Category: Writing

Not her mom

This narrative is drawn from a dream I had just before waking today.

She was small, with tiny features and wispy dark hair, eyes shining dark against skin so pale it was almost pallid. But she was full of energy, hurtling through the hot spring resort so fast it was all I could do just to keep up, let alone right the chaos she left in her wake.

Girls like her always had hangers-on, and she was no exception. First there was the straw-haired boy who’d accompanied the household on this vacation, the son of her father’s valet; the two had grown up together and might as well have been siblings. The second was new, the brown-haired, deeply-tanned son of a local. She’d caught his eye the moment she’d stepped from the train, and he’d been following her ever since.

If you added all their ages, you’d need yet another child to reach twenty years.

I caught up to them in an anteroom surrounded by a cluster of single rooms. The main hallway continued straight to the springs. The family’s rooms were similarly arrayed, but in a suite, allowing both access and privacy. The young mistress was teasing her local’s son, making him blush. I saw the valet’s son watching quietly, from a distance, his head lowered.

“We’ll go to the baths!” the young mistress announced, not noticing me. “But we’ll need towels and robes; our playclothes won’t do. Come!” And she turned on her tiny heel and marched into the nearest single room. In moments she was tearing drawers open and ripping the blankets from the bed.

I don’t know what happened then. I had witnessed many such a scene before, and my duty was always the same: to make amends afterwards. I did not begrudge the young mistress the trouble it took to seek out her victims and compensate their losses. Such work was the reason I was employed by the household. Such work kept me clothed and fed, and let me see wonders and amusements throughout the world alongside the family. Perhaps it was the look on the face of the dear valet’s son. Perhaps it was the careless way with which the young mistress was rifling through the stranger’s belongings.

Perhaps it was because, in my head, I had so casually concocted a group of girls like her.

Whatever it was, very shortly, I found myself screaming.

“Who do you think you are?” I roared, hooking the girl by the shoulder, spinning her around, and flinging her down on the bed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Those dark eyes were wide. It was not a look I had ever seen on her face before. Shock, certainly. Fear, perhaps. “I–I was just–we needed–”

“If you needed robes and towels, you have plenty of your own in your own rooms,” I shrilled. “Is this your room, young mistress?”

“M-m-my–”

“Is it?”

“I-I-I–”

“Do the things in this room belong to you? Did your mother and father check you into this room? Is your prize possession, the braid of unicorn mane, to be found in this room?”

“No,” she said finally, in the smallest voice I’d ever heard come out of her tiny mouth.

“Then what gives you the right to come into this room and take whatever you want?”

She had no answer. Her face was turning pink.

“And what gives you the right to ignore your lifelong friend as if he doesn’t even exist?”

“What?” she tried to say, but a sob caught the word in her throat as her eyes filled with tears.

“Have you ever thought about anyone but yourself?” I seethed. “Have you ever thought about the people whose things you’ve taken without asking, whose property you’ve destroyed just for your own pleasure?”

She started outright bawling. “You’re not being fair,” she sobbed.

“When have you ever been ‘fair’?” I countered.

“Why are you being so mean?”

And I broke. Whatever had been driving me on was gone in that instant. Her dark eyes, overflowing with tears, reamed accusatory holes into my heart that I could not deflect.

“Oh, sweetheart,” I murmured, and my eyes brimmed over as well. I slipped my hands beneath her tiny form, lifting her from where she’d lay stunned and motionless on the bed, and drew her into a gentle embrace. “Shh. Sweetheart. I’m sorry. I just…I love you so.”

She made a pathetic noise that I could only imagine signaled her bewilderment.

“I know. I know. I know I’m not your mother, and I never could be…but sometimes I feel like I am, I really do.” She shook quietly in my arms. “And I just…I don’t want you to be a bad girl.”

そして誰もいなくなればいい

Some time ago, I attempted a fan translation of the bland anime-original Detective Conan episode 439, そして誰もいなくなればいい. Work went slowly because I found the story so boring. Not being a 推理オタク (mystery geek), I didn’t even realize the plot was a blatant rip-off of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None until a friend pointed it out later, so when I submitted my translation, I had a title like “And It’d Be Great If Everyone Disappeared”. While this works as a fairly literal translation, it’s obviously not what the writers were going for with the title. They very clearly meant to refer to Christie’s work.

そして誰もいなくなった is the Japanese title of And Then There Were None. Changing the verb ending to なれば makes it conditional, and then adding いい indicates that the preceding is the desired situation. This results in something like:

If (And Then There Were None), Good!

