(Parentheses)

The library is my favorite room in my apartment.  (Just so you will know how vexing my life is, I spent about ten minutes trying to figure out how to bring my wife and both her joint ownership and her preference for the library into that sentence without it sounding awkward.  I did not succeed, partially due to the horrible construction of “my wife’s and my” and partially because of the lack of antecedent for the use of “our.”  I was not about to use the former, and the latter just wouldn’t do without the former, so I just gave up.  How troubling!)  One of these days I’ll learn how to write paragraphs that do not include lengthy parenthetical asides. 

Hopefully I will learn that skill while seated in my library (what a segue!).  (Speaking of segues, I thought they were spelled “segway” until sophomore or junior year of college.)  The room, as one might guess, is walled in books.  Even just thinking about it makes me joyful, but being there is “a whole nother” experience, as some would have it. 

Until this point I was planning to talk about something completely different, but now that I have made this many asides and pointless comments, I might as well talk about how much I like them.  You’ll just have to wait until a later date for my original thoughts (which I really haven’t given away at all yet).  In multiple settings, I have heard that the use of parentheses (other than for citation) is a sign of a weak writer.  My pride tells me to deny this, but I cannot.  My wife and I are unable to think of any authors who conspicuously love parentheses.  Apparently, being tangential is not something many writers aspire to. 

Yet I cannot deny my love for the aside, even a multitude of asides.  I view them as a more organized form of stream of consciousness.  They allow the reader into the twisted meanderings of the brain, the ephemeral connections elicited by a visual clue or a long-forgotten memory, the complex interactions of the current state of the writer, his environment, his history, and his work.  And yet the necessity of clarity is obvious to me because of its merits both for the reader and the writer.  A focused writer keeps the reader entranced in an idea or a story, and the further that story develops, the more the reader becomes a participant.  This generally also helps the writer by retaining his readership.  I most certainly do not want to lose all of my readers, but to some extent I also write just because I want to.  If I was entirely concerned with pleasing my reader, I would never write half of what I do, I would have a much more attractive site, and I would feel like a failure as an artist (to whatever extent I grant that blogging is art, which is certainly a stretch at times).

When it comes to writing for pleasure, the aside is one of the most enjoyable aspects my work.  I think this is because the essay than resembles a conversation more closely, or at least one side of the conversation.  Most people restrain their inner voice in conversations, though their thoughts are often more interesting than what they say.  They do not say, “How are you today?  [What is that thing on his shirt?  Is it some sort of manly brooch? Oh, no, looks like some silver paint – or maybe it is a piece of stray aluminum foil from his Moe’s burrito.] Yeah, I’m doing pretty well too.”  For the sake of keeping one’s friends, some thoughts, like the ones above, are better left unsaid.  But often we arrive at the most stimulating conversations only after a long series of less awkward tangents.

It is not uncommon for me to begin a blog on one topic and learn after a few paragraphs, as in this blog, that I really want to talk about something else.  I have a long list of jottings where I keep all my ideas for blogs, and I generally glance through it before I start writing any blog.  But despite the thoroughness of my list, which truly captures nearly all of my random thoughts for writing, nothing compares to the wide array of topics that can shoot onto the page between a couple of curly brackets once I have begun writing about one of the topics already on my list.  It makes blogging all the more exciting.

(All this time I’ve been trying to fit in this comment, but it doesn’t fit anywhere:  Have you noticed how some people put nearly everything in quotations?  They have some sort of “problem” understanding that quotation marks indicate utterances, irony, or risqué-ness, and very few other “things.”)

I will try for you, reader, to chain up the tangential tiger that lurks within me on future posts, though I will probably use weak chains, because I like it when he occasionally escapes.  But perhaps I have already begun to tame that side of me by forcing it to be a topic in its own right.  It is terribly ironic when one focuses on divergence.

Mugs - A Sonnet

I was a little lazy this week, so I decided to write a poem rather than a normal post for this Wednesday.  Here is the fruit of my labor:


Mugs

They hang on walls in precincts, fortune’s lost

Souls: the drear and drooping, grim-faced, low.

Nor wealth nor penury will change the cost,

(They say) of being caught in badge’s tow.

