30day challenge: 12.

Day 12: Why do you blog?

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Blogging is my therapy.

 

I don’t do it for fame or fortune or even acknowledgement, I do it to keep myself sane.

 

Though it did take me a while to pluck up the courage to start.

 

For a while social networks like Myspace and Facebook were providing me with a good enough outlet for the extrovert within and acting like literary leeches for my mental blood-letting, but I knew I needed something more structured and without all the frou-frou.

 

I also wanted to write. Just write. Put words together in some sort of structure that amused me. I needed a creative outlet.

 

So, one evening with nothing better to do, this blog was born.

 

Here is my little corner of the internet where I unload the thoughts in my brain, play with words, understand what’s going on in my head even as I’m writing the thoughts down.

 

Then one day I felt like balance was required, and lifeonmirth was born.

 

Now I have two little corners of the internet where I can come and play or pout or poeticise or poke fun at myself – to what end I still don’t know.

 

My only hope is that my writing improves and sanity ensues.

the philosophy of grammar nazis

There’s nothing like seeing someone do something similar to what I have done in the past to teach me important lessons in life.

 

Example – I used to rant a lot online but now I try to temper it, because I've seen others be negative ALL the time, day after day, and I realise now how much it wears down the shiny on everyone who reads it. It becomes obvious it’s purely for attention and pity. They don’t want anyone to fix anything about their life, they don’t even want to try and fix it themselves, they just want everyone to feel their pain. They exist in their pain. It’s truly tiresome.

 

Yet, because I’ve been there myself, I can empathise, and hope that one day they too will see how damaging it becomes.

 

And so, tonight, in a perfect example of contradiction, I find myself outraged at the trivial things other people become outraged about. Like grammar and punctuation.

 

I can high-horse it with the best of them when it comes to misuse of the possessive apostrophe, the incorrect your/you’re, or there/their/they’re, and the very cringe worthy “should/could/would OF”, but I have now been shown the error of my ways. I will henceforth loosen my stance, having seen how ridiculous it makes a person look to be so petty.

 

Tonight’s lesson is brought to you by the ellipsis, commonly represented by a series of three dots […]. Until tonight, I had never known anyone to be upset by people perhaps using only two dots, or four, or more than four, instead of the standard (and apparently required at all times) three.

 

My first reaction was to try and understand why, out of all the horrible evil wrongs that occur in the world every minute of every day, someone would choose to be annoyed enough by this to mention it in a public forum.

 

I despair at the things people channel their energy towards when there are so many more worthwhile causes requiring our outrage and our help to fix.

 

People should be allowed to paint their sentences with whatever colours they wish. If they want to use more dots for effect, so be it! Less? Fine! Go for it. Who are we to constrict another’s sentence construction? If the great writers of the world all followed the rules to the letter our literature would all be dull beige today. e.e cummings would be raked over the coals, for sure.

 

So, out of my petty outrage at someone’s petty outrage, I’ve managed to learn another lesson: live and let live, write and let write. Let. It. Go.

 

Language is our putty to sculpt with as we wish, into whatever we wish, however we wish. Go forth and sculpt unencumbered.

the wonder of the colour orange

 

I’ve started reading Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder again, and I think it’s going to be one of those books I will definitely get a lot more out of on the second reading, compared to when I first tackled it in my late teens/early 20’s.

 

For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s a journey through the history of philosophy as seen through the eyes of a 14 year old girl. Her philosophical brain is awakened with two questions: who are you? where does the world come from?

 

Already the first few pages have left me spending all of today in sneaky contemplation about the wonder of the world.

 

As newborns, we are launched into this world full of wonder and jaw-dropping amazement, but through repetition and through others’ nonchalance at our exclamations of wonder (and a little through science), we learn to accept the magic as normal everyday things, and eventually lose our sense of wonder altogether.

 

We are no longer amazed by such things as a world hurtling through space, grass growing out of the ground seemingly of it’s own accord, or flying birds.

 

We don’t question the ‘how’ or ‘why’ enough.

 

Tonight I chopped up a pumpkin that was beyond orange, like supercharged orange, and wondered how it was that I knew it was orange. I just see this particular colour and call it orange, because that’s what I was taught in school. I learnt to associate a certain colour of the spectrum with the word ‘orange’.

 

But what if someone else sees that pumpkin, calls it orange, but they’re actually seeing my version of purple? They label it orange because they were also taught to associate that particular word with that particular colour.

