this happens for every third word, conversations with me can become rather tiresome. I suppose I should just start coining my own words; it would save me such anxiety.
To assuage some of the botherment, I keep a file on my desktop of words that I keep forgetting. (The filename is “words you keep forgetting.txt”.) Many of them are absurdly common, and I use them almost every day to describe some of my favorite concepts — but when I reach for them, they’re just not there. Words like catharsis, exposition, disregard, catalyst, and paraphrase. Others — prosopopeia, dysphemism, moiety, breviloquence — are a bit more specialized. I can probably get away with not remembering those when I need them.
Why, therefore, it has taken me until today to start a file on fantastic names, I don’t know. Potential titles, character names, and band names — the sorts of things that come up all the time, then disappear into the vapor. At the moment all I’ve got is a phrase I found nestled in my head when I woke today: Airtight Harem. The actual words were Airtight Harlem, which is also good, but I meant the former.
(Airtight Heirloom isn’t quite as good. Too obvious.)
The day that I figured out how to use scissors, I remember wavering around the activity room in nursery school, singing to myself “I can cut / I can cut / I can cut…”, until I snipped an awkward gash in a medium stack of construction paper. A teacher admonished me, and presented me the paper. WELL IT’S YOURS NOW, she said. I was devastated. I didn’t want the paper, but… it was mine now.
the hardest part of writing isn’t finding what to say, or working out how to say it. Once you’re on that level, unless you’ve already written your thing and you’re just going back through with an editor’s hand, you’re stuck.
The hardest thing is finding the mood. In preparing yourself to pour into the template that you’ve built for yourself. Actual writing — actual expression — can’t be constructed, intellectually. It’s a flow of the unconscious — of all one’s training, working out of instinct. And either it happens or it doesn’t.
In a sense, every creative process is a performance. The play is perhaps the most fundamental expressive form. Every other medium is just some sort of an adaptation. Prose is effectively a depersonalized script. Film, a cemented performance. Music, an abstracted performance. Videogames — well, they’re just theater again.
In their particapatory qualities, they are — ironically considering the gestalt nature of their literal makeup — one of the more primal, more basic forms. Or, no. I suppose that reversal — the improvisational, active interpretation element being the audience’s purview — is what makes the form postmodern.
Which is interesting. If play is the most basic form, then videogames are post-play, or play 2.0. They’re the post-structuralist theater — which may explain some of the difficulty in illustrating with them. It’s the difference between following a car from the front, as compared to the back.
I am not a natural performer. My skills of improvisation are weak, unpracticed. Yet as uncomfortable as I am, going off-script, I have very little patience for scripts. I recall in my few acting lessons, every performance became an impromptu improvisation, if for noting more than boredom. What’s been written has already been done, and probably done poorly. It”s more interesting to take the script as a thematic starting place and whittle out my own story. In retrospect, considering how hard I find it just to talk to people on the phone, I don’t know where I found that energy.
I need to get over this intellectualism.
The hardest part of anything is getting started. Then once that thing is started, it takes more energy to stop than to keep it rolling.
All right, I’m working, I’m working…
Whoa, uh. Verity Lambert, Doctor Who’s first producer (and at the time the youngest, and first female, producer in the BBC’s history), just died. On the day before the show’s 44th anniversary — its first broadcast also being one day after JFK’s assassination. She wasn’t that old; seventy-one. I guess that’s old enough, though.
The show was such a strange force back then; all staffed and conceived by twentysomething women and minorities and foreigners, working under the auspices of a department that was ashamed of them all and what they were doing, in the face of another department that was deathly jealous of them and what they were doing, both mostly staffed with old white men, most of which did all they could to interfere. That the show was a success was all the more an embarassment, as it meant they had little excuse to sweep it under the carpet.
It was over four decades ago, though. I guess it’s surprising so many of the cast and crew have hung on this long. Ms. Lambert last appeared all over the special features and commentaries to the “Beginning” box set, in which she gushed her appreciation for the new series and all its nods back to her era — from which she felt the classic series had drifted away a bit much for her liking. This past spring, she was even name-checked as John Smith’s “mother” in Paul Cornell’s “Human Nature” two-parter.
I guess things turned out pretty well, in the end — at least so far as that business goes. And who knows how large it loomed in her life. She seemed grateful, though. And it seems she was creatively active up to her death. I understand she just produced a new series of a show I’ve never heard of. Looks like it’s a criical success, too.
Some interesting commentary from “superfan” Ian Levine.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, sort of, I just noticed that Sylvester McCoy (The Seventh Doctor), Sophie Aldred (his companion, Ace), and Anthony Ainley (the ’80s incarnation of the Master) all share the same birthday (August 20th). This show seems to attract bizarre coincidences both in birth and in death.
I wonder if my toothpaste protects against demons. It doesn’t specifically claim anything on the package, so I’m tempted to think otherwise.
I find mirrors to be very odd. I’m not used to them, really. More accurately, I’m still not very used to seeing myself in them. It’s difficult for me to decide what to make of this form which moves with me. It’s strange to see myself from the outside. Maybe it helps with perspective?
I rarely give much thought to my appearance. It always seems strange to me to remember that I have one. I suppose it would help to learn this more well, someday.