Don't live for your dreams. EVER.

Okay, this is gonna be cynical as hell, so please forgive it. The trigger was an advertisement for a new movie, Santa Paws. I don't know what Santa Paws is, other than talking puppies and Walt Disney's ashes spinning in his urn, but one of the puppies said, at the end of the trailer, "All you have to do is dream."

I've had this backbuilding annoyance with this part of popular culture. We've marketed the living fuck out of the idea that if you work hard enough and day-dream even harder, you'll get your dreams. Disney Princesses moon over lakes and water and men (mostly men) while singing about how much they want something. Books talk about Live Your Best Life Now and The Purpose Driven Life and how "God has a plan for you", implying that this plan is not right now, and God am I going to get into the Prosperity Gospel bullshit in a couple of minutes. And every single "uplifting" movie shows someone pulling themselves into success of some form or another. TV shows never follow the losers, it's always the winners and then OMG when the winners lose it's a tear fest and a showcase of character and integrity because our self-inserts the main characters only lose when they deserve to learn a lesson. The natural tilt of the universe is that we, the centers of it, shall win eventually. I don't think our parents had this level of bullshit saturation that we do right now. The result is we have a generation that believes we'll get our fifteen minutes of fame. Usually presented on a platter, but sometimes after a shit-ton of hard work that somehow falls far short of the real work involved in being successful.

This was showcased really well in a chick flick a couple years back, Julie and Julia, about the life of Julia Childs and Julie Powell. Half that movie is good, and it's the half with Meryl Streep in it. I am not going to say that Julie Powell is a waste of skin and air, because the character is based on a real human being and I refuse to believe anyone can be that bad. Amy Adams as Julie Powell is annoying, entitled and obnoxious, and there's an undertone running through the whole movie that the success both women get is something they earned, something they're entitled to because of all the hard work they went through to get there. In the case of Julia Child, that was probably true. The Julie Powell half of the movie ... guys, if you succeed at internet anything it's not because you're good at something or bad at something. It's because the internet farted in your direction today. In her half of the movie, after she worked hard, screamed, cried and threw tantrums, she was literally handed her goal on a platter, right next to her deboned duck.

And then you have Prosperity Gospel. For those of you who haven't darkened the door of a large church, picked up a bestselling Christian book or listened to Christian radio lately, Prosperity Gospel turns God into the big Slot Machine in the sky: put in enough faith tokens and you'll get a pony. The two big headliners are Joel Olstine and Rick Warren, authors of Your Best Life Now and The Purpose-Driven Life, respectively. I have not read Best Life Now because there's only so much Olstine I can take in one sitting. Purpose Driven Life centers on the idea that if you can figure out what God wants you to do with your life, he will bless you and you will be happy, or at least happier than you are right now. That God does not want his children to live a life of sorrow and despair, and if we just work with him, he'll make everything good and beautiful and reward us for our work and suffering right now.

Guys, I'm listening to a Christian album right now, one of the best I've heard in years, by Stephen Curtis Chapman. He wrote it after his adopted daughter died in a car accident. He wrote it to deal with the sorrow and quite obviously, his difficulty reconciling a loving God with his daughter's death. If you believe in the Christian God and you believe that God is in control, than you have to believe that it was his will for that to happen. Because if He didn't want it to happen that way, it wouldn't have. And that's why I find Propserity Gospel so fucking offensive. It implies that if your life has gone to shit and things aren't happening the way you want them to, there is something wrong with you. You don't know something. You're not doing something right. You haven't figured the Great Question of Reality out yet and if you just pushed a little bit longer and held on a bit further, you'd break out into the great meadow of rainbows and unicorns and everything would be alright again.

