Purple prose prizewinner: the Bulwer-Lytton contest

The Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest is sponsored by San Jose State University, with the goal of finding someone who can write as bad a first paragraph as Edward George Bulwer-Lytton did in 1830 with the opener to “Paul Clifford.”

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

They get thousands and thousands of entries each year, many of which are positively brilliant pieces of writing, in the over-the-top style demanded by the assignment. I’m serious.

Take this, the winning paragraph from a couple years back from computer analyst Dan McKay:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in Chapter 7 of the shop manual.

Take about colorful writing! E.B. White would have applauded the extended metaphor, the specificity of the details, the action verbs, the images that pop off the page.

The 2008 contest winner will be announced in the next couple of weeks and I’ll keep you posted.

Pet peeve: packing

Ah, vacation! Tomorrow I leave for ten days.

[Pat on back: I pulled together some P posts for distance posting plus some possible pinch-hitting from one of my progeny...]

Time away from everyday chores… distant shores, friends & family, lolling on the beach, hiking in the woods, wining dining playing scrabble, reading (formerly) dime novels, thinking useless thoughts.

But by the time I get on a plane I’m so whipped that I need an extra vacation to recover from my preparations.

Packing is a problem of procrastination. Not so much that I procrastinate on packing. Not exactly. I leave so many OTHER critical tasks to the last minute that suddenly it’s the 11th hour and my suitcase is still in the closet.

I paid bills, did laundry, vacuuming, watering, canceling of mail and papers, completed two writing assignments, found caregivers for the dog and the cat, etc etc. But then I noticed the grass had GROWN in my front yard, and if I didn’t mow it NOW, the unkemptness would signal Absentee Owner.  So I mowed the lawn.

In so doing I discovered that the mole I’d hoped would go away, had returned with a vengeance. So I had to get out my shovel and traps and do the whack-a-mole dance to lure him while I’m gone.  No kidding, this very serious guy at the garden store told me that the secret to catching moles (because a trap is insufficient) is the little mole dance.  He says his grandpa taught it to his dad, and his dad taught it to him.

This was more self-revelation than he’d intended. He wouldn’t give me the demo dance, so I’ve made up my own.

It’s now 9p. I leave in the morning. Maybe I should pack.

Pricking the prosperity pipe dream

Prosperity: the condition of being financially successful, flourishing

Pipe dream: illusion (orginally related to smoking opium)

“Oh, you’re just a bunch of whiners,” said a McCain advisor last month.  Everything’s great - just a little problem in the housing and mortgage end of things. Yeah, maybe gas is more expensive than it was, but drill a few more wells and we’ll be fine. Quitcher bitchin’.

Tell that to the people I know.  To a person, we’re feeling the pinch and we’re cutting back on all fronts.

According to Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in Clinton’s administration:

…This isn’t a normal downturn. The problem lies deeper. Most Americans can no longer maintain their standard of living. The only lasting remedy is to improve their standard of living by widening the circle of prosperity.

The heart of the matter isn’t the collapse in housing prices or even the frenetic rise in oil and food prices. These are contributing to the mess, but they are not creating it directly. The basic reality is this: For most Americans, earnings have not kept up with the cost of living. This is not a new phenomenon, but it has finally caught up with the pocketbooks of average people. If you look at the earnings of nongovernment workers, especially the hourly workers who comprise 80 percent of the work force, you’ll find they are barely higher than they were in the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. Per-person productivity has grown considerably since then, but most Americans have not reaped the benefits of those productivity gains. They’ve gone largely to the top.

Inequality on this scale is bad for many reasons, but it is also bad for the economy. The wealthy devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us because, after all, they’re rich. They already have most of what they want. Instead of buying, the very wealthy are more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return.

This underlying earnings problem has been masked for years as middle- and lower-income Americans found means to live beyond their paychecks. But they have now run out of such coping mechanisms.

Coping mechanisms we have used and outgrown include:

• Women joining the workforce to augment family income
• Working more hours
• Borrowing. Big time. Credit cards, home refinancing.

Proper progressive that he is, Reich suggests:

…the long-term answer is for us to invest in the productivity of our working people — enabling families to afford health insurance and have access to good schools and higher education — while also rebuilding our infrastructure and investing in the clean energy technologies of the future. We must also adopt progressive taxes at the federal, state and local levels. In other words, we must rebuild the American economy from the bottom up. It cannot be rebuilt from the top down.

I’m with him on this. It’s a standard public health approach, with long term benefits to be reaped only after the pain of spending preventive money up front.  It’s the right thing to do, just as the right thing to do in Iraq and Afganistan is to build schools, roads, hospitals - ask Greg Mortenson hero of the bestseller Three Cups of Tea.

Will we do it?? Not till the Republicans are in a much greater minority.

Meanwhile, I know that as I buy less, the folks who built the stuff I’m not buying have less to build, and the folks who own the factory where these folks are building less stuff are buying fewer raw materials, which means the folks who mine or ship or create those raw materials have to cut back too…. and pretty soon everyone is hurting.

Prolonging the pain at the pump: keeping a gas guzzler

I have a 1998 Toyota Sienna Minivan.

