Blogging NUMB again

Happy Saturday! A quick note to let you know that since football season is almost upon us, I've begun blogging again for the esteemed Northwestern football blog, Lake the Posts. My first post, a Q&A with the band's SpiriTeam about the upcoming season, went up this morning. Check it out! And have a great weekend!

For an aggressively inarticulate generation

Check out this short slam poetry piece by Taylor Mali, given the typographical treatment by graphic artist Ronnie Bruce. This is the best 2:45 you'll spend today.

Mali's poem is about speaking with conviction, about not ending every sentence with an uptick, as a question, thereby making you sound unsure of everything you say. (Ya know?) Bruce takes that performance and gives us the actual words, the hidden question marks, the metadiscourse of "like" and "you know." He portrays words as both shy and bold. He makes them into trees and axes. He fits everything together. The poem was poignant and funny and clever to begin with, but Bruce's execution has made it into art.

I love words so much. I think this demonstrates the power they can have if you're competent and you speak with conviction. And with an increasingly "aggressively inarticulate generation" learning literacy via text message and Facebook chat, it's a nice reminder that though language may change, the power it has when used effectively is enduring.

Whatchu talkin' about, Mark Twain?

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination."
- Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger

Gangsta.

It's surprising how timeless certain ideas can be. As a writer, this immortality is both dis- and encouraging: On the one hand, it seems that all the wisdom has been found, wrought, digested, and regurgitated in "Inspirational Quote-a-Day" calendars. But on the other hand, we have these wonderfully knowledgeable guides to teach us things they learned the hard way. And who are we to balk at that? Especially since we can then take those lessons and build on them, make them relevant to ourselves and modern society. After all, Twain couldn't have anticipated what social media would do to happiness quotients, or how the Internet would render sanity an unnecessary prerequisite to amassing thousands of readers (or Twitter followers, but I contend that no one on Twitter is truly sane). (P.S. Follow me on Twitter!)

But Twain was obviously getting at something with this sanity/happiness thing, and the fact that we pluck this one sentence out of a book and put it on t-shirts and coffee mugs speaks to one of two things: either we're rocking the bookworm fashion, or we are able to read between the lines and apply this lesson to our own lives.

Do me a favor and think some more about the Twain quote.

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination."

What was your initial reaction? More than likely you considered it, recalling the adage "ignorance is bliss," and then what? Did you dismiss it? After all, it makes madness sound like not such a bad way to spend a life, but you probably don't consider yourself truly insane. Or do you? How do we define insanity in various contexts? How much does this idea apply to something in your own life? Should we all just give up now?

I read an article today titled "30 Lessons Learned by 30." Despite being six years from the dreaded 30 (I hear it's not that bad!), I found myself immediately applying these one-liner lessons to my own life, evaluating how well I perform them on a daily basis, making mental notes to try harder to prioritize relationships, to be grateful and giving and loving, not to judge others. It's easy to roll your eyes at such well-meaning advice, to resist acknowledging that an entire life's lesson fits so easily into ten words. But understanding that lesson requires some background knowledge, some empathy with the situation. It's hard to argue with maxims like "Honesty is the best policy in relationships. The truth will come out eventually" -- but if you don't have any experience with dishonesty in relationships, then this means nothing to you. It is through life experience that we're able to boil down lessons into easy-to-digest tidbits. It's the reason cliches work and refuse to die: at some point, we realize they're all true.

This is also why grandmothers have so many things embroidered on pillows and hand-painted on adorable signs hanging around their house. Aging brings an understanding of and trust in digestible wisdom. And it's why young people, no matter how smart they are, will always be stupid: we simply don't have the years to back up what we claim to know. Experience trumps every other form of knowledge, always. Take it from a (still relatively stupid) young person who would love nothing more than to write a book that establishes a cliche that winds up on a coffee mug. It's the American dream, I tell ya.

I should mention that the opening quote was said by the main character of the unfinished and posthumously published novel The Mysterious Stranger. That character happens to be the nephew of Satan, and he spends the book ruminating on "the damned human race." It's heady stuff. The character goes on to say:

"No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the result - and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means possible to his race - and you are not satisfied!" He heaved a discouraged sigh, and said, "It seems to me that this race is hard to please."

No kidding, dude.

The Blackberry Suicides

Let me tell you a story. It is one of loss, betrayal, and first-world hardship. This is a story that proves it may, in fact, be better never to have loved than to have loved and lost. This is the chronicle of my pathetic history with the Blackberry.

I bought my first Blackberry in the summer of 2009 as a personal reward for completing college and obtaining a real-person job. It felt appropriate: I was an adult, and people would thus require constant access to me. In turn, I would need constant access to Google maps, Facebook, and the TFLN mobile website. I even bought a gel skin to protect my investment. Life was grand.

The following Thanksgiving, I was helping my grandfather haul a Christmas tree over a porch railing, forgetting about my prize Blackberry encased in its feeble gel skin in my front pocket. I leaned hard, resulting in a broken screen. Goodbye, Blackberry #1.

