livingtech

Relationships are fucked. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. I prefer to err on the side of “do” myself, but it’s not always up to me.

I spent the last hour or two reading through a bunch of Home Detention Lady’s posts, (thanks for the comment!) and thinking about relationships in general.

I would like to think that any two people in the world are a potential match. Any two people could “make it work” with enough compromise and effort. I think those are the kickers. These are the deal breakers.

With 100% effort and 100% compromise, I could date anyone in the world. But I’m not about to do either, and especially not right away. I’m probably not going to make more than a 5% effort in the first month of a given relationship, and screw compromise in the early stages… if we can’t find common ground, then it’s just not worth it.

But I think the longer you stay with someone, the more of both a relationship needs. The more you know about someone, about their habits, about their “flaws”, about the character traits that you don’t immediately adore and admire–the more compromises you are going to have to make in both principal and your vision of that “ideal relationship” that everyone has floating around in their heads. And also as time passes, more effort is required to maintain an acceptable relationship for both parties. Effort to stay in synch with the wants and needs of your partner. I think this is absolutely a natural state of affairs.

But of course, as the levels of effort and compromise required to maintain a relationship change, people re-evaluate. I think all too often, “people” (not talking specifics here, ha!) think that they’ll find the perfect person, with whom they never have to make any compromises.

So I’ve decided I’m going to atone for not writing a novel in november by writing at least 50,000 words before next year’s nano. But I’m going with the mindblurbs style novel-length writing idea. “No plot, no problem” will be literal in my case. The difference is that I won’t even be trying for one.

It’s all a bit like prose poetry. I had briefly wondered whether others have written novel-length stuff in this vein, but hadn’t done any searching until this morning. To be honest, I hadn’t even known what to search for until today when I somehow dredged up a phrase out of a particularly dusty corner in my brain labeled “automatic writing”. The wikipedia entry on automatic writing led me to another on Surrealist Automatism, which is probably closer to what I’m trying to do.

“In 1919 [Andre] Breton and Philippe Soupault wrote the first automatic book, Les Champs Magnetiques [The Magnetic Fields] while The Automatic Message was one of Breton’s significant theoretical works about automatism.”

I know I have read a bit of surrealist writing, and all I remember was that I found it dense and difficult to get through, but rewarding. I will be hunting down both books in the near future. (This also gives me new appreciation for The Magnetic Fields, the band, which has been a relatively recent discovery.)

I can’t decide how I feel about this decision. I am simultaniously incredibly relieved, and also a bit disappointed with myself.

I mean, of course I’m disappointed with myself. Writing is a big deal to me… but the weird thing is that I’m also not disappointed. I feel daunted by the task ahead, and also less interested in it than I’ve been before.

I feel like nanowrimo is the wrong way to write a novel. Yes, it is good for getting ideas down on paper, it is probably exceptionally good for getting your stentences straightened out–good for the practice of writing, but it is not necessarily good for the parts of writing that I am bad at… the finishing, and the plot. I am terrible with plots.

I have this picture of myself at 45 writing novels. Maybe even at 35. But right now I want to still be in my 20s (last year for it) and enjoying life to the fullest. Not stressing about work or novel writing, or how I’m going to fit both into my day.

I am still going to make an effort to write more frequently. Perhaps I will make an effort to sit down every day and write. Yes, I will do that at least through november. I think I will try and actually finish up the novel I wrote last year for nanowrimo. But more importantly, I think I’m going to try and write a poem a day again. And I don’t want to stop at the end of november. I want to write a poem a day for at least a year. I’m going to write a poem a day until next november, and maybe then I’ll do nanowrimo again as a 30-something. (But without the something.)

Yeah, so how are things? Things are grand, things are fucking great really. I’m dating someone wonderful, and I’m learning to do aerial acrobatics. (Albiet the latter quite slowly; I think I might start going to class more than once a week.) My work has moved to a real location again, which is quite nice. I’m taking the bus to work more or less every day and loving the time I get to read.

Oh yeah, and I’m going to take at least a half-hour to read every day.

So yeah, not writing a novel this november, but I’m going to write a poem every day, and maybe a bit of last year’s novel. I’m definitely going to print that fucker out and do some major editing. And I’m going to take time to read every day. And maybe start playing guitaur again.

…and I’m not going to feel guilty for not writing 2,000 words a day.

OK, so i did things a little back-ass-wards, and ended up totally fucking up the MT instance on my free hosting account (where all my friend’s blogs are hosted). So if you’re one of those friends, and you can’t post to your blog, i really appologize. I’m going to be re-creating your blogs from scratch in a new location (with a new upgraded MT), and then asking you to switch to the new login. Basically, what i think happned was that the old instance of MT just has too many spam comments on it for the MT upgrade script to handle it. I did a little searching on this problem, but not too extensively. I’m sure other people have encountered it if that is indeed the case. (My comments.db file is 204MB large, if that gives you any idea of how many comments. I believe Elia’s blog has like 30,000 spam comments on it. That’s some fucked up shit right there.)

I wanted to add another item to my blog TODO… it’s really quite a bit more than one item… but I’d really like to sign up for various APIs and start integrating the various sites and services that i use regularly into my blog. This would include my flickr photos, various last.fm (audioscrobbler) information, and possibly boardgamegeek.com information of some kind. (I’m just not very good about updating that site really.)

[Update: I also saw a post on the flickr blog today that led me to QOOP, that prints bound books of your flickr photos... that seems like such a cool idea...Makes me want to take (and post) more photos.]

So I’m taking care of Dr. Bombay’s cats while he’s in europe for two weeks. Today I happened to glance on his dresser, and discovered a DVD that I had loaned to him a few weeks ago. The DVD is part of a set, and the set isn’t even mine, so I’d been meaning to ask him for it back before he left. Anyway, I grab the DVD on my way out the door, but underneath it is a stack of small papers, maybe one fourth of eight and a half by eleven sheets. One of the papers sticks to the dvd, falling to the floor.

I bent down to pick it up and was surprised to discover printed on it in a very small font these poems… The strange thing was that I could swear I’ve read them before.

[update: They were jason's friend charlie's poems. Fucking amazing stuff, some of it. I really liked what I read while sifting through, trying to find some identifying text.]