Cleaning My Room

No, I didn't get the whole thing cleaned up, though I got more than I ever thought was possible in only two hours.

It all started when I had a set of D&D dice out, rolling up random stat arrays. I had my dice lying on top of my  Pathfinder core book, which was also serving as a surface for the die-rolling. Unfortunately, I managed to move in just such a way as to tilt the book, spilling the dice onto the floor--or, more accurately, onto the pile of sheets and clothes that covered that area of the floor.

I managed to recover all the dice except the d4. Thinking that I'd better find that little caltrop before I stepped on it, I started pulling stuff off the pile to check under it. As I stumbled upon old, worn-out socks with holes in them, I threw them away while I was there. I kept any socks that were in reasonably good shape, giving them a provisional reprieve until I could confirm whether or not they had a mate in decent shape.

After I'd cleared all the socks off the floor, I saw that there was a decent-sized bare spot. In fact, it was big enough to fit a hardcover roleplaying rulebook in. It occurred to me that I could open up a lot more floor space by putting all my RPG books in a stable stack on the floor (as opposed to on top of a shifting mound of old socks). So I rounded up my books and put all the current ones in one big stack, putting books from obsolete games like D&D 3.0 and Gurps 3e in a separate pile, to be taken to the Bookery or some similar place and sold. By the time that was done, I'd cleared up even more space. I actually had a lane of clear floor stretching halfway around my bed! All that from just a couple of little organizational tasks. If I can get such dividends from so (relatively) little investment of energy, I may be able to clean the whole mess out eventually.

Odds and Ends

The big family project this week is cleaning out the sunroom so one of Grandpa's brothers can turn it into a downstairs bathroom. There was a lot of stuff in there, including some books from my first undergrad stint and some writing I'd done back in middle school and  high school.

The biggest lesson I learned from reading a few of the old stories is that, no matter how bad you think some of your writing is now, it was worse when you were 12-14. To be fair, though, I could see the complexity of the subject matter going up in the high-school stuff, even if the writing style was still woefully bad.

Some of the old books from literature classes stirred up some memories. I came across a book containing three plays by Bertolt Brecht. The only one I had read was Life of Galileo, for a class on the depiction of science in literature. I randomly opened the book to Scene 4, in which Galileo debates a bunch of old-school Aristotelian philosophers and mathematicians on standards of evidence and the search for truth. I'd forgotten how brilliant some of the dialogue in the play is. One of the best (or most effectively translated lines) was "Why try to be clever now that we at last have a chance of being just a little less stupid?" If any utterance echoes through the decades (or even centuries, if one believes this line reflected Galileo's thinking to some extent), this is it.

I decided to keep a translation of Friedrich Duerrenmat's The Physicists. It's a great play, but my most vivid recollection of it is a mistranslated line. I had read untranslated scenes from this play in a second-year German class, and then read the full English translation for that science-in-literature class. When I saw the English line, "The world has fallen into the hands of an insane female psychiatrist" (Act Two, p. 92 of the 1991 Grove Weidenfeld edition), I cringed. It's an accurate literal translation of the line, but the literal translation ruins the spirit of the line in English. In German, you can't talk about somebody's occupation without indicating their gender. Every word for an occupation has a masculine and feminine version. Duerrenmat wasn't trying to draw attention to the crazy psychiatrist's gender; the irony is the fact that the insane newly minted dictator of the world is a psychiatrist.


Then there were several books from a class on the modern English novel (meaning the modern period in the first half of the 20th Century). My most vivid memory from that class was how everybody thought the teacher was crazy. He had some eccentric ideas about education, including a tendency to put bizarre minutiae on exams. For example, we all joked that we'd never forget what the captain in Joseph Conrad's Typhoon called his umbrella ("the blessed gamp") because of this guy's obsession with it. The class was no problem for me, since I'm the king of useless, irrelevant information, but it was problematic for some of the other students.


My biggest problem is that I'm not optimally efficient at sifting through this material at this point. Recent developments in my life have made me more likely to reexamine my past in a new light. That slows me down, even though I now have the ability to say "enough is enough" and move on after following a tangent for so long. As opposed to my early undergrad stint, when research papers took me forever because I would read all kinds of off-topic material at the library.

Anger

I had to lead a writing exercise in class today. While looking for ideas about an exercise to get people writing courageously (a vague, amorphous concept not conducive to easy ideas), I looked at this self-help book for writers called The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. While it didn't have any exercises that were appropriate for a class, I did manage to take enough inspiration to come up with a half-assed, serviceable exercise on my own.

One particularly interesting passage dealt with the role of anger in a well-adjusted person's life.

Anger is meant to be acted upon. It is not meant to be acted out. Anger points the direction. We are meant to use anger as fuel to take the actions we need to move where our anger points us. With a little thought, we can usually translate the message that our anger is sending us.

"Blast him! I could make a better film than that!" (This anger says: you want to make movies. You need to learn how.)

"I can't believe it! I had this idea for a play three years ago, and she's gone and written it." (This anger says: stop procrastinating. Ideas don't get opening nights. Finished plays do. Start writing.)

"That's my strategy he's using. This is incredible! I've been ripped off! I knew I should have pulled that material together and copyrighted it." (This anger says: it's time to take your own ideas seriously enough to treat them well.)

I would add that when you're angry about your job, the anger isn't saying, "Kill your boss" (no matter how evil and narcissistic your boss actually is). It's telling you it's time to get out of dodge and work toward doing what you really want to do with your life. And it only took me about 4-5 years after first getting that feeling to act on it. This passage represents the thing I most wish somebody had told me 10 years ago.