Weekend Assignment: #279: This Changes Everything!

Following on from last night's entry:

Weekend Assignment: #279: At one time or another, we've all had some kind of good news, expected or unexpected, that made a big difference in our lives, or at least gave us a sense that things were getting better. Tell us of such an incident.
Extra Credit: Who was the first person you told about your good news?

When I came up with this topic yesterday, it was going to be my excuse to tell you about Pepper not limping any more and the three job leads I had yesterday. But I wrote about all that last night, so I'm not going to do an extended rerun here. Suffice it to say that having three people call me on the same day to express interest in my resume is a major boost to my confidence, giving me real hope that I will soon be fully employed again.

With that rather obvious observation out of the way, let's go back a little over three decades, to two bits of related news that had a greater impact on my life than I ever expected at the time.

Me at Clarion, July 1977.

When I was in high school, my major extracurricular interests were Star Trek and the writings of Harlan Ellison. I also read and enjoyed lots of other fantasy and sf, but Harlan in particular was a big deal to me. He wrote the original version of my favorite Star Trek episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever," but that wasn't the main reason for my interest. I was hooked on his collections of award-winning short stories and edgy, personal and often political essays.

I've written about my interactions with Harlan a few times over the years, but for the purpose of this entry, the thing to remember is this: he was my favorite writer, and a huge influence during my teens and early 20s. He was having a surge in popularity back then, fueled by several awards and a deal with Pyramid Books to republish many of his earlier works plus several new collections. Meanwhile, I was struggling to get a certain novel past page 2. (Yes, that novel, the one I'm still intermittently revising all these years later.)

One book I bought about the time I graduated from high school was titled Clarion 3. It was an anthology of sf short stories by people associated with the Clarion Writers' Workshop, interspersed with essays about writing. The editor was Robin Scott Wilson, founder of the workshop. The last piece in the book was the essay "When Dreams Become Nightmares: Some Cautionary Notes on the Clarion Experience" by, you guessed it, Harlan Ellison. Harlan had taught at several Clarions, but wasn't going to do it anymore. That was unfortunate, I thought as I finished reading the essay in our back yard in Manlius. At that moment, I really, really wanted to go to Clarion and be taught by Harlan Ellison. Apparently, I'd already missed my chance.

So: life-changing good news incident #1. My first two years at Syracuse University, I was majoring in Creative Writing and TV-Radio. (I switched to English Lit and Film my junior year.) My problem with Creative Writing was that I could never find the department head in his office, and consequently spent a lot of time hanging out at his closed office door. That's where I saw it: a little paper notice about the 1977 Clarion Writers' Workshop. Robin Scott Wilson would be teaching, as would Peter S. Beagle, writer of one of my favorite fantasy novels. These facts alone would have been enough for me to want to go, but there was more. Harlan was also teaching. I was stunned, almost shaking with excitement. It was like the Universe was saying to me, "Karen, the thing you wanted really badly but thought was impossible is possible after all. Now find a way to do it!"

Fortunately, both my parents agreed to let me try, as long as I was willing to work a summer job until the workshop began. So I sent Chapter One of The Tengrim Sword (as it was called then) off to Michigan State, along with a self-addressed, stamped manila envelope. Weeks passed, and then that envelope arrived back at my dad's apartment. When I saw it, my heart sank. It was too heavy and bulky to contain just an acceptance letter.

Then I opened it anyway - and a map of Michigan State fell out. Joy! Unbounded, whooping joy! And there you have it: life-changing good news incident #2! I was going to Clarion!

I assume that my dad was the first person I told of my good news.

I've written before about the Clarion workshop I attended, the people I met and worked with, the personal relationship stuff, and the not-entirely-positive effect the workshop had on my writing. (I put the novel away for years after that.) There were a lot of things about "the Clarion experience," as Harlan put it, that still influence me, all these years later, in my writing and in other ways. Harlan was part of that, but only a part.

The biggest impact, by far, came from an unforeseen consequence of my six weeks in an East Lansing dorm in the hot summer of 1977. I started hanging out with one of my fellow Clarionites, this guy named John. Last name Blocher. 22 months later, I married him.

