Jinx: Appeasing Small Gods

I am a rather superstitious person, though I can’t explain why. I suppose that’s the nature of superstition, to defy explanation. If I were in a superstition support group, I would probably realize that many individuals with advanced degrees have silly little beliefs that make no sense, but I am too embarrassed to even find out if such support groups exist.

Still, these notions haunt me. Part of me laughs at it, but when no one is looking, I make sure I’m not jinxing myself.

Re: snow days. There is a myth that says teachers must dance naked on the school lawn in order for these to happen. I don’t believe that, but I do believe that jinxing occurs when too many people start counting on it before the flakes begin to fall.

A teacher’s jinxing power is approximately nine times that of a freshman student. When a ninth-grader says to me, “We’re not having school tomorrow because there’s going to be eight inches of snow,” I know that we’ll probably be in school. But when a colleague tells me on a Thursday evening, “See you Monday,” I am sure we’re doomed. There won’t be one flake. The snow gods are pissed off.

Re: chain letters. I hate it when people send me these . I always ignore them, but secretly fear that over the years I have caused an avalanche of problems by my unwillingness to appease the chain-letter gods.

When I was a child, these used to arrive in the mailbox. They instructed me to send seven postcards to seven friends, or nine recipes to nine friends, or five poems to five friends. Avoiding the chain-curse required much more effort than today, and only the dire consequences explained in the letter made me send out postcards and recipes and poems to (former) friends. People who didn’t do it had actually died! In terrible ways!

Now it’s much easier to keep the chain going, as these arrive in my email inbox. It only requires a few clicks to make people groan when they open their email. But these days I usually ignore them, mostly because I have no more friends.

Re: locks. There is a fine line between superstition and obsession/compulsion, in my mind. I lock my car twice, go back inside to make sure I really did lock all the doors and turn on the alarm, go around checking doors I haven’t opened before I go to bed. It’s not as if I expect the patio door to unlock itself when I haven’t used it in months. I just feel better if I take a look. If I don’t look, I still know it’s locked, but I can’t stop thinking about it.

Re: fortune cookies. These are not reliable forecasters of anything. Though I enjoy being told that my creativity will be great rewards or that my sense of humor wins me many friends, and learning the Chinese word for chicken, on the whole they are rather useless. One day I will open a fortune cookie and it will tell me, “Snow Day!” Then I will begin to dance naked on the lawn.

Re: stars. My mother hated astrology; I always felt guilty when I checked my horoscope in the newspaper. To attribute characteristics to people based on a random grouping of starts makes no sense, I know. I still feel sheepish when I have conversations with true believers; I guess I’m just a couple steps removed from that level of commitment.

Re: numbers. Both of my parents taught math, and I’ve always loved numbers. They have personalities. As I child, I would greet the answers to my math homework problems as old friends: “Hello, 47! Are you still arguing with 49? Just because you’re prime doesn’t mean you can push other numbers around. Some of them have square roots, you know.” This is how I remember phone numbers and account numbers, the way I connect a name and a face. To me, they are people.

Though I know it’s silly to believe in vibrations and numerical harmony, I sometimes notice syncs. I don’t add up the numbers in people’s names because that makes no sense to me, but if number turns up a lot, I start to think about what it means. I think it has something to do with my birthday: Friday, the thirteenth. Though it wasn’t a lucky day for my mother, who was in labor for sixteen hours, it was fortunate for me. And more interesting than being born on Saturday, the fourteenth.

I don’t play the lottery, though; I’ve read too many short stories about people who would have won a million dollars but that was the day they didn’t play their usual number because they didn’t have a dollar. I would hate to get into the lottery habit because I would be obsessive about it. I would start playing more and more numbers and worry about missing a day (just as I worry about locking doors). It would take all the enjoyment out of numbers.

I don’t choose to be superstitious. If I could, I would talk myself out of the whole thing and become an atheist. As it is, there are many gods to appease, and ignoring them is a sure way to find trouble. I am cautious. Today is the ninth, never a good day to change my mind about things. Maybe tomorrow.