So, how to reference Christie’s title while keeping the conditional intact and using English that doesn’t sound ridiculous? Obviously “It’d Be Great If and Then There Were None” is out. But that was the best I could come up with for months and months. This morning, lying sleeplessly in a bed hundreds of miles from home, a solution finally occurred to me. Here are some variations.

And Then There Were None? That’d Be Great!
And Then There Were None? That’s My Preference
And Then There Were None? If Only

The question mark handles the conditional and maintains the flow of the original title. Then it’s up to the following phrase to drive home the murderous point.

I think I like the last one best.

Challenging myself

I noticed when I was writing my last post, which was pretty much a middle school essay on a movie I like, that I got tired of writing it pretty quickly. I had points I wanted to make, but I was getting bored while trying to make them.

That’s not a good sign.

For most of my life, I’ve been a writer. I started keeping diaries and writing stories in elementary school, and even though I didn’t write daily, I wrote enough that it was obvious I loved writing.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped writing regularly. I’m pretty sure “somewhere” coincides closely with my joining Twitter in February of 2007. I have spent a lot of time pouring my thoughts out there…but what I do on Twitter isn’t writing. It’s stream of consciousness, and often it isn’t worth reading at all. I even avoid using @ mentions sometimes so I don’t have to worry about someone important or smart seeing what I’ve said about a subject that concerns them.

I don’t try to write on Twitter. If anything, Twitter gives me an excuse not to try. And as I’ve continued not writing, my writing skills and endurance have atrophied almost to the point of nothing.

This isn’t what I want for myself. It’s not how I’ve spent most of my life.

So I’ve decided to start writing regularly. If not every day, every other day. I won’t worry about length, but I will worry about quality. If what I write is something I could have dashed off in 30 seconds on Twitter, it won’t count.

I want my writing to have meaning again. So here goes.

Published
Categorized as Diary, Writing

Last night’s dream: An odd journey

In my dream last night I was on a journey, exploring sprawling lands dotted with preserved historic manor homes. I had left one of the manors, traversed a long dirt road with a sign at the end that changed from “Wopat” to “Cary” when the light struck it at a different angle, and met up with a large collection of my family for some sort of antiquing crawl when I realized I had thoughtlessly taken a china plate and a small figurine from the house. As everyone else pulled out and began to organize envelopes filled with cash gifts, I hurried to both return the items and find my own envelopes.

I turned back down the same dirt road I’d used before, but when I got to the cluster of buildings where I thought the manor house was, it was nowhere to be found. I entered a door and found myself in a Victorian-styled shop. A woman holding a baby was standing at a counter, and she accidentally dropped 10p (yes, pence, not a dime). Two scruffy, lazy-looking men dressed like Mary Poppins characters laughed and mocked her as she tried and failed to stoop down and retrieve the money. One of the men picked it up himself and then embedded it in his mass of thick curly hair with a jeer.

I could not let this stand, so I marched up to the men and told them off. Somewhere during my rant their victim shifted from being a woman holding a baby to being a pregnant woman. I made a big deal about this, yelling at the men that a pregnant woman has a hard time bending over. One of the men countered that she was only in her first trimester, at which point my speech was derailed and I wondered confusedly why she’d had trouble picking up the coin.

Meanwhile, the woman had run off, abandoning her 10p. It became clear that I was now the focus of the men’s attention, and I knew if they figured out what the plate and figurine were, they’d use them against me.

Suddenly I hit upon the perfect plan. “I took these from a manor house somewhere around here. I can’t remember which one,” I told them, handing the items over. “I’ll leave them with you. Now everyone will think you stole them, unless you can get them back to where they came from.” And I turned and slipped out, sprinting away from the store.

I had made it a good distance away and was stalking across a steep hillside partially covered with tarps when the men came running up to me. “Okay, you win,” one of them panted. “Just please take the plate and figurine back.”

“So we’re even?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said.

I retrieved the items and kept walking, and for some reason the men joined me. We ended up back in town. The man who’d given me the plate and figurine back seemed to think we now had a bond, and as we passed a stable, he spoke up.

“I used to use this livery all the time, but I’ve been banned. Can you just walk through there like you’re going to use it?”

I obliged. As I strolled through the stable, a small pack animal appeared beside me and, conditioned by years of habit, trudged up a ramp that led to a harnessing area. As stable hands began hooking up the tackle, the man who’d spoken grabbed a wooden cart and wheeled it out to the other side of the barn, where the other man stood waiting. I found myself abruptly lost in a maze of fences and wooden corrals–I had to turn back or crawl through a tiny space to get to where the men were with the cart. As I attempted the crawl, gave up, and doubled back, I muttered something about avoiding dust.