How's that for a bit of good news that changes everything?

So how about you? What bit of good news made all the difference for you? Please tell us about it in your blog, and include a link back here. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below, so that next week I can direct people to your blog, thus:

For Weekend Assignment: #278: Time to Blog, I asked you about your blogging habits, particularly your blogging schedule and frequency. Here are excerpts from the responses:

Julie wrote...

What it boils down to is the more I have to do, the less time I have to blog. That may be a good thing. Or not, depending on what I have to do. This is one of my busier times of the year, and some days I sit down at the computer, and the next thing I know, it's 3:30. Where has the day gone?

Florinda wrote...

"How often I blog" and "how often I post" are two different things, usually. I try to post here at least five times a week, and most of the time I have something up on one of the weekend days as well. But most of my posts are written ahead of time, and then I schedule them out daily; posting time is 5 AM Pacific time weekdays, and 6 AM on weekends.

Mike wrote....

Well, for me, there isn't a straight up answer. I certainly don't have a schedule. I pretty much blog when I can, or when I have something I want to say. I participate in Karen's Weekend Assignments, but I don't have a certain day that I do them. That's why I'm writing this at 10pm when I should be going to bed. That's dedication for you, people.

Your turn! If you've ever considered participating in the Weekend Assignment (or used to participate but dropped out), please help us out with your thoughts on this topic, or else the next one. You've got until Thursday night to post your entry, and in a pinch I'll even take a late one. And if you haven't considered participating, why the heck not?

Also please, if you have an idea for a future Weekend Assignment, email me at mavarin2 (at) gmail.com. Thanks!

My Round Robin entry will follow in a few hours.

Karen

Weekend Assignment: #274: The Pursuit of Happiness

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, under the editorial kibitzing of John Adams and Ben Franklin, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Our Weekend Assignment, delayed until the anniversary of the ratification of those words by the Continental Congress, takes its cue from my old buddy Tom:

Weekend Assignment: #274: How do you personally pursue Happiness?
Extra Credit: How do you know when you've caught it?

This has got to be the shortest Weekend Assignment question I've ever posed, but it's not necessarily the simplest. The concept of happiness can be tricky to define, let alone recognize. It's a platonic ideal, frequently defined more by its absence - or its pursuit - than by the actual experience of it.

Yet we know it's real, at least in retrospect. Often we can look back on a moment and say, "Ah, I was so happy then," whether we recognized it at the time or not. Even the big, obviously joyous occasions - a wedding day, the birth of a child, the vacation of a lifetime - can be obscured by the stresses of the moment, or by just being too busy to fully appreciate that ah, yes, this is happiness, right now.

Still, we try for it, all day, every day. An accepted theory of human behavior is that every single thing we do is in pursuit of happiness, of trying to make ourselves feel better, selfishly or otherwise. I've always hated that idea, that the most altruistic act isn't really for the sake of the other person, but to make us feel good about ourselves.

So, to transition from the pontificating, which has been making me happy for several minutes now because the writing is going well, I now must consider what I do to try to be happy. There are lots of things I do, some of them contradictory. I write. I hang out with dogs. I goof off. I stop goofing off and accomplish something, thereby reducing the guilt quotient. I hang out with John. I read. I drive up the mountain. I watch my favorite tv shows. I go to church - which doesn't sound like a happiness-producing activity, especially if you're as uneasy with certain kinds of religious behavior and belief systems as I am. Yet againt the odds, St. Michael's does indeed make me happy, at least as much because of the people as because of the ritual and the meaning behind it.

It's been a stressful week for me. I discovered on Wednesday night that my unemployment claim ran out at the end of May, but the state website let me continue to put in claims anyway. It just didn't pay anything. There was a form in the mail that explained about an additional 7 weeks I qualified for, if I filled it out and turned it in - no later than two weeks ago. I learned of its existence on Wednesday night, and tracked it down in a pile of mail on Thursday afternoon, just in time to get it turned in at DES (Department of Economic Services) before they closed for the holiday weekend. The DES employee couldn't tell me whether it would still be accepted. And I just realized that I should have filed a claim anyway online this week, even if it's not being paid, and I think I've missed the deadline on it. If all this works, it should be paid retroactively, but only if I don't break the chain with a week of no reported claim.

