Please don't watch

I just typed up a bunch of crap for a response I had to do for my Lit theory course.  She (the prof) mostly just wants us to write a page about a question to show that we are thinking about the course material.  I will probably get a seven out of ten or something.  I sort of like it because it helps force me to actually write something (becasue as you have clearly noticed I am not very good at forcing myself to do that) and it also (hopefully) helps others to write as well.  Of course it would probably be better if she graded us on things like paragraph structure and the like as I am certain some people still don’t know how to write properly, because let’s face it , the education system did not do a very good job with everyone, and some people did not do a very good job with the education system.

I’m so out of it.  I left this post and closed it and went downstairs and now I can’t remember where I was going with it/what I was going to write next and I should really go to sleep so I will do that.  Goodnight.

You’ll go to bed soon but you know you have to write something.  Anything really.  In order to keep this thing going.  In order to hopefully titillate the few reader who have bravely decided to attempt to casually read/glance at/pass over/or hopefully take in and devour your words as if they were ripe and full of some useful thing, with the ability to sustain them.  

The Pocket Watch

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick…

perspectiveacles:

yellowfriday:

thinking of how much better life would be if adverbs and cognitive dissonance didn’t exist.

I think it would be nice if instead of finding words to describe our verbs we just found better verbs; “She sprinted to the door” sounds so much better than “She quickly ran to the door”.

Also cognitive dissonance is frustrating because I hate knowing that I deceive myself.  I wish I could clearly discern what is true and what isn’t without automatically justifying things in my mind.

I should probably be paying attention in class right now.

Disclaimer: Adverbs are my favourite part of speech, closely followed by the verb. (Which, coincidentally, they usually are.)

But recently I’ve been feeling the same way as Justine has about people using boring verbs to describe exciting things. 

I often begrudge the overuse of the word “love”. People love peach juice, and they absolutely love running, and they really really really love their cats. If you use “really really really” to describe the way you love your cats, how are you going to describe the way you love your mom? 

I’ve been becoming increasingly frustrated at the number of times people turn to adverbs out of laziness. Particularly in my Creative Writing class.

We have to critique each other’s work. And these self-deemed Creative Writers almost always start their evaluations by saying “I loved it” or “I really loved it” or “I absolutely loved it.” There hasn’t been a single formal critique that didn’t use the word love. To describe something very (ironically) amateur. And the adverbs make it worse. These fluff words aim to add all this extra meaning…but it’s too much! If the first critique really loved it, then the second critique really really loved it, and the third has to really really really love it or risk feeling like a jerk.

If students in a Creative Writing class can’t choose their words thoughtfully, who will?

Adverbs are so important. I’ve used 11 so far in this post (excluding the “reallys” and “absolutelys”). Justine used 3 in hers. We need adverbs, not to keep things moving, but to keep things interesting.

But we need to use them with the right verbs, and we need to use them correctly.

I am disappointed that your critiques seem to avoid criticism in order to spare feelings.  Through peer editing this year I found that even when telling my peers that they had done poor they greatly appreciated input that would improve their writing and then did not feel bad about taking apart my own writing.  As long as everyone feels as though the critique is improving their “skillz” it seems to come across as less, and perhaps not at all insulting. 

As for the first bit about cognitive dissonance, best of luck, especially with the who myth of transcendental signifiers which you will most likely have to work around.

I don’t know about you, but I typically find myself coming up with titles for these posts and then writing the post, post title.  Through pre-titling I feel I may be limiting myself.  I should not be doing that, and I also need to eliminate my use of the the words “think” and “feel” in my writing as those things should be implied through the reader’s cognition.  When editing I really should go through Orwell’s rules, which is something I never do consciously.

What are these rules you ask?  Well first of all you should read this (or at the very least “Politics and the English Language”). And secondly here they are:

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech, which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous

(And now for an example of editing seen through this post:  I formerly had “I feel like I may be limiting myself” and realized that I know I am limiting myself so why use the word like.  Rather ironically I follow this statement with a sentence condemning the use of the word “feel”.  I have kept it to see if you have noticed.