“Dust,” one of the men said mockingly. “According to your TARDIS, we’re all dust.” This made me slightly uncomfortable as I wondered if the men had designs on my TARDIS. (I had a TARDIS? Where did I put it? And how did it form its own opinions?)

Outside, stable hands hooked the cart up to the pack animal. I shrugged and placed the things I’d been carrying in our new cart, and we all continued on our journey. The original missions of returning the plate and figurine and meeting back up with my family seemed to have been forgotten; I’m not sure where we were going.

Before stopping to rest for the night, the man who’d done most of the (civilized) talking and I both purchased the same book from a roadside vendor. At this point the dream shifted into third person, and I saw that my character was a tall, slender woman with straw-colored blond hair that fell in thick, gentle curls well down her back, bright blue eyes that were set rather close together, a prominent but not large nose, and a somewhat long face. Her thoughts began narrating as both she and the man settled in to read before bed, she sitting at the window of her room at an old West-style inn, he outside propped up against the cart.

As the two of them read, cremated remains began piling up around them, appearing out of nowhere. It appeared to be a side effect of the story they were reading. Neither of them took much notice as the ashes buried their backs up to their necks and began spilling over in front of them. However, both frequently glanced up from their books to stare through the window at each other.

“The seduction happened then,” the woman’s narration intoned as she lowered the book into the ashes and, with a slight look of worry or discomfort, closed two sets of ineffectual, sheer lace curtains. She was still perfectly visible to the man and it was obvious she could tell as she resumed reading.

“As I read, the remains piling up around me, I felt the hands of other men,” the narration continued, and skeleton hands appeared from the ashes, stroking her shoulders.

I was really rather fascinated by where this was all going–for some reason the remains and the skeleton hands didn’t scare me at all–but alas, my alarm clock went off.

Obese people are people too

Canada has ruled that people who require two airline seats can have them without paying extra.

The high court declined to hear an appeal by Canadian airlines of a decision by the Canadian Transportation Agency that people who are “functionally disabled by obesity” deserve to have two seats for one fare.

My friend posted to Twitter, “This is kind of ridiculous. If you’re wide enough for a second seat, you ought to pay for it.”

He doesn’t believe he’s being unfair, because he’s one of the people who might be affected by this sort of ruling. However, there is a fundamental fallacy in his argument, and that is

Obese people don’t have the same rights as people at lower weights.

If you think of each airline seat as a commodity, it seems unfair for one person to get two while others only get one for the same price. But that’s not really what’s going on here. The obese person isn’t enjoying a luxurious extra seat, with room to lounge or lie down or spread out. The obese person is simply getting enough room to actually sit down. To say that a person must pay extra for a seat because they require more room is nothing more than prejudice. Should a person in a wheelchair pay extra for the room her chair takes up?

This brings me to another fundamental fallacy. This fallacy is what breathes life into the first.

Obese people choose to be obese.

How many obese people do you know who say, “I love being obese! I wouldn’t change a thing about myself!” I doubt you know anyone who says that. No, what an obese person is more likely to say is, “I’m obese because I’m lazy and don’t eat right.”

That argument may or may not be true. I’m not trying to diminish the importance of personal responsibility for one’s health. But the fact of the matter is, our society makes it ridiculously difficult to escape obesity.

We are less active

We hardly have to walk anywhere. We drive our cars straight up to the buildings we want to enter, even if they’re right next door. There’s a negative connotation associated with walking. When you see a person walking down the street, do you think, “Oh, how healthy!” or do you think, “What a vagrant! Get a job!” Yes, there is laziness involved here. But our country’s transportation fundamentals–the way we organize how we get from place to place–are heavily skewed against healthy options.

We have evolved into car-addicts. We zone our towns so that it’s often impossible to commute by any way other than car. While large cities may have subways or buses, these seem to have a negative connotation. Smaller cities may or may not have public transportation, and certainly not enough to make switching a viable choice for most people. The “ideal” is to have your own car and drive it everywhere.

We also have an obsession with “convenience” and “efficiency”. Americans have always been about innovating in order to save time and money. It somehow seems more efficient to us to drive everywhere than use other methods of transportation. It’s certainly more convenient. We can carry more things in a car, and we can stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter. We can drive right up to wherever we’re going and be inside in a flash.

