botany

Up all night writing a botany report for extra credit. Prof says I'm on track for a C as long as I complete my independent project. This is mysterious. Does this project have to be good? Is there a possibility that my project might be so poorly executed that I receive no extra credit whatsoever? That would make my bean growing a waste of time. Besides all the character it built, of course.

good npr interview

Tuned into NPR tonight on the drive home from school. Fresh Air was on. A gentleman named Frank Schaeffer was promoting his book Crazy for God, about how he and his father helped create the current evangelical right. There are several fantastic anecdotes, and I highly recommend listening to it.

Frank Schaeffer's NPR interview.

The title of the article is retarded, however. If you think abortion should be legal, then you are pro-choice. Pro-choice doesn't necessarily mean you like or agree with the practice of abortion, it means you support a woman's right to choose what to do with her body.

past vs. present tense

I don't know if you know this, but I'm currently writing a novel, called "By the Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends". I've been working on it for a long time. I've driven myself crazy writing it and it's gotten rather complex. My problem was this: no matter how much I wrote, I couldn't feel connected to my characters. And now I think I know why:

I've been writing the fucking thing in the present tense.

I read this blog, by a woman named Emma Darwin (who's books, it should be noted, don't look like my cup of tea):

Past and present tense

A few quotes stood out to me:

"...Present tense is by definition unreflective. Because it's all present, there's less sense of even the past that happened on the previous page. It's just tap-tap-tap... one event after another. So although it can be quite thriller-ish, I sometimes also feel that the immediate past slips away for the reader as well, and to that extent you actually lose urgency, rather than gaining it, because you lose the pressure of those previous events on the characters, which is what ought to be propelling the story forward."

"I think it's that fiction is always about time and memory, at some level: not only does the experience of reading the book happen in time, but the story needs to exist in time - its own time, and the reader's - and if it's all present tense then you lose that: it's just a series of nows, if you see what I mean, no past underpinning it and no sense of the future ahead."

"Partly, perhaps, there are now at least two generations of would-be writers who are thinking in terms of scriptwriting as much as fiction, and of course film - even flashbacks - is always, you could say, in present tense. But more generally I wonder if it's one of the bastard tyrannical offspring of the revolution against the authoritarian author - not just the technically omniscient narrator, but what Gardner calls the 'essayist' novelist, whose opinions are explicitly stated, rather than implicit in the story and how its told. If a past-tense narrative at least implies a narrator retelling the past, it also implies their authority to tell it. Whereas present-tense narrative seems to be freer from any particular narratorial (sorry, horrible word) personality. This seeming objectivity is illusory, of course: in fact an author is always authoritative, and their personality forms the narrative just as a filmmaker forms the narrative of a documentary whether or not you see their decisions about what to film, or hear the questions they asked or the edits they made. Those events on film aren't happening now, any more than what's happening in a novel is."

I think she makes some good points. What do you all think? Do you like present tense? Does it annoy you? Give me some feedback, maybe some examples of novels you liked that were in the present tense.

my dog and failure

There's nothing more irritating, really, than unsolicited advice on how to raise your dog. Rios' mother went to visit friends, who live in the country. They have an ACD, and it herds their horses. Upon hearing that Rios and I own an ACD, they informed her mother that Kahlua must be depressed, because ACDs are meant to be outside dogs.

I do my best, I don't own land in the country, or horses, and I love my dog. I don't need to hear about how I'm failing, I think about that enough as it is.

messy desk

The mess on my desk changes, it's always some variation on: flyers, cords, pens, receipts, comic books, textbooks, and boxcutters. The Newsweek with Barack has been there for a while. I haven't moved it yet. There isn't a reason for this. Today I bought the Perfect Pushup. We'll see, won't we?

reminder

There are times when you hate everything, sure, but it's never all bad.

shit on the floor

When you have a dog, sometimes when you take her for a walk that walk becomes how you define yourself as a human being. If she doesn't take a shit, you have failed. Especially if she's not shitting because she has already taken a shit on the floor, which makes you a double failure, because your dog is house-broken, you thought. The reason why she did this is obvious: you've been gone a lot, lately, and even though you were only leaving for a few minutes this time, you even told her, in plain English, "I'll be right back", she doesn't know this, and she acts accordingly, logically. Put yourself in her shoes, or paws, maybe: you have to take a shit. The bathroom has just been closed off, indefinitely. Do you sit around, patiently waiting for the doors to open, or do you just say "fuck it" and enjoy your time alone without undue asshole pressure? The answer is clear: you shit the floor. Then the owner returns, minutes later. He eyeballs your big steaming load and he starts saying "Shame" as hard as he can, but how were you supposed to know? Stepping back out of the dog's perspective, we can see that you, as a dog-owner, are failing in the very simple task of giving your dog a reliable schedule. This reflects negatively on you, because you also have no reliable schedule. You are stretched thin, doing this and that and in the end having nothing really to show for it. You are a grocery list that's gotten to long, and you want to say "fuck all this shit, I'm going to fucking Taco Bell". But you don't. You eat Taco Cabana, instead. And it is good. You and your wife spend time together, and when you return to your apartment, there is no shit on the floor.