Category: observations/thoughts (Page 2 of 12)

People Are More Important Than Things (but things still have deep meaning)

June 15, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Re-watching Pixar’s Up (first time watching it with my kids).

I was struck by the moment towards the end of the movie when Carl has to throw everything out of his house so it will be light enough to lift off the ground. The things of his life — all the things that represent the life he lived with Ellie — are not bad, but in order to help Russell and Kevin and Dug, Carl must let go of these possessions. The people in his life are more important than the things.

The movie honors the things of Carl’s life. They aren’t meaningless. The “Adventure Book” is a beautiful object that communicates Ellie’s deep love for Carl. The objects in the house hold memories, and those memories are good.

But the people (and animals) in the here-and-now are still more important than any object, no matter the memories it may evoke. The greatest testament to Ellie’s life isn’t the house or the objects within it, but Carl’s rediscover of the ability to love and care for others.

I really liked how the movie honored the objects (and the house) that helped Carl remember his wife, while at the same time showing how those objects cannot be made more important than the flesh-and-blood relationships in our lives. The image of Carl tied to his house, trying to carry it like Atlas trying to hold up the Earth, is the key metaphor for this idea. We root for him to get the house to the Falls, but at the same time, we can see what a burden carrying that house has become. When he frees himself from that heavy weight, he is finally able to live life to the fullest again, to love someone again.

As I try to tidy my own house, I sometimes have a hard time knowing what to keep and what to give away. I’m not particularly sentimental, but when it comes to my kids’ artwork or books of any sort or certain toys and stuffed animals, I have a hard time letting go. It’s not the stuff, it’s the fact that these things mean so much to my children, and because I love my children, I want to honor their love for these things. I keep the things because I love the people.

Knowing when and how to let go of stuff is tricky. I’m not good at it, frankly. I sometimes wish I had a big life-altering event that would force my hand, like Carl’s adventures with Russell. But we don’t always get to pick our adventures, and not every adventure ends happily.

Instead, I’ll have to find a way to honor the stuff in my life while also focusing on what really matters: the people I love.

Creative Writing: Week 7

May 13, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Unbelievably, the term is almost over. Two more weeks to go. This is the time of the school year when I become incredibly self-critical.

All the things I could’ve done! All the lessons I should’ve changed! All the feedback I wish I’d given! All the ideas I never tried!

I am heavy with regrets. Every May, every end of the term, I am heavy with self-recriminations. Not enough time. Not enough quality. Not enough… perfection?

In a lot of ways, approaching the end of the term is like approaching the end of a writing project. Lots of couldas, wouldas, shouldas. Lots of second guessing. Lots of self-loathing.

The project we envision at the start is never what actually ends up on the page. This disconnect between head-book and actual book is disappointing. We beat ourselves up about it. I know I do.

My teaching is often the same. I have such grand plans, but when the end of the term rolls around, it feels like I just survived a post-apocalyptic road race.

And then I wonder, “Am I the only one who feels this way?” Maybe I’m just shitty at my job (possible).

It’s the same for my writing. I approach the end of a story or novel and think, “I feel like a failure. Is this normal?” (And not just the end; often in the middle, when I read over what I’ve written, it can feel like swimming through tar and slowly sinking.)

I think it’s normal. I think there will always be a disconnect between the work we have in our head and the work that ends up on the page. I think the key is to keep going even when our self-critical brain tells us we stink. I think these moments of self-loathing are “product-focused” thinking and not “process-focused” thinking.

Yes, the finished product isn’t exactly what I envisioned. It isn’t a perfect story. It isn’t “great.”

But what about the process? Was the process fun? Did I enjoy it? Did I get deep into the creating and find flow with my work? Did I surprise myself? Did I discover something new? Did I experiment? Did I do the best I could?

These are the questions that matter, and when approaching the end of either a story or a term of teaching, it’s important to look back on the entire process, not just the end point or where you think you should be.

The day-to-day act of teaching this Creative Writing class was a good experience. I learned a lot. What to do next time. What not to do next time. I learned more about myself as a writer and about what it means to teach others to write. I learned that often the best lessons or ideas are ones that come to me in the spur of the moment right before class. Sometimes the best lessons happen because a student asked a great question. I learned that learning never stops, and whatever fruit came from this term, it will continue to grow even after the last bell rings.

Because it’s all process. As long as we continue to write creatively, as long as we continue to be artists, there is no “end point.” There is only the process. This is one of the great things about teaching: it’s cyclical. We have terms, we have holidays, we start new school years, we start new classes with new students. There is a constant process of renewal and new beginnings. Whatever this semester was, the next one will be another season to try new things, refine the old, and enjoy the process along the way.

