Religion As a Cost-Benefit Calculation

Here's a thought I had tonight. I'm not sure it really goes anywhere or is useful in any way, but here goes:

The claim is often made that human beings act entirely in their own self-interest; that is, they do everything because they expect to benefit in some way, even if that benefit is just to feel virtuous. I've always found this to be an overly cynical way of looking at human behavior, but it's hard to argue your way out of that basic proposition. We do things expecting to benefit from our actions.

Conversely, though, we also avoid things out of self-interest. "It hurts" might be our secret excuse for putting off dentistry. "It's too much trouble" is our way of letting inertia have its way. "What if they don't like me?" might keep you from auditioning or speaking up. And so on. That's the crux of cost-benefit analysis in everyday life. If the attraction of the expected benefit is greater than the avoidance generated by expected negative consequences, we will probably do whatever it is. If not, then not.

Let's apply this idea first to a simple behavior before moving on to a more problematic one. Let's say some annoying blogger (to name no names!) keeps mentioning certain games on Facebook. If a reader of that blog isn't even on Facebook and thinks Facebook is too much trouble, a waste of time, etc., chances are that reader will never try the game, even if it sounds vaguely interesting. But if the reader is on Facebook already, and the reader expects to enjoy the game, he or she may well try it. The expected benefit (having fun) outweigh the expected cost (dealing with Facebook and learning the game).

Having tried the game, the reader has another calculation to make. Is the game actually fun? Are there new costs to balance against the fun? Well, yes. In the case of the games I'm thinking of, it is difficult to progress (and thus have fun) without soliciting friends (or strangers, or both) as allies in the game. Is it worth the effort? Some will still find the benefit outweighs the cost, but others will not. And there are further calculations beyond that.

It's the same thing with eating, or going to the gym, or even going to work. Is it worth preparing a proper meal, or is a bowl of cereal nearly as great a benefit for less cost? Is the benefit the body and mind will derive from working out greater than the benefit of relaxing in front of the tv instead? Is the job worth the daily slog, knowing that good jobs are scarce and there are bills to be paid?

Okay, now here's the tricky part. I've been thinking tonight about how easy it is to persuade some people to become avid gamers, and wondering how this whole cost-benefit mechanism applies to religion in general, and going to church specifically. If the person is a confirmed atheist - that is, utterly convinced that there is no God - then it would be extremely difficult to provide that person with sufficient expected benefit for that person to attend church. The primary benefit others perceive would not apply. The social component, in which the person expects to enjoy being around other people in a group activity, is outweighed by considerations of possible hypocrisy and supporting what one does not believe in. Really, the only scenarios I can think of in which an atheist would go to a traditional church involve either the benefit of a non-religious activity - e.g. receiving a bag of groceries in a time of need, or being involved in providing services to others in need - or an unusual degree of expected cost of not going, such as when the spouse nags the person into it, or the politician is aware that atheism would not go down well with many of his constituents.

That's one extreme. At the other extreme, the True Believer believes that the expected benefit, namely eternal life, etc., outweighs any possible cost. But what if the person believes the expected benefit can be derived without the cost? Maybe it's enough to believe a certain way, without the trouble of going to church. Or what if the promised benefit doesn't seem real and immediate, compared with the cost? Heaven is a pie-in-the-sky, long-term consideration, like losing weight. Sometimes you'd just rather have the pie on the plate. Instant gratification is a powerful thing. Result: if the immense but distant (or vaguely believed) expected benefit of going to church is outweighed by the feeling that "it's too much trouble" or "maybe next week," then even the believer may not show up on Sunday.

So what if you're a pastor, a vestry member, a church webmaster, or someone else with an interest in bringing more people into the church? The obvious thing to do is to try to influence the potential churchgoer's cost-benefit analysis. Either the expected benefit needs to be as strong as possible, or the expected cost needs to be as light as possible, or both. Here are some possibilities:

• Convince others that the cost of not attending church is too great to be viable. This is the nuclear option, the idea that skipping church is a mortal sin. Hey, it worked for Catholics for many years.
• Convince others that there is an immediate, observable benefit from attending church. Make it fun, or inspiring. Give us magnificent or hip music, a great sermon, coffee and doughnuts. Market the church as the "cool church," and yourself as the "fighting young priest who can talk to the young."
• Make it easy to go, so the burden is light. Offer day care and Sunday school so there's no babysitter issue. Have services at a variety of convenient times. Have plenty of free parking. And maybe, just maybe, ask very little of churchgoers in the way of living out their faith. Don't ask them to feed the hungry or visit the prisoners, or to love their enemies. Skip over anything that might require critical thought or an unselfish attitude. Yeah, that'll get 'em.

As I say, I'm not sure any of this is useful. For what it's worth, I enjoy going to St. Michael's. The service fits with my beliefs and sensibilities, the music is interesting and sometimes challenging, I like the people, I enjoy serving as an acolyte, and it's fun to sit with friends at coffee hour afterward. And the cost of not going, for me, is not that it's a mortal sin or anything, but that I'd let down Kevin, who depends on me for a ride, and Proscovia, who depends on me to carry a torch or a crucifix, and occasionally to read from the Old Testament.

But how do I take this insight and try to convince people who don't know Kevin and Proscovia and the rest that the benefit of attending St. Michael's outweighs the inertia of "it's too much trouble" or "what if they don't like me?" Well, aside from assuring folks that of course we'll like you, I have no idea. I only know that about 12 years ago, I overcame my own inertia in the expectation of possible benefit in attending that church on Wilmot, the one with the sign. And for a dozen years, the benefit has far outweighed the cost.



Karen

Seen of An Accident (sic)

With all the photos I've had to show you over the past week, I forgot to even mention the serious two-car accident that happened about 25 feet from me on Friday evening. I had just pulled up to the corner of Wilmot Rd on a side street called East Calle Marte, from which I intended to turn left onto Wilmot, bound for Safeway. About a second later, two cars crashed into each other right in front of me and spun around. The SUV or minivan or whatever it was pulled off the road into a neighbor's yard, and the sedan backed up a few feet and stopped, facing south next to the median on the northbound side of Wilmot.

From Scene of An Accident

It was such a shock that I screamed. A second later (if I didn't pay attention) or a few feet of difference in trajectory and it could easily have been a three car accident, with my Eagle Vision as the third car. Other cars from other directions immediately stopped, and people ran to check on the driver of the sedan. I stayed in my car and called 911.

Sorry about the angle. The white and blue areas at the bottom are my car.

People in the neighborhood and people waiting for buses quickly gathered on the curb and sidewalk. 911 asked whether there were injuries and connected me to the police, who confirmed the name of the side street and asked for my name and phone number. I saw someone else on a cell phone before I finished.

The fire department arrived about two minutes later, being stationed just a few blocks up Wilmot from the accident. I quickly realized I wasn't going anywhere for a while. Not only was I interested in documenting the accident, but I was pretty much trapped. Wilmot was blocked northbound and partially blocked southbound. Diverted cars were turning right onto Marte in a steady flow, leaving me no opportunity to back up and turn around safely.

The other vehicle was relatively unscathed - at least from the back.

The police arrived about two minutes behind the fire trucks.

Nearly all the attention was directed at the occupant of the car that was still in the street.

I got out of my car and asked the driver of the minivan whether she was okay. She was. A kid in a green shirt asked me if I saw what happened. As I tried to describe what I'd seen of the accident for a third time (after the 911 and police dispatchers), I suddenly realized that I wasn't sure where each vehicle started from and what each driver was trying to do. Was one turning left onto Marte and one turning left off of Marte just ahead of me? Was one turning on or off of Marte when the other came speeding up Wilmot? I'm still not sure. I make a lousy witness! The kid in green pointed out that the spinning cars and heavy damage and huge debris field in the street pointed to a high rate of speed. I had to concede that he made a good point!