If you're a Christian, you believe that God Himself became human -- I mean, think about that for a second. You go from being God of All to being a subsistence-level carpenter, who is also a member of one of the most despised races in human history, during the reign of Emperor Tiberius in Ancient Rome. And God's will is that we prosper? Poverty is not God's will for us, sometimes? What, did he just make an exception for himself? -- and died one of the ugliest, most brutal deaths humanity ever conceived of, shortened only because he was severely tortured the day before his crucifixion. Yes, it had a point. It had a beautiful point. The payoff never came during Jesus's life, the last years of which were spent homeless. Hell, our own homeless would be a step up. They get down filled jackets and warm concrete to sleep on. According to my belief system, God's will for his own life was horrible, with an eternal payoff.

You know, sometimes things just don't work. For every uplifting story, there are a lot that end poorly. The happy stuff is remembered, not because it's normal, but because it's so abnormal, and we humans are self-centered enough to believe that if it happened to you, surely, surely eventually it'll happen to me. Surely if I sing at Simon, I'll go on to American Idol, win and get a singing contract. Nevermind that most of the people who go are fodder for our amusement, I am different. Surely I am different. Surely God will bless me. He didn't bless himself, but he'll bless me.

The best thing a person can do for themselves, in my opinion, is not to live for your dreams. Live for your family. Friends. For the weekend when you get to go fishing, or do whatever else it is that brings you joy. Living for your dreams is about as solid as attempting to eat them.

Am I saying that you shouldn't try to get them? Hell no. I'm just saying you shouldn't expect it. I'm saying that "think positive" and "keep high self-esteem" is bullshit. "Focus on your potential" is bullshit. Think pessimistically. Attempt success and plan for failure. Keep an exit strategy in mind. Prepare for failure. Maybe don't assume that something you made sucks, but assume that it could be made better. Because the thing nobody tells you about? The dreams don't die. Even when you want them to. Having a dream will eventually feel like you've swallowed burning coals, because it's guaranteed that you will fail most of the time. And your choice is either to think that there's something wrong with you -- because they always win on American Idol -- or to think that maybe it's just not going to happen this time. Either way, the coal is not going to go out. You're not going to throw it away. You might have planned that exit strategy, but you're not going to take it. Ever.

And yeah, you can give up. That has nothing to do with "living for your dreams" ... frankly I think "living for your dreams" encourages people to give up. They're not successful, so it must be their fault. There must be something they're not doing. But if you realize that most of it is just chance and persistence, the only thing you can do if you want to succeed is to keep trying and to keep trying a lot. It's like the lottery, the more tickets you have the more likely you are to win. It's also like the lottery, in that you're not really likely to win, but dreamers are compulsive gamblers.

So expect failure. Make sure you've got a landing platform. Make sure you've got a life. Don't give up, but don't be wedded to the idea of winning, either.

The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever

I was wandering the 'net trying to find the solution to the Labyrinth puzzle (aka Knights and Knaves) and I came across this monster instead. I've embroidered it a bit to make it read better. It can easily be solved by Google, so don't use it:

You come to an island with three Gods, True, False and Random. True will answer truthfully. False will lie. Random will answer either truly or falsely, at random. The Gods understand English, but will only answer in their own language, which you do not fully understand. You know that "ja" and "da" stand for yes and no, but you don't know which word stands for which. "Ja" could be either yes or no. Random has a boat, True has a compass, False has a map. They will give these to you, but only if you petition them with the correct name. To escape the island, you must identify the Gods. You may ask three yes/no questions, and may only ask each question once, though you may ask each God more than one question.

I will probably wind up using this in my second book. Have fun!

Book Bitch: Soul Harvest

Okay, recap of series so far: Rayford Steele fails at monogamy, Buck Williams is loaded, both men are JBJ's self inserts, Hattie is a total skank and fucking annoying, HEY STUPID THE RAPTURE HAPPENED, both Buck and Ray work for the Antichrist even though they hate it, author fails at keeping track of ages, WW2 got lost for most of book 2, Chloe Williams does ... um, what does she do? Tim LaHaye upgrades his self-insert from a black theologian to a Jewish theologian, and then ... EARTHQUAKE!!!!
 So let's find out what happened to Amanda!