 

We just accept what we’re told. “That colour is orange” but could it be that Joe Blow sees orange as my purple and I see his purple as my green, and we both see yellow as someone else’s red?

 

Sure there are scientific things like spectrums and wavelengths and cornea whatevers, but is there a way to know whether our individual perceptions have any influence on how we see colours?

 

I mean, apparently pigeons can see ultraviolet light. How do they translate that in their little bird brains? Maybe their perception of ultraviolet light is really just similar to our perception of the colour brown?

 

As much as you could get scientific and talk about the eye receiving signals, it still comes down to those signals being sent to a brain which has been programmed a certain way. Surely that means there’s room for difference?

 

If that’s the case, then there’s room for difference in everything else we see too. Maybe nothing we are looking at in this world is actually what we think we’re looking at.

 

Curious.

a book bind

I’m in a literary quandary.

When I decided to up the tempo on this writing thing, first thing I did was buy a moleskine and carry it everywhere to scrawl down whatever came out of my head. Second thing I did was revisit the masters. My masters -- the ones who get me excited about words: cummings, Kerouac, Burroughs, Gonzo, Hesse, Marquez, Irving, Kesey, Palahniuk. I devoured their inspiration and flicked the switch on the ‘let’s play with words’ room in my brain.

So when about a month ago, on yet another second-hand bookstore scavenge, I bumped into William Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded, it was like getting a whole new lego set for my words room. I was yea excited.

Surely Burroughs, beat poet, word maestro, would come play lego with me? Surely a novel heralded as a perfect example of the cut-up technique of writing would give me some ideas? After all, I loved Junky.

But, I. Am. Struggling! This book is too much! I’ve barely managed to push myself through 50 pages, most of that done with a facial expression whose verbal equivalent would be, “ewwwww”. Do you know how hard it is to read with one eye closed and your head turned to one side while your face is screwed up like that? I’m scared to read it in public in case someone else sees it, knows exactly what I’m reading and thinks me a total pervert.

I could describe this book (so far as I’ve read) in three words, but I can’t write them here because together, they will definitely not google well at all. The first two might be ok – gay, and alien. The third rhymes with horn. I’m not kidding. And there seem to be a lot of boys in it. I don’t think that’s right. Amazon’s key phrases for the book might give you an idea of what I’m talking about. Or maybe not.

What I do know is that I’m not getting the connection yet between what’s on the page and what the book is actually meant to be about, which I think is some sort of P.I trying to get to the bottom of an intergalactic takeover occurring through mind control and technology (and a lot of man-man loving).

The thing is, I really believe it has something to teach me about playing with syntax. The whole idea of cut-up is fascinating – take text, physically cut it up, put it back together to create new meanings through juxtaposition. Force the readers to make sense of it themselves instead of force-feeding them the meaning.

Some sentences go for whole paragraphs with no punctuation at all. Then there are whole pages of short grabs. That is the fascinating part of this book. The actual story – so very not.

Like this…

“Murder under a carbide lamp in Puya rain outside it’s a mighty wet place drinking aguardiente with tea and canella to cut that kerosene taste he called me a drunken son of a bitch and there it was across the table raw and bloody as a fresh used knife . . sitting torpid and quiescent in a canvas chair after reading last month’s Sunday comics “the jokes” he called them and read every word it sometimes took him a full hour by a tidal river in Mexico slow murder in his eyes maybe ten fifteen years later I see the move he made then he was a good amateur chess player it took up most of his time actually but he had plenty of that.”

Or this…

“In the open air a boy waiting – Smiles overtake someone walking – The questions drift down slowly out of an old dream – mountain wind caught in the door – the odor of drowned suns trailing her linen sweat in the final ape of history – Like I’d ask alterations but blue sky on our ticket that exploded”

- The Ticket that Exploded, William S. Burroughs

Both passages are pretty much, ‘wha??’ and yet I understand his play and manipulation.

So, my quandary is this: do I keep reading this – persevere as it were – through the severity of the story matter, in the hope of gleaning a new way of looking at words and syntax, or do I give up and go wash my brain out with soap?

Is it even possible to ignore subject matter altogether, and just focus on construction? Can you look at a painting of something awful only to admire the beauty in the brush strokes?

It feels wrong to turn my back on one of my masters. But seriously, he’s coming across as a dirty old bugger! Maybe I’ll give him 50 more pages.

Oh no! I flicked ahead! It gets worse! ewwwww!