As police directed traffic and spoke to victims and witnesses...

...some of the fire department folks got out brooms and swept up the wreckage. I wondered whether the police would ask me anything in person, and whether I had anything remotely useful to say, given my failure to observe and remember exactly what happened. A policewoman who was directing the traffic onto Marte looked askance at my car, still in the way, still trapped, still with its lights on. I went over to her and explained my predicament. "You need to back up and turn around," she said. I told her I understood that, but didn't think I could do so safely given all the incoming traffic. "I'll help you," she said, and held up traffic long enough for me to make a K turn and get out of there, for which I thanked her.

I won't be turning left out of Calle Marte for a while.

Karen

Auditing Myself

Nor surprisingly, considering that I just completed a whole string of lessons about internal control for my online Auditing seminar, I have internal controls and related concepts on the brain tonight. After eight hours of answering questions about segregation of duties, control of assets, matching numbered documents to test completeness, etc., I start to see the whole world in auditing terms, from the monitoring of gold received by my character in Dragon Wars to my own performance in completing the assignment a couple hours late.

Neither an online fantasy game nor the nature, timing and extent of my studying procedures are directly related to what I was studying, and even now the imagined concurrence between them is slipping away. But when you get really immersed in a particular way of looking at things, that perspective tends to map itself on your perception of the rest of the world, however briefly. I remember reading eight or more Doonesbury books in a row once, quite a few years ago now. For an hour or two afterward, my thoughts about the world around me assumed a standard four-panel structure: set-up, punchline, secondary punchline or tag. Similarly, I once stood in the Catalina Theatre parking lot after seeing Field of Dreams for the first time, feeling, however briefly, that the world was shimmering with human altruism and mystical possibility.

From that experience comes a passage in Heirs of Mâvarin that I've quoted from in my sig files for quite a few years now. Crel, who recently learned that she is really Princess Cathma but isn't supposed to tell anyone, obliquely compares that revelation to a more limited alteration of perception:

“I know what you mean,” Li said. “I get that way about books, too. Do you ever get the feeling, right after you read something, that the whole world around you is a little different because of what you read?”

Crel thought about it and nodded. “Like everything that happens right after that means a little more, as if it were part of the story. Yes, I’ve felt that.”

“Then the feeling wears off,” Li said earnestly, “and everything’s just the same.”

Crel looked at him again. She knew just what Li meant. She’d felt it herself, but she had never been able to talk to anyone about it. Not to Del, and certainly not to Jamek.

“Somebody told me a story a few days ago,” Crel said slowly. “It changed the world around me, and I don’t think the effect is ever going to wear off.”

One thing the human brain does is compare new experience to existing data, to identify everything and fit it into one's understanding of the world. This thing Pepper is barking at is a St. Bernard, because it matches my stored image of what that breed of dog looks like. Another dog matches my brain's description of a Great Dane in shape but not in color, which based on my readings about dogs in fifth grade, my brain labels "brindle." And so on. This process is absolutely necessary to our ability to learn and understand and function. A particular example may be entirely appropriate and benign, such a recognition of something as a "table" or "test of controls," or it can be skewed and detrimental, such as a false identification of a person as "lazy" or a "terrorist" based on faulty data or stereotyping.

And it can be wonky in the way that the new data alters the rest of the database, forcing accommodations to make it fit. If we apply critical thinking, we may see that the new information requires us to revise our understanding of something. For example, when I finally took my first formal accounting course after years of learning on the job, there was a definite "everything you know is wrong" aspect to a lot of it. To learn accounting properly, I had to revise my understanding of a number of terms and concepts, and did so. But this isn't necessarily the way everyone deals with new information. Rather than alter one's understanding of, say, a Congressional bill we don't like, based on factual information and expert opinion, we may choose to deny or ignore the data that doesn't fit our established world view, substituting false and illogical claims that allow us to maintain a static understanding, however flawed it may be. Or, as we have seen, the new data can encourage a greater change in perception than is actually justified. The world really isn't a Doonesbury book, a mystical cornfield or a study of internal controls of an organization in the planning phase of an external audit. Most of the time we recognize this, and are only influenced a tiny bit by such data outside the scope to which it applies. But there are times when it has an unwarranted impact. For example, one bad experience during early childhood can result in a lifelong fear of dogs, or a single rejection for a job due to not being bilingual can result in a lasting resentment of the Hispanic labor force.

Well, anyway.

My office at Worldwide Travel at its worst, March 2005.

Separation of duties, for the non-accountants among you, is a subset of internal control, which is basically the system of policies and procedures designed to minimize fraud, error, illegality and inefficiency in an organization. The idea behind separation of duties is that if the same person is in charge of an entire accounting process, such as the authorization, preparation, signing, distribution and recording of a check issued by the company, that person has plenty of opportunity to do something nefarious, or make errors that will go undetected.

In reading all this stuff about separation of duties, I inevitably compare what I'm reading with my personal work experience. The first time I read about this in one of my accounting courses, I compared the standards for separation of duties and other internal control procedures with what happened at Worldwide Travel. Being the entire accounting department, I both prepared and recorded the checks in the general ledger, which is less than ideal. (I didn't sign or mail them, though, so it wasn't horrible internal control.) I also collected the cash and checks from the safe, prepared and recorded the deposits and the components thereof, and often took them to the bank. That's worse than the disbursements thing by far. But this was a small company, and when there are only six people in the office on a given day and five of them are mostly there to sell travel, it isn't practical to conform to the same standards that are appropriate to an organization with hundreds or thousands of employees.

My office at Worldwide Travel after a major catchup and
cleanup effort prior to leaving the company, May 2005.

So this time around with the same material, I find myself thinking about Worldwide Travel again, and also about First Magnus and Beaudry RV, where I worked after getting my accounting degree. First Magnus was big enough to sustain good separation of duties, and yet I suspect I was in charge of too much of the payroll and fixed assets accounting cycles. At Beaudry RV, there was so much segregation of duties that I was in a little ghetto of specific tasks, with little idea what the big picture was, except that it was hard to miss the departure of longtime management and other indications the company was in trouble.

So maybe as I second-guess myself about my competence and breadth of knowledge an an experienced staff accountant, it's not too surprising that I haven't performed every task in every job description that comes along. Worldwide Travel notwithstanding, a single accountant isn't supposed to be in charge of everything from soup to nuts. I only hope that the stuff I have done, combined with a good theoretical knowledge of other accounting tasks, will be enough to match the criteria of some good job somewhere in Tucson, with a large or small company. And when I get it, no doubt I'll compare the new info of my job experience with my knowledge base about internal control and all that jazz.

Karen

A Few Words About Depression

I had an email today from a Tucson Citizen reporter - not the one who interviewed me for an article on unemployment in Tucson, a different one. Having been interviewed on my jobless state, was I now willing to be interviewed about seeking therapy for unemployment-related depression? Ummm....

There are two problems with my agreeing to the request. The first, I'm sure you understand, is that the role of Tucson's Famously Depressed Deadbeat, er, Unemployed Person isn't exactly a flattering one. Who knows how being Famously Unemployed in the local paper, picture and all, coincidentally on the same day as my second job interview in three months, may have affected my prospects? Did someone in HR give me a thumbs down for grandstanding? Probably not, but I'll never know. The second problem is, I'm not someone who has sought therapy for depression. Well, maybe a little. Back when my parents were first divorced in 1976, I met with a completely useless, Rogerian student therapist once or twice at Syracuse University, and visited Father Ed at St. Patrick's Church for tea and sympathy. But recently? I think I entertained the notion for two minutes once as an option for the future, when I happened to be in the same building as my mom's old therapist. But other than that, no.