Our transportation issue has evolved into a self-feeding cycle. We drive everywhere because city planners zone commercial and residential far away from each other, because we like the convenience of driving and the “safety” of neighborhoods secluded from commerce. We can’t stop driving everywhere easily, even if we want to. It takes too long to get to places by foot or bike. It’s less safe. And we don’t have any other options, except perhaps a bus that doesn’t quite go where we need it to.

We don’t eat right

This point hardly needs to be made. Everyone knows by now that human beings are not supposed to eat as much as we eat here in America, and certainly not the types of food we eat. The majority of us are built to store fat to keep us from starving when times are rough. As many have noted, though, our cheapest food items nowadays are the ones that are the worst for us. It’s harder to eat fresh vegetables because we often don’t have time to cook, so we pick up something quick (and loaded with fat and salt) and the veggies go bad in the fridge.

Why don’t we have time to cook, if everything is supposedly so convenient? Because we don’t actually save any time doing things the way we do them. We sit in the car driving to work on the other side of town. We sit around for 8 to 12 hours trying to make more money. Instead of setting convenience as a means to an end–a healthy, joyful life–we’ve made convenience our goal.

Our relationships, just like our health, suffer because it’s inefficient to spend time working on them.

“I deserve it”

The sheer amount of time, energy, and money it would take for an obese person to work themselves down to a healthy size are the reasons more of them (us) aren’t doing it. We basically have to fight basic precepts of our society. We have to teach ourselves that convenience is not good. We have to teach ourselves that it’s okay to spend more money. We have to teach ourselves to spend less time on things we enjoy so we have more time to exercise. And all of these things run completely counter to the “pursuit of happiness” we are indoctrinated into growing up.

We’re told we can do whatever we want, whenever we want. That this is our privilege as Americans. We believe that we have a right to convenience. We have a culture of entitlement, and if things don’t go our way we feel it’s perfectly acceptable to pitch a fit. These underlying assumptions feed our quest for more, more, more, now, now, now, whether that be a faster route to school than walking or the bus, or as much food as we can scarf for the least amount of money.

We are, essentially, training ourselves to be lazy in all things–making it appealing to be selfish and miserable.

The inverse

Many of us recognize this sense of entitlement in ourselves and others and find it repulsive. We don’t want a handout, we’ll say. We don’t want special treatment. We want to be treated like everyone else.

The problem is, sometimes we go too far. We’ll state that it’s only fair that obese people pay for as many seats as they need, for example, because they shouldn’t get more of anything than anyone else. We’ll buy into a logical fallacy because we don’t want to be identified with our gluttonous society.

Obesity is not something we can turn off like a light switch. It is a fundamental problem in our society that everyone–individuals, businesses, and government–needs to work together to eliminate. But while we’re working on it, the fact of the matter is, people are going to be obese.

Obese people are people too

Giving a person a chair that is the right size is not special treatment. It is not saying, “You are entitled to be obese.” It is saying, “I want you to be just as comfortable as everyone else.”

Marginalizing people due to their size ignores the fact that obesity, for many people, is not a choice. Poor education, societal pressures, convenience and “efficiency”, genes, the slow death of the community, and factors we may not even be aware of yet have all combined to thrust Americans into an unhappy, unhealthy world. We can no longer simply blame the fat guy for being fat. We have to take a hard look at everything we do as a society.

We need to educate. We need to reform our transportation system. We need to offer more healthy options. We need to put an emphasis back on communities, on taking care of each other. We need to do all of these things and more to get ourselves back on track.

And in the meantime, we need to treat the ones who are affected most with the same dignity and respect we give everyone else. No more…and no less.

NaNoWriMo approacheth

Two days till NaNoWriMo. I am going to participate this year, and this time I will actually keep writing all month, instead of stopping after a week, or whatever it was I did last year.

The rules dictate that I can’t have written any of this work beforehand, so I can’t continue any of my old stories. It’s good to have a clean slate, but for awhile I wasn’t sure I’d be able to think of something to write about.

However, an interesting concept came to me recently. It touches on personal privacy issues and the paranormal. The story will take place a couple generations from now, so things will still be recognizable, but there will be plenty of new technology.

Even if this has been done before, it’s never been done by me, so I think it will be worth doing even if I can’t publish it.

Having a concept is all well and good, but the characters are paramount. Right now I’m seeing two principal characters, a teenager and a younger sibling, and I’m thinking they’re being raised by a single father who has become very overprotective since divorcing his wife, who is an abusive alcoholic. I haven’t figured out the kids’ genders yet, but right now I’m leaning towards the idea of both of them as girls.