There is another, too, that often glooms,

For lack of fullness in the joys of life.

Now here, now there, perchance, there blooms

A trodden darkness, waiting with a knife

To snuff me out and send me ere away

From others still that hold a different brew

Of tea or sweet or bitterness in clay,

All of which will remedy the blue.

The varied scope of palate, mood, or wall

Will prove the canvas for these three mugs all.

Veracity On!

Facebook is a fascinating creature that seems to be on evolutionary steroids.  I remember when it had first come out and it was only for college students.  We all had a chip on our shoulders back then.  Only certain schools had access originally, and you had to write in with requests to get new schools added.  And you couldn’t actually do much on the site, just put in your interests, get as many friends as possible, and write on everyone else’s wall.  Then before you knew it, anyone in college could have an account, then anyone in high school (of which we all highly disapproved), then anyone at all.  And along the way there were groups, applications, a privacy scandal involving extraordinarily large e-petitions, and about three hundred different layouts, each of which confused me.  I am yet to grasp the most recent layout changes in their entirety. 

As Facebook became larger, security became a more important issue.  At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, Zuckerberg and friends introduced word verification as a way to fight spam.  Most of you are probably aware of this process, but for those who are not, when you post something on your status or on someone else’s wall, you now often must type in two words that are randomly generated for you to copy.  They are displayed in such a way that is supposed to ensure only a human could actually read them.  So you type in the words and then your message is displayed.

Well, I have always been a fan of these often ironic or otherwise comical word pairings.  So I have recorded the last few verifications I have had to enter, and now I offer you a tribute to the irony of random word generation.  The following story is fictional, and the word verifications will be the only dialogue.  This is probably going to be a little random, but indulge me.

Persephone was not easily crushed.  All her life she had been told she had no sense of expression, but she could not abandon her dream of acting.  She wanted more than anything to express ideas on stage, to open up the door to new possibilities, to explore the fuzzy boundary surrounding truth and reality.  Now she had her chance.  She had heard of an independent film that was looking for a few actors and actresses in town, so she drove down one day to a large warehouse near the Perimeter where much of the production was going to occur. 

She found the warehouse, verifying the address on a print-out she had brought with her, though she knew she was in the right place by the eclectic group of people milling around in the parking lot waiting for the doors to open.  They looked like dramatic folk.  It must have been the greasy hair. 

She got out of the car and walked up to join the small crowd.  After standing around for a minute or two, she plucked up her courage and asked the person next to her what this was a movie of.

“Of evacuees,” he replied.  She wondered how he had discovered this, for it not been listed on the ad. She also thought his answer was odd – who puts the word of at the beginning of an answer?  But she was pleased that the topic was substantial, one that could use some exposure in the world.

After a few more minutes, during which Persephone began to grow anxious, unconsciously curling and uncurling her flowing black hair, the doors finally opened, and the crowd flooded into the building to the gratuitous welcome of a young man.  As they piled into a small antechamber, the man receded to the back door of the room, which presumably opened into the larger production area.  The crowd’s murmuring and motion began to die down, and Persephone noticed a short woman discreetly come through the door behind the man.  She was so short that had it not been for the door opening and closing, it would have looked as if she had just appeared out of thin air, so effectively was she hidden in the young man’s shadow before moving next to him.  To the general surprise of the crowd, as soon as she stood next to the young man, she began chiding him for something, and the man’s previously strong demeanor faded into meekness as he tried to apologize through a gushy mixture of sycophancy and touchy gestures (the woman was obviously his girlfriend).  After nearly a minute of this spectacle, which was now being keenly observed by the whole crowd in silence, the woman tersely commanded the man back inside the production area, and he quickly obeyed.

“He whipped,” Persephone heard an indiscreet voice mumble, which brought out a small cascade of snickers and restrained laughter.  The woman, also apparently catching the remark, glared in the general direction of the speaker, though she could not make out who was responsible.  Without a word, she motioned for all of them to follow her through the door behind her.

Inside they found a large room with two small occupied areas.  There was a portion just ahead cordoned off with ribbons where large pieces of electronic equipment still resided unpacked.  To the left and beyond this first station was a stage room, well lit, which looked like a sitcom set from the seventies.  The film crew was going to revamp it soon, but it would serve the purpose of their audition space today. 

