Death Is Bad

I don’t get poetry. Sure, there’s a couple poems I like (literally, I can think of two). But for the most part it completely goes over my head. I much prefer poetic prose such as (if you’ll excuse me using my standard example) Comes The Huntsman.

I get spoken poetry. I love Storm and What Teachers Make, when performed. Because the emotion is in the performance.

So when I see people bagging on Kristen Stewart’s poem, I find myself very suspicious. I read it, and to me it looks just like most other modern poetry. I suspect that if the author was unknown, this wouldn’t be viewed as bad. Maybe not great, I dunno, I can’t judge poetry.

I think 95% of the ridicule that’s being thrown at it is by people who just dislike Kristen Stewart for whatever reason and want to hate on anything associated with her. I agree that she’s bland, and a poor actor her acting in the Twilight movies was uninspired. But I don’t see anything to separate this poem from most other poetry I’ve run across.

Maybe I’ve only ever been exposed to bad poetry? I suppose that would explain my dislike of it.

As I’m sure we all know by now, regular exercise is an amazing life hack. Not just via the traditional benefits to your health, attractiveness, and life expectancy. It also improves your sleep, mental and emotional health, and gives you a Halo Effect boost. And it significantly improves intelligence, memory, and learning in a wide variety of ways, and delays cognitive decline and memory loss later in life.

If you aren’t exercising already, it’s a good idea to figure out what the greatest obstacle stopping you is, and demolish it. It took me many years to finally admit to what mine was, and I think it’s probably not that uncommon.

Exercising is goddamned undignified.

Your clothing gets soaked in sweat and sticks to you. You get all flushed and red, and you make all these stupid faces. You emit all sorts of grunts and noises. The whole damn process is an embarrassment.

So here’s the most amazingly easy way to get around this that I’ve ever discovered, and it works like a charm.

Exercise alone, in your own place, behind locked doors. Seriously.

All you need is a pair of dumbbells. They cost a little over a dollar per pound, and if you’re just starting out you won’t need very heavy weights. Hell, if you really want to cut start-up costs you can get by with just one (although that’ll be a bit less efficient).

Everyone’s always going on about all this equipment you need and how expensive it is. Bullshit. A pair of dumbbells and your own body weight is more than enough to work out almost every major muscle group. They take up almost no space and are easy to use.

Everyone’s always going on about how you need others to motivate you to work out, using peer-pressure. Those people are obviously nothing like us, because the LAST thing I want to do is work out in front of someone. It’s this kind of advice that keeps introverts out of shape.

How awesome is working out alone? Let me count the ways.

1. You can be as undignified as you want and it doesn’t matter! Make faces, grunt and huff! It’s all good.
2. You can strip naked. Not only does this prevent gross sweaty clothes from sticking to your body, it also helps reduce overheating, letting your workouts be more efficient. I can’t over-emphasize just how cool this is.
3. You don’t have to drive all over town, wasting your life in further commuting. All your work-out time is ACTUAL work-out time.
4. It doesn’t cost anything (after the initial purchase)
5. You don’t have to be bored – you can have stuff playing while you work out! Probably not anything visually intense, but things that work mainly via audio are great. I always use this time to watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

Lookit that, avoiding the major deterrent to working-out also nets you four bonus upgrades! And your life is better in so many ways.

In summary: you can be introverted and still work out. Just rejected the extrovert paradigm. They don’t know shit about us. :)

In a recent comment, Samuel asked if I’ve considered self-publishing. I had a similar IRL conversation not too long ago as well.

Yes, I have considered it. And it brings one back to “Why do I write in the first place?”

Ultimately, I write because I have something I want to say. The problem is, I don’t know if I’m saying it very well. I think I am. But generally EVERYONE thinks that they are. I acknowledge that I am in the worst possible position to evaluate my work. And the thing is, I don’t want to end up like one of those auditionees on American Idol. The ones who are convinced they are amazing, but who are so objectively horrible that even someone like me (with a tin ear) can tell it’s bad. They’re always shocked and dismayed when they’re told they’re awful, sometimes simply refusing to believe it… but they are so bad. And it’s because the only people they ever sang for were their friends and family who didn’t have the heart to tell them they sucked. Who had a subconscious motivation to praise them, and thus maybe even convinced themselves it wasn’t that bad. These people were terrible and they never knew.

I wrote before about how much I appreciate honest feedback from my friends, but I know that even they pull their punches. Publishing Editors, on the other hand, have no motivation to make me feel better. Their only motivation is to print the best stuff they can. So, like praise from Simon Cowell, their approval means a lot. It means that someone who doesn’t give a shit about me and just wants good fiction, someone with a refined palate and a good sense for the genre I’m writing in, thinks the work itself is good.