I’m considering using my old AMRN character, Natalie “Byron” Ryan, for the teenage daughter, but I haven’t decided yet. This would actually be somewhat convenient, because the closest character I’ve played to how I envison the girls’ father is Bill Anderson, who was Byron’s self-appointed guardian. However, I don’t want to trap myself within old story ideas–this is going to be something new and different. (The teenage daughter will not have high levels of Spiritia ;P)

I’m also not sure from whose perspective I will write. It’s tempting to write from the father’s perspective, because his motivations are key and I feel the urge to explain them, but ultimately I think it will be best to have the father represent a circumstance rather than act as protagonist. With the teenage daughter I have the perfect foil for both the reaction to the father’s actions and the realization of the phenomena surrounding the younger sister…

I do think I’ll stick to third person, though, because a teenage girl’s perspective would be tiring to write (and read).

Today’s Overuse of an Expression Award goes to: Breck Mickelson, Nicholasville

They’re talking about putting a huge Jack Nicklaus signature golf course over off US 68 in western Nicholasville. (Ugh. They only just finished the lane expansion over there…) It would be a golfing community, similar to The River in North Augusta, with houses and townhomes averaging $500,000 apiece.

Breck Mickelson, a Nicholasville resident, is understandably perturbed.

“We didn’t want to live in the city. That’s why we moved out here.”

I’m with Breck, really. US 68 (aka Harrodsburg Road, aka my favorite way to get to my parents’ house) has gone to crap in recent years, with construction (notably Southland Christian Church, which seemingly quadrupled in size) and added lanes out the wazoo.

I actually used to be a proponent of widening Harrodsburg Road, and it really does help traffic congestion to have those extra lanes, but now I think I was short-sighted. With Harrodsburg widened, now people are going to want to build up all along it, just like what happened to Nicholasville Road. We’ll lose ancient farmhouses and traditional stone fencing. We’ll lose old trees and rolling farmland. We’ll gain…shopping outlets, and a golf course? (There’s already a golf course along Harrodsburg, thank you very much.)

So yes, I am with Breck Mickelson. I agree with him 100%. And when he said,

We need 660 houses in Jessamine County like we need a hole in the head.

I thought that was pretty clever.

But then he said,

We need more traffic on Harrodsburg Road like we need a hole in the head.

Now come on, Mr. Mickelson. I know that redundancy can be powerful, but the cliche “like we need a hole in the head” is powerful enough. Redundancy only cheapens the sentiment.

In this instance, we need redundancy like we need a hole in the head.

(See what I did there?)

A lesson learned; or, an exercise in paranoid obsessive-compulsion

Eric Burns reminded me today that National Novel Writing Month is coming. (NaNoWriMo, a truncation worthy of the Japanese language!)

So. Should I do it?

I am really, really upset over losing what little I wrote about Tilya and the Mazarins. I mean, there is an infinitesimal chance that the demo guys will rake through the rubble and pluck out my hard drive, and that my writing will still be on it. But ultimately, it’s probably best to just accept that it’s lost. And the thing is, it didn’t have to be.

I was publishing the book online. It was readily available. It could have been Google-cached, or stored on the Internet Archive.

But I got skittish. I didn’t want the blog to be the “first publication” of the book, because I “might” try to get it published, and people familiar with the publishing world indicated that publishers don’t like sloppy seconds.

In other words, I wanted to protect the publishing rights for something I hadn’t even written yet.

There’s a cliche for that sort of thing, you know. It involves chickens.

If I’d left it public, I’d still have it. And you know, just because I’ve “published” it doesn’t mean a publisher won’t still be interested. There are many people who’ve been published because of their blogs.

What all this is boiling down to is: should I once again attempt a serious writing project, I will do it publicly, on a blog. Rather than bank on something that may or may not happen in the distant future, I will share my work immediately, and get feedback, and ensure that if this house burns down with all my stuff in it, at least what I’ve written will survive.

Losing my writing

There were short stories on my hard drive that I hadn’t put on the web anywhere. None of them was finished, and none of them was particularly good. The first novel I ever tried to write was there, an epic fantasy in two parts (yes, I was writing a fantasy series…hahaha), and so was the other novel, the one about the bald guy and the conspiracy.

It occurs to me that losing them might be a good thing, because now I’m unfettered by the actual writing I did those years ago. I only have the ideas. Maybe I can turn them into something worthwhile now that I don’t have my prior, fumbling attempts to restrain me.

The book I tried to write last November was also there, and I removed it from this site…and unlike those older things, this one actually had relatively decent writing.

Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine. At least I still have the last (and weakest) chapter…

Googled

I, like all self-obsessed persons, enjoy searching for myself on Google. (Right now I’m pleased to report that this journal is the number two result for searches for “Heather Meadows”. Go me and my bad self.) I searched for “Heather Aubrey” again, just for fun, and once again came across the “Utopia Bibliography” wherein the following horrendous sentence is quoted:

Heather Aubrey’s George Orwell and the English Language

Orwell’s “predictions of what problems the dangerous capabilities of language might cause are coming true today.”

Yes, I did write that. And yes, I am so sorry. Please forgive me.

(You could pretend that the sentence was intended as an example of language going bad, but I don’t think it’s bad in the way Orwell was predicting, and anyway I wasn’t that smart when I was a senior in high school.)

[Update 9/13 3:30 pm:] OMGWTFBBQ, here is the essay in its entirety. I have got to archive this puppy.

[Update 8/14/2011:] I’ve decided to archive the essay here, just in case. The text is copyright 1996 Heather Aubrey (Meadows), so if you’d like to reproduce this thrilling high school essay elsewhere (why?), please include my credit.

George Orwell and the English Language

George Orwell. The very mention of the name brings to mind terms like totalitarianism, fascism, dictatorship, Newspeak, doublethink. The man who discarded the given name Eric Arthur Blair had an enormous impact on today’s world. His vivid and often horrifying descriptions of what the world was and what it was turning into have become legendary.

Many people have read Orwell, have criticized his ideas or agreed with them, have made conjectures as to what Orwell believed about a wide variety of subjects. One of these oft-discussed topics, though not touched upon quite as frequently as the others, is Orwell’s opinion about English itself.

George Orwell loved the English language and wanted to see it used to the fullest extent internationally. He was dismayed by the apparent degeneration of the language and sought to preserve it in a simpler, yet meaningful, form. He was aware of the many powers of language and wanted to show the world how these powers could be abused by the fascist and totalitarian powers he feared. His predictions of what problems the dangerous capabilities of language might cause are coming true today.

Orwell believe to be “good” writing? What were his standards, his techniques, and how were they developed?

Very few authors actually developed essays explaining the motivation behind their writing. Orwell was among this minority. As he explains in his essay “Why I Write,” writing, for him, was not something necessarily enjoyable. Rather, it was a compulsion that could not be ignored. He wrote

1) to be remembered after death,

2) because of “aesthetic enthusiasm,”

3) to record historical facts, and

4) for a political purpose. Orwell stated that these four reasons for writing are true for every writer, but are manifested in different proportions for each. (Orwell, 1946) For Orwell, it can be assumed that the most important of these four reasons was political purpose. Orwell wrote primarily to make a point about the situation the world was in. Animal Farm was a brilliant satire of the totalitarian powers in Russia before and after Czar Nicholas II. 1984 was not only a look at what the future might bring, but a reflection of Orwell’s own time period and the conditions in World War II era London, as suggested by Anthony Burgess (Burgess, 18).

Orwell has been described as a writer who utilized “firmness, colloquial vigor, unpretentious vividness, and limpid clarity.” He believed that the writer’s personality, the ideas the writer expresses, and the language the writer uses are all closely linked. He also believed that purpose determines how a piece should be written, but it is not necessarily the most important factor. For Orwell, the impulse to put his own experiences into some kind of meaningful form outweighed his desire to create original stories and situations. (Woodcock, 292-3) In fact, it has been suggested that 1984 was not a book written about the future but rather about the year 1948; clearly, the social conditions are similar. (Burgess, 11-34) Besides simply describing the social conditions of the world he lived in, Orwell also poured over all his old essays and journals, often quoting exactly from himself in order to put 1984 together. George Orwell was the master of “self-plagiarism.” Despite the fact that the novel’s separate pieces were not entirely original, Orwell managed to create a book with a completely original story and prediction based on his own observations. (Huber, 1994)

Examining Orwell’s work with the English language and noting his concern for its welfare, it can be assumed that Orwell wrote not only to make a statement, but because he loved the English language and wanted to see it used to the fullest extent. Orwell was very interested in English and its changes. He was very concerned with how changes in the English language would affect the world. The biographies of Orwell have recorded evidence of this love affair with the language; Orwell was known to try and understand and describe a relationship between thought and language that wasn’t simply a matter of writing formulas. He also thought that English would make a good international language, due to its large vocabulary and relatively simple grammar and syntax. However, Orwell was deeply concerned for the welfare of the language. He feared that English was being destroyed by both its American version, which was full of too many interchangeable parts of speech and useless prepositions, and the government, which tended to twist the language for its own gain. (Steinhoff, 167-9)

