If I buy one more book on how to write, And add it, still unopened, to my shelf, And still neglect to take the time to write — Yes, the part where I sit at the keyboard — I should lock down my Amazon account And plan to donate the money I would Have spent on such books to a better cause, Such as a charity for homeless dogs (My dog now looks at me with grave concern); Or a fund to supply kids with backpacks Filled with enough school supplies for a year; Or, finally, start that Kiva account And lend the same twenty-five dollars to People who’ll use the cash to change their lives. It might make sense to spend money on books That will show me how to do something that I do not already know how to do, But I have enough of those already And no extra time to learn the new skills. It’s best to focus on the skills I have. Besides, I don’t need a book to tell me That I should sit down every day to write — I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. What I need is permission from myself To make that time be for me, every day, When I sit down and try to beat the muse To the punch, or to the punchline or the Deadline, or to the death of the traitor Muse, if it knows the key that will unlock All the doors to my creativity But refuses to tell me where it is.
There are no shortcuts to the ten thousand Hours that you must put in to master The skill that you would like to focus on; This breaks down to four hundred and sixteen (And a bit more) twenty-four-hour days. Maybe one should allow time for sleeping. To go to another extreme, you could Plan to spend only one hour per day On your chosen skill; you would reach your goal After twenty-seven years and four months. Perhaps there’s a goal somewhere in between That would allow an apprentice, of sorts, To come up to speed at a quicker pace. Or a multivariate equation That would calculate with accuracy How many hours need be spent writing On the weekdays as opposed to weekends. Yet it’s not as if an alarm goes “ding” When the ten-thousand hour quota is met. I think the real goal is to find the thing That brings me to the keyboard every day, So that writing gets easier with time And that I get more quickly to the place Where I can see the work of the next day And it doesn’t feel like work any more, And I stop keeping track of the numbers.
Eldest and I went out to the movies yesterday afternoon. I can’t remember the last time we went out to see a movie, but I’m sure that he can. It was a bit strange in that no one (except some of the superheroes) wore masks and there was little artificial distancing other than cheerful stickers (which everyone respected) on the floor in the concession line. Other things, like popcorn and a drink costing more than two adult movie tickets, were comforting “normal” occurrences.
Honestly, it would have been cheaper to pony up for the Disney Premier pricing for this one, but then it wouldn’t have been an event. We wouldn’t have taken a bit of a scenic route to the theater to look at the old cars in everyone’s backyards. We wouldn’t have stopped by Taco Bell for a pre-movie “dinner.” And we probably wouldn’t have spent so much time talking about the movie, its mixed reviews and the possible reasons for them, its place and function in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and how its events have consequences that will play out in future films and TV series (Clint, watch your six).
I won’t give my own review of the movie here, but I have invited Eldest to access my movie-specific blog, Take Five Film Reviews, to not only review it but contribute some other film-related writing. The last movie I reviewed there was “Captain Marvel” in 2019, so I’d better blow the dust off it before I provide a link. (I also have a lot of broken links to repair, but perhaps Eldest can help with that as well.) Eldest was a bit wary of the offer at first, but after we talked about it he seemed to warm up to the idea. (Please don’t remind him — or tell him — that MiddleSon has contributed at least two guest posts to Chocolate Sheep.)
Eldest also took on the role of writing down the titles of the trailers that played before the feature. We saw at least three movies that I think we’d like to see (for me, they were “Reminiscence,” which comes out on August 20, “The King’s Man,” which has a release date of December 22, and “The Protégé,” which was apparently released on April 21), which made me think about establishing a more regular pattern for going out to the movies. And that seems strange. Or maybe normal. I’m not sure anymore.
Some of the promotional materials we saw in the theater were dated 2020, which makes sense — it was a “lost year” for the industry, and to catch up with all the movies that would have been released back then we have to do a bit of time travel and then fast-forward up to the present. (I wouldn’t be surprised if this kind of time-skip becomes something of a trope in movies that come out in the next few years. We write about what we suffer.)
We hadn’t really planned to see a movie this weekend, but circumstances arranged themselves so that we wouldn’t be leaving anyone out if we did. So we tightened up our morning schedule as much as we could, and bolted for the theater as soon as we were able. We kept ourselves as safe as we could. And I think we both look forward to going out again and having something new to talk about.
Knitwise, there’s been no knitting at all. That might change next week, when I may have time to take on a simple, relaxing project. What I have been doing, suddenly, is math. (That’s not to say that knitting doesn’t have math. It has math and algorithms, and please feel free to leave a comment if you’re a crafter — particularly a knitter, crocheter, or quilter — who was absolutely ambushed by precision mathematics after the beginning stage of your craft/hobby.) I had been working my way through a book of very practical mathematics up until the last week or so, when I hadn’t found time to move forward. Then, suddenly, my work called for some projections to be figured out very quickly, and because of the time that I had spent with the Very Practical Book I was able to reason my way through generating the numbers I needed to generate. It wasn’t quite like “I just started working out last week and then today I needed to lift a ’68 Chevy Impala and now I can,” but it kind of felt like it on Friday afternoon. I knew what I needed to determine and I knew the starting point I needed; once I had the starting point, the rest followed with a combination of logic and intuition.