Of course popular approval can be just as rewarding. HPMoR, after all, is simply an incredibly popular fanfic. Fanfic is generally looked down upon by The Gatekeepers of Fiction. But as Rachael Acks says (one of the few actual published authors I know IRL) –

“I wrote one short little fic after I saw Thor: The Dark World and in the time since I put it online I have literally received more feedback on it than I have in total for every piece of original work I’ve ever published. It’s like pure black tar heroin for the sad little twitching addict that is a writer’s ego.”

God yes, this, this right here! I know the podcast is somewhat popular, it has over a million downloads. Every episode gets about a thousand downloads in the first week and steadily climbs to a few thousand over time. Those numbers mean it’s good, right? Yet there’s always a voice inside saying “Eh, it’s not that great.” I get about one email a month saying “Hey, I love you’re podcast, keep it up!” and those mean so much more than looking at download numbers. Somehow. Even though it’s just one email, vs thousands of downloads. Emotions cannot Shut Up and Multiply, they cannot math.

So could I self-publish? Maybe. But unless it was on a major forum like FanFiction.net it wouldn’t get enough readership to fuel that insecure, approval-hungry writer ego. And even if I could write fanfic (harder than one may imagine, staying true to other’s characters), it would never make it into the truly prestigious awards like the Hugos or the Nebulas.

Because I’ll admit – ultimately that’s the only thing that’ll ever really convince me. I read lots of fiction that gets published that I think is crap. Not to knock any published authors! They obviously know what they’re doing, because they’re published and I’m not. There’s just some things I read that I think “Wow. How did this ever make it into print??” And that knife cuts both ways. If that drek can get into print, than obviously if I get into print I could be as bad. I could be awful even AFTER getting published! How the hell am I ever going to know if I am actually accomplishing what I want to accomplish? How will I know I’m really good, and not just some poor shlub surrounded in his own Matrix-like bubble of people who want him to feel good about himself, and editors with questionable taste? The major awards are the only answer I can think of. Until then I am no more a writer than I was back in 3^rd grade when my parents put my “poetry” up on the refrigerator.

This post has gone on long enough, but for those of you who say “Who cares what some critics say? They don’t get any right to decide what’s great.” On the one hand, yes, I agree. Often amazing works are overlooked (*cough* Vellum *cough*). This is worse in some fields… the Academy Awards for movies (aka The Oscars) are so mind-bogglingly retarded that most people I know don’t even bother following them anymore. Same with The Grammys. They simply don’t track quality anymore. But, as Bad Horse says –

“And yet I realized, as 2AM approached, that I cared about my story’s ranking. I cared a lot. Why? I already have my opinion of it, and the opinions of some people whose judgement I trust more than voting results.

[…] So do I care because I want to know that other people like what I wrote? I don’t think so. How much of a warm fuzzy feeling (or deliciously cold and dark) I get from my stories isn’t affected by the thumb counts. That just affects my opinion of the general intelligence of the human race.

I guess I just like the acclaim. Hmm. Not very logical of me.”

I’ve always looked up to the authors who win those awards. And until that is finally ground out of me decades from now, I will continue to care about them. Even though I can’t support it rationally.

I’ve moved five times in the last six years. The first two times it was forced on me by circumstance, but I’ve come to enjoy it. Nowadays I try to move every 1-2 years. I recommend it to everyone.

You learn a lot about yourself when you’re forced to move often. One of the early things you learn is just how worthless most physical possessions are. I used to accumulate stuff, like everyone else. Just because it was the thing to do. But when you move often you become conscious of how much it costs simply to have things, even if you don’t use them. This cost becomes most clear on moving day.

Helping your friends move is the go-to example of things friends do for each other just because they’re friends. But it’s still quite an imposition, and it’s assumed that you won’t impose on your friends in this way more than once every five or six years – if that. When you start requesting help every 12 months, you start to really feel the social capital that consumes. When you see a friend moving the same box that they moved last year AND the year before that, and which hasn’t even been opened in the time between any of these three moves, you feel on a gut level that those THINGS are costing you a lot. The time and energy of your friends is expensive, you don’t want to squander that social capital. Whatever is in that box has not been even slightly useful to you – it certainly has not paid for the social capital it’s consuming with utility to you. Your belongings must pay rent. If they aren’t paying rent they are wasting your life. It was at this point that I started throwing things away very liberally. Last time I moved the entire operation (from first item being picked up to move to the truck to last item being taken out of the truck – including drive time) took only four hours, with a grand total of four people working (one of them being myself).

Nowadays before I buy anything I always think “Will this bring enough enjoyment/utility to my life to be worth moving in 6 months, and then every 12 months for decades?” The answer is often no. I recently came across TNG action figures – still in the original packaging! – going for $3 each at a thrift store. God do I love TNG. And the entire crew was there! But was it worth that? After a couple minutes I decided no… this was one more thing that was extremely cool right now, and would end up in a box and never see the light of day again after my next move. So I passed.

I know it’s a cliché, but your possessions really do end up weighing you down. Move often, find out what is actually important. Jettison the rest.