It was Orwell’s concern for the English language that caused him to create Newspeak, the new version of English presented in 1984 as a way of “perfecting” thought. In the novel, the purpose of this change in the language was to narrow the range of human thought and put an end to “traitorous” thoughts. (Orwell, 1949) Orwell’s concern about the dangers of language was not unfounded. Today, we have our own version of Newspeak. To employ Newspeak nowadays is to deliberately use words that are ambiguous or deceptive so that public opinion can be controlled. It has been suggested that the term “affirmative action” is actually a Newspeak word, since nothing that is “affirmative” can be bad. By making the action seem good simply by calling it affirmative, politicians have subtly swayed the opinions of voters. (Folmsbee, 1996) Orwell believed in the intimate connection between words and thought, and he believed that clear expression was necessary for political integrity. He thought that clichés and the like only led to confusion and propaganda. His beliefs have been proven to be sound in today’s world. (Calder, 1990)

Orwell wanted desperately to preserve the English language and make it available for world use. It was because of this that he embraced the idea of “Basic English,” a system of language first proposed by C. K. Ogden in his book The System of Basic English in 1934. Some say that this system is the basis of Newspeak, which is an interesting paradox, since Newspeak was the result of the destruction of language, and Orwell sought to preserve language.

Newspeak itself wasn’t just a code-like language Orwell invented for pleasure, although he was interested in that sort of thing. It was a statement of Orwell’s belief in the power of language. Used the wrong way, even a good idea like Basic English (in Orwell’s opinion) could be turned to evil purposes. Orwell made Newspeak a projection of the existing tendencies toward destroying English in politics. (Steinhoff, 167-9) Newspeak was the foundation of doublethink. It was what gave the Inner Party the power to control other people’s minds and effectively maintain totalitarian rule. (Orwell, 1949)

Orwell’s chilling predictions in 1984 of what might happen to mankind in the future still concern the people of the world, but many fail to notice that Orwell’s predictions of what could happen to the English language are already coming true in America. (Fleming, 1995) Today’s version of Newspeak is used to reduce the power of the people, just as in 1984. (Folmsbee, 1996) What people do not realize is that many times they are the willing vessels of Newspeak. Newspeak today is a subtle form of mind control in which ideologues and demagogues employ euphemism, misinformation, and other methods of distortion to mislead and sometimes divide citizens and to sway public opinion, according to one reporter. Because of the extensive use of this method of mind control in politics today, many people have become cynical and uncaring when it comes to the welfare of this country. This cynicism and lack of action is a fatal danger to everything the United States of America stand for. This same reporter cries out to us that it is our duty as citizens to hold our elected officials responsible for their actions and to put the power back where it belongs, in the hands of the people. (Fleming, 1995)

To see how far this craze has gone, one need only check the headlines. Daily, words are being changed or destroyed so that “better,” “less offensive” words can be used. The manifestation of this in the United States is political correctness. (Folmsbee, 1996) An example: a tobacco company is trying to do away with the word “cancer” and replace it with a code name, so that people won’t be afraid to buy cigarettes. They made this decision based on the “negative connotation” of the word cancer, and they wish to replace the word with the code name Zephyr, a non-threatening word meaning “a slight breeze.” By taking away consumers’ fears by changing the name of a product, salespeople are effectively using Newspeak to control people’s minds. (Grytting, 1996)

George Orwell was indeed a brilliant man. He foresaw the damage language abuse could cause. People ignorant of the power politicians and advertisers now hold over America are only aiding the spread of Newspeak. Orwell wrote the way he did to warn us. He did not mean for us to discard language completely; he felt quite the opposite. He believed that language was a thing to be nurtured, cared for, that it was beautiful. However, he wanted to make sure that people realized that language is also powerful, dangerous, and in danger itself. Orwell’s final message to us is this: Language is sacred. Take care of it. Do not abuse it. Remember that it is amendable, flexible, yet intangible. Because of language, “He who controls the future controls the present. He who controls the present controls the past.” (Orwell, 1949)

Monica Lewinsky I am not

It’s my first day back at the internship since the fire; I skipped last week. Things have been going okay. I’ve been offered condolences by everyone…and a king size wrought iron canopy bed by the vice president. She’s moving and doesn’t have the space for it anymore. If we end up getting that cute little two bedroom with the horrible thrusting garage, the bed would definitely fit in the master bedroom…

At any rate, I’ve had actual work to do today, which has been fun and challenging and interesting and all that. For the first half hour or so, I read a book called The Complete 35mm Sourcebook, which was quite interesting. I got through about half of the history of the format. Then I ran an errand to the Augusta Chronicle and helped prepare some items for an advertisers meeting.