...Amanda who? Oh, right. Rayford's wife. Who had like, three scenes in as many novels. Who will be Ray's primary motivation for the next three hundred pages. Right.


Anybody got an aspirin I can borrow?

Dear Literary Agents,

Please stop putting compliments in rejection letters. After we get the fourth one, or so, we are going to automatically assume that it's a form, that you say that to everybody. Ergo, compliments in rejections are a waste of time, energy and space, respectively yours, mine and the universe's. If my writing were worth complimenting, you would have read more. In fact, when rejecting, start with the word "Sorry". Wading through three sentences of cheerful, fluffy false-praise (and I don't give a fuck if you really DID write something personal or not. I AM ASSUMING IT IS FORM NO MATTER WHAT) to get to the "no" does very unpleasant things with my brain and blood pressure. SAY NO, SIMPLICITY WILL NOT HURT YOU.

Also, remember dating, and how you do not say "Well, I'm sure you'll find someone (ELSE) who is very nice, eventually" to the other during the breakup process? Because this is apparently stupid and trite and it only makes YOU feel better, and not the ex-SO you just broke up with? Please transpose this information over into rejection letters. You know the phrase, "Remember, this is just my subjective opinion"? STOP SAYING THAT. IT DOES NOT FUCKING WORK.

Cheers!

CW

P.S. Yes, I know we writer-types are supposed to pretend like we've never been rejected at all so you don't have to think about it. But you and I both know writers get enough rejections to fill a swimming pool, so pardon me if I want to wade in mine a little bit.

An Honest-to-God rambling thought

So I spent part of today trying to understand the Axiom of Choice, and so far what I have gathered is this: it involves choice, and mathematicians cannot write. This chain of thought lead me to a secondary conclusion: Perhaps many of the higher sciences are difficult to understand, not because the concepts themselves are confusing, or not only because the concepts themselves are confusing, but because the people who must write about these concepts cannot write worth a damn.

I had the same problems understanding Meditations on the Tarot (BTW that is (a not actually about Tarot and (b. a really good book with some really weird ideas). The concepts themselves were difficult to grasp, but I first had to wade through the language of the book, which for a recently written book was very ... strange. And I frequently find myself going "Oh, THAT's what you were talking about. Is there a reason you couldn't just say that in simpler language?"

Writing is hard work, in case you didn't know. The primary job of a writer is to take an idea from inside of their head and phrase it in a way that a reader can easily understand. This is why (IMHO) passive voice is out of favor. "The body was placed in the cupboard" is more difficult to understand than "She put the body in the cupboard." Admittedly, the concept here (a body in a cupboard) is simple enough for anybody to grasp, but it's awkward. Awkwardness is a roadblock to comprehension. The more complicated the concept, the larger the roadblock. The more roadblocks you put between the reader and comprehension, the more blatantly you fail in the most basic job in writing.

 And before you say, "These ideas are complicated, CW. There's no way you could write them so most people could understand," There's a beautiful example of breaking things down simply in A Wrinkle in Time, one of my favorite books. In it, a teacher (who also happens to be a former star) explains time-and-space travel to a child. Specifically, how use of the fourth dimension allows the teacher, the child and their companions to jump from planet to planet almost instantaneously when the child knows it should be impossible. This is a very complex idea, and I have read several other books on the subject of time and dimensional theory which I enjoyed very much. But none of the books had the gorgeous simplicity of the Wrinkle in Time passage, and I suspect I wouldn't be able to understand any of the other concepts at all if I had not read Wrinkle as a child. So let me repeat myself: I had a basic understanding of dimensional theory as a ten-year-old, not because I was brilliant, but because someone was willing to take the time and effort to break an extraordinarily complex idea into language a child could understand. So it can be done. If you have the time, patience and intelligance to do so.