It’s not a hip car, but it’s a great car. 120,000 miles and nothing has ever broken on it.  It’s comfy, quiet, and useful. It’s the best car I’ve ever owned.  My poodle Molly and I traveled 10,000 miles across the US, up and down the eastern seaboard and back in it in 2001, right after 9/11 (”Travels with Charley” redux).

Poodle and Packed Minivan

It also gets a sucky average of 19 mpg.  The price of gas is bad enough, but the fact that my carbon output is twice as high as it could be bothers me even more.

So like many others, I checked into down-sizing my ride. hahaha.

What I suspected is true.  The NY Times has an article today about whether this is a cost-effective plan. In the article is a link to a website where you can calculate how soon you’ll break even if you trade in your gas-guzzler for a more fuel-efficient model. I did the math:

My car’s trade-in value is $4,100.  A used 2005 Honda Civic hybrid is $19,200. Not counting sales tax, license fees, etc - and if gas stays at $4/25 a gallon - I will break even in a mere ten years!

The Sienna stays. I have to figure out how to rely on it less.

Parenting problem: parceling out a 25-year old

My ex and I have been living separately for more than six years, since our youngest went off to college. Most of that time the ex has had a girlfriend (several different ones, actually) so when this son came home for a visit he stayed with me and the ex would come by to see him when it suited his schedule.

Now the ex is girlfriendless and lonely.

The son, almost 25, has been working in LA since college (personal assistant in the film industry AKA “dogsbody”), but is ready to re-assess his life plan. He wants to move home for a few months of earning money rent-free with the goal of doing some foreign volunteer/travel as a way of gaining perspective.

Suddenly the ex wants to know if I intend to hog his company, or if he gets equal time.  Crap!!! Our son is a grown man and his dad is ready for some kind of custody battle.

I’m not playing.  Our son is no dummy. I don’t think he’ll play either. He can choose. And maybe he’ll decide that coming home was a bad idea after all..

Our two older children each did a 6-month boomerang stay with us after graduation but at that time the family was intact.  They turned out ok and our time together did too, but the first month or two were uncomfortable.

The “custody” issue is unique, but the boomerang issue is not: about 18 million young adults ages 18 to 34 now live back at home. Someone has even written a book about it: Boomerang Nation: How to Survive Living With Your Parents the Second Time Around by Elina Furman.

One advice column suggests creating a contract with the kid:

Writing this down in a “contract” that you all sign is a great way to make sure you’re working from the same page. You don’t need a formal document; create your own by using the following points as a guide:

1. Jim will move back into his old room beginning June 1 and will have saved enough money to move out by _____(date).
2. He will pay $100 a month for his room and $100 a month for food, beginning with his second monthly paycheck.
3. He will be responsible for buying and caring for his own clothing, doing his own laundry and purchasing items for personal use.
4. He agrees to wash the car every Saturday.
5. He will alternate cooking and grocery shopping with Mom.
6. He will contribute half the cost of cable TV.
7. He may play music and watch TV in his room, but agrees to keep the volume low after midnight.

Postprandial plunge: to nap or not to nap?

Postprandial: following a meal

Plunge: to descend precipitously

Perhaps I exaggerate - but plunge was the only p-word that comes close to what happens to me after lunch most days… (and after as little as one glass of wine w. dinner) - I want to get horizontal and shut my eyes.

Supposedly it has something to do with blood sugar levels, but it doesn’t seem to matter whether I eat a low or high carb meal; I just get sleepy.

And then I resist it.  I sit at my computer trying to write, trying to compute, trying to think through a problem — gaining no traction but refusing to succumb.  If I get up and tackle a physical chore I can sometimes barrel through it, but at a detriment to my effectiveness.

Half an hour after a nap it’s as if I rebooted my whole system, and all the resource-hogging resident programs in my brain have cleared out.  My question to myself is this: why don’t I just go with the flow and make room in my schedule for a daily nap?

Napping is a high art in some cultures; there’s no shame attached to it. It’s probably good for your health, as a recent study from Greece indicates.   From that story in the NY Times:

Now, out of Greece, comes permission to do exactly that. A study of more than 23,000 adults shows that those who napped for about 30 minutes each week had a 37 percent lower risk of dying from a heart attack than those who did not.

So this should mean that all working Americans will receive permission from their bosses to close their eyes every afternoon at about 4 p.m., right?

Don’t bet your blankie on it.

This is hardly the first study showing that sleep is more than simply time when we really should be at work. Other studies, though few as extensive as the Greek research, show that short periods of sleep during the day increase productivity and creativity while reducing stress. And even without surveys, we know this from experience.

When you need a nap, you need a nap. Nothing — not caffeine, not a chocolate bar, not a pill — recharges the battery in the same way.

I welcome you to join me…

Precipice postponed: procrastination #3

Precipice: the edge of an extremely dangerous situation; a cliff with a steep dropoff

Postpone: to delay until a future time, put off

I can breathe again. I made my maiden Powerpoint voyage and managed to stay afloat for the duration of the presentation.  Obviously I should have done another run-thru on a wall more than 2 feet wide, because if I had, I’d have noticed that the right-hand 25% of each slide was truncated… for reasons I don’t yet know.