I also had this balderdash written “I also need to eliminate my use of the the words think and feel in my writing as those things should be implied by the fact that I am writing it and obviously displaying my opinions through the writing itself.” Instead of this “and I also need to eliminate my use of the the words “think” and “feel” in my writing as those things should be implied through the reader’s cognition.”)

Waking up properly requires that your body is awakened at a certain point within your sleep cycle.  The ability to figure out the proper amount of time to give yourself to sleep in order to wake refreshed and renewed is something that not many of us actually aspire to achieve during our lifetimes.  I don’t know why that is.  It seems to me as thought this kind of information would be extremely valuable to all human beings, and yet it doesn’t appear to be so.

Even though we as a species are constantly attempting to improve our lives through excessive, healthy eating, new appliances, larger televisions and beds that do not ever spill a single drop of wine, we have not, on any sort of large scale, attempted to talk about how waking up at the right time will be beneficial and run classes on how that could be achieved.  We almost force ourselves to be groggy in the morning solely because we do not take the time to acquire some simple knowledge about our own sleeping cycles.

I bring this up because yesterday when I was cross country skiing someone mentioned that they had actually figured out how long they needed to sleep in order dto feel refreshed when they woke up based on the fact that they felt good when they had slept for seven and a half hours as well as only five hours, they had extrapolated that they must have two and one half hour REM cycles.

This piece of information has now lead to the stream of thought you see above.  Do you think you would take the time to figure out something like this or would you prefer to continue sleeping all willy-nilly and never achieving a level of comfort you can acquire, nay deserve, as someone living in the 21st century?

As I would like to begin reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green very soon.  I feel as though it should be a good book.  I haven’t actually read any of his other work and felt like I would jump on an oppurtunity to get a book that was autographed.  Of course since this was the case I obviously got one of the pre-orders that was not signed, and am now awaiting some form of custom something or other as a token of apology. Another reason I decided to start reading this book in particular is because of John Green’s other career, that of a Vlog Brother.  I thouroughly enjoy his and Hanks conversations which are rather informative and discuss topics I personally enjoy thinking about.  My own brother once suggested that we attempt ot do something similar but I think I have dissuaded him.  I don’t necessarily agree with everything my brother says so it may actually end up being a rather interesting endeavour if it were to actually come to fruition.

I also ate some salsa today, not much, that may have been bad.  I’m not sure and that’s why I didn’t eat all that much.  By which I mean I didn’t eat much raw.  I decided to microwave it for about three minutes as that would probably kill any possible botulinus which is my main concern.  My mom canned the salsa a while ago and I got it from our basement and the top stuff had gone dark but it didn’t smell bad or anything so I tried some and it didn’t taste bad but I’m still a little nervous, but less nervous because of the acidity of tomatoes, as botulism is only supposed to occur in low acid canning, like carrots and beats and what not. 

Anyway now to do some (not for school) reading.

This seems like a good idea/ thing to do since I already started this blog and said that I would use it for writing I think I will begin doing a similar thing, and we shall see where it takes us.  It should at least help me get my typing speed up a little bit; which would be nice as I am not the fastest keyboardist in the world.  

Of course it is 1am and I plan on skipping a very important class tomorrow as I haven’t even really started working on a rough copy of an essay which is due tomorrow and I assume they will get each other to look them over and analyze each other’s writing and what not and it will all be very productive.  The problem here is that I have been severely slacking and would have written it all haphazardly tonight.  That combined with the fact that I spent most of the day thinking about dropping that class didn’t help much on the actually getting the work done front.  So yeah.  We’ll see how this goes in the future. That was only about 5mins of work.  A half hour will hopefully be nice and cohesive but I doubt it.  I will also only commit to writing and not an actual time and also not EVERYDAY because I know how I work.  I will however attempt to post semi-regularly (a stipulation just vague enough to be plausible)

I don’t know if I actually want to become a writer, however,  I do enjoy working with writing/do believe I would like to go into some sort of work which involves writing.  Therefore, I have decided to attempt to write some sort of prose work on this, the most inter of nets.  

It may be good.  It may be complete crap.  But it will most certainly not be not writing.  Thank you for joining me here at rerewriting.