The woman was now passing through the ranks handing out pieces of paper, one color for the men, another for the women.  She explained that each scrap had a number on it.  They would be trying out in groups of two, one woman and one man, in some sort of prelude to a love scene.  Apparently the greasy man who suggested the topic of evacuees had been wrong; it was a romantic comedy, and a fairly risqué one at that.  Persephone became all the more nervous when she heard the woman say something about breaking new ground in love scenes. 

Just then she received her scrap of paper and, unfolding it, saw the number one on it.  She would be going first!  Great.  Without wasting any time, the woman called the number ones forward.  Persephone was smitten with fear, and when no woman moved, a few of the actors around Persephone pushed her forward, seeing her piece of paper.  The woman handed her a script and told her to read, pushing her further onto the stage.  The man was waiting.

Persephone glanced down at the script and saw she had the first line.  Gathering herself, she spoke, “Vacuous Mr…” She was immediately cut off by the male role, who launched himself into a passionate monologue about how lovers should never refer to each other as mister or miss.  Apparently he missed the fact that Persephone had just called him vacuous to his face.  And apparently the female roles in this movie were solely focused on providing flesh for the audience to slobber over: she had only one other line, and here it came.

She missed it.  Silence reigned.  She peered confusedly at her script.  Was this really all she was supposed to say?  The woman who wore the pants came stomping into the light looking irritated.  “Remember ‘and!’” she growled.  Persephone had not forgotten.  She just didn’t think and was much of a line worth saying.  But she uttered her single syllable answer to the opposing man’s constant stream of emotion.  And must have been inviting some response from the man, though Persephone was not sure exactly what, as she hadn’t really been listening.

The man got a strange look in his eyes.  To Persephone it looked like he might throw up any second, and she turned her head away in disgust, throwing up her arms for protection.  The man lunged at her, as a lion pouncing on his prey, and the director again came forward, this time throwing her stool into the scene, which quite startled the two on stage.  She yelled and cursed for a moment then told the man to go back to his original position.  The look in his eyes was supposed to be one of deep love, and Persephone had missed it.  But the director had advice for the man this time.  After all, the woman was just there to be pretty.

“Advance steamier,” she said with emotion to the man, making some grotesque motion with her hands about her middle, seeming to indicate that she was being disemboweled.  Persephone didn’t bother to say her one line – she knew it was pointless.  Even were she a terrible actress, she was above this pitiful excuse for a movie.  As the man began to lunge once again, this time looking like he had just crossed a desert and was about to fall on top of the well of Persephone, she dropped her script and walked off the stage toward the exit. 

The man missed his target, crashing into the wall and bringing down a deluge of old lights and props.  Amid the chaos that ensued, Persephone could hear the director shouting hysterically about truth and art and how Persephone clearly did not understand the ideals of artistry, otherwise she would recognize what a great film she had just flouted.  The screams grew more and more intense as Persephone realized the director was truly enraged at her.  She picked up her pace, and finally reached the door to the antechamber.  She turned around briefly and saw the livid director, her boyfriend crouching behind her in panic, pick up a defunct light casing and hurl it towards Persephone, shouting in her rage.

“Veracity on!”

Persephone squeezed through the door and heard the casing crash against the other side.  Maybe it was time she started trying to express truth in another field after all.

Judging a Book By Its Cover

“Never judge a book by it’s cover.”  So the saying goes, at least for those who do not know how to use apostrophes correctly.  Regardless of who is telling me this trite wisdom, be it an expert grammarian or an illiterate yeoman (though that would be a rather ironic thing for an illiterate yeoman to say), I never take their advice.  I might try to, but I know covers affect me.

I recently read Lord of the Flies for the first time, and I absolutely loved it.  I expected to, and I’m glad it did not have a grotesque cover to spurn me.  Then on my last trip to the library to buy used books, where we buy nearly all of our books that we always meant to read but never did, I picked up another Golding book, The Inheritors, and thought, “What the heck – it’s only twenty five cents.”  I say that a lot when I’m at the little used book shop at the library.  I buy them in droves, flocks, mountains, hoards, heaps, clans.  Thankfully, there is no border control to stop me even when adopting in such quantity.  But I assure you I provide a loving home for my books.   