Blackberry #2 fell victim to a friend's birthday bar night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a few months later. It was left on a table, whereupon some douchebag picked it up, turned it off, and probably sold it on eBay, instead of replying to my frantic texts and phone calls. People are a-holes.

Blackberry #3 also fell victim to a broken screen, but I was particularly irked because I hadn't done anything to deserve it this time. It was just sitting in my bag, minding its own business, when it got the living shit kicked out of it by another member of my purse community. No one has stepped forward to claim responsibility. It was probably domestic terrorism.

Blackberry #4 was lost in epic fashion while vacationing in Las Vegas this past February. To protect the integrity of those involved, I'll just say that the last time I saw it, my fourth Blackberry was somewhere in Treasure Island. (Trust me, it's not the weirdest thing found there.) Needless to say, Vegas marketers don't fuck around.


At this point, my cell phone insurance provider dropped my coverage. I was officially on my own. But that didn't slow my irreverent momentum, as Blackberries were dropping like acid at a Flaming Lips concert. Blackberry #5 was in my hand during a softball team bar outing this spring. Fifteen minutes later, it was nowhere to be seen. Again, I suspect some douchebag picked it up and made an eBay profit. Seriously, people suck.

Blackberry #6 was obtained from the T-Mobile store in June, but within a couple days it was clear there was a defect that prevented certain necessary actions. I could not, for instance, upload photos to Facebook from my mobile device. Finding this injustice unacceptable, I took it back to the store and traded it for one that worked. This, I submit, was the most innocent and painless of the Blackberry deaths. At the very least, it was definitely not my fault.

But Blackberry #7 only lasted two weeks. It was lost this past Thursday, somewhere between a River North club and the cab ride home. I honest to God have no idea what happened.

The cosmic message is clear: I was not meant to be a smartphone owner. In an act of contrition, I've downgraded to the "Samsung :)" -- a slide phone designed for a 13-year-old girl with an emoticon fetish. If I can keep this flimsy not-smartphone alive for a year, I'm allowed to get another Blackberry. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I urge you, dear Reader, to observe a moment of silence for the seven Blackberries that had to die to teach me this unpleasant lesson. What was meant to be a symbol of my triumphant entry into adulthood has turned into the insolent shitshow of my early twenties. Let their demise not be in vain. Learn from my tale. And don't bother with the gel skin.

Alas, if only I'd gone for real protection. At the very least,
thieves would have been deterred out of pure disgust.

The stuff dreams are made of

My motivation for the next nine months.

Words of Wisdom from Ira Glass

(click the image to see it clearer)

Ira Glass, the host of This American Life on NPR, is one of the best journalists and storytellers working today. A graphic designer took a quote of his and turned it into a visual lesson on sticking to your guns in a creative profession. Keep your head down, keep writing, just keep swimming -- that's the theme as I face two more weeks of summer school, followed by four weeks of relative freedom, before diving right back into class and student teaching. Grad school is incredibly rewarding, but man, do I miss that dozen hours of my week. Anything worth having...

Stephen Colbert at Northwestern last weekend

Northwestern alum Stephen Colbert gave the commencement address to the class of 2011 in Evanston last weekend. There are many, many great pull-quotes...

"[Northwestern] represents humanity at its best. And on Dillo Day, it represents humanity at its worst...today evidently armadillos are honored by drinking Four Loko out of a supersoaker while dancing to the New Pornographers in a drunken mosh pit filled mostly with National Merit finalists."

And it gets better. Totally worth the 20 minutes, I promise.

And if you can't get enough, check out this feature on Colbert from the winter 2010 Northwestern Magazine.

Go 'Cats!

Another edition of me trying to justify my graduate study

This is my textbook for my Language & Style summer class. Doesn't it look super interesting‽ * I especially love the completely unrelated cover art depicting water. Or is that cigarette smoke? Either way, couldn't we find a more interesting way to depict grammar? How about this:


Much better.

Anyway, I'm studying for my test tonight on sentence structure, and I saw this as an opportunity to a) educate the world, b) defend my choice of master's study, and c) procrastinate while actually sort of studying in a way kinda.

Turns out everyone who's been freaking out about English grammar since, er, grammar school is sort of overreacting. This is mostly because we teach grammar really badly. In truth, there are only six possible sentence structures in English. Six. Total. If you want to feel like a grammar gorilla on cocaine -- all-powerful, all-knowing, and sort of depressingly manic -- then lend me just five minutes of your day.** Here's what you need to know:

You are aware, of course, that all sentences include a subject and a verb. "The grammar gorilla likes cocaine." "The grammar gorilla chortles." "The grammar gorilla does not give a crap what you think of his hairdo." All perfectly acceptable American English sentences.

I'm going to give you a chart now, but please don't freak out. You can skip it and come back for reference.