After that, the real work began. I attended a meeting wherein the account manager told the art director and myself what was needed for three upcoming ads. I was asked to write slogans/headlines and create mockups for two of the ads.

I nailed down my headlines pretty quickly, and I’ve done two mockups for one ad, so I’m pretty satisfied with my work so far today. (Of course, I still need to mock up the other ad, for which a rough draft is actually due today. I’m actually waiting on some information in that regard…) I suppose I should admit that a lot of my work has been “cheating”; that is, I’ve lifted quite a bit from the company’s existing ads. However, that’s what they want…so there you go.

It’s really cool that the company is using me more now. I’m definitely getting some good experience.

Not even vignettes

I don’t have time to write full stories about everything that’s been happening to me, but there have been a few moments that have left impressions, and I wanted to document them.

So here are a few random scenes.

Suddenly he swung the massive truck into a parking lot. “Wait here,” he said. “I’ve gotta see my friend for a minute.”

He got out and headed to a storefront. I sat in the truck and waited. A few minutes later, he returned with a brown paper bag, which he deposited in the floor of the backseat.

“There was a girl from North Carolina and a woman from Ve-neh-zoo-ay-luh, and they saw my churn and asked, ‘Is that an ice cream maker?’ I couldn’t believe it. You know what a butter churn is, don’t you dear? And the molds you put the butter in when it’s done? That woman from Ve-neh-zoo-ay-luh, she was 45 years old.”

“This young lady has never seen a real hardware store before.”

After work yesterday I went to the mall to get a manicure. Ever since working at GRW, the nail on my left pointer finger has been flawed. A line runs up the length of it, causing it to split and break at the tip. I was hoping the manicurist would be able to do something about it, or at least that the procedure would strengthen the nail.

The place I went to, Nail Something in the mall, was run by a group of Vietnamese women who chattered away in their own language as they attended to their customers. A teenage girl took particular interest in my hands, which needed a lot of work. The middle-aged woman taking care of me filed my nails down, then scraped back the cuticles, and then hacked the skin off all the way around. It smarted, and one nail started to bleed.

She applied lotion all up my arms, giving my forearms and hands and fingers a rough but pleasant massage. Then, after I washed my hands, she buffed the nails and painted them clear. I was impatient and didn’t let my hands dry long enough before digging in my purse, so she had to touch up the polish on my thumbnails.

The manicure cost $12, and I gave her a $3 tip.

Superman II was on, and I was watching it more out of a sense of curiosity than out of any actual desire to see it.

“I’d rather watch something else, if you don’t mind,” Sean said. I shrugged and started flipping. “Here,” he said, and took the remote. A few clicks later and there was Lenny Briscoe, making some comment about how parking rates in New York City will kill you, which was funny because there was a dead body in the parking lot.

“Are you addicted to this show?”

“Yes.”

So we watched three episodes.

Water is so rejuvenating to me. I know I’ve said this before. But every time I drive over the lake to get to work, I feel so refreshed. Today I was filled with emotion to the point that it brought tears to my eyes. And they were happy tears, for a change.

To the MAX!

Oh my god, Brian Clevinger (you know, 8-Bit Theater, Nuklear Age) posted the most hi-larious rant on the recent comic. (Scroll to the bottom of that page.)

Loonatics, man! ‘Cause they’re CRAZY. They make regular x-treme look, like, y’know, something so not x-treme you can’t think of a word for it. You can’t talk about them without excessive use of BOLD ITACLIC CAPS, MAN, TO THE MAX!

I find the philosophy behind being a television or Hollywood executive fascinating. Apparently these are people utterly devoid of taste or culture. They are completely without a sense of what is good. It’s like how sociopaths are incapable of feeling empathy. They can maim and kill and torture people because they are hardwired not to understand that it’s bad to do that. You can’t fix these people, they are broken from the factory and need to be destroyed after studying how fucked up they are so we can identify and destroy them better in the future.

That’s what these executives are like, only instead of lacking empathy — which they may very well also lack — they lack a sense of what good is. The rest of humanity has it. Sure, we might disagree about specifics, but there are certain instances where crap is crap and no one can deny it. I’m not saying Catwoman was one such movie, but it was.

Go read the rest, seriously. It’s a hoot.