Las Vegas

Oh boy have I been doing some big thinking lately. It’s not about anything important mind you, just my usual ruminating about life but by golly I’ve got some new material and I’m very excited about it. In addition to the aforementioned blogging brain that I put on the back burner this year, I stopped reading all of my philosophical books and researching different facets of cognitive sciences. Did you know that’s what I do in my spare time? Well, did, in my spare time. I had an interesting conversation the other day that prompted me to do a little research on government systems and just like that I was thumbing through my old copy of Walden and mulling over concepts from Jonathan Haidt.

I also happened to start reading an extremely convoluted book that is less about insightfulness and more of an accidental and profane look at the absurdity of human life. It’s a fiction story, silly, and written in the name of good fun but as I read, I can only think about the complex mind of the fella who wrote it and somehow that’s become more interesting to me than the actual story. Tracking where he’s going with this tale is entirely captivating. How did his brain come up with nonsense of such an insightful caliber?

Nothing I’m writing here means anything to you does it? I’m being vague and excluding you from my jumble of good thoughts. How rude of me. I also don’t really have a point here. I’m just excited about what’s going on in my brain.

In other news, The Union clan has safely made it home from our somewhat off-putting holiday to Las Vegas. Now you know us. We have a good time everywhere doing anything, but most of us decided we could happily never go to Las Vegas again. The crowds, the prices, the fat people, the bimbos, the gluttony, the extravagance, the constant ring-a-ding-ding of the slot machines. Did I mention prices? I had half of a quesadilla and it was $20. An entire quesadilla would have been $40 which happens to be half of my water bill. For what it’s worth, it was a good quesadilla.

I’ve always been particularly inpatient in crowds of people because I take long strides and have a quick gait. Sometimes my feet are farther along than the person in front of me. This causes tripping, doubling up tiny steps, and crashing into idiots that spontaneously stop moving with the flow of things. There was a shoulder-to-shoulder mob everywhere we went which means Big Lu was irritable for three days. Also, its very dry out there which makes for sharp boogers.
Mom really hated the sharp boogers.

That said, we laughed and laughed, taught Dad a few embarrassing life lessons, had a number of tasty meals, ate gelato in the daytime, took naps, rode in a helicopter, and invented a new gambling game we called Elevator Roulette during which all participants have to run and stand by the elevator that they thought would open first. This sounds simple and boring but it provided many laughs. That means it’s worthwhile.

So that’s all. Blogging break is over and it’s back to subjecting you with posts like this one that really have no point. Brace yourselves.

And Happy New Years!

The Merits of Blogging Brain

Since officially relinquishing myself from perpetual blogging back in January of this year, my hopes for the writing break completely backfired. I thought taking my focus off of coming up with Blog material would give me the brainpower I needed to properly construct the longer stories I was writing in my spare time. I never make New Year’s resolutions (why bother?) but I told myself I was going to work on chapters this year, not blurbs or quotes or gobbets. Since rearranging my habits to promote writing productivity I wrote less this year than I have the last six years of haphazardly sitting to write when I felt like it.

It’s very hard for me to sit and write now. My brain doesn’t dance across the letters like a ballerina, like it used to. That’s my mental picture of writing and how I know when things sound ok. I watch her tip-toe, twirl, and leap from word to word while I read and if she stops or stumbles, I come to and really look at the words and figure out what needs changing. (That’s not weird, right?) These days my brain has a surefooted and heavy-set government worker, stomping across my letters in corrective shoes. She knows what she’s doing but there’s no delicate nonsense. This year I am not cutting back on my writing. In fact I’m going to set fake goals to write often, daily like I used to, before I thought not writing as much would help my writing. I need my bouncing subtitles icon to morph back into a lady worthy of Swan Lake.

What I found even more interesting than losing a bit of my writing ability is what happened to my brain. I like to think I’m an observant gal and I sure do enjoy ruminating. But since I went “off duty” my brain stopped looking for blog material. I stopped reading scenarios as carefully and analyzing my own reactions to things. I noticed this right away and at first it was relaxing. I didn’t need to remember these story-worthy moments because I wasn’t going to be writing a story. But I have not enjoyed being less observant. Being unaware of what’s going on around me has left me feeling less creative and less understood. Perhaps my main motivation to write more should be that I will live my life with my eyes much more open than they are when I’m not planning to write.

I was super frustrated at this time last year and decided to restructure things in an effort to find peace. I’ve never been the type to make goals or have actual obtainable dreams (a summer home in Italy anyone?). Instead of making any progress on what I set out to do, a whole new world of ideas and opportunities floated up to the surface due to my own strategic avoidance of my “goals” and frustrations at sidestepping that to-do list. So now I have solid evidence that making plans means and guarantees nothing. Self-awareness and self-discipline are much more effective tools than plan-making. Write that down, kids. (Keep in mind this is coming from someone without an ounce of self-discipline but my self-awareness keeps me informed on these things.) Also this is really more for inner-peace and your own search for happiness. Workplace goals and business for The Man require lots of plan-making. There's a time and place, kids. Write that down too.

In short, because I have no self-discipline, I avoided my writing goals and spent more time on other things and the more time I spent on other things, the more I realized lots of really new things and my thinking was consumed with new ideas which, when mixed with immense frustration, led to barreling forward on a near-whim plan, in a fashion I would normally not entertain. (That's Lux, by the way. The near-whim plan. (There was some plan-making involved.)) So maybe my writing plan only half backfired. I definitely did not write as much (or at all really) but avoiding the writing gave me time to come up with a different way to make me happy and that's all I really wanted in the first place.