My New Favorite Typo

Usually, I spell things right the first time.  But four or five times in the past week, I've written "while" in place of "well."  Always at the start of a sentence, always followed by a comma.  I don't know what leads me to replace this space-filler with a temporal signifier, but I do.  I can't recall ever having done it before this week, but it keeps happening.

It's an odd slip, it is.  And isn't that a part of what life is made of.

Back on the Blog

Sorry I haven't written in a long time.  I've been busy reading.  And living my life.  It's been pretty amazing in the past few years.

I'm not the same person who started writing this blog, but I'm pretty close.  I may be wiser.  I've certainly been more places.

Last week a good friend said she missed my blogging, and challenged me to start up again.  So here it goes.  Back to the blog.

What were you thinking?

The source for this post is my recent project of "spring cleaning" on my gmail account... since I hadn't used it in two years, a fair number of unread messages, mostly from listservs, had piled up.  When I merged in all the messages I received as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I had 1,637 unread messages.

The most interesting part came when I went through my "drafts" folder.  Which is a snapshot of ideas I was in the middle of forming two years ago:

What use are stories?

Last August, I had the singular pleasure of reading, for the first time, a few essays by Brian Doyle, as part of a class about essays. At the end of that class, I had another great pleasure and privilege: that of sitting in the room during a phone interview with Brian Doyle himself. Here are my notes:

"The reason that poetry is in the end the greatest literary art is that it’s closest to music. It can be easily abused. There’s more bad poetry than anything else.

To say something big in a small space is a great virtue.

Part of our training as writers is to write poorly, you have to learn the craft by learning what not to do.

A lot of early writing is about the self, it’s kind of self absorbed—maturity as a writer involves looking at the glory and beauty in other things.

If not now, when?

Wrote a long letter to a good friend tonight.

I've been looking at the world with the intent to write it with a while now, which means that I'd see something or hear something and start writing a paragraph in my head, trying out how it would sound to describe it to Joumana.

Two months of that kind of thinking made for a six page letter. I think I enjoy letter writing almost more than anything else, so it's a pity I don't do it more often.

I'd kept putting off writing it, telling myself I didn't have the time, that I'd find time in the evening, that I'd find time over the weekend.

Finally decided that the only way to find time is to look for it. Strangely enough, as soon as I looked, there it was.

Is it really possible to complete a goal?

♫ This question began my sister-in-law Nicole's g-mail status for several weeks. It continued, "The anticipation, work, and dedication is so all-encompassing that the completion still feels incomplete."

I know what she means. It's part of what I felt when I finished my Eagle Scout.

I wrote an essay about it, at the time, trying to make sense of how far I'd come and where I was going, trying to understand how something "finished" could still feel so far from done. I went through about four or five giant outlines, and then wrote the final draft in one crazy weekend, after coming home from a Model United Nations conference in Illinois.

I was looking at that essay a few weeks ago, because I was going to link to it on my other blog. And as I read it, I realized that if I wrote it now, it would be a different essay. And I wanted to sit down right then with my outlines and start it all over again. But that's my past. I have other essays to write. Maybe, someday, it will be time for me to come back to it.

What If none of the answers is right?

A while back, I had to take a grammar tutorial, which also included a grammar quiz. The rules were fairly simple: just choose the sentence with no mistakes. I was doing great until I got to a question where this was the only grammatically proper answer:

"Because it is a Catholic country, its government is a democracy modified by authoritarianism."

I don't know about you, but I have some trouble saying that there isn't a problem with that sentence. It may be grammatically perfect, but there's definitely something fishy going on there...

Why do I procrastinate?

I ask myself this question almost every day, or at least every time I find myself writing a paper on the day that it's due. And yet, in so many years, I still haven't found a fully satisfactory answer.

I'll have to get back to you on that.

Why is writing so hard?

I just asked my Dad that question, and he had three theories, in quick succession.

1) Writing is hard because our fingers cramp up.

2) Writing is hard because we have too many words; if we wrote everything in binary, we'd only have to use 0's and 1's.

3) Writing isn't hard anymore, but we still think it is because we have the evolutionary memory of how hard it was for our ancestors who had to carve letters into stone: writing is easy, but we recoil from it out of instinct.

After we debated these responses, he settled on a more satisfactory, but less colorful answer: writing is hard because any type of writing requires careful thought in order to provide the meaning provided in conversation by intonation, hand gestures, etc. Good writing is especially hard because it requires even more careful thought, in order to be logically sound, to take other points of view into consideration, etc. Also, writing is hard because anything worth doing is hard. (My father points out that breathing is worth doing, but is not hard. So this last statement cannot in fact be taken as a universal.)