So anyway, I picked up that Golding book, barely glancing at the cover because I had just read his other book and enjoyed it so much.  I fanned through the pages to test the extent of defacement (which is a great burden to my soul, especially that caused by grisly highlighters), and seeing that it was mostly free of such sin, I gathered it into my herd, where it quickly lost itself amongst its comrades. 

I then led them to the checkout, where I paid nearly six dollars for about twelve books, deciding that one particular collection of essays was worth the hefty price of ¾ of a Starbucks Latte.  (I later decided it was worth at least five Frappucinos, so I was rather pleased.)  I left the library with a pleasant mien and a heavy sack.

Later, when I was distributing the new gaggle amongst the various sections of the library, I had a small, involuntary twinge when I placed The Inheritors upon the shelf.  I wondered at it for a moment, and then thought nothing of it and promptly left the feeling stranded.   But it returned with a vengeance when I later pulled the book from the shelf to sample it. 

There on the front of my vintage copy, which cost less than a stick of gum, was a hideous drawing of a Neanderthal, or something like it, hunched over naked in shades of brown and chartreuse, sniffing and poking at some unknown plant.  Like the sculptures of the Greco-Roman world, whose paint has long since faded, the androgynous creature has no pupils.  But ancient sculptures did not choose to let their painted eyes fade away.  The “artist” who created this cover, on the other hand, purposefully left the creature to look soulless and evil.   Opposed with this depiction is the fact that the Neanderthal is hunched over in the most polite of manners, kindly remembering to shield us and our fragile sensibilities from the private nooks and crannies of his body.  I guess in this aspect he decided to rise above the artist’s implications of his nature.

And then there is the looming question of why there is a name written in the ground next to the Neanderthal.  Did someone named Charles travel through time, perhaps like one of those hunters in The Sound of Thunder, dropping his name randomly about the landscape, hoping that it would be noticed in one of these artistic book covers?  Or is the Neanderthal merely posing in this posture, feigning ignorance, while all along he has left us a clue that he can actually write his own name?  Perhaps, like so many, he is an oppressed being, grasping at any chance he has to reveal his true potential. 

Maybe I’m being a little harsh on this Charles chap and his book cover, but can I help feeling repulsed when I pick up the book?  When I bought it, not having really noticed the cover, I could not wait to read it.  Golding was my new territory in literature, a fresh and verdant landscape I had just discovered.  But this cover could not help but remind me of vomit. 

About once a week I now pick up the book, hoping I will find in my heart some pity for its wretched estate.  But as of yet, I have been unsuccessful.  I know this is all very sophomoric of me, but I can’t help but feel distaste when a great artist like Golding is paired with such mediocrity.  I remind myself, when I think of the harm that has been done Golding’s name in publishing a book with such an abysmal cover, that I did not used to enjoy green beans or asparagus but I now like them both.  I doubt I will ever like this book cover, but I hope to one day push beyond the foul taste it puts in my mouth and arrive at the story mostly unscathed. 

What were you thinking?

Scenario 1:

A couple walks into their house, the woman obviously flustered.  She throws down her purse and flings her jacket at a chair.  The husband meekly follows, locking the door, gingerly hanging up his coat. 

“Ugh!”  She is pacing around the living room wringing her hands.  “How could you be so stupid?  What were you thinking?”

“I’m sorry.  I wasn’t”

Scenario 2:

A group of friends reflects over a late night meal at Waffle House.  They are lounging, full and happy, laughing as they recount the events of earlier in the evening.

“I swear, I thought the guy was going to pull a knife out of his pocket any second and spit us all!”  He lunges at his friend with a leftover straw, and they all laugh some more. 

“I guess I’m just stupid – I thought he really wanted our help fighting the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide.  What were you thinking?”  He looks across at Jeff.

“I have to be honest – I knew the guy was messing with us the whole time.  I guess none of you took high school chemistry!”