But being obsessively confessional and overly fond of pontificating (not to mention humorously self-deprecating!), I answered the email anyway, with written answers to the reporter's questions. I said that my depression is very minor, more situational than clinical, and that I couldn't afford therapy even were I so inclined.

The reason I'm mentioning all this here, aside from the aforementioned confessional tendencies, is that the reporter's other questions got me thinking about coping mechanisms and the extent to which they help me. That subject seems sufficiently interesting, and possibly helpful, to sustain a blog entry, so here we are.

Things that seem to help:

1. Distraction. In a way, this sounds like a bad idea. We're supposed to confront our problems head on, not turn our backs and pretend they don't exist. That's denial, not coping. Yes, but. One thing I've noticed many times over the years is that it's even more harmful to spend all your time thinking about how miserable you are. Of course you're going to think about that sometimes, if you're acutely or chronically depressed. How can you not? But don't indulge it. If you're having a bad day, then it can be very therapeutic to compile a fixed assets depreciation entry, read a book, prepare for a class, watch a favorite tv show, listen to the Beatles, or do almost anything else that takes your mind away from feelings of helplessness or hopelessness or worthlessness. Six years later, I'm almost grateful that the University of Phoenix made no provision for missing class due to bereavement, and that I consequently had to make a PowerPoint presentation nine hours after my mother died. I probably didn't do a great job of revising my final paper for that class; my concentration wasn't that good. But having something annoyingly irrelevant to do that night probably helped me get through that day.

2. Change the Script. Have you ever seen the film Agnes of God? Meg Tilly plays an innocent, deeply disturbed young nun who gets pregnant and dumps her baby, and yet is a holy, naive, virginal figure who fasts and abases herself and (if I recall correctly) even gets stigmata. Jane Fonda plays the cynical, chain-smoking, ex-Catholic therapist who tries to get to the bottom of what happened and grows to care deeply about her patient. In one key scene, Fonda's Dr. Livingston tries to teach Sister Agnes to fight back against the belief in her own worthlessness that her mother instilled in her. Playing the role of Agnes's mother, Livingston calls her "ugly" and "stupid" and "a mistake," and encourages her to refute these descriptions. (Against the "mistake" charge, Sister Agnes cries out, "I'm not a mistake! God doesn't make mistakes!") I think of this scene often when talking to a depressed friend, or when my own Inner Weasel is trying to tell me nasty things about myself. Nobody is perfect, but telling yourself that you're stupid or ugly, useless or wicked or worthless is not the way to make yourself a better or happier person. Still, we often do what psychologists sometimes call playing tapes, letting negative thoughts replay themselves endlessly in our heads, tearing ourselves down even further. It's important to recognize this behavior and correct it, refuting exaggeratedly negative descriptions of ourselves and replacing thoughts of "I can't" with the knowledge that "I can." Which leads us to the next coping mechanism:

3. Move forward. The essence of depression is a feeling that things won't get better, that you're stuck in the morass of a bad situation and can't get out, and perhaps don't even deserve to get out. If you're feeling hopeless and helpless, a good way to pull free of the mire is to prove to yourself that there are things you can do after all. Maybe I can't magically order up a new job right now, but I can apply for the ones for which I'm qualified and hope. And more important, I can work to make myself more employable. That's what the courses for professional certification that I wrote about last night represent to me: a way forward, to exert some control over my situation and improve my chances of a better outcome in the long run. It should also make me feel better about myself in the meantime, knowing I'm not just shlumphing around waited to be rescued from my fate.

That all seems to help me, but it's not a panacea. Sometimes I'm still fairly miserable, and it's all too easy to reach for food, a coping mechanism that's a short-term mood-lifter but detrimental in the long run. Nor am I suggesting that someone who suffers from chronic or severe clinical depression can solve everything with Sgt. Pepper and being productive. I am, after all, only mildly depressed, and it's not really a chronic condition for me. There are certainly people for whom psychotherapy, with or without appropriate medication or supplements (look into TMG!), is a necessary part of the solution. But these three strategies are worth a try, I think, for just about anyone who suffers from depression.

Do I hope that the Tucson Citizen writer will use me in the article? Not really. I'd just as soon not be Tucson's Designated Unemployed Person. But if I am mentioned, I hope I'm the minor figure in the last paragraph, the wise soul who gets the last word.

Karen

Update: John expressed a preference that I not be in a newspaper article on depression, so I just begged off in an email. Ah, well!

The Web of Ideas

I want to write an in-depth thing here, but I can't really do that tonight, having spent over two hours just preparing the visual parts of the thing and with church in four and a half hours. I've had two hours of sleep, with no chance of more until I dump sufficient words into this entry. So let's get an introduction going, and I'll try to revisit the subject with something approaching profundity some other time.

This particular train of thought started on Twitter, or, taking the long view, on AOL Mail, or, slightly longer view, on the Outpost, or very long view, on television in the 1970s and 1980s. A few days ago in this blog I mentioned science historian James Burke, whose Connections series of shows and series The Day the Universe Changed led years ago to my buying some of his books and even a Connections computer game. In preparing the entry I checked transmission dates on Wikipedia, imdb, YouTube and elsewhere via Google, and found a Burke-related site that didn't turn up the last time I Googled him. All these connections between web sites led to my explaining a little bit about his work, which is fundamentally concerned with a connective view of innovation. Burke loves to show how seemingly disparate people, events and ideas interact in unexpected ways, increasing knowledge and creating change. Part of his thesis is that you need a macro view of what Douglas Adams called "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things," as opposed to a "reductionist" view of knowledge that causes more and more specialization, so that individuals "know more and more about less and less," and can't effectively disseminate their ideas outside the silo of their specialty.

Some of my open tabs tonight in Firefox, including several James Burke sites.

Well, anyway, because whatever I was ranting about that night reminded me of James Burke and I worked him into the entry, I ended up using the title of one of his books / tv shows for the entry title, which I then promoted on Twitter and Facebook. The next day I got AOL mail informing me that a James Burke enthusiast was now following me on Twitter. I followed him on Twitter, which led me to still more Burke links.

More open tabs, including a web of Doctor Who resources.

Another thread of ideas I followed around the web today started, on the Doctor Who blog Planet Gallifrey. I happened to see the beginning of the entry on my revamped Outpost sidebar, read it, and left a comment. I subsequently revamped my sidebar further with a cities-and-flags visitor counter I nicked from Martha while making the rounds on two or three different memes. The counter isn't perfect; it thinks I live in Phoenix and can't narrow down the point of origin of some folks beyond "United States" or "United Kingdom." But I was pleased to see a number of UK cities pop up overnight, and got to worrying that they were following the link from the Who blog comment to the Outpost, only to be disappointed by the lack of Doctor Who speculation in this blog. So I spent and hour or two writing up my thoughts on the subject of this year's Doctor Who Christmas special, which has a character called "The Next Doctor" in the episode title. Fans are feverishly considering each emerging detail about the upcoming story to try to figure out who the heck he is. My in-depth hypothesizing on the subject on my LiveJournal (so as not to overburden you folks with esoterica) was rendered slightly obsolete later in the day, when a link on the Doctor Who Forum led me to an article with a quote that makes the possibilities even more confusing. The article also led me to the official BBC Doctor Who site, from which I found a link to BBC archived copies of early typed documents from 1962 and 1963 that led to the creation of the original tv series. Amazing stuff!