I talked to the screen rather than the audience more than I should have, and I had some issues with the remote control…   Fortunately, I know my feng shui material well enough that I could talk my way through the glitches, and my Toastmasters club is very supportive of anyone trying something challenging.

As I said earlier, I put off preparing this presentation until the last possible moment…  I usually love putting together presentations, but this one filled me with the desire to change my sheets, reorganize my file drawer, clean the toilets…. ANYTHING else.  And all this when I absolutely LUSTED for the projector which would enable me to do illustrated presentations.

According to the study center at Cal Poly there are four reasons we procrastinate:

1. Difficult - the task seems hard to do; we naturally tend to avoid difficult things in favor of those which seem easy to us. [this would explain my desire to clean toilets]

2. Time-consuming - the task will take large blocks of time, and large blocks of time are unavailable until the weekend. [especially if you have no idea how you're going to structure the talk to take advantage of a new medium]

3. Lack of knowledge or skills - no one wants to make mistakes, so wait until you learn how before you start. [I've heard so many horror stories about AV equipment failures that I was scared even to try the projector!]

4. Fears - everyone will know how you screwed up. [This didn't bother me for the Toastmasters talk, but I am preparing for a much lengthier illustrated talk for paying customers next week and screw-ups aren't really cool.]

Cal Poly suggests the following steps to cure yourself:

1. Realize you are delaying something unnecessarily. (Duh… but maybe it’s the “unnecessarily” we need to come to grips with. You have to realize this before days and weeks have passed - like as soon as you feel that twinge of uneasiness.)
2. Discover the real reasons for your delay. List them.
3. Dispute those real reasons and overcome them. Be vigorous.
4. Begin the task.

I do think the secret is just to start anywhere.  Set a timer and commit to working at it for 15 minutes.  Wait awhile and do it again.  This is the swiss cheese approach. Once you’ve eaten a few holes in the project it suddenly seems like no big deal, and you’re halfway there.

What’s your formula?

Practice, Persevere, Purge: wisdom from Ira Glass

So you want to be a writer? Storyteller? Screen or radio writer?

Ira Glass of This American Life (a masterful collector of uniquely gripping radio stories -now also on TV) has great advice for you.  Boiled down, it amounts to three of my favorite p-words:

• Practice (write or record a lot of crap, and maybe occasionally some good stuff).
• Persevere (do it some more, and then some more and then more after that).
• Purge (you’ll produce lots of crap and will need to let most of it go).

But he says this with much more pizzazz than I do, so you must watch these four videos on You-Tube.  REALLY. They’re only five minutes each and packed with wisdom.

Start here - #1: Building blocks of the story. The power of the anecdote. Raising questions and then answering them. Reflecting on the point. Every preacher or public speaker should listen to this one.

Then here #2  Finding a decent story - do lots of work then ruthlessly purge the crap.

Then here #3:  How your work almost always, for YEARS, falls short of your taste, your vision.  But do it anyway. A lot. Persevere. 

And finally #4  Two common pitfalls.

Publish or perish

Publish: to prepare and issue (printed material) for public distribution, to bring to public attention.

Perish: to die, esp. in an untimely manner; to pass from existence.

I’ve had friends in academia who viewed this dictum as a death threat that hung over their heads until finally they had published enough to gain tenure. My own view was that a professor’s job was to TEACH students - and that tenure should be based primarily on that ability. (Silly me - it’s actually about the university bolstering its reputation and getting grant money for research.)

I’m not an academic; I’m a writer, and for writers publishing is what rewards us for a lot of dreary production work.  I can write something and print it out in hard copy, but I don’t feel the pleasure until it’s transformed by some outside entity into a published work for the world to see.

I’ve had lots of stuff published over the years, even had a piece of mine picked up by Reader’s Digest.  (I looked down my patrician nose at RD until I discovered that compared to other magazines, they paid three times as much money for half as many words… Shut my mouth.)

To keep myself from mentally perishing, I need to know that my work will eventually be seen by someone besides me. Which is why I so love blogging on WordPress.

I write my post, I press the SAVE button, preview and correct the post, then press PUBLISH!

Et voilà, I’m out there, and you can see it. No middle man.

No money either…. but money wasn’t my objective. Although money would be good.

Hmm. I could charge for pushing P products: poodles, peonies, peanuts, pajamas, paint, pearls, pigs…

Pimping my practice (of feng shui)

In late May I wrote an article about feng shui for the local newspaper which they liked so much they asked if I’d write one a month for their home & garden section.  This was great news because that first piece drove a really big turnout for my class at a home furnishings boutique in town.  I was hoping it would generate demand for folks to come to my class at Clark College later this year, lead readers to my website, which in turn would lead to more paying clients.

Easy come, easy go.

Just after I submitted my article for July, I get an email from the section editor telling me they’ve made another round of cuts at the paper - staff and content both - and the home & garden section has been greatly reduced and absorbed as a part of the features department under a different editor in the newsroom.

I have a call into her as I write, trying to convince her that feng shui is the perfect discipline for times of economic hardship, because most fixes cost little or nothing.  We’ll see.