Scenario 3:

A young man lies on a couch in a cushy office.  In a high-back chair next to him sits a psychologist.  He looks a lot like Steve Martin.  He might even be Steve Martin.  The young man speaks:

“I guess I can see her point. I mean, a blender does suggest a certain... reference to sexual politics, but I swear, it never entered my consciousness at the time.”

“What were you thinking?”

“You know those banana shakes she likes to make, right? Well, that's why I thought she'd like a blender.”

“And how did that make you feel?”

“..What?  That she liked banana shakes?  Haven’t I already been telling you what I feel?”

It’s amazing what a little change in emphasis can do to a sentence.  It is said that tone of voice (and I think that this number also includes things like emphasis) provides 38% of communication when speaking.  55% is facial expression, and only 7% is communicated by the actual words you speak.  That is to say, I’m probably communicating basically nothing right now. 

When I was in middle school, written communication was both a blessing and a curse.  Like most young teens of my day, I spent as much time as possible on Instant Messenger.  It was one of the safest ways to talk to girls without embarrassing yourself.  You had as much time as you wanted to think through how to say things.  You could just small talk if all else failed, and you didn’t need to worry about those awkward silences that can come up in real conversations.  Half the time conversations just sort of ended without even having to say goodbye. 

But then there were those moments when the lack of vocal and visual clues would drive me insane.  There I would be, talking to some girl I had a crush on.  We had just started our conversation and she would ask, “So what r u doing tonight?”

My mind would race.  Was that “So…what are you doing tonight?”  Was that a hint?  Was she twirling her finger in her hair as she said that, perhaps raising one of her eyebrows?  Was she asking if I wanted to go out with her?  Or was it “[You’re] so [boring], what are you doing tonight?”  Maybe when she said it in her head, she was completely apathetic, filing her nails as she responded in kind to my “what’s up?”  (I never even considered that she was saying “So what are you doing tonight?” and was actually curious.)

I would debate between “not too much” which would leave the door open to the possibility of actually being available, though I really wasn’t (I couldn’t drive and I wasn’t about to admit to my parents who my crush was), and “pretty busy - tons of homework in math,” which would force me to admit that I knew deep down this girl was not asking me out.  Back and forth, back and forth, and after ten minutes, I would decide it was too late to say anything at all, and I would just give up.

Later that night I would find myself in my room, listening to my traditional melancholy music – Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – staring out my window as the rain dripped down the panes.  I had lost my chance.  If I had just said something, anything!  But now I would have to hide my face from her tomorrow, or I’d have to come up with some lame excuse about my dog eating the computer wire.  But I don’t have a dog.  So she’ll just think I was ignoring her, which isn’t the greatest way to get the girl. 

Man!  What was I thinking?

Trailing Off

Many great composers had serious problems with self-confidence. Paul Dukas, who composed The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, later gaining public renown from its use in Disney’s Fantasia, wrote a considerable amount of music, but he destroyed most of it rather than publish something that, to him, was less than perfect. Anton Bruckner, who composed some of the most grandiose romantic works in the canon, did not seem to trust his own preferences and often revised his work repeatedly to conform to the recommendations of other musicians. To this day some of his works do not have a standard version.

Other times, the composers have some great ideas, but they lose steam as the work nears its end. The first two movements of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique are both very “pathetic,” meaning they are full of pathos, but the last movement does not match the emotion of the first two. It seems as if Beethoven had used up all the inspiration he had for the first two movements, and by the third he was just tired, trying to spit something out to complete the required three movement form.

I only work in essays, and at that I am a mere amateur, but I suffer from both of these problems in conjunction. As a writer, it is easy for me to get excited about a topic. Almost anything can hold my interest for awhile, which I think is fairly obvious from the variety of topics I discuss in this blog. I love coming up with bizarre ways to approach a topic, starting somewhere off in the bleachers beyond left field, slowly meandering my way through the crowds, stopping for a hot dog, eventually entering the field over the home team’s dugout, and then puttering my way to home plate, where my topic awaits me. The pursuit of a good introduction is one of my passions.

