Author: Teel

A lot of the music on my iPod that is the most played and the highest rated is music about being lonely, about missing someone or losing someone or never even really having the chance to be with someone, or even just about being alone and wishing there was someone out there to be with. And for a long time, this was reasonable, something I felt, something I identified strongly with, there were people I missed, longed to be with, and lamented the loss of. And these songs would come on and the emotions would well up inside me and it was a good thing, because I like feeling.

But now I’m thinking I need to figure out how I want to re-arrange my music, because I don’t have that longing anymore, I don’t miss any of those people any more. I hear the songs, I still like many of them, but the emotional response simply isn’t there any longer. There are still songs on my iPod I have an emotional response to, but … I’m finding more and more of the songs I used to respond to, songs about love and longing and distance and missing, just don’t do anything for me anymore, and there’s a lot of them.

There’s a storm a’brew’in.

Outside and in.

I guess I had to settle in just a little more to trigger my dad: he told me, the very next time he was in town after I hung my art, that regardless of what other things happen I’ve got to find new living arrangements at the end of the year…

Anyway, in thinking about where I might go, I considered renting or buying a place here in town, probably near work… but it occurrs to me that really there’s nothing tying me to Phoenix right now. Which is not precisely to say that I don’t have ties here, or that my family is unimportant, but rather that … the ties I have here are very flexible. My family is still my family, no matter how far from them I get, and I’m sure I’ll return to them time after time, and a few years here or there or elsewhere isn’t going to break those ties.

My first non-phoenix inclination was to go live in New York City. I realize it’s “more expensive” to live there than anywhere else in the US, but there are certainly millions of unskilled and entry-level workers working and living in and around the city, and I don’t see why I couldn’t become one of them. I don’t have a family and I’m certainly willing to sacrifice my ‘standard of living’ for a new experience – not that my standard of living is very high right now anyway, compared to the “average” Arizonan… I have wanted to live in New York City (staying at least for a couple of years, perhaps as long as ten) for at least as far back as I’ve been making lists of long-term goals. It’s on my lists from college, from high school, and many in between.

The bulk of the US publishing industry is based out of NYC, which might be a nice avenue to look down for an entry level job. I can certainly work in a mail room or in a basic administrative capacity, and perhaps from inside the industry I could get a better idea of how it all works. (Which reminds me that I haven’t been keeping up on my personal goal to find 5 new agents every week to consider querying… I shall have to make myself a goal for this weekend to catch up.)

It occurred to me today that I also might like to live in Washington, D.C.. Other locations, mostly international, have also occurred to me, but NYC and DC top the list in my mind right now, and Phoenix is still in the top ten somewhere. So my plan going forward seems to be to plan to move … someplace else after the end of the year, and I’ll keep my mind/heart/spirit open to suggestions and clues about where I ought to go, in case there’s someplace else I’m needed or desired. But I’ll re-organise my financial goals to aim for a drastic move.

Anyone want to buy some furniture and appliances? I’m not sure it makes sense to try to bring all my ‘stuff’ with me, and the money might help with moving expenses. I’ll think about it, and probably post more detailed ‘stuff’ lists later. Or maybe I’ll rent a one-way truck rather than going the bohemian route… it all depends too much on unknowns right now, so this is all just brainstorming.

I was fooling around with numbers yesterday, and noticed the following things about November, National Novel Writing Month:

November has 30 days.
30 days is 720 hours.
If one didn’t sleep, that’s a LOT of time to work on novels.
IF one could use modafinil continuously without dying or anything for a month… wow.
Taking 200mg every 7 hours (to avoid that lull during the 8th hour), one would need about 103 200mg pills to cover the full month.
100 200mg doses of modafinil is only about $120. I paid that much for coffee during the month of November last year.

On the many occassions when I have been able to write continuously for 8 hours or more, I have averaged nearly 1000 words per hour. This includes appropriate eating, drinking, and bathroom breaks, plus time for daydreaming and brainstorming and (usually, because these sessions have typically occurred in coffee houses) a fair amount of chit-chat with baristas and other patrons. So 1000 words per hour that I am not trying to do anything else is reasonable, and allows me to not starve to death.