It's kind of depressing, partly because I've screwed up, and partly because I shouldn't still need unemployment payments after all this time. My part time job is good and valuable, but not lucrative. Am I doing enough to find work, or letting my discouragement over the lack of response induce a debilitating lethargy where job hunting is concerned? And does it even matter, when most of the job listings either don't fit my skills and qualifications or are the same ones I've applied for at least once before? Clearly, though, lapsing into defeatism isn't going to lead to either employment or happiness. So I went through CareerBuilder and Monster and a few other sites this week, updating and upgrading, and compiled a master document of past job data: addresses and dates and supervisors' names and phone numbers. And for a moment, I was happy with what I'd accomplished - but I still have much more to do.

Often, though, it's not the head-on, work through your troubles approach that leads to short-term happiness, or at least pleasure. (There's a whole tangent I could pursue but won't: what is pleasure, if not a sort of degraded, shamefaced form of happiness?) We all face that annoying tension between short term gratification and long-term goals. Do I enjoy an ice cream cone now, or deny myself for the sake of a lower number on a bathroom scale?

Maybe we have to have both, the adult, disciplined pursuit of the things that we hope will made us happy in the long run, and the little pleasures that make us happy in the moment. Tonight I was going to start this entry right after John turned off Torchwood on DVD, but instead I spent most of the night reading a magazine about golden moments from each of the 200 Doctor Who stories to date. The many writers of this DWM Special describe particular scenes, and why they're brilliant, and the impact they had on their chid- or adult-selves. Their joy in the show, their love for it and happiness that it's still going strong after nearly 46 years, beams out from the pages, and produces an answering outpouring of emotion from me. So for a few hours, as I read about the "deadly jelly baby" scene and "everybody lives" and the disinfecting elevator, and I'm happy. Then I put the magazine away, and return to the problem of facing my own, imperfect life.

So. What about you? How to you pursue happiness, and do you notice when you find it? Tell us about it in your blog, with a link back here, and a link to your blog entry in the comments below. You can get all philosophical on us, as I just did, or maybe just describe a particular activity that does the trick for you. Heck, if stamp collecting make you happy, I want to know about it! Just be sure to get your entry in by Thursday evening, because I'm going to try to get this increasingly tardy meme back on schedule next week. Meanwhile, there's last week's Assignment to wrap up:

For Weekend Assignment #273: Music(ians) of Your Life, I asked for your reaction to the death of Michael Jackson, and whether there a particular musician whose work has particular meaning for you. Excepts from the responses follow.


Julie said...

Sure, I grew up listening to the Jackson 5. I even had a picture of young Michael Jackson on my wall when I was twelve. But my heart belonged to the Beatles. Even then, I listened to a lot of different music. I was probably the only kid my age who knew that swing music wasn't something made schmaltzy by Lawrence Welk. I was also a huge standup comedy fan and could listen to those records for hours. I still can. The other day I was reading an urban fantasy story that involved Noah, and all I could think of was Bill Cosby: "God? What's a cubit?"

Florinda named the Beatles and four other artists:

The Beatles: I was ten years old when I first became aware of them, and they'd been broken up for four years by then. Their sound shaped my musical preferences, and they're still the standard I use for evaluating the best pop/rock: melody, harmony, lyrics, and how it all works together. There's a song in their catalog to go with nearly every moment you can think of. They produced their share of clunkers (for my money, most of them inhabit the White Album), but in eight years of recording together, the classics-to-clunkers ratio is very much in the classics' favor.

Mike also names a number of bands, including...

The next stage came with music I actually bought myself. Mostly that was Styx and Kansas. I loved those two bands. They were a bit different in style than The Cars, but they had the right mix for me. Some good rocking music, but also some slower songs mixed with a little progressive rock; especially with Kansas.

I think Styx Paradise Theater album was the one I listened to the most. It was certainly one of their biggest albums and it hit at the perfect time for me. What I want to know, though, is why is not on iTunes? That is driving me crazy.

