Elbow Grease(Narrative Review)

     This is not the sort of post that should be read. It's far too meta and y'all shouldn't have to go through that. It's a homework post, and anyone reading this has already had enough of their own college homework. Seriously. Just stop. Don't keep going. Noooooooo. This is not what you should be doing with your life. There are flowers and chocolate and dating and reading or even homework to do. GO. BE FREE.

     So. You have chosen pain. Well. I cannot save you now.

     I had a weird night a couple of weeks ago and finished about seven pages of writing, including the narrative. I swear this isn't always how I always do papers. It was a fluke, I decided I wasn't tired, and I ended up writing the narrative in about an hour and a half between two to four in the morning.

     This is why you should never ask writers about their process. You'll learn far more than you ever wanted to.

     That being said, this assignment played to my strengths. Descriptive language and stories are what I'm good at. I spent some time as a kid learning how to write, and I'm just going to give a shoutout to Druidawn Creations whenever you find something I've written that you liked. On top of that, I've heard this story ten thousand times, and I've had to tell it more than once. Eventually you pick up a few points in the telling.

     I hadn't really drawn the connection between the two stories I told though. I mean, they were both on a beach, and of course I realized that. But they're actually really similar, if you look past the deadly nature of one and the relatively inconsequential impact of the other. I don't often tell the crab story, but I think I'll start tacking it onto the end of the tidepool one when I can.

Depth

Sometimes, when the parched wind blows around the rocks and prickling trees of Colorado, I close my eyes and breathe deep, trying to capture the sea wind of a life once led. I try to remember the drenched air, sweet and rich as golden honey. I remember the brine of the ocean and the terrifying thrill of seaweed wrapping around my ankles. Then I open my eyes again. And I sigh.

            I was young back then, still a child. My innocence has given way to a prickling cynicism, but I remember being young, idling away the hours picking wild, ripe blackberries in empty gallon jugs. I still remember my grandmother’s blackberry cobbler, though I can make it myself now. I haven’t forgotten the dense forest, with thick moss blanketing the trees and ground, and bashful pink huckleberries hiding in the shade. I’ll never forget building forts of driftwood on Double Bluff, or the deep, still tide pools there.

            But there are stories I can’t remember. I can’t remember slipping on the hardwood stairs and breaking my favorite snow globe, or bawling when I wanted to head home and my grandparents took me a way I didn’t recognize. I don’t remember our garden, or the compost pile, or what our quiet stretch of the deep woods looked like. I don’t remember looking up from the bottom of a tide pool, eyes open, quietly, peacefully, drowning. Those stories were told to me after.

            As I can’t remember this story, even though it’s my own, I’m going to have to elaborate on some of the particulars. I don’t mind much. After all, it is my story, and I can do with it as I please.

            The beaches of Washington are a mix of fine sand, hard rocks, and crusted pads of dried seaweed. Sometimes, water collects in deep pools, attracting clams, crabs, and small fishes into a fragile ecosystem that can literally wash out with the tide. When I was a kid, the beaches were my second favorite place in the world, right after a huckleberry bush that I could crawl into the base of and snuggle up and eat berries from. The beaches were more of a treat, a place where my mother could go to drop us off to play with other children, expending our youthful energy on thoroughly useless and wonderfully enjoyable pursuits. My brother and I could spend hours splashing in the surf, stacking the ever-present driftwood into makeshift forts, and generally making fool of ourselves as only small children can. Meanwhile, my mother could take some time off and talk with other parents who also had small, rambunctious children. It was idyllic. If the halcyon days of my youth are awarded retroactively, as Calvin and Hobbes suggests, then I am sure these were some of them.

            Here I have to take a few editorial liberties. Again, these aren’t my own memories. I know this story because my mother would tell it whenever I felt lost in the world, when I wasn’t sure why I was here or where I was going. When I was when I was a leaf on the wind, this story was an anchor in a storm. Nevertheless, I can’t remember walking into the beach’s dunes. I can’t remember looking down into the deep, still pool, watching the fishes slowly turn. I’m not sure if I slipped, or if my childlike innocence lead me to toddle straight in. I only know that when my mother found me, I was at the bottom of the pool, eyes wide open, looking up. My mother doesn’t know how long I had been down there. I was smiling.

            While I was off falling into a watery grave, my mother was chatting with another mom with young boys. This was my mother’s chance to unwind, and get time away from the over-enthusiastic hassle of small children, however adorable my young self undoubtedly was. But this time was different. My mother heard a voice. Quiet. Firm. It only said three words. “Go get Noah.”

            Thankfully, my mother isn’t the type to ignore something like that. She hastily excused herself from her conversation and ran. I was nowhere to be seen. Se crested a hill. I looked up from the bottom of a tide pool, fishes swimming all around me, grinning.