Unfortunately, the pursuit of a better conclusion is where I should really be focusing. I often feel like a song-writer who has come up with a catchy chorus. You hear it one day on the radio and find it at least agreeable, so you keep listening. After awhile you realize the song should be coming to an end soon or it will pass into the realm of lost novelty, and right on cue, it begins to quiet down. But it’s not leading up to any cadence, any semblance of finality. No, the writer got so caught up in his catchy chorus that he forgot to figure out how to end the song. Luckily, in our studio era, there is an easy way to hide this error – just keep playing that catchy chorus and slowly fade the music out.

So what do those bands do when they have a concert? They obviously can’t just fade out at the end. Rather than face the deafening silence, the bands (or perhaps their more pragmatic producers) come up with some contrived ending that’s forced in where it was never intended to be. They have a quick pause followed by a final ringing chord, or they have a ridiculous build up where the drummer goes berserk until the crowd is roaring. Either way, the band has been forced to awkwardly cauterize their idea, effectively terminating the song but stealing away some of its vitality.

I commiserate with them. When you are pouring all your creative energies into an idea, sometimes you are just too sapped to figure out how to wrap it up. You would rather it hang around, ringing in your ears until everything in the world is better. Nearly every time I write I face this problem, but no amount of interest early on can mask the lack of a conclusion.

Thus I am forced to try. Some of the time I realize that I just told a story with no point whatsoever. Other times I have a point but I’m too bashful to make it forcefully. Like Bruckner I am overly concerned with what others will think. Still other times I know my purpose and write it plainly, but then I come across as pompous and moralizing. And all the while I would rather be back in the first part of the essay, writing another exaggerated story of my duel with a tiny spider. I become frustrated and start looking for excuses to procrastinate. Eventually, after the excitement has left me entirely, I abruptly end the story.

Emergency Books

“Jonathan come here quick oh my gosh Jonathan hurry hurry hurry HURRY!”

Computers careen through the air; chairs helicopter lopsidedly; small tremors shiver through the apartment. I charge upon my invisible steed toward the sound of my damsel in distress one room over. I overshoot my target, since steeds are hard to stop once charging, then back-pedal to find my wife gesticulating wildly toward some dark corner.

“It was HUGE hurry get it before it runs away there it is!”

I swing my mighty battle axe at the fell beast and smite it upon the head repeatedly until it is cloven in two. (Despite being mighty, my battle axe is not very sharp).

“Is it dead let me see.”

Once again I have saved the day. I gather up my wilting battle axe and the beast within and flush them into the toilet’s twirling torrents, never mentioning to my wife that the bug was smaller than my pinky fingernail. Okay, so sometimes I do mention it, but I still kill the foul little creatures. And occasionally they are considerable enough to warrant both my respect and a larger weapon than a tissue.

Though I am generally the more emotional of us, my wife has a more sudden and cataclysmic response to perceived emergencies. Or perhaps my responses are just as intense, but my mind classifies fewer events in the category of emergency. For example, a few minutes into a trip, my wife will sometimes suddenly release the sort of severe gasp that I would reserve for situations akin to the moment when I realized Evelyn Waugh was a man. I respond:

“Where are they? Where?” The gasp indicated to me that a herd of antelope was charging at our car from somewhere outside my line of vision.

“Dang it, I forgot to bring my white sweater in the car with me!”

“Your sweater? It’s in your suitcase - are you telling me there are no antelope?”

At this she seems confused, and I emit my own sigh. But I have to give her credit for putting up with what I consider emergencies, particularly issues related to evolution, theology, or Swedish holidays (and their accompanying gastronomy – mmm St. Lucia buns).

Concerning one particular emergency, though, we are ardently united: the travesty of having to wait somewhere for more than five minutes without something to read. And I mean something worth reading, not those awful magazines that befoul countless waiting rooms across the nation. (The least they could do is cancel all their subscriptions to Horse and Hound and pool their funds to get a worthy news periodical like The Economist.)