What Does One Do with One’s Comics?

May 6, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I used to buy a lot of comic books. So many, in fact, that I often didn’t get around to reading them each month, and then more books would come the next month, and I would fall further behind. But I continued to buy them, and store them in those plastic bags with cardboard backing to keep them straight, and I swore I’d read them some day.

Then, when that some day came, I didn’t read them. I decided to sell them back to a store and make some money and free up copious amounts of bookshelf space.

But I still really love comics. I’d love to buy them again. I just don’t know what to do with them once I’ve read them? Keep them? Sell them back? Give them away?

Comics (the floppy magazine comics, not the trade paperbacks) are in this weird space between disposable and keepable (yeah, I know that’s not a word).

This is all to say that I took my daughter to Free Comic Book Day 2024 and we brought home a haul of comics, and now I’m itching to start subscribing to a few books, but what do I do with them once I start buying them? I don’t want to have boxes and boxes of comics again. Do I read and purge right away? But then what if I want to reread the comics? I might (I tell myself). And comics aren’t cheap. So I’m spending four or five bucks per month (or more) on something I’m just gonna get rid of?

This is why I’ve started reading comics on the Hoopla app from the library. One, they are free. Two, I don’t have to worry about them taking up space.

But still, as a person who loves physical media, there’s something wonderful about holding a floppy comic book in my hands. Going to Free Comic Book Day reminded me of that feeling.

Maybe I start small. Start with one or two subscriptions. See how it goes. And if the issues start piling up and space gets limited, then off-load them. Sell them or put them in my classroom or something.

Now which series to start with… The new TMNT looks pretty good…

(Free Comic Book Day did it’s job, I guess. It got a new customer.)

Creative Writing: Week ???

May 5, 2024 / / 0 Comments

“Take art seriously without going about it in a serious way.”

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act, p. 354

I’ve lost track of which week it is in the term. End of April and all of May are such a whirlwind when teaching high school. I feel like All the Things are happening. I can’t keep up.

Anyway, in one of my recent weeks of teaching Creative Writing, we spent a week dedicated to playing games and thinking about how making art is/can be/should be playful.

To help them along the way, we played a storytelling RPG where I and another student were the game masters, and the rest of the class were our players. I played with two different groups on two different days, and one of the groups was a real struggle to engage with.

There were some in the group who just could not take it seriously, and therefore they could not be playful.

I don’t mean they were being silly and I wanted them to be serious. My aim was quite the opposite, in fact. I wanted shenanigans. I wanted laughter and high jinks.

The first group I played with was generally able to do this. They committed to their ridiculous characters (the world we were playing in was a bit of a spoof of the Twilight series), and we all laughed a lot and had a fun time. They approached the game on its own terms and took it seriously, while at the same time, being playful.

But for the students in the second group who wouldn’t take the game seriously, there was neither laughter nor pathos nor anything in between. Only grim faces and boredom.

Now, maybe my GMing skills were subpar and that ruined things. Maybe I should have done a better job of crafting the world and the challenges. But I don’t think that was the case. The likelier culprit was that for some of the students in the group, the game was beneath them. They were embarrassed by the whole notion of playing an RPG. Of pretending to be a character. Of romping around in a fantasy world.

And that’s fine. Not everyone digs that kind of fun.

But I think their overall attitude to the game illustrates Rubin’s point quoted above: Games, like art, should be taken seriously without going about it in a serious way. The first group, who DID meet the game on its own terms, ended up having a blast. They weren’t playing in an overly-serious, solemn way. They were light. They were silly. But they accepted the game on its own terms and committed to what the game was trying to do.

The second group could not do that. They didn’t see the value in the game, nor could they approach it with any sort of commitment. And thus, they couldn’t have fun.

Or maybe they thought they HAD to approach the game in a serious way, and therefore they were blocked from having fun. Because they thought they had to be serious, they disengaged entirely.

Either way, their experience illustrates Rubin’s point. We have to take what we’re doing seriously, whether it’s playing an RPG or writing a story or illustrating a comic or directing a film or whatever. We have to believe that the thing we’re making is worth making. That our commitment to the project is worth our time and effort. That we’re doing something worthwhile.

Because this is the paradox: If we don’t have that commitment, that seriousness about the enterprise, then we can’t be playful about the making of it either.