And that's not even counting the back and forth between the Outpost and blogs of Round Robin participants, and the ideas that inspired. Or the fact that my pastor at St. Michael's was experimenting with Twitter, so I recommended the Dean of the Episcopal cathedral in Phoenix as someone to follow, who immediately started following both of us!

Connections between my open tabs.

Now, none of this results in a cure for cancer or a better way to travel to Mars, a plan for making Detroit car companies viable, or even a job offer for me. The knowledge gained from the day's browsing is essentially trivial, except what I absorbed from two James Burke screencasts. But it does show in microcosm some of what Burke is talking about, the serendipity of ideas connecting across space and time. Web 2.0 enables us to learn more and more about more and more, not just about less and less, and can help to spark new ideas and innovations. Or it can just be a pleasant waste of an evening. My fairly specialized interests led me in several directions on this particular day, but they could have ranged much further.

One very simple set of connections shows me part of what's at stake. Two hyperlinks away from the visionary, scientific Burke's site was a link to a video rant with the following description:

Psalm 2
Saturday, November 29, 2008 9:33 PM
Why do the heathen rage? Obama is the antichrist and this world is doomed! The return of the Lord Jesus Christ is at hand!!

Whoever posted this ill-informed bit of paranoia has a right to do so on his or her own site, assuming the video (which I didn't look at) doesn't violate the DCMA or advocate assassination or treason. But there are people who believe such things, and it's unhelpful to the stability of the country and the world. The Web should be used, in part, to expose people to factual information and encourage rational thought, overwhelming ignorance with a flood of knowledge.

Enough. I've gotta go to bed!

Karen

Equal Opportunity Obsessive

I never know from one day to the next what's going to grab hold of my synapses and refuse to let go. If you think I'm in full-blown Doctor Who mode these days, consider this: I've written two entire Wikipedia articles this week, neither of which even mentions the Doctor. One is based on the writing of Madeleine L'Engle, and the other is A Thurber Carnival.

The book that started the trouble

It was probably in early February that I noticed the disappearance of the Echthroi article from Wikipedia. Digging around in the ex-article's history, I discovered that it was sitting in something called "TransWiki," waiting to be evaluated and cleaned up for possible use in Wiktionary. On the Wikipedia side it had turned into a "redirect." This means that clicking on a link for "Echthroi" took the reader to the article for A Wind in the Door, in which the Echthroi first appeared. This happened even if the link for Echthroi was in the article for A Wind in the Door itself!

What are Echthroi? They're the supernatural baddies in two of L'Engle's books, sort of demon agents of depersonalization and nihilism. A number of people have written about them in connection with L'Engle's work. I spent a couple evenings this week digging up those references and adding them to the article. Meanwhile, it turned out that the term also appears in books about the Bible and about Greek Tragedy. It's Greek for Enemies, you see, which is why L'Engle called her evil uncharacters by that name. Someone on Wikipedia felt the article would be one-sided if I didn't mention all that, so I did. Basically the Bible connection is about people parsing the original Greek text to determine what is meant each time the word or its singlular form (Echthros) appears. As for those ancient Greek thespians, they tended to see the non-protagonist characters in three categories: philioi (friends and loved ones), echthroi (enemies) and medetoeroi (neithers).



As of last night I had that article more or less under control, and was getting a little bored with it. So I did my blog entry on Gallifrey One (part Whatever) and went to bed. Ten hours of sleep later, I got up and checked my email, my Doctor Who Forum subscriptions and my Wikipedia watchlist. It happened that someone updated the Peggy Cass article a little, so I clicked on that to make sure it wasn't vandalism (e.g. "I like cheese."). That's when the article taunted me, with its picture of Cass with Thurber, and its redlink for the nonexistent article on A Thurber Carnival.

So I wrote it. Beginning to end. Took me about ten hours. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good for a single day's work, if I do say so myself.



Why did I do it? Why do I even care that much? Well, I suppose it's because I grew up with that play, and with Thurber's writing in general. My mom directed A Thurber Carnival in Syracuse circa 1967. There's a mildly amusing story connected with that, in a you-had-to-be-there sort of way; I commend to your attention my previous write-up of the subject. Somewhere around the time I came across my mom's copy of Thurber's Alarms & Diversions, and loved it. By high school I was collecting Thurber books, and reading them when I supposed to be doing something else. My friend Howard and I used to play word games based on Thurber's writing, and I've discussed Thurber with William Windom, whose career has included a lot of Thurber stuff - a tv series and a one man show. Attending A Thurber Carnival on Broadway is even on my list of things to do when I get my time machine, but only if Thurber is on stage that night, playin himself in one of my favorite Thurber pieces of all time, "File and Forget."

Does this mean I'll spend tomorrow rereading Thurber Country, which has some great pieces I lost track of yours ago? Or will I get on with reading my L'Engle-related non-fiction, as I've been threatening to do for years? Could be both or neither. Maybe I'll go back to mapping northeast Mâvarin and counting out the number of hours it takes Jamek to get to his next scene. Or I'll resume watching every Doctor Who story from Rose through Voyage of the Damned, with the commentaries turned on.

Or, considering how late it is right now, maybe I'll go back to bed as soon as I get home from church. Yes, that seems more likely.

Karen

Introvert's Lament

Some of the writerly guests at Gallifrey One this year

There's a line in the Christmas 2007 Doctor Who special, "Voyage of the Damned," in which the Doctor offers the opinion that taking a cruise "on your own" doesn't "quite work." As someone whose only cruise was a three day one taken with my mom, I think that's probably about right in most cases. In fact, I would extend the observation to science fiction and sf media conventions, with the same basic exception as in the cruise example.

You see, in both cases it depends on the kind of person who is attending the group activity alone. I imagine that if you're a fearless extrovert, adept at making friends everywhere you go, solo cons and cruises are no problem. I've seen people this weekend (well, a few of them) who can walk up to almost anyone and strike up a successful conversation. Such people, I'm reasonably certain, will be fine in situations like this.

And I have no doubt that people make friends at these things; I've done it myself a number of times over the years. By and large, though, nearly everyone at this convention is either here with someone else or a celebrity with a handler, friends and hangers-on. I'm here alone, and that makes it harder. I've had a good time, met a lot of nice people, taken pictures, looked at merchandise, gained insights and generally been entertained - but it would have all been much better with one or more close friends at my side. In the early days of Gallifrey One, I used to drive out here with Tracy and Teresa, Dimitra and sometimes Sherlock. Now one is dead, two live far away and one has fallen on hard times. And I miss them, darn it, the younger, healthier, Tucson-based versions of them. Sherlock lives in Texas, but at least she used to visit Tucson occasionally when the twins were here.

Still, despite my shyness in person, I haven't been completely isolated socially. I've asked questions in panel discussions, chatted with some of the writers, had a long conversation with someone's mother about travel and her plush Mickey Mouse collection (no, really!), and chatted with other fans about Doctor Who "shipping" (factions in favor of one romantic pairing or another, coupled with antipathy toward rival characters), the casting of Hitchhiker's Guide characters in different media, and hatred of the character Dawn in Buffy fandom. But today, when I wasn't in an overflow crowd at a live DVD commentary, a Sylvester McCoy interview or some other event, I've been at loose ends, wandering around looking for something to connect with. In the hall, people hung around chatting with friends. In the con suite, people ate bologna and watched a show about people who survived serious accidents. In the lobby, just outside the hotel bar, groupings of chairs and tables held an ever-changing assortment of celebrities and fans, with the celebrities chatting to each other as fans looked on. Sometimes fans were part of the main conversation, but mostly only if they were personal acquaintances one of more of the celebrities present. These conversations were almost inevitably punctuated by people going to the bar and bringing back another round.