I’ll check my work on Monday morning. I promise.
In other news, I had an emergency tooth extraction last week, which was really a much better event than if nature had been allowed to take its course with an abcessed tooth. (DO NOT Google this!) So after a couple of days of living on yogurt, energy drinks, and spoon-fed milkshakes, I am starting to put solid food back in my diet. Last night I even had some of our house favorite, the Saturday night slow-cooked beef stew, without a problem.
I’ll work on the relaxing, and the knitting, and the math. I’m willing to use whatever tools may help.
Last week I was helping a friend move from one office space to another. One of the things we discussed for a while, before I left her alone to do all the hard work, was why it is so hard to get rid of books. It was the associations, she surmised (I’m paraphrasing). This is a book from graduate school and brings back all of those memories. A good ex gave me this book. A bad ex gave me that one.
Right away I could see books having good mojo or bad vibes — and I could think of specific books in my life that are all but impossible to discard. Just acknowledging their existence took some of the weight off my shoulders, as if I had been carrying all of these books along with everything else.
I also began to imagine a book as an octopus, with tentacles reaching out in curious and unexpected directions. No, wait! The book as a spider at the center of an elaborate web, connecting times and places and snaring the reader whenever they pick it up or even look at it. Or think of it. If you’re careful you can stay clear. But if you forget, and stumble into it, you’re stuck as the housefly that will become Charlotte’s breakfast.
Those of us who have relationships with books (in particular and in general) probably have them because of these associations, and we don’t find this a new or unusual concept. Books linger in our memories because they were from that literature class we liked, or from the class with the teacher we had a crush on. We chose books because of who else was reading them, of how they looked, or how they felt in our hands. Maybe we picked up a book from our grandmother’s attic or our father’s bookshelf and felt, when we read it, that we were entering their world for a while and doing, perhaps, a bit of time travel. Or someone gave us a book — as a birthday gift, as a prize, as a going-away present — and we hold on to it to maintain that connection and those memories.
Books like this are more to us than just paper on a shelf, and we may even entertain the notion that the relationship between us and the books is a two-way street: maybe they feel connected to us, too, and are grateful to be well housed and read. (If this seems like a bizarre concept to you, just consider it the next time you accuse your computer or your cell phone of conspiring against you in your time of need.)
image by Aileen Posada Calle
Of course, the older we get and the longer we hang on to our books, the deeper those relationships can become. We can also create relationships with new copies of the old books, if we haven’t hung on to the original specimens we remember from childhood, or that summer in Germany, or the vacation at the beach. We might want to have our own copy of the book we checked out from the public library over and over again — and each time we open it we remember all of those visits to the library. We’re happily stuck to these books (and they to us).
The Book Loft, Columbus (German Village), Ohio
Right now I’m stuck to quite a few books. The number, which I have many reasons for not wanting to calculate, may well be in the thousands. A few days ago I made a rare trip to the basement to look for a particular book — which I didn’t think I’d find, and I didn’t — and after going through several cardboard boxes I was reminded of all those books I’m stuck to that I don’t even visit. They don’t have good living conditions by any means, and no one enjoys them. You would think that it would be easy to just get rid of them all, since I’m not looking at them anyway. But I’m still stuck.
I’m planning to move in a few more years, and part of the plan involves sort of an un-sticking process with the items that, honestly, won’t have a place in the new house. I really have about three houses’ worth of things in the current house, and the thought of getting rid of twice as many things as I’m going to keep is rather panic-inducing. But I can’t take it all with me.
Perhaps I can work out an equation to measure the stickiness of a particular book, and I can eliminate books that fall outside of a certain range. A book I don’t even remember buying, and I have no interest in reading? Stickiness = 0 (Teflon), goes directly to Goodwill. A book that’s so sticky that I feel oppressed by it, under so much emotional obligation that I’m utterly stifled? Stickiness = 10, get a friend to help me negotiate a separation from this toxic relationship. Maybe I can narrow the range to a stickiness value somewhere between 7 and 9. (I can hear several of you laughing already. Just go with it for now, okay? It’s good to have goals.) The remaining books will be the most loved ones, the most special ones, and the ones I’ll open again to use and cherish.
Knitwise….I made progress today. I stopped in at a local thrift store this morning before going grocery shopping. I thought I was safe because I only had a dollar or two in my wallet and the store took only cash. But a sign on the door said, we now accept checks and debit cards, $5 minimum. Okay, fine. Then I started finding things I actually wanted to buy, and my arms were full. After I checked the tags I realized that I was nowhere near $5 — one item I had picked up was only 30 cents — and I took myself out of the checkout line to set the items down and figure out how much money I actually had. For a minute I thought that I might have to buy another armload of items just to get over the $5 mark. Then I realized that I had a bit more money tucked away in a different location in my purse, and if I used some of that I’d be able to pay in cash. I wouldn’t have to buy more yarn after all. And I only bought two more books.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of reading about math and mathematicians, and a lot of thinking about my young, quasi-mathematical self. (Please pardon me if I go over some of the same ground I have travelled before. That’s kind of how my thoughts are these days — wandering, returning, and rethinking. I’ll follow the thoughts and we’ll see if they take me somewhere worth visiting.)