            The way she tells it, she yanked me out of the water, called for my brother, and we left. She toweled me down before we got into the car, as not even a near-death experience entitles you to get seawater on the car seats. Breathless, she asked me, “What happened?”

            Still grinning, I looked up and proudly said, “I eat the fishies!”

            This was one of my favorite stories when I was young, and the utter lack of concern when danger is about is still somewhat typical of me. Mom would tell this story whenever I didn’t fit in, or was just generally having a horrific sort of day. It never failed to lift my spirits. It took me a while to tease the meaning out of it. I’ll admit I was less impressed by the spiritual experience than a two year old probably should be. But knowing that someone’s out there watching after you helps a kid, as I know it helped me later.

            See, this story isn’t done. My family takes fairly regular vacations back up to Washington. I’ve been back to Double Bluff, and fittingly enough, there was a massive tide pool waiting for me. I waded in it. I’ve seen the blackberry bushes in full bloom, and become vaguely known by the side of the family that still lives up there. But the last bit of this story, fittingly, happens on another beach.

            My mom was visiting friends who had moved out, and I was bored, so I went walking. This beach was rocky, with small pools with just enough water for tiny crabs to scuttle, hiding underneath bunches of seaweed. I meandered, picked up a few pretty rocks, and generally enjoyed the sun on my face and the ocean air. It was only when I was heading back that I heard the screaming.

            There was a small group of first, maybe second graders enjoying a field trip at the beach. They were messing around, being kids, and some of them had found a fairly massive crab. Being children, and therefore not possessed of any functioning survival urge, they’d begun to poke at it. And one of them had been grabbed. The claws of a crab are incredibly strong, and they’re only meant to pinch one way. Once they grab you, they can’t be shaken off.

            By the time I made it to the kids, their teacher was trying to pull the crab’s pincers apart as it dangled from the child’s pinky. He was white as a sheet, white as the skin where the crab had hold of him. As I watched, the teacher stepped back and called for something to help pry the claw open. I guess the best way to explain what happened next is selective blindness. Everything close by seemed very real, while everything further away seemed to fade into the background. I heard a voice. Quiet. Firm. It only said three words. “Break the claw.”

            I’ve eaten enough crab to know how their joints work. I hesitated for a moment, as I like crabs and don’t enjoy hurting something that I know was only acting according to its nature. Then I pushed the elbow of the crab inwards, snapping it. It’s how you break cooked crab.  A girl threw the crab into the surf.

            The young boy who’d been dumb enough to get pinched was still white, and seemed to have gone into shock. I did what I could, but this was his teacher’s forte from here, and I figured they’d be better at helping. On a whim, I went back and retrieved the claw. I told the kid to keep it as a spoil of war, a trophy of sorts.

            I only thought to ask about the voice later. None of my family had heard it, despite being close by at the time. I’m not particularly spiritual, and this was the first manifestation of its type to come to me, so I struggled a bit before I admitted it. Looking back, it has a sort of poetry. First my mother kept me in the world, and then I was able to help a kid like I was have a story of his own.

Fulfilling Basic Requirements

     Right, so I heard about the required blog posts a bit late and now the next few blogs might be a bit dry. Brace yourselves.

     Rather, don't. You have better things to do. Look up Hyperboly and Half or Lackadaisy.(Hyperboly and Half's wonderful and impossible to describe, Lackadaisy is Prohibition-era rum-runners except its cats and the later art is some of the best I've ever seen.)

     I mean, seriously. You have Buffy The Vampire Slayer or Friends to watch, maybe even Dollhouse if you're feeling eclectic and awesome. We've got a museum on campus with some incredible Japanese art deco, and there's entire shelves of fiction to sink your teeth into. Talk to a friend. Give people chocolate. Don't read people's research paper blog posts. You have better things to be doing.

     If you're still with me... Well, I guess you're crazy enough that I can't really tell you what to do. Well done. Even I can't rant at you over this one. Which is saying something.

     I started the research paper when I heard about Google Blogger doing something incredibly dumb and trying to restrict certain kinds of free speech(Read: Porn) on the Blogger platform. It was very technically legal, but Google was taking it into its own hands to restrict free speech, so... Public outcry happened. Google retracted, and I wasn't left with enough material to write a paper on. I changed topics and scrambled.

     I ended up writing a paper on the debilitating effects of media. Did the reading on whether video games actually cause violence, that sort of thing. (They do, by the way. Measurable across whatever kind of controlling you do.) Also went into the idea of social media creating a large number of "friends" with very little depth to the friendships(I know this isn't always the case. I once met a girl in a chatroom, and we talked 'till morning. It happens, I know.) Then there was ranting about empathy, because I do so enjoy ranting about that.