If you're at a convention with a friend or family member, you're automatically not pathetic (by fandom standards) or lonely or bored. Even if the programming of the moment consists of a screening of That Awful Show, a panel discussion with the Second Actor From the Left, an autograph session with nonfiction writers you've never heard of and a retrospective slideshow on the history of athletic shoes in science fiction, you have someone to talk to about something more interesting, perhaps with three to five other fans joining in along the way. But when you're there alone, it's trickier. Does that person you know casually from past conventions want you hanging around all the time, just because you're on a first name basis? Probably not. Is it permissible to hang around at the fringes of the crowd surrounding your favorite actor? In some cases, the answer is yes, but if you stay at the fringes you probably won't hear much of the conversation, much less contribute to it. And if you hang around one celebrity all weekend I imagine that you'll seem a little creepy.

I'm on a first name basis with one person from Phoenix and two from L.A., and I've met a number of the celebrities several times over the years. I've interviewed Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, who starred in the show in the last 1980s; but it was over a decade ago and they're exceedingly unlikely to remember. A few of the writers remember that I wrote those trading cards in the mid-1990s, and one more remembers the comment I left on his blog about the Lennon-McCartney dynamic. But none of that gives me a license to hang out with them, beyond the non-intrusive, limited contact that is the norm here.

And yet...

Other fans can and do have conversations, with the celebrities and with each other, beyond what I've managed so far. Yes, they have their support groups of friends and family members and the excuse of past acquaintance; some of them have been coming to this thing nearly every year since 1990, and even many of the celebs have been here three times or more. Even so, in trying to strike a balance between too intrusive and too unobtrusive, I'm pretty sure I'm well into the latter category. I've done well in some one-to-one situations, but overall I think I rate a D+ for social interaction this weekend.

I'll have to see what I can do tomorrow to raise that grade.

Karen

Late Night at the Harriott

Hey, John,

You know how, before I left Tucson on this trip, you asked me repeatedly not to do anything stupid? Well, I've mostly managed that so far. The one exception you sort-of know about, and it's too interesting an anecdote not to share it with the world (or, at least, the tiny portion thereof that reads this blog). Don't worry: nothing actually bad happened. The car is fine, I am fine, and our finances are fine. So relax. This is just one of those Karen-tells-of-an-amusing-screwup stories, the kind that aggravate you only briefly.

As I admitted to you this morning, I neglected to print out the hotel confirmation email and bring it with me. I figured it would be easy to find the LAX Hilton. After all, LAX is easy to find, and I've been to the nearby Hilton before. Also I forgot.

So after a mostly-uneventful drive in (details of which will be revealed shortly), I found my way onto Century Blvd, drove past the Hilton, turned right and make my way into their rather alarming parking garage. I say this because it was steep and narrow and underground, with lots of hairpin turns marked out with metal ropes. I drove down to the fourth level near row B and parked as instructed on the signs. Made it!

I locked the car and took the elevator up to registration. The couple in front of me told the couple in front of them that they were from England, and I nodded knowingly, not that anyone noticed. Nor was I correct in my "knowing." I should have had an inkling when they said they were checking out, not checking in as I would have expected on the Friday of a Doctor Who convention.

When it was my turn, the hotel desk clerk could not find my registration. I could not understand why until she indicated that she was unfamiliar with this "Gallifrey" of which I spoke.

That's when I finally deduced the Awful Truth. The convention wasn't at the LAX Hilton. And I was so sure that it was! For one thing, there was a whole discussion online about the nearby Carl's Jr, and other places with off-airport addresses that were said to be close by. It was clearly an LAX hotel, then. But which one?

Too embarrassed to call and ask you to look it up, I did something reasonably clever instead. I went to the Carl's Jr., got lunch, and simply asked the first really obvious Doctor Who fans I saw which hotel the con was in. Two minutes later I knew it was at the LAX Marriott, in between the Hilton and that same Carl's Jr., on the same block. (Incidentally, nearly everyone in the place was a con-goer.) Somehow I read the word "Marriott" repeatedly, and my brain read it back to me as "Hilton." This was because this convention and possibly one of the Quantum Leap cons had been held at two airport Hiltons in the area, this one and the Burbank one. My brain's expectations led me astray. And by the way, I can name at least two occasions on which you, too, acted on what you expected to hear or see instead of what was actually there.

One of the traditional blurry con photos

Once I got to the right hotel, everything went great. The parking is on the surface and has a discounted convention rate. The hotel had my reservation, and the extra pillows (but not the free fridge, 'cause they're out of them). I've seen Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred and our acquaintance Gary Russell on stage together, spoken briefly with my two favorite living Doctor Who screenwriters and two additional Who novelists, had dinner with three of the Phoenix fans, taken some traditionally distant and blurry con pictures, chatted about fudged accounting practices with an airline employee and told him my airplane joke, and successfully got online after the front desk said the network was down for the night. Ha! I win!


Oh, and I photographed a few rather clever entries from the second row at the Masque of Mandragora costume contest. The one above, in which Lady Cassandra's moisturizing "lovely boys" discover a marketing opportunity, was named Best in Show. Taking these pictures reminded me strongly of the great non-digital photos you took of fan costumes at that ST con in Baltimore (or was it the St. Louis one?) 22 years ago. I still have a mental image (and we still have the physical photo) of your dynamic shot of Batman, Catwoman and Robin.

As for the trip itself: the drive over started at 10:45 PM or so. The rented car has satellite radio, and I quickly found a Jack Benny marathon hosted by his daughter and stayed on that station all night. Listening to that made it much easier to cope when I was at a dead standstill for about 15 minutes at 1 AM in Phoenix due to a traffic accident up ahead, and when at least two I-10 rest areas in California were closed and I had to drive on. I sort of watched for Cabezon, but dinosaurs are hard to spot in the dark, and there are now several exits with that word in them.

Waking to windmills

Shortly after passing the second of these and thinking I'd missed the exit I wanted, I finally found an open rest area and stopped. It was 5 AM. I reclined the seat and slept until 11 AM. When I awoke, I saw I was parked almost adjacent to one of the hills full of windmills that we always see on the Northern Route. Once I got moving, I passed mountains with snow on them, which reminded my of your warning about snow on the Southern Route.

Snow near the Cabezon T. Rex

And then...and then...there was Cabezon after all! I parked by the dinosaurs and had breakfast at the Wheel Inn. Hooray! I can't quite decide whether I first visited the place with you in 1986, or with my mom in 1978 or so.

The really icky part of the drive was from there to LAX. Even at noon and early afternoon, the freeways were packed. Locals later told me it's always like this on Friday, and more so on a holiday weekend. D'oh! Can't be helped, though.

So now it's late night at the Hilt--I mean Marriott, and I think I'm finally ready to sleep. If the internet connection works tomorrow night, I'll be blogging as usual. Meanwhile, Johnny-me-love, I hope you'll forgive me for the hotel name gaffe. If it helps, I haven't bought anything in the dealer's room yet except a T-shirt. That will change, but no, I won't be spending a lot. Good night!

Karen

I Failed Vein Check! And Other Notes From My Day

Okay, this one's mostly a bunch of mini-rants. But first let me fulfill a little request.


Photo of the Month

Martha of the journal Perception has a new photo meme, and she asked me to join in. Frankly, I'm so caught up in the Round Robin, the Weekend Assignment and the Monday Photo Shoot that I'm not in the market for another meme, but hers is monthly and easy, and she's a regular on the Round Robin and MPS and deserves my support. It's called Photo of the month, and I'm less than two hours from her deadline. If she's on eastern time, I'm six minutes overdue! But here are two photos, my favorite of the 1000 or so pictures I took in January, and my favorite of the unposted ones.