If I didn’t have any other responsibilities, didn’t have a job, didn’t go to church or the movies or shopping, in 720 hours I could reasonably expect to write something approaching 700,000 words. Perhaps as little as 650,000 words, but that would still represent fully double the number of words contained in my four completed novels. If I wrote novels between 50k and 65k words in length, that would allow for ten to twelve or even fourteen full novels. In a month. Ridiculous!

Continue reading Let’s set the bar too high

(I would have had this online earlier, except there was some bad news in my neighborhood tonight)

3 – number of movies I saw on Friday, the day they were released in Phoenix*
34 – approximate number of hours I worked on my GWB art-piece this weekend
312 – number of characters I stenciled onto tape, cut out, and then spray-painted this weekend**
3300 – minimum number of cuts I made with an X-ACTO knife this weekend***
1200 – number of mg of modafinil I used over the course of the weekend
6 – number of hours I slept Sunday, despite at least 200mg of modafinil in my system
4 – number of characters I created stencils for that did not get used****
4 – number of days before the paint is completely ‘cured’ and I can work on the piece again
1600 – estimated number of tiny screws to be screwed into the piece*****
14 – number of “DVDs” I “watched” this weekend******
2 – number of movies I saw this weekend that made me cry
129 – number of dollars someone paid this weekend for a rustic/natural-form end table I built last year in Pine
0 – number of copies of the new Harry Potter book I bought*******
162 – number of people who requested the new Harry Potter book from my library before I put my request in
335 – number of people who requested the new Harry Potter book from my library before it was released
101 – number of people who are still ahead of me on the request list at the library, as I write this
2 – number of tasks I performed this weekend that required me to put my beard in a hair tie to keep it out of my work
0 – number of times I’ve put my beard in a hair tie before this weekend

Continue reading Numbering my weekend

There was a ‘meme’ running around a while back to the effect of ‘what 5 things would you say to your 16 year old self?’, and there is always a track in my mind working of varietals of time travel and sending-messages-through-time ideas, but by 16 I was already pretty deep into things… ten years is not far enough back, I think, since the most meaningful things I could tell myself then are very very specific and thus only useful in an instant and then lost forever… I mean, if the first thing I told me was to find a creative writing program or to major in art, that might not effect things right away, since by this time ten years ago I’d only barely started college, but if the second thing was to not cheat on Amanda… that would change the entire course of my life, and might interfere with whatever other things I might have said… or just prolonged a relationship that the universe didn’t want to continue, or… well, really there’s no way to know. anything too specific is like micromanaging something you can’t see, and by 16, anything vague is very nearly too late…

Anyway, it’s been getting longer and more refined, but I was working on a message to send myself twenty years ago, when I’m 6, before I started having emotional issues, before counseling and anxiety attacks and bullying and before criminal charges and before I ever got pulled out or kicked out of school. And the following message is what I’ve got right now, if I could give myself one message, knowing beyond a doubt that it was from myself, somehow, at age six, this is it:

“You like to learn, and some teachers are interested in teaching you, but most only want to teach you to obey, to conform, and you have to do what it takes to keep them happy in order to get what you want later, so learn to relax, take an IQ test, and whenever you are attacked, whether it is physically, mentally, or emotionally, whether it is by peers or by authority figures, try to remember that they are probably just trying to make themselves feel better by hurting you, so don’t give them the satisfaction; instead ensure that they have to take responsibility for their actions, just as you take responsibility for yours.”

The italicized phrase is italicized so I can mention it here, not to give it emphasis in the message. If I were to communicate with my 16 year old self, I could send this same message, except for the italicized portion, and it would likely have the best and most predictable positive effect on me from that point forward, more than anything more specific could. Heck, I could send just the part before the italicized portion and change the face of my college career. But I’d prefer to send the whole thing to myself at or about age six.

I believe that a lot of the social and educational problems I’ve encountered in my life, and more that stem from those, are a result of a basic misunderstanding of school and teachers; until right around the time I was kicked out of ASU in 1998, I really thought that the purpose of going to school/college was to learn, that the purpose of taking a class was to learn its subject matter, and that the purpose of the class and the teacher was to teach me that subject matter. Sadly, as I now know, learning, especially learning the subject matter of each class, if it occurs, tends to be a tangential side effect of meeting the course requirements set by the professors – at the college level, anyway – and not generally included in the purpose of the class in the professors’ minds. But to get what you want, and to get the side-effect of learning, you must play along.