     The weird thing is, I am a gamer. Anything relatively big-budget, I'm relatively sure to have heard of, even if I haven't actually played. I've played Minecraft with over a hundred mods enabled, and wasted more time than I'm comfortable admitting between Fallout and Skyrim. I can converse about the current meta for League, even though that was never really my game. I've been to Rapture, and Caelondia, and the many worlds of Starcraft, FTL, and Sins of a Solar Empire. Tabletop, RPG, FPS, puzzle... name a genre, and I've probably played at least a thing or two in it.

     I went in biased. I wanted to believe that gaming was inherently good for you, that it increased your decision-making capabilities and reflexes, not to mention the storylines and atmospheres leading to enhanced creativity and all the whatnot. I'd like to believe that all forms of media are inherently equal, and that the accessibility of gaming media doesn't conflict with its ability to tell a fantastic story.

     Afterward.... Well, I'm conflicted. I've seen the research, and violent gaming does cause violence. Games in general cause withdrawal from the world, and all sorts of other nonsense. Violence is caused by gaming, which then results in lack of empathy, which can be inherited, that sort of thing. This paper's made me worried for the future and guilty about playing so many games and confused why we're still arguing over conclusive data, all at the same time. But I'm still not sure that the pro-gaming standpoint is entirely wrong.

     Take Bioshock, for instance. It's set in an underwater city called Rapture, and it's gorgeous. Sixties vibes everywhere, neon lights and windows to the ocean. Beautiful. By the time the game starts, the city's decaying, which adds an entirely new dimension to the pretty. Water flowing down stairs, darkened restaurants and bars, everywhere the signs of a society gone horribly wrong. You wouldn't think that that could be pretty. You'd be wrong. The two styles of the game play of each other, and you're left feeling thoroughly creeped out and simultaneously wondering just what the sunken city was like before it got taken over by madmen and walking diving suits. The game was was wonderful. I learned things that I later put to use against my friends in a more traditional role-playing environment that left them feeling sorry for fighting the game's mooks. I'm pretty certain that if I ever have to write horror, that's what I'll be turning to for inspiration. And yet, I know that gaming's incredibly debilitating now. I know that's it's going to make me a worse person, and even more telling is the fact that most of the research I read was based around violent FPS games that reward the player for choosing violent actions- games exactly like Bioshock. Everything I know now, everything I've learned, applies to this game. But playing the game taught me how to recreate it, which, if I choose to write for money anytime down the line, will be an incredibly useful skill.

     I'm definitely going to be more careful choosing my games from now on. And I'm glad that I know the research side of things now. But I have to admit, I didn't expect to learn anything from the research paper, and I really didn't expect to be left with a moral quandary that challenges how I spend my free time.

     So that's what I got out of writing the research paper. That and lack of rest from four all-nighters, and way more stress than really needed to ever exist in my life. Or anyone's life.

     Next time, I'm going to choose something simple and just learn how to cite sources.

Pratchett

     Terry Pratchett is dead.

     Long live Terry Pratchett.

     Seriously though, the man was knighted for being hilarious(Technically his 'services to literature' or something, but he's a satirist, so same thing) and he wrote about a billion books, covering everything from Death playing the role of Santa(Hogfather) to acceptance of the goblin community(Snuff). There's something in there that you'd prob'ly enjoy, so head over to the library and let's commemorate the wonderful rascal.

Living Music

     Over the last few months, I've had the chance to go out and enjoy BYU's lovely concert halls. Specifically, I've been investigating the jazz here. There's something about jazz that simply doesn't feel right recorded, and I've truly enjoyed being close enough to go out and find it on my own.

     There's something special about jazz. It feels more organic than other music, as if it's something created spontaneously rather than planned and practiced. Granted, you occasionally get crashing cacophonies of music that you can't puzzle a melody out of, but then, sometimes you get lovely little experimental trills of music that you simply don't find in any other genre.

     There's also the concept of riffing. I know of no other genre that specifically gives time to its musicians to extemporize on the fly, and it is incredible to see it done right. Jazz normally uses a group of players, but when riffing is done properly, a player takes the song into their own hands and create something entirely new with its fabric. Granted, most of the younger players seem to flounder a little, but that's to be expected. I've done public speaking, and speaking from experience, creating something good on the fly is incredibly difficult. I can only imagine that it'd be harder for musicians, who've had to learn the new language of their instrument and haven't ever had the chance to converse with it rather than playing to an empty room.

     I say converse because that's what riffing feels like sometimes. When two players both decide to play off each other, they can get an incredible back and forth going. It feels like nothing more than a spirited conversation. You can even see the personality and emotion of the player, if you watch close enough. Some players will be almost reserved while riffing, despite this being a time to be put on proud display. Others will try to fly off the walls with eager energy. And when they decide to play together, it's easy to see those styles clash and resolve and blend.

     And you only get this in jazz. And it's phenomenal.