In order to do good work, we have to go about it without seriousness. We can’t make the work “important” because then we’ll freeze or play it too safe. So in order to be light and playful, we must believe in the seriousness of what we’re doing. But in order to not get bogged down, we can’t approach our work with a grim-faced sense that we’re taking our medicine or doing what we’ve been told. We have to be playful.

For my grim-faced, bored students playing the RPG, they were being told to play. And they couldn’t be bothered to. Playing an imaginative role-playing game was beneath them, I guess. So they slogged through it and never got to experience the lightness and playfulness of taking something seriously without going about it in a serious way.

Creative Writing: Week Two

April 9, 2024 / / 2 Comments

I told them that input could be whatever they wanted, so I have to refrain from being judgy about their choices, but after looking over their input logs from the first week, I think it might be time to talk about high-quality input versus low-quality input.

It’s a tricky subject because it reminds me too much of the snobbish position that certain kinds of literature are better than others, that comic books and video games are worthless, that pulp literature and Hollywood movies are for the unwashed masses, etc. etc. All that elitist crap.

I’m a “more/and” kind of person. A “yes” person. I like liking things, to quote Abed. And for too long, science fiction and fantasy were looked down on as “lesser-than” by the literary establishment, and I don’t want to contribute to that kind of judgment, a judgment more often born out of snobbery and cliquishness than actual merit and quality.

But. But, but, but…

There are certainly artistic avenues and byways my students could be exploring that they aren’t, and if they did explore those byways, they might find them rewarding and much more satisfying than what they are reading/watching/listening to right now.

I’m tempted, therefore, to maybe give them more required reading/viewing/listening/etc. Not a lot, but a few assignments each week that they have to engage with. “Read X by Wednesday and we’ll talk about it in class.” That kind of thing.

Yeah, I’m backtracking a little from what I said at the beginning of the term, but I think/hope it will help them see that it’s not about which art is “good” and which is “bad” so much as it’s a question of whether the art I’m inputting is expanding my life as a writer or limiting it. If it’s limiting/narrowing/same-old-same-old, then what’s the point? A kind of familiar numbness? The comfort of hearing my old notions parroted back to me? Inertia?

Or is it that they don’t know what else is out there? If I’m going to assign better input experiences for them, then I need to meet them where they are. Maybe something like the book recommendations John Warner does? They give me a list of their last five input experiences and I put together a list of five more to explore that are of a potentially better quality. It’s worth a shot.

We’ll be watching Richard Linklater’s School of Rock in Week Three, partially because I want to introduce the concept of going back and exploring the influences of those who influence you.

I feel like I’m only in Week Two and the year is almost over. These quarter-long classes we do at my school just don’t feel like enough time, especially this fourth quarter with senioritis hitting hard and Easter and all the random days off and schedule changes. There’s SO MUCH we could be doing in this Creative Writing class. If I am going to teach it next year, I’ll need to scale back my ambitions for the class considerably. At the moment, there’s too much I want to do and no time in which to do it.

I need to repeat my mantra from the beginning of the year: “Slow learning.”

We don’t have to do it all. We can leave a few chips on the table. We can do less. We can go deeper on the things that matter for us right now, not some predetermined schedule.

I need to remember that. I’m building a space for them to write creatively and develop ideas and skills. It takes time to build that space, and maybe we only start to build it together, and it’s up to each student to finish building it on her own (or with each other, after the last bell has rung on the school year).

Whenever I want to do too much, I end up regretting it.

For now, we’re looking at input. Better quality. Exploring influences. Finding the good stuff that will expand your imagination. Leaving the stuff that limits you.

I’ll go down this road with the students until I feel like we’ve gotten what we need. Then we’ll move on. Maybe that’s by the end of Week Three, maybe it’s by the end of Week Four. Maybe we stay on this for the rest of the school year — IF it’s yielding fruit and helping us all grow.

Otherwise, we can keep going down the road: going slow, but going beyond the surface of things.

The “Morning Routine” is cliche at this point, but it still works

April 3, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I hesitate to write about morning routines because I feel like at this point, all the gurus have spoken (often annoyingly), it’s gotten cliche to spout off about how important one’s morning routine is, and we’ve heard the advice ad nauseam so what more is there to say?

And yet, I have been thinking once again about why I’ve been floundering since mid-December, and the answer is crystal clear: It’s my faltering morning routine.

From early August until the end of November, my morning routine had been relatively steady (I even managed a modified version of it while visiting family over the Thanksgiving holiday), and even though my writing output wasn’t huge in that span, I was writing consistently and enjoyably. Life was in balance.