Spelling is Ded

Give it another twenty, thirty years. Let those of us who care, who do the job interviews and hiring, who decide what gets published – give us time to die. Then you can declare spelling dead.

People complain, “Spelling / grammar / punctuation – I’m no good at it.” The implication is that we should overlook their mistakes since they admit that they make them. It’s like saying, “I’m a jerk. But since I recognize it, it’s okay!”

Spelling and grammar are not genetic traits; they are habits. I can hear you sighing. Habits are not popular things. They are 1) something you don’t want to do but feel like you should; or 2) things you do and feel guilty about. The amount of fun is limited in either case.

If you’re writing, you should care about spelling / grammar / punctuation. Wouldn’t you speak more clearly if someone said they couldn’t understand you? If you are expressing yourself, you should care about how others receive that expression.

I admit that English spelling is illogical, stupid, not based on phonetics, as the spelling of most languages is. It’s a bear. Kids graduate from high school unable to spell ‘immediately’ and ‘definitely.’ If they put spelling on the graduation test, we’d have to fail a lot of people.

Small commercial: this is why people should learn Latin. I have yet to meet a Latin student who hasn’t improved their spelling of English. Once you know what conjugation a verb belongs to, you will never again wonder, “Is it -ite or -ate?”

To be honest, I have little love for English spelling. But I do love the language, and accept the quirky spelling the way I put up with a lover’s annoying traits. It’s not worth arguing about there, their and they’re. Why get all bent out of shape over misapplied apostrophes?

When I was much younger, I thought it would be a good idea to divorce traditional spelling and learn the Shavian phonetic alphabet. With some practice, I got pretty good at it. The problem was that nobody was as enthusiastic as I was. Though everyone complained about spelling, nobody seemed willing to make an effort to change. Books and magazines were printed in standard English, so there wasn’t even anything to read except for my own notes.

That is life. Once you realize that people don’t change unless forced, you will be much happier. Spelling isn’t going to change, and people aren’t going to suddenly improve their spelling, so I might as well just accept it. Or except it.

Owed to the Spell Checker:

Pizza of the Absurd

A True Story:

Dax (calling pizza delivery place): I’d like to order a medium Hawaiian pizza, for delivery.

Pizza Guy: I’m sorry, we don’t make the Hawaiian pizza anymore.

Dax: Hmm. I see that one of your topping is ham.

PG: Yes, sir. Would you like a medium ham pizza?

Dax: Yes. I see that you also have pineapple. Can I get pineapple on my medium ham pizza?

PG: Yes. Is there anything else?

Dax: What’s the difference between a ham and pineapple pizza and a Hawaiian pizza?

PG: The Hawaiian pizza has cinnamon on it.

Dax: Could you sprinkle a bit of cinnamon on my ham and pineapple pizza?

PG: No, sir. That would be a Hawaiian pizza. We don’t make the Hawaiian pizza anymore.

Dax: But I can get a ham and pineapple pizza?

PG: Yes. Would you like any wings with that?

Dax: Do you have lemon-pepper wings?

PG: We have lemon wings, but no lemon-pepper.

Dax: Do you have any pepper in your kitchen?

PG: Yes, sir.

Dax: Could you add some pepper to my lemon wings?

PG: No, we don’t have lemon-pepper sauce.

Dax: I see. Could I order some plain wings with extra pepper on them?

PG: Yes, you can have extra pepper.

Dax: Could I also get some lemon sauce on my extra pepper wings?

PG: I’m sorry, the lemon wings don’t have pepper on them.

Dax: But couldn’t the pepper wings have lemon on them?

PG: No. The lemon wings don’t have pepper.

Dax: Could I get a half dozen lemon wings and a half dozen extra pepper wings in the same box? And could the delivery person shake the box up a bit?

PG: Our employees aren’t supposed to shake their deliveries.

Dax: I won’t tell anyone. Let him know there’s a good tip in it for him if he shakes the wings.

PG: I can’t tell an employee to break the rules, sir. You’ll have to shake your own wings.

Dax: And shake my own cinnamon, too, I suppose. Very well.

PG: That’s one medium ham and pineapple pizza, six lemon wings, and six plain wings with extra pepper. Is that right?