Angela's Last Tucson Sunset

Freight Train Behind the Bars (previously unposted)

How Do They Do It?

I was up most of the night Friday (nothing new there) writing last night's entry. I got intrigued with all the stuff about the B Banzai quote and the psycomedy records (see what I did there?) and ended up in bed at 6 AM thinking about how it all ties in with what actors do when they play a role.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s I interviewed dozens of actors, writers and producers, and even a director or two, from three of my two favorite tv shows (Route 66, Doctor Who and Quantum Leap, in case that's not obvious). Through most of those interviews I was trying to find a way to derive some understanding of the creative process, what artists do and how and why. The writing aspect isn't so opaque for me, since I do it myself, but the acting one is a mystery. Do actors try to leave their own identities behind in their grand game of Let's Pretend? Are they trying to imagine themselves in their characters' situations, building on the bits of themselves that intersect with the roles they play? Or is it truly just a matter of learning the lines and not bumping into the furniture, as one actor famously said?

I suspect it depends on the actor. One actor talked about going "out of one's head" to play a role. Another spoke of imagining he would feel much like the embittered actor he was playing, had his own career gone the same way. And a third quoted the furniture bumping quote at me.

As for myself, I've always been fascinated by the strange things the mind is capable of doing, including the acting and the writing - and other things, lots of them. The one thing in the Mâvarin books that feeds my obsession about this is the way a tengrem's mind works, sometimes forcing the former human being to react primarily on instinct. Writing Rani is as close as I'll ever come to knowing what that's like, but it's akin to the whole meditation thing, in which the person is supposed to let the conscious mind go and become one with the universe or something. I've always been kind of dubious about that. When I try to meditate, the best I ever manage is to fall asleep! And how can you be aware of being emptied of self if the self isn't there to be aware of it?

All in all, my own answer to last night's question is no. I wouldn't want to leave myself behind, except perhaps for a couple of seconds to see whether it's even possible and what it would be like. It's a fascinating concept, but so is the concept of the self. I am myself, and I'm glad of that. Karen Christine Funk Blocher is the only person I've ever wanted to be. My talents my faults, my interests, my memories, good and bad, it's all me, the only person, allowing for personal growth, I can imagine ever being. And yet I've got all these characters in my head, who aren't me, but come from the mysterious processes of the human mind. My mind. Maybe that's why what an actor does is so interesting to me. They too pull fictional people out of their own heads, but with two differences. One, they have a writer's words to help them. Two, they somehow manage to become that person, at least outwardly, for minutes or hours at a time. Weird. And we pay them to do it!

Okay, that was a bit longer than I intended to go on about that subject tonight. I mostly wanted to reassure anyone who might have worried about me that last night's post was not about wallowing in my teenage angst or wanting to escape myself or anything like that. It was more about the wonders of the human mind - mine, and others'.

My Grade-A Blood

On to the vein check. I tried to give blood early this afternoon, which meant that I didn't get to sleep until 2 or 3 PM as I often do on Saturday. The Red Cross always calls me to come in the first day I'm eligible again, every eight weeks. I'm A+, which isn't rare, but they always need it. They probably need all the blood types all the time, in greater quantities than they get. It amuses me that my blood type happens to look like the highest possible grade on a report card in high school. It also amuses me that it was a plot point in the first full Tenth Doctor story, "The Christmas Invasion." If I lived in that fictional world, I would have spent part of Christmas Day 2006 in a trance on a rooftop somewhere, courtesy of the invading Sycorax. So would the Royal Family of Great Britain. Ha!

When I go down to the Red Cross, where the elderly volunteer now knows me by name, one of three things happens. Either I fail the hemoglobin test with an iron count that's just a smidge too low, or I fail the vein check with veins too small and hard to get at, or everything goes great and it's all over quickly and almost painlessly. Today the iron was fine; six weeks out from my 51st birthday I finally seem to be hitting an entirely symptomless menopause, which should help. But they didn't like the look of those veins. They never do, because they're small and hard to get at and go in a funny direction. But it's worse when I fail to drink lots and lots of fluids the day before. We were out of everything but Diet Pepsi at home, and I didn't take advantage of the filtered water at work. I'll do better next week.

NEVER SURRENDER, Joe!

If you type the words Joe Mikulik Tucson into Google, the fourth result is a piece I wrote several years back in the old blog, called When They Were Toros. Joe was a minor league player who drove in the league championship-winning run for the Tucson Toros back in 1991, two years before I became interested in baseball. On his wristbands that night, and again in 1993 when the Toros won their second championship, were the handwritten words "NEVER SURRENDER." I was there to see them that time. I even wrote NEVER SURRENDER on my own wristbands when I dressed as a Toro for Halloween a year or two later. (And this was long before Galaxy Quest!) Joe lasted another year as a player, and eventually became a minor league manager at the single-A level.

So Joe's a local hero, but basically small potatoes, right? That's why I was surprised tonight to see that he had an article on Wikipedia. When I clicked over to check it out, I was shocked and stunned. Apparently he had a major tantrum back in 2006 with a substitute umpire, which was shown on all the sports shows. It earned him a fine and a suspension. That was the entire substance of the article. It mentioned how long he had been managing the Asheville Tourists, but didn't bother with his full first name, when he was born, when he was drafted by the Astros, his 11-year minor league career or his pennant-winning hit. Heck, it didn't even mention that he ever played baseball! Of course I couldn't let that stand, so I added the basic stats and the stuff about the 1991 season, still fondly remembered as the greatest moment in Tucson baseball history. Never surrender, Joe! Not even to having a crappy attack article on Wikipedia!

Goodness, look at the time! Rants over!

Karen

No Matter Where You Go...

I've been working on that database project most of the night and I'm tired now, so I probably won't give this entry the depth that the subject deserves. In fact, I know I won't. My plan of the moment is to introduce the topic and leave you a question to ponder, if anyone is so inclined. Some time soon I'll probably come back and do my best to turn it into something profound, or at least amusing.

Fans of the film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension probably recognize the quote in the subject line. The end of the sentence, of course, is, "...there you are." It turns out that the quip and its many variations both predate and postdate BB by centuries. A FAQ that compiles this material anecdotally attributes it to the fifteenth century theologian Thomas à Kempis, to Buddhism, and to Confucius, and also notes, multiple times, its presence on the dedication plaque for the Starship U.S.S. Excelsior. (Another starship was apparently built by Yoyodyne.) Oh, and supposedly, that endless font of real and attributed quotes, Yogi Berra, once said, "No matter where you go, you end up somewhere!"

But I digress.



The first place I personally came across the basic sentiment was on a comedy LP by stand-up psychologist Dr. Murray Banks. No, really. My mom had two albums by this guy, How to Live With Yourself, or What to Do Until the Psychiatrist Comes; and Just in Case You Think You're Normal. And wonders of the age, someone has uploaded both of them on YouTube. That's what the links are. Now that I've found them, I'll probably listen to all five parts of each, but in the meantime there are certain bits that have been in my memory for forty years. This was one of them. In Just in Case You Think You're Normal (part one of the YouTube rip, btw) he quotes a woman as saying, "Where'er I go, I must take myself along. And that spoils everything." A third comedy LP by Second City founder Del Close, called The “Do It Yourself” Psychoanalysis Kit. At some point in that album, "Dr. Siegfried Gestalt," the shrink with the Viennese accent exclaims, "You try everything, sex, cars, women, Zen Buddhism. But wherever you go, you go too, and spoil everything!" And hooray! Another blogger has tracked that down for us, too!

Forty years I've been thinking about that line, at least from time to time. The last twenty years I've mostly been thinking about the B Banzai version, with Murray Banks (and maybe, occasionally Del Close) intoning in the background. What does it mean?