Then December hit, Christmas prepping and end-of-semester-grading took over my life, and the morning routine was decimated. I tried to get back on track in January, but to no avail. I couldn’t get to bed on time, and in the morning, sleep felt more important than writing, so I would snooze until it was time to get my kids ready for school.

And now, here I am in April, and I’m grumbling about how out of sync I feel, how paltry my creative output has been, and how, frankly, depressed I’m getting.

It’s the lack of a morning routine!

I’ve known it the whole time, but for some reason I had convinced myself that perhaps my life was too unpredictable to commit to a regular morning routine and I’d be better off sneaking my writing in whenever I could, doing my art whenever the small snatches of time presented themselves. Planning didn’t seem to be working, so I would be more spontaneous.

But spontaneous is just another word for not getting shit done. Without a rhythm, without a routine, I never was able to find those snatches of time. My output nosedived.

Here’s the thing: it wasn’t that planning didn’t work. It was that I had given up on committing to the plan. I wanted my sleep (I still do, of course). And I figured it was too hard to get to bed at 10:00 p.m. My life wouldn’t let me. I had to face reality. Blah, blah, blah.

But what I was facing wasn’t reality. It was my own resignation in the face of a challenge. I had given up and soothed myself by saying it was pragmatism.

It wasn’t pragmatism. It was a reluctance to make changes. To turn off the screens and go to bed even if there were other things I wanted to do. The real reality is that we have to make choices, and from December to April, I had been making the choice to stay up later and not wake up early to do my morning routine. This was a choice I was making. I didn’t have to read one more online article after 9:00 p.m., but I did. I didn’t have to watch a second episode of that TV show, but I did. I didn’t have to put off my paper-grading all day so that I had a stack of them to grade at night, but I did.

These were choices. They still are choices I must face each and every day. But if I want to establish my morning routine again, then I must make different choices. Some things, yes, are always out of our control. I can’t control when my child has a nightmare and needs me to sit with him in his bedroom. I can’t control those nights when we get home late from visiting family and I have to stay up late to make the lunches and wash dishes.

But on typical nights, those normal nights when I have more control over my choices and time, I can start making the choice for the morning routine — the routine that gives my life balance and structure and health — over the choice for one more episode, one more article, one more paper to grade.

If it’s at all interesting to others, my morning routine consists of waking up at 6:00 a.m. and immediately doing stretches in bed to help with my back problems and muscle stiffness. Then I get up, drink a glass of water and take vitamins, and then begin walking around the house for exercise. While I walk, I usually pray. If it’s light enough outside, I might walk outside, but usually it’s too dark for that.

After my walk and prayer time, I do my Julia Cameron-style morning pages in my notebook, and then I do some creative writing, either fiction or nonfiction or poetry, whatever feels right and I’m most excited about.

By this time, I have to get ready for work, so I shower, pack the kids’ lunches, eat breakfast, and head to work with enough time to grade papers for thirty minutes before my first class period starts.

This is the ideal morning routine for me. In this three-hour span, I’m able to exercise, pray, reflect, write creatively, eat breakfast, and make progress on my teaching job, so that by 9:00 a.m., I have accomplished all the important things I need to accomplish for the day related to my health, my spiritual life, my art, and my job.

After 9:00 a.m., if I’ve done my morning routine, whatever else gets accomplished throughout the day, I can feel good knowing I did the things I needed to do to make myself feel whole.

Maybe some of the gurus would say my routine is too ambitious, and that’s why I fell off the wagon.

Maybe.

But over the years, I’ve trained myself to become more and more of a morning person, and as I get older, I know that by the time the afternoon hits, I’m too tired both physically and mentally to be effective at my creative work. The best time for me is the morning. Before the day has had a chance to drain me. So I need to get several things done in the morning because my health, my spiritual life, my art, and my job are all things I need to keep in balance for an ordered, satisfying life.

And if that means I need to wake up at 5:30 a.m. and go to bed at 9:30 p.m., then maybe I need to start making the choices that will allow me to do that. But it all comes down to choices, to what I value, and where I focus my time.

Not everything is under my control. Life will have bumps and setbacks.

But the morning routine — for me, at least — really does work as a tool and structure for making my art. I’ve noticed a huge plummet of happiness and artistic fulfillment since I floundered in my morning routine. And in just the past two days, since I’ve been trying to reestablish that routine, I’ve noticed a huge upswing in my mood and ability to get creative work done.

Reminding myself that the morning routine really does work, and that it’s worth making different choices at night, may be cliche to write about, but I wouldn’t have had the energy or time to write this blog post without my morning routine.

I’ll take the cliche every time if it means I get to make my art again and keep myself whole.

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