Dax: That’s correct.

PG: Would you like anything to drink?

Dax: Do you have anything with alcohol in it?

PG: We don’t have a liquor license, sir.

Dax: Pity.

Just Being Honest

I should start out with a quotation here, something about truth and beauty or the philosophical inquiry into truth, but I don’t think it will help what I’m writing today. It might make you think that my opinion is worth something, but that would be an illusion. People who start their essays with quotations from Shakespeare or definitions from Webster are not deeper thinkers or smarter; they’ve just read the chapter on introductory paragraphs from the style manual their eleventh grade English teacher made them buy.

What I really want to know is this: why does honesty get such high marks?

In philosophy, the theory of correspondence says that truth corresponds to what is real. I’m not going to pretend that I read the whole chapter on truth (it was really long), but I would guess that many people would answer my question thus: It is good to be honest because you are affirming things as they are, not distorting them.

Next question: who determines reality?

Let’s take this out of the classroom and put it into the real world. The person in the office next to mine has an annoying laugh. She hasn’t touched up her roots in a while, and even so, she would look a lot better if she would stop dying her hair jet black. Very few people look good with jet black hair, especially when they have bad skin, as she does. Hasn’t she ever heard of dermatology? She eats frozen yogurt for lunch every day, thinking it is good for her because it’s yogurt – never mind the pile of nuts and M&M’s she puts on it, never mind the sugar and fat and the fact that she’s eating a giant 24-oz size cup of it. No wonder her gut squishes out over the top of her jeans. Does she really think she’s a size 8?

All of this is true. It is also my opinion. Would it be a good idea for me to share all this with her? Just being honest, you know – how can that be a bad thing? To keep it to myself would be dishonest, and to lie to her face – “No, those jeans don’t make you look fat” – would be wrong. Much better to share with her all the things that bug me, rather than write about them here.

This is the problem: people think that their opinions, which may very well be fact-based, are truth, and truth must always be told by good people. Honesty demands that we tell other people what we think of them. Venting to someone else about her annoying laugh is dishonest, deceptive, and makes me a bad person.

Here’s what I think – take it as truth if you wish, or dismiss it as warped and misguided: Truth has no particular virtue in and of itself. Sometimes truth is necessary. When I go to the doctor, I don’t want him to lie to me about my cholesterol, to tell me I don’t need to exercise.

But a lot of times truth is like Reality TV – it may be real and true, but it’s unnecessary, cruel and nobody’s business. Not telling my neighbor that she’s fat does not bend the moral order of the universe. Telling her that her husband, who just died, was having an affair is both cruel and unnecessary.

There are times to speak out. A child’s bruises should not be ignored. It is dangerous to text and drive. It is a kindness to tell a woman that her skirt is caught in her panty hose, rather than letting her walk around all day showing her unmentionables. A person leaving for a job interview needs to know that wearing a T-shirt bearing a picture that says ‘Big Pimpin’ or an offensive picture is not a good idea.

To equate honesty with morality is deceptive. Most of the time, we mistake our own opinions for truth; they are based on facts, and must therefore be true. And we think too highly of our own opinions, because they are ours, and we mean well, and we are not perceptive enough to see that we are doing more harm than good, or honest enough to admit that we do not mean well.

Rudeness has attained a certain status. “Hey, I’m just being honest,” a person will say, as if that makes it moral.

The truth is, some things are best left unsaid. If I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.

Furry Monks

In a few hours the sun will rise and the groundhog will get to exercise its one prognosticatory talent, letting us know how much longer winter will last. It’s an important question, especially for those of us who live in northern climates where winter could last into April. Every day I touch the weather button on my iPhone, hoping I can leave the wool socks at home, but for several weeks now spring has seemed remote. Today I will put my faith in marmota monax.

Monax sounds like a software company. Because it sounds like it might be Latin, I looked up the word in my Lewis and Short unabridged Latin dictionary, but didn’t find it. I suspect that it is related to the word monachus, a monk, which comes from the Greek monax. I suppose groundhogs like to live alone.