I might even admit that one of those gasps without warning is justified when one has forgotten her emergency book, and my wife and I have both had this misfortune. My wife is really responsible for helping me establish the habit of the emergency book, and I can no longer imagine life without it. She has had this practice since she was a youth, when she would sometimes even bring books when her family went out for dinner. I never brought a book with me on common errands until I married my wife, but now it is one of the items on the list whenever I go anywhere. And her habit of reading during meals has influenced me as well. It is not uncommon for us to read through meals at home together, and this often greatly improves are conversations later. Rather than just making small talk about the day, we can discuss issues raised by whatever we are reading, whether it is the social consequences of the bubonic plague or the effects of censorship in China, the diction of Shakespeare or the merits of natural food. And I assure you all of these topics have actually arisen.

One of my favorite topics to discuss is Medieval Literature and History. It would not be strange for someone to find my wife and me discussing The Battle of Maldon, Volsunga Saga, and Lord of the Rings in conjunction some night at a coffee shop. This sort of conversation would undoubtedly be enriching for us. While my wife would have been equipped for such a discussion due to her degree, I never would have been able to participate were it not for a day trip when I stole Ashley’s copy of Beowulf as my emergency book. What literary passions I would lack without having encountered Beowulf I cringe to consider.

In a world where conversation often descends to the banality of voyeuristic reality TV shows, there is an easy solution for recapturing quality discussion. Rather than picking up that remote when you’re bored, pick up a book. And if you find yourself so busy that you don’t even have time to be bored, the emergency book is one of the easiest ways to squeeze in some extra time immersing yourself in new (or old) ideas.

Llamas and Refrigerators

A friend of mine recently described the various tattoos she had considered getting in her life, though she had never gotten one. She said she had four main options that she had debated. They were these:

1) “Yes”

2) “?”

3) A circle

4) An elephant

This list made me very happy. There is a certain beauty in completely off-the-wall randomness.

Now I know I am biased on this issue. I have been told by many that I am the most random person they know, and I am no longer surprised when I here this. At work, I am the random fact guy, who occasionally spurts out completely useless, unimportant information. And every time we have a team meeting, I am expected to produce new geographic commentary as we view the wall-sized map in our team room. (I like these duties, by the way. And today I branched out of mere terrestrial geography and discussed Neptune. Did you know that this frigid planet can have sustained winds of up to 1500mph?? Wow.)

But there are many who are not so keen on things random. I have many friends who find peace and joy in the complete ordering of their surroundings. I’ve always been glad there are people like this who can balance out the ones like me.

Recently, though, I have begun to realize that my love of randomness is not so different from a love of order. Many before us have noticed that opposites in their most extreme manifestations often suddenly find themselves rather similar – Communism and Facism being an oft-cited example (I think before long General Relativity and Quantum Theory will become another one). And in some areas, like natural selection, randomness is rather orderly indeed.

But at a more basic level, I’ve realized that the manner in which I judge the merits of any random thing is in fact a logical process. It’s a lot like one of those logic games where you are presented with a group of objects and asked to spot the one that doesn’t fit. Except this time, I want them all to be completely unique, sharing as few traits as possible with all the other items in the list. That’s why my friend’s list of tattoo options was so excellent. The four options have almost nothing in common. “Yes” is a word, whose part of speech I cannot even say I know; “?” is a symbol, only slightly related to yes in that they can both be used in sentences, though “yes” is very definitive while “?” is extremely uncertain. A circle is also a symbol but it has definite physical applications and occurences and is used in math rather than language; an elephant is the only purely physical thing in the list and is obviously unique. And this list would become even better if the items’ small similarities were eliminated, though completely eliminating similarities can only go so far.

I now see that this love of orderly randomness is why I am so fond of a particular, random video entitled “The Llama Song.” I was first introduced to it in college, and it is completely ridiculous and makes no sense. It includes lines like, “I was once a treehouse; I lived in a cake. But I never saw the way the orange slayed the rake,” and lists like “tablet, brick, potato, llama,” and “doorknob, ankle, cold.” That last one is particularly good from a logical perspective. Doorknobs are physical, inorganic, and discrete; ankles are physical, but organic and continuous (who can really say, “the ankle stops here”), and cold is conceptual and subjective, never necessarily present or absent. How wonderful!

So now that I have sapped all randomness of its pleasure, I will leave you with a different sort of randomness, which is equally thrilling, and not of my making:

Haikus are easy,

But sometimes they don’t make sense.

Refrigerator