If this is true (that any idea can be broken down into language simple enough for a child to understand) than the more complex ideas are more difficult to grasp, not because they are complex but because the people who understand them just can't be arsed to break them down. It's too much work and they don't want to. Education is the attempt to find a middle ground. Give someone the basic knowledge necessary so that the "in the knows" don't have to break their concepts down quite as far. Also, breaking a complex idea into simple language requires a total understanding of the subject at hand, so that the writer knows which simple words to use. In order to describe a cerulean hemisphere, you must completely understand what both concepts mean to break them down into "half a ball, in a specific shade of blue". If you are talking to someone with the same knowledge as you, sans the specific concept, you can use more complex language. If you are talking to someone with less specified knowledge, however, then you must not only understand your concept, you must also understand language, and also understand the way people think. It takes intelligence to understand the implications of what a wrinkle in fourth-dimensional space could mean for spacial travel. It takes genius to break that concept down into the image of an ant walking across a table cloth, and what a large wrinkle in the table-cloth would mean to the ant.

And having gotten THAT out of my system, I leave you with this:



Math is so cool

*headdesk*

Dear Christian America, Of Which I Am Still Nominally A Part:

Knock this shit off please.

I'm serious. This is the kind of thing that makes my teeth bleed. Kids get "exposed" to a lot of things that parents can't control. It's better for them to become aware of them in a controlled environment (school, for example) than it is an uncontrolled one (the back of somebody's car).

Reality is an ugly, uncaring, unfeeling, horrible place. Sheltering your kids from it will not work for very long. It likes to get in through the cracks. You can either let your kids know this and arm them to fight the nasty, or you can shelter them and leave them pretty much defenseless against it. I'd rather have sex education than pregnant fourteen year olds. I'd rather have books about rape than students too scared to come forward. I'd rather show my kids everything, all the beauty and all the ugliness, as high as it can get and as low as it can get, in the safe environment of childhood rather than hide the cracked spots and let my kids become disillusioned when reality bites.

Your job as a parent is not only to keep your children pure. It's also to arm them for a life that's little more than a running fight against the dark.

Sometimes I HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE my job

Oh, it's not that it sucks eggs (though it does) but for some reason I have been DYING of boredom. My usual cure for falling asleep over the doughnuts has been buying new music. Problem is ... this is not working as well anymore. I have discovered new bands for painting (Abney Park. Holy flying awesome STEAMPUNK BAND!!!) but nothing to keep me awake while I'm making soggy, fried, teeth rotting bread (have I mentioned lately how FUCKING SICK OF DOUGHNUTS you get when you do it for a living? Because you get fucking sick of them. My dad will pick me up if I buy them for him, and I would rather walk back to my apartment in the rain than encourage the sale of teeth rotting doughnuts. I have glaze on my fucking ear again, I swear to God.)

Evil. Sugary, sugary evil.

Well, out of desperation two nights ago I discovered that my MP3 player has audiobook samples, and one of them was Duma Key. I love Stephen King and I loved the ink out of Duma Key, and I discovered that a five minute sample of a Stephen King novel is TOO FUCKING SHORT. I came very close to having to buy an eighth MP3 player, I was that irritated. So to make a long, boring OMG get me away from the computer I am too tired to be writing now, story short, I am going to test-drive audiobooks for a while to see if that can keep me entertained while I hunt down new music. Or let the old music dry off a little bit so I can go back to it once I'm done listening to Duma Key.

And my Trainee is surviving. I am very surprised. It's like having a potted plant and figuring that you're going to come back one day and find this crispy dry thing in the corner, you forgot to water it for a week, only to discover that its worked its way through the foundation and is draining the city water from a leaky pipe somewhere.

If this goes according to plan, I will only need to fry doughnuts twice a week. (please god let it go according to plan I do not want to do this anymore please). Also, somebody needs to invent wrist braces that you can wear when you're doing food service work. There HAS to be a way to sanitize them.

I'm going to go die now.