How the groundhog developed this ability to predict weather is unknown. As far as I know hedgehogs, prairie dogs, chipmunks and other small rodenty critters that stick their noses out of holes in the ground are not similarly endowed. Groundhogs, also known as woodchucks or whistle-pigs, are the furry oracles of the woods. In ancient Europe, badgers were similarly responsible for forecasting the weather. Maybe the badgers were wrong often enough that people switched over to groundhogs.

If we can believe Wikipedia, the Pennsylvania Dutch are responsible for this belief. Wikipedia, however, though it has an endless store of wisdom, has never been able to forecast the weather — or anything else.

In ancient and not-so-ancient times people sometimes practiced bibliomancy, divination through books. The practice is simple: open the book, point your finger at a passage, read it, and it will answer your question. Like fortune cookies, what you read won’t always make sense, but that’s the thing about divination. The sybil didn’t earn her reputation by giving straight answers. If you need clear directions, Mapquest is what you want.

Though bibliomancy doesn’t work with e-books (as far as I know), Wikipedia would be an excellent tool for this. There is a link you can click on that will call up a random article, which is perhaps the Wiki answer to bibliomancy. My random link today: biomechanical art. Maybe a hip replacement is in my future.

Groundhogs are better than books, though, for they also have the interesting and uncanny ability to put you in a time loop, endlessly reliving the day. At least, that’s what happened in the movie. And you only get to relive a really crappy day; if your day goes well, you just move on, and regardless of how bad February 3 is, you don’t get a second chance to straighten out your karma. I’ve had bad days, but fortunately always woke up to another equally bad day.

As we await the furry oracle, let us be careful what we wish for.

Clues

Etymology always has a new story. No, not bugs – that’s entomology. I’m talking about where words come from, the roads they use to get here, and how the journey changes them. When they arrive, they often look very different from when they got on the omnibus.

A ‘clue’ is a piece of evidence, something we follow to solve a mystery or unravel a problem. It’s a rather general word – a clue can be fingerprints, a lab test, an observation, a phone call. Crossword puzzles have clues. Lots of people don’t have a clue.

Originally ‘clue’ was ‘clew,’ a ball of thread. Think of a labyrinth, trying to find your way out of those twisting passages. Even Daedalos, the inventor, had trouble with that. The Greek hero Theseus unwound a ball of thread as he pursued the Minotaur so he could quickly find his way back out. Clever Ariadne, King Minos’ daughter, gave him the ‘clew.’

Writers must leave clews. As we wind our way towards the center of our story, we have to leave a way to get back out. It’s no good to get to the middle and then have to bring in a deus ex machina to rescue our story. Too contrived. If we unwind our clew a little bit at a time, the way out is no problem.

This is how I’ve been re-writing my most recent story, begun in November. I am creating a detailed outline – literally everything that happens, in order. Each event must lead naturally from the last. I am about halfway now, and see the value of planning before writing. On my first draft I wrote my way to the middle and couldn’t get out. Surprisingly, this method doesn’t produce a bland and predictable story; it lets me place clues where they can increase tension and raise suspense.

Once my outline is laid, the writing will be easier because I won’t be thinking about what should happen next or how to solve a problem I just created by blundering into a dead end. All that pretty writing – how can I bear to unravel it? That is how my first drafts usually go; by the time I figure out I don’t need something, I’ve already committed too much time and emotion to it. I can’t cut the thread.

Today my creative writing students will each receive a box containing three clues. Some will find a stack of letters, twenty years old, or a page from a newspaper article. Some will find a watch, or a picture, or a diploma, or a ring. (None of these clues are actual objects, of course – this is a fiction class, you know.) They will ask themselves, who sent this box, and why? What does each item tell us about the person who put them inside?

Students always want their characters to be physically attractive, rich, famous. They forget about the little things, the small clues that lead to the really interesting stories. We will see how far these clews will unwind, what stories they will produce. That is my journey today.

Trees

I am sitting in my living room looking at my Christmas tree. It’s the last day of January. I finally got all the ornaments put away, but the tree remains with its lonely string of lights.