That's it for now! As always, I'm looking for suggestions for future Weekend Assignments, and also for more of you to participate in writing the entries. Come on - as good the our three stalwarts above are, we'd love to hear from YOU as well. Thanks!

Karen

RRPC: Happiness Is...

Yes, it's Round Robin time again! This week's theme, Joy: What Makes Your Heart Happy? combines suggestions by Kathy of Through the Viewfinder and Wammy of The Ellis Family Cincinnati.

Now, of the people and things that make me personally happy, John doesn't like to be photographed, and most of my friends are online, which makes them hard to photograph. A good job would make me happy, but I don't have one of those right now. But that still leaves several major sources of joy for me. It's all the same stuff I blog about all the time, especially that other species of Blocher family members:

Cayenne, full of joy, knowing a trip to the dog park is imminent.

From my Picasa album Trouble Dogs

Yup, I'm talking about dogs again. I didn't get in on Feline and Furballs with Feathers Friday this week, but let's make up for that right now. To avoid boring you with the usual dog park pictures, I've had fun with my cheap photo editing software, applying various effects to my photos. That gives me joy, too!

Here's Cayenne, and Cayenne, and Cayenne! Aside from pasting in a few clones of my dog, I saturated the image, embossed it a little and used a color balancing tool.

I'm pretty sure I did this one with the watercolor effect plus a canvas texture.

This is the impressionism effect, except for Pepper. I took an unadulterated copy of the same shot and resized until Pepper was the same size as on the edited photo, and then pasted her over the original image.

Same shot, different edit. This one is severely cropped, and Pepper is somewhat lacking in definition. The background is saturated, motion blurred, and leather-textured.

Another thing that makes me happy? Watching (and reading or writing about) Doctor Who! Obviously I didn't photograph the actors, although I did two screen grabs. They are composited over a photo of the most-watched items in my Doctor Who DVD collection.

From my Picasa album Sabino Canyon 2009

And last but not least, here is a previously unseen shot from my recent hike through Lower Sabino Canyon. I think I mostly just saturated it a bit. Getting out into the desert for a few hours on a beautiful day is definitely a joyful thing to do!

Now let's go see what makes everyone else happy!

Linking List

Wammy - Posted!
The Ellis Family
http://theellisfamilycincinnati.blogspot.com

Kathy - Posted!
Through the Viewfinder
http://naliorf.blogspot.com/

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Monica - Posted!
Click Shots
http://familyaffairphotos.blogspot.com/

gwenlyn - Posted!
Greenchair
http://gtsgreenchair.blogspot.com/

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Suzanne R - Posted!
SuzyQ421's Photo Blog
http://suzyq421sphotoblog.blogspot.com

Gattina - Posted!
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com/

Yecap - Posted!
Camera Obscura
http://yecap1970rrc.blogspot.com

Sherrie - Posted!
Sherrie's Stuff
http://sherrie-plummer.blogspot.com/

MavisMolly ***Welcome, new member!*** - Posted!
Holly On The Run
http://hollyontherun.wordpress.com

Mojo ***Welcome, new member!*** - Posted!
Why? What Have You Heard?
http://mojo11.blogspot.com/

Marina - Posted!
milepebbles
http://milepebbles.blogspot.com

Valerie - Posted!
Rosemary's Other Baby
http://rosemarysotherbaby.blogspot.com

Dawn
Dawn's Drivel
http://dawnallynn.blogspot.com/

Jama
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

maryt/theteach - Posted!
Work of the Poet
http://workofthepoet.blogspot.com

TJ - Posted!
TJ's Photo Expressions
http://tjphotoexpressions.blogspot.com/

Teena - Posted!
It's all about me!
http://www.purple4mee.com/

Ourhomeschool - Posted!
Through the Eye of my Camera
http://ourhomeschoolinthewoods.blogspot.com

Saffron ***Welcome, new member!*** - Posted!
CV Photographs... Do you see what I see?

http://chryseisvivienne.webs.com/apps/blog/show/419626-saffron

Karen