If you knew me from any part of my life before my high school graduation, you’d probably agree that I was a kind of geeky kid and teenager. I liked mostly books and solitary activities, cycled over 1000 miles before college, wrote stories, wandered through the woods, and played nerdy games like Mastermind and Scrabble. I frequently read books that were too old for me. When I was little I had a Spirograph set and I probably played with it until I ran out of paper. As a teenager I had trouble falling asleep and would get out of bed and play hand after hand after hand of Solitaire on the hardwood floor. After a while I established some sort of point system for the finished games, and I kept a running tally. (Somewhere there’s a tiny, meaningless notebook slowly degrading in a landfill. It’s okay, little one; you served your purpose.)
This was a kid who thought maybe they’d be a research scientist working deep in a lab. Or maybe an inventor: I stood at my basement “workshop” for quite a while wondering what to invent, and how inventors got started. Or maybe a world famous author, I thought as I banged away on my manual typewriter in the private office I had constructed inside my closet. Or maybe a meteorologist. Or maybe….
This was a kid who went to science camp, and learned to program computers (and convert Microsoft BASIC into Apple BASIC so the Eliza program would run on a //e). They went to math contests and snuck out to another school to take the SAT. This kid read Irving Wallace novels and Stephen King novels and wrote stories about zombie cats (perhaps Mr. King was slightly more influential) and won ribbons at the county fair for their short stories. And, shamefully, this kid read James Clavell novels in Algebra I class, wrote poetry in Geometry class, re-read Jane Eyre in Life Science, and tried to read Wuthering Heights in Biology.
This kid was torn. By the time I graduated from high school I had been told that I could do anything I wanted to do. I just had no idea what that was. Should I write? Should I do math?
About a week and a half ago I was chatting with a math professor (okay, technically an Associate Professor of Mathematics) and I mentioned some of they math-y things I had done and liked in high school. Leon asked me, “So, why didn’t you do math?”
And I had to think about it. It really boiled down to the fact that…nobody asked me to. Despite the fact that I had done well in all of my math classes, despite my performances in math competitions, despite my attendance at math camp, despite my SAT scores, despite my love of coding, despite my curiosity and creativity – nobody asked me to. When I got to my college registration session and signed up for classes, English was there and recommended a path for me. The Honors program was there and invited me in. The Math department didn’t show up.
I really can’t blame the Math Department. They had plenty of better students to pick from, and I didn’t seek them out. But if they had asked me, I think I would have tried to be a good math student. I might have found people who could have appreciated what I had to offer, and pushed me to excel in ways I still cannot imagine.
There is a huge focus on STEM classes and careers right now, and STEAM classes and careers (LET STEM = STEM + A [arts]). That’s great; I think everyone should be encouraged to do what they do best. Some people are not going to work in those fields. I think we’re happiest when we are aligned with what we are good at and what interests us. And most times, that’s kind of easy to figure out. You probably know someone who was born to fix engines, or be a veterinarian or a pediatric nurse or a farmer or a cop. They see their future ahead of them like a route in Google Maps, and they never need to recalculate.
But what if you don’t know?
One kid picked an English major specializing in creative writing. Later they added a second major in English Literature. But along the way, they added and dropped a minor in Systems Analysis because they were tired of reading books and short stories and not doing anything tangible, active, real. The secretaries who added the minor didn’t understand why they were adding it. When the minor was dropped they said, “That’s okay, honey.” They didn’t think it would stick anyway.
But, just as I met my people when I went to math camp after 8th grade, I met my people in the SAN program and MUBBS (the Miami University Bulletin Board System). Oh, children, this was in the days before campus email addresses. I hung out with the geeky boys who excelled at COBOL and cruised through Assembler. They coded their own freaking discussion board and I was a part of it. I moderated the Religion forum (of all things) and kept an eye on people like Aaron who needed my support. I combined calculation and expression, but didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t ask for help. Didn’t ask for guidance.
“You know what you were trying to do,” Peter stated in the late 80s or early 90s. “You were trying to be a MTSC.” He was referring to Miami’s new graduate program, the Master’s in Technical and Scientific Communication, and he was right. I was trying to combine written expression and computer language at the undergraduate level. I thought that the only way to do that was by way of technical documentation. But what I wasn’t able to do through my coursework I found another way to do.
I have some more options now, more ways to combine the two sides of my brain, but I wonder what would have happened to the kid who had continued on the math path. Would she have found a different set of “her people” in the Math department instead of the English department? Would she have found someone to encourage and inspire her, to show her that there could be a place for her in mathematics without being a math teacher?
What happened to the other kid? Where would she be now, and what would she be doing? What would she have achieved? Who would she be?
Knitwise, I did some work on the one-row scarf last week while attending a Webex meeting. I added a couple of inches to the work. Some of the yarn was so compressed that it looked like an entirely different type of fiber, but I think it might fluff up in the wash. I have a long way to go before I get there, but I’ll get there. Maybe the other kid will, too.
Chocolate Sheep 