SIX BASIC ENGLISH SENTENCE PATTERNS

be patterns SUBJ-VERB-SUBJECT COMPLEMENT
linking patterns SUBJ-VERB-SUBJECT COMPLEMENT
intransitive patterns SUBJ-VERB
transitive patterns SUBJ-VERB-DIRECT OBJECT
di-transitive patterns SUBJ-VERB-INDIRECT OBJECT-DIRECT OBJECT
complex transitive patterns SUBJ-VERB-DIRECT OBJECT-OBJECT COMPLEMENT

Hi! Okay glad to still have you here. So listed above are the six possible sentence structures in English. I'm going to glaze over the actual definitions and just use a transitive sentence as an example so I can get to the cool part, which is the fact that you can take any of those sentences and make them negative, passive, perfect, progressive, interrogative, or change tense (past/present/future) -- and it REMAINS THE SAME SENTENCE STRUCTURE. So for example:

You like occlupanids.

This sentence contains a subject, a verb, and a direct object (takes the action of the verb; what I like are occlupanids) -- so it's a transitive sentence. Now let's have some fun with it:

You liked occlupanids. (past)
You will like occlupanids. (future)
You don't like occlupanids. (negative)
You are liking occlupanids. (progressive)
You have liked occlupanids. (perfect)
Occlupanids are liked by you. (passive)
Do you like occlupanids? (interrogative)

So we've made seven new sentences that say completely different things -- BUT IT'S STILL THE EXACT SAME SENTENCE STRUCTURE. It's still got a subject, a verb, and a direct object. It's still a transitive sentence.

Is anyone else as bowled over by this as I am? I mean, the sentence element mix-and-match possibilities are literally infinite, and if you know how to boil it down to the basic elements of the sentence -- that is, the form word slots (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) as opposed to the structure words (conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, determiners, etc.) -- then you can create anything. This, my friends, is what I went to graduate school to learn: how to finesse and manipulate sentences. Because, again, that's what writers do. Let's make this sentence as crazy as we possibly can:

Have occlupanids not been being liked by you?
(past passive perfect progressive interrogative)

It's still the same sentence: "you" is the subject, "liked" is the verb, and "occlupanids" is the direct object; we've just thrown a bunch of other elements in there to mess with tense, aspect, positive/negative, and form. Nevermind the fact that there are probably very few opportunities to use a sentence like this. It is grammatically correct, and that's what matters.

For the record, this works for really long sentences too:

Last year, you definitely liked bright green and orange occlupanids despite the fact that my mother's best friend's uncle's sister gave you a huge bag of twist ties for your birthday instead.

All of the information beyond the basic sentence is adverbial; that is, if we stripped it all away, we'd still be left with a grammatical sentence:

You liked occlupanids.

And that concludes our lesson for the day. I hope you learned something. At the very least, you should now know what an occlupanid is.


* Yes, that is an interrobang. No, interrobangs do not get the respect they deserve from English grammarians. Fight the power.
** Satisfaction not guaranteed. But I'm gonna try really hard.

What a writing major does

My god I love Google image search.

Sometimes I have a hard time describing my graduate program to people.

"I'm studying writing and publishing," I tell them.

"Like books?" they ask.

"Well...yeah, sort of. Like, I have writing workshops on things like memoir and revision, and I study grammar and education theory and stuff too."

It's surprisingly vague and hard to explain, and it actually took me a full year of classes to understand what I was really in grad school for. It's not unusual for me to not really grasp the full extent of the syllabus until eight weeks into the ten-week class, and that's fine because it presents me with a series of satisfying "Eureka!" moments on a regular basis.

Now I've only got four classes left to go before getting my MA. One of those classes -- "Language and Style for Writers" -- I began yesterday in an intense 5-week summer session. (Quarters are normally ten weeks.) My next class is tomorrow -- "week two," if you will -- and I again find myself staring at four chapters of reading from the most vaguely titled textbook I've ever seen in my life: Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects (6th edition, natch).

But I'm a few pages into the introduction -- which, I will add, was not actually assigned reading but I decided to read anyway because it might give me a clue as to what the class is really about -- and I'm intrigued enough to procrastinate a bit with a blog post.

What caught my eye was the definition the authors offer for the title phrase "rhetorical grammar," which is basically the choices a writer makes regarding audience, purpose, and topic. The authors use an example of the difference between writing a text message to a friend and writing a formal fundraising request to the university dean. Each format has its own conventions, from spelling to sentence structure to punctuation to emoticon usage, and each audience has certain expectations. Those grammatical choices, particularly those related to sentence structure, are rhetorical grammar -- and the subject of what I'm studying in class. How to manipulate sentences. Because that, my friends, is what writers do.

And yes, it's past 10pm the night before class and I've paused while reading the introduction to my reading, which is not actually part of the assigned 80 pages, to inform the Internet of just what it is I'm not studying. I'm taking masochistic procrastination to a whole new level here, folks.