If it were a real tree, it would be long gone. Only its sad pretense of reality has kept it standing here, in my front window, where everyone can see it. I stopped plugging in the lights a couple weeks ago. No sense in looking like an idiot in front of the neighbors.

It is a metaphor, my right brain says. You see only trees, no forest. It is a symbol of your inability to see anything but false pieces of reality. (My right brain is definitely a forest person, a metaphoric, holistic, big-picture seeing observer. It doesn’t really care whether I put the tree away or not; it just likes metaphors.)

I’m just lazy, my left brain says. Hey, at least I put away the ornaments. It’s not like it’s going to start a fire or anything.

Actually, I’m more of a root person, as I’ve observed before. This tree has no roots, which is why it provokes no deep emotions in me. I never had a fake tree before. All the real trees I used to put up at Christmas gave their lives to produce a few days of anticipation, joy, memories. They gave up their roots to stand in a bowl of water and pretend to be alive so I could feel less depressed.

This ‘tree’ served the purpose – it held all my ornament-memories, filled the right spot in the living room, and reminded me of a tree.

Today I’ll unwind the lights, fold up the branches, and put it back in the box until next December. I won’t have to drag it to the curb, spraying dry needles everywhere that will get caught in the vacuum hose. It will make a clean, graceful exit and leave no metaphors behind.

Create Your Own Universe

There’s a scene in the movie Catch Me If You Can that always strikes me. It’s the one where the family of his fiance gathers in front of the television to Sing Along with Mitch. I remember that show; it was one of my grandmother’s favorites, along with Lawrence Welk. As a child I thought it was pretty boring (I wanted to watch cartoons), but I realize now that I knew many of the songs on those shows because I had learned them in school. Generations could sing together, and that is something that could hardly happen any more.

I don’t know what they teach in elementary school music classes anymore, or if music is even taught at all. Economics or the urgency of testing has possibly driven it out of a few schools, and certainly made it irrelevant. When my sons were in grade school I went to a few concerts; the classes sang songs that I had never heard, songs written for elementary school children to sing. No more This Land is Your Land, She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain, or Sidewalks of New York.

We used to sing Christmas carols in December when I was a child; now they sing ‘winter carols’ about snowmen and ice skating. Recognizing that we are diverse, we do not share our diversity, but make up a fake culture to show fake unity.

Nobody sings along with ‘winter carols.’ They belong to no culture.

Music has become a private experience.

Creative Boredom

Computing has given us the useful word multitasking – “to schedule and execute multiple tasks (program) simultaneously; control being passed from one to the other using interrupts.”

The part of that definition that is usually ignored is the ‘interrupts’ — i.e. the processor is not really executing all tasks simultaneously; it is switching between tasks, giving the illusion of parallelism.

The same is true of multi-tasking in humans. It is an illusion.

Everyone seems to be trying to do more things simultaneously. Driving and texting, listening to music and reading, talking on the phone and typing, memorizing Latin verbs and writing on people’s Facebook walls — I could think of many other examples, but you get the idea.

It’s a bit like juggling. If you don’t drop a ball, it’s considered a success.

But work, school, socializing aren’t as simple as balls tossed into the air; they are activities that can be done with varying degrees of completeness and finesse.

Some people claim that they work better when they are trying to do three things at once — the more, the better.

The truth (and I am not talking about computers here) is this: doing two linguistic tasks simultaneously is not possible. Our brains can’t do that. You may think you are writing your essay and talking to your friend, but you are actually switching between tasks. And you are taking twice as long to do it.Thirty minutes of working on essay + thirty minutes of talking to your friend = two hours of real time. And the essay is probably crap.

Make a Wish

I’ve been re-writing my Nano novel, and am facing a choice: do I want to use a first person narrator?

The last time I wrote a book in first person, I also used present tense, which got tiresome very quickly. After about three chapters, the narrator’s voice began to grate on my nerves.
That is the problem with a first person narrator. To justify using it, the voice has to be unique and interesting. But a quirky voice that pulls the reader into the first chapter may become irritating after a few chapters.

Third person is a safe choice, but I might get bored. For some reason, I want to tell this in the first person.