If it's just the B. Banzai version of the quote, it could mean a number of things. As a tv pioneer supposedly said and Yogi implied, you have to be careful where you're going, because you may get there. It may mean something about living with the consequences of your actions. But brought up as I was on Murray Banks and Del Close, I'm more inclined to the other interpretation. Wherever I go, I know Karen is there.

Does she spoil everything? I guess it depends. When I was in about ninth grade, give or take a year or two, my mom arranged for me to spend a day at Manlius Pebble Hill School. It was sort of a "try before you buy" thing. I've been to kindergarten at Pebble Hill, but at public school ever since. Being smart, fat, physically awkward and socially inept, and having that wonderful surname Funk to make fun of, I had some fairly miserable times at F-M. The worst of it was behind me when my mom offered me the chance to get a fresh start elsewhere. So I went over to the private school for the day. All day long, kids asked me why on earth I wanted to go to Manlius Pebble Hill. They all longed to go to the public school, and earnestly advised me to stay put, which of course I did. But I started to explain, once or twice, that I was at a school with peers who had known me since I played a skunk in the second grade play, and that I was interested in ditching the reputation I'd built up from every social gaffe I'd ever made and every time I'd ever been teased. I didn't put it quite like that, but that was the sense of it. And then I realized that in telling kids that at the new school, I was importing that same reputation. I was truly bringing the worst of myself along, and spoiling everything.

Over on the Doctor Who forum tonight, someone called "Mr Dark" mentioned that Stephen King can't ditch writing like Stephen King, even if he writes under another name. He also said that Paul McCartney once expressed interest in the Beatles doing concerts in disguise at small venues, and was disappointed when someone from the press pointed out they'd be recognized the moment their voices were heard. They too had to take themselves along.

My question to you, as I finally take myself off to bed, is whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. After all, who we are, what we've done and what we remember, informs any new experiences and gives them context. Does the fact that I'd heard a similar line decades earlier enhance that scene with Buckaroo or just muddy the water? If we could leave behind our prejudices, our guilt, our own particular filters, and see the world from a fresh perspective, would that be a good thing, or just an opportunity to make new mistakes? If we could take a vacation from ourselves, should we do it?

Karen
or maybe, for tonight,
Bonnie from Queens, NY

Running from the Weasel

So, on the first day of the year, a year in which I've promised to finish my rewrites and edits on Heirs of Mâvarin and the Mages of Mâvarin trilogy and get the books sold, I barely even glanced at the first page of the first chapter of the first book. Instead I spent many hours rewatching a couple of Doctor Who episodes plus deleted scenes, reading blogs and message boards, IMing three different people, tweaking a few Wikipedia articles, searching for my keys (found 'em!) and suffering through a fairly obnoxious BBC Radio One podcast to get to a two minute interview.

Is it laziness? Is it my Doctor Who obsession getting in the way of productivity?

No. It certainly looks that way, but that's not it.

It was avoidant behavior, brought on by fear.

Fear of the Weasel.

I've written about the Inner Weasel before. It's that nasty defeatist voice inside a writer's head, or in anyone, the one that says what you're working on is no good, that it will never be any good, that you may as well give up now. The name comes from a discussion on an AOL sf writing message board about eight years ago. The Inner Weasel, also known as the Inner Critic, is the Superego gone wild. It sees every flaw and sternly points them out. If someone else criticizes your work, it believes every word; but it ignores any incoming praise. The Inner Weasel holds you to a higher standard, all the while claiming that you will never crawl that high.

It's daft of me, I know, but even though I believe in the novels, the characters and my own writing ability, I find it all too easy to listen to the Weasel. This has been especially true since September, when the DAW first reader rejected Heirs and my life got difficult with Tuffy's cancer and the challenges of the new job.

In a way it was the right thing to do, but I actually gave the Weasel more power shortly after that. Discouraged about the rejection letter, I brought in a new beta reader, and asked two of my existing ones to try to read Heirs Chapter One as if the story were new to them. The resulting advice was highly contradictory, and the Weasel absorbed all of it, and read it back to me at every opportunity. I undertook a major overhaul of the chapter, which was already on its 5,047th draft, but nothing I did pleased the Weasel. Every cut and every addition, inspired by the advice of one reader or another, took the chapter farther away from what someone else liked. So I gave it up, made excuses, didn't open the document for weeks at a time, or opened it and didn't look at it. And of course I felt guilty about this. It was like the Weasel kept telling me. I wasn't really a writer, since clearly I wasn't writing. I was just pretending. I would never get it published. "Write something else, something different," John advised me for the 500th time, and didn't understand why I found the advice so depressing and soul-killing.

But this is 2008, a chance to start over. And why should I fear a fictional weasel? This is where that affirmations stuff kinda makes sense to me. If I can dump the fear and believe in myself, I've clearly got a much better chance of accomplishing something than if I let myself hide from the Weasel by hiding from my fiction writing.

Okay, so it took until about 2 AM on January 2nd to actually start work on the chapter.

And it wasn't so bad. I trimmed a phrase here, a sentence there, cut half a paragraph and moved up the bit about Shela. It all worked. It all improved the flow of the thing.

A tengrem. Art by Sherlock

What about the lack of dramatic tension J talked about? the Weasel asked.

Shut up, I said. Clearly the boy in the tree is foreshadowed as being about to come face to face with an insane fire-breathing monster, and does so on page seven. That should be dramatic enough for anyone. I'm not going to invent false tension or fake action before that. It will only get in the way and delay things.

What about the teenagers who should be in the hunting party? the Weasel asked.

There are two seventeen-year-olds with the hunters. They just don't get mentioned 'cause they don't have a line, I said.

What about Suri's sheep? the Weasel asked. You already cut the dialogue of him worrying about them, and now you've cut the fact that the tengrem was seen in the pasture. Nobody will even know about Suri and his sheep now.

That's all right; I know, I said. Suri's sheep aren't important to anyone but Suri.

That's what Bil says, the Weasel pointed out. Isn't that line going to confuse people now?

Oops! You're right, I said, and cut the line.

A decent start. But now I'm late for bed!

Karen

Do I Dare to Live My Dreams?

Weekend Assignment #196: What are your hopes or plans for 2008? Any big projects for the year? Anything you hope to accomplish or change? Or will you just relax? Because, you know, that's okay, too.

Extra Credit: How was your 2007?

Today I had the fourth of four sessions in a seminar called Investment in Excellence. It's a sort of motivational / transformative program that encourages you to dream big, and to achieve those dreams with affirmations and "self-talk" and other techniques. As with the first three sessions, I'm not sure how much I believe it all. Some of it makes a lot of sense, but a lot of it seems to be predicated on wishful or magical thinking. Apparently it works for some people, but it's not very compatible with cynicism or even rationalism. After the first two sessions I sort of vaguely intended to give it a try, but soon got distracted. My fear is that I'll do a tiny portion of what the program recommends, forget to do even that after a while, and then claim, "See? It doesn't work for people like me." But really, I think I ought to swallow my distaste for affirmations and such, and give it a fair chance.

One of the things we did today was write a letter (well, sort of a letter) from the fictional perspective of December 20, 2008, looking back on all we've accomplished in the past year. We placed these in envelopes, addressed to ourselves. The facilitator collected them and will mail them to us a year from now. Obviously I don't have my letter to refer to now, but here's the gist of what I said I'd done between 12/20/07 and 12/20/08:

What I Accomplished in 2008

1. Tuffy's tongue is healed, her appetite is good and her cancer is in remission.
2. I've lost weight through diet and exercise.
3. I've found a literary agent, who has placed the Mâvarin books. Heirs of Mâvarin is due out in January 2009, Mages of Mâvarin later that year. The Lives and Times of Joshua Wander is also on the way, and I'm continuing to write further books.
4. I'm getting together with a lonely friend once a month. It seems to be helping her sense of self-worth.
5. I've resolved the problem with another friend. We get together occasionally.
6. I've been to Gallifrey One (Los Angeles, February 2008), England and Wales (where I saw Doctor Who being filmed), and plan to go to Hawaii next. With John, of course.
7. I've visited my dad and brother in Wilmington and Cleveland, respectively.
8. I have thoroughly learned my job and how the business works, and made useful innovations to improve the process and help the company.

Now, some of that stuff is clearly unlikely, but none of it is impossible. To get there, I'm essentially supposed to train my brain to expect those results, become dissatisfied with the status quo, find out what I need to find out, seek answers that may be hiding behind personal blind spots, eliminate fear, self-doubt and other negative thinking, and "grow into it." Can I do that? Will it result in book publication and all the rest of it? How about half of it?

But isn't it better to give it a shot than to continue to mope along, avoiding things out of fear and self-doubt and making excuses for my lack of progress?

Extra Credit: As you know, it hasn't been a wonderful year. I've written about it all repeatedly and at length, but I lost one job when the company collapsed, lost another when the temp position didn't lead to the permanent one, had a stressful first month at my current job due to not knowing anything about the industry or the company procedures, apparently lost a friend in a one paragraph letter, and almost lost my dog to cancer. Yikes! But next year will be better. I say that every year, and once in a while I'm actually right. May it be true this time!

Karen

...What Keeps Everything From Happening at Once

Y'know, I just took a few minutes to research the title of this entry, trying to get the exact wording from Buckaroo Banzai. Instead I found this:

"Time," he said, "is what keeps everything from happening at once."
--Ray Cummings, "The Girl in the Golden Atom" (1919)

And this:

“Time is what prevents everything from happening at once”
--John Archibald Wheeler (American physicist, b. 1911)

I even found someone advising not to worry about whether Einstein or Woody Allen said it first. One thing's for sure, though: it didn't originate with ol' Buckaroo.

I thought of the quote, or paraphrase, tonight as I cast around for something I was ready to say with respect to this seminar I've been attending. Yes, Julie, fish were thrown on a video screen, and there was also an unseen gorilla. But that wasn't really the gist of the thing. I still don't know how much I understand the details of this particular cognitive/gestalt system of self-improvement, or how much I'm willing to buy into it, or at least give it a chance. I'm only halfway through it, after all. The other half will be the week before Christmas. Some of it does seem to make sense, and I don't want my normal skepticism to turn into postmodern cynicism. So I'll have to think it over, possibly test some elements of it, and make up my mind in the fullness of time.

One particular claim that came out today seems counterintuitive, to say the least; and that's where the time quote comes in. Affirmations guru Lou Tice claims that you should write a bunch of affirmations (think of the Al Franken character Stuart Smalley, only less pathetic) in different areas of one's life, and thus improve all aspects of your life at once. The idea is to avoid being too obsessed with one thing, and being "out of balance" in one's priorities. As someone with a marked tendency to obsess over one thing at a time, I can sort of see this reasoning even as I rebel against it. After all, just a week ago I wrote about the major stressful changes in my life over a three month period. I'm sure I've read before that the more major changes going on in your life (good or bad or both), the more stressed out you'll be. I've therefore never thought it might be a good idea to work on my writing, dieting, exercise, CPA exam, finances, house cleaning, etc. all at once! But perhaps the explanation is that the affirmations thing is supposed to get you primed for your new improved life rather than just dumping the end result on you. You have a little time to get used to it, I guess.

So here we are, just under a month before Christmas. The holidays are a stressful time anyway. I'm just digging out from my lack of industry knowledge at work, my dog just finished her radiation therapy for cancer, and I'm supposed to be selecting materials to fix up my bathroom. Is this really the time to start reading sentences every morning and night about losing weight, writing every night, and [third affirmation omitted here]? Sorry, but that doesn't doesn't sound right to me.

Still, the writing thing is something I can do, even if I don't read about it off a 3x5 card. I finished revising the opening scene of Heirs tonight. I'm still not sure page 11 is soon enough for Something Awful to Happen to get the plot moving, but overall I'm pleased with what I've accomplished. For now at least, I plan to keep that going.

On the 3x5 card labeled "Health," the one on which I wrote about good food and daily exercise and such, I also said something about seven hours of sleep a night. Yeah, like that's going to happen. If I ever do try this affirmation thing, I'm going to cross out the word "seven" and write in "six" instead. Even at that, I'm running a little late tonight. Good night!

Minor Investments

As noted briefly last night, I was unable to pick Tuffy up from the vet at lunchtime today. I was in a seminar all day called "Investments in Excellence," a business-oriented self-actualization seminar full of cognitive psychology concepts about affirmations and changing your tapes and such. I'm not ready to write about this in any depth, partly because I haven't yet decided what I think of it. I've got tomorrow's continuation to get through yet, and two more days in December. As a psychologist's daughter, I'm already somewhat familiar with this stuff. It was my mom's preferred form of therapy, and I've done my best to coach at least one friend to apply such concepts in the past, specifically trying to get her to replace her defeatist self-pity and self-abasement with more positive thoughts about herself, and what she can do to make things better. On the other hand, there's a certain amount of silly jargon involved (e.g. "efficaciousness" instead of "effectiveness"), and a definite element of magical thinking. I'll have more to say once I've had more time to take in what they have to say and mull it over.

Pressed to participate in discussions about goals and attitudes and such, I naturally mentioned the novels several times today. The truth is that there's a lot more I can and should be doing, and I've let fear, discouragement, depression, distractions and Doctor Who get in the way. (Anyone know a word for "fear" that starts with a D?) Rather than let this neglect of my novels continue, I did put in some time and effort tonight on Heirs Chapter One, with some success. There are still some bits that bother me, but I'm not sure how much is really in need of fixing, and how much is just my inner weasel. Perhaps my beta readers will be able to help me out on that one. But at least I did something, instead of making the usual excuses for not doing it.


Tuffy really didn't want to be at the vet at all today, let alone for nine hours, but it was her fourth and last radiation treatment, and we're hoping it will all have been worth our time and money, Tuffy's fear and discomfort, and the vets' and technicians' efforts. The vet and her assistants were gone for the evening when I got there, but the paperwork says that her tongue "is showing some mile ulceration secondary to the radiation therapy." It also says to bring her in two weeks from now to see whether that has cleared up. I don't know whether that's part of the initial $2000 cost that was estimated for all this, but I do know the radiation hasn't come to nearly that much money so far.

Back at home, Tuffy was as hungry as I've seen her. She's eaten two of those Cesar dog food portions since getting home tonight, plus some Lunchables ham and cheese, pepperoni and (unless she buried them) dog biscuits! Hooray!

That's all I have to say tonight, because of the whole need-to-sleep-now thing. Except: there was some good news today from the BBC. Rose Tyler, the "companion" character who was a huge part of the success of the revived Doctor Who in 2005 and 2006, will be appearing in three episodes next year, despite having been trapped "forever" on a parallel Earth in the 2006 series finale. Apparently fans saw her filming in Cardiff, and posted pictures to Outpost Gallifrey. From there it was picked up by a British newspaper or two, and the BBC felt compelled to make an announcement. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's great that the character's coming back (and not displacing her successors), and kind of neat that fans broke the story. But I think I would have preferred to be shocked and stunned when she turned up in an episode, with no advance warning. Ah, well!

Karen