Fail in What You Love

All---

Change is part of life.  So are set-backs.  So are re-directions, mis-directions, and forgetting to ask for directions.  No matter what your pursuit, you will, at times, feel like your legs are being swept out from under you or you're being kicked in the gut.

That's why it's so important to embrace your passion and do you what you love.

When you're standing at the bottom of the hill, looking at the boulder rolling your way...

When you're laying on the floor, watching the boot come down...

When you're just sitting alone at a table in the corner of a dark room, staring into your eighth cup of coffee with a squirt of lime juice and a pinch of salt...

You want to be able to look back and say...

"Yeah, but it's been worth it."

"You can knock me down, but you can't knock me out."

"I'll be fighting my way right back."

Not...

"Wow, was that worth this?"

"Why did I invest so much of my self?"

"So now what?"

You will fail.  You will be set back.  You will get knocked around.

Make sure you fail doing what you love, so that when it happens, it's all part of the game.

.Nevets.

The Jade Badge of Courage

All---

It comes as no surprise, I'm sure, to learn that police, investigators, and emergency personnel all routinely encounter a sort of darkness that most of get through our day just fine without.  It's the kind of darkness that people wear close to their skin or wrap around their heart, that never sees the light of day.  Police, investigators, and emergency personnel don't work in the light of day.  (Metaphorically.)

You can reign in your crazy fantasies here, too.  I'm not even talking about serial killers and shotgun murderers, child rapists, or people with the kind of secret sexual lifestyle that inspires television crime drama.  That stuff is there, and it's plenty dark.  It can also be a bit of distraction.  There's plenty of other darkness.  There's the man who knows his smoking is killing him, and just sort of hopes every trip to the emergency room might be his last one.  There's the lady whose Alzheimer's is so advanced that she can't stop shoplifting and only giggles like a two year-old when she's caught.  There's the guy who always wondered what it would be like to smoke marijuana and happened to smoke some pretty foul grass on a foggy, icy night when he was already tired, and no one knows if it helped him into the lake or not; they just know he ended up in the lake.  There's the girl who is so bored and discontent with her life that she wanders through the park, daydreaming with her eyes closed, not paying attention to where she's walking or who else is around her.  That's all darkness, too.

What makes makes darkness a challenge for people like police, investigators, and emergency personnel is that there is in, in the end, nothing they can do about it.  Whatever they do, it's too late to stop the something from happening.  Perhaps they can stop it from happening again, but they are are the mop up crew for society's spiritual and moral waste water.  Once it's spilled, you can clean it up, but that doesn't undo the spill, not really.

Not only that, but normal human coping mechanisms are not options for these folks.  Laws, codes of conduct, oaths of service... These things bind such personnel.  The darkness they encounter, they cannot talk about.  They can't go fishing with a buddy and talk about it, even if someone wanted to hear it, even if someone could stand to hear it.

So what do they do?

They drink, a lot.

They tell cynical, tasteless jokes.  A lot.

Sometimes they stretch the boundaries of their oaths, and they talk to one another.  Sometimes they violate their codes, and they just go ahead and talk to their wives or their friends.  Sometimes they find a counselor who is qualified, willing, and distanced enough to sit back and listen and is bound by an oath of her own.

That's probably the healthiest option, but it's not always as easy as it sounds to find such a person, let alone to feel the kind of trust necessary to expose them to the private darkness the cop is carrying around.

Most often, cops wear the darkness like a sheath over the badge.  It's a sign of toughness.  It's a sign of pride.  It's a sign of shared, gasping futility.  It's a way of saying, "I take this crap into my head so that you never have to, and nothing you can ever do will thank me enough for that."

We've been talking recently in my anthropology class about cognition and perception, about meaning and expression.  The world that you know is shaped by meanings that you have internalized.  Those meanings develop (in part) as the world passes through your perception (seeing it) and then your conception (organizing it, making sense of it).  It's one thing to know that the darkness is out there.  It changes your whole world when you come face to face with the darkness.  It breaks your world when you have no way to organize and make sense of it.

.Nevets.

What is Help?

All---

I suppose it's a strange question, but I sometimes wonder about what "help" really means.  On obvious reason for this is that my day job is in customer support, and we often have to determine what course of action is truly the most helpful.  We also struggle with trying to feel like our "help" is meaningful and rewarding.  More than that, though, it's my personality to want to help people.

The Mystery Men -- 


The Shoveller: Lucille, God gave me a gift. I shovel well. I shovel very well.
Lucille: Oh, honey, you shovel better than any man I've ever known, but that does not make you a super hero . . .  Listen to me. You're a good husband, and a good father. But that's all. Nothing more.
The Shoveller's Son: I believe in you, Daddy!
Lucille: Roland, do not encourage your father.

Who does want to be a superhero?
photo by Jeffrey O. Gustafson

Part of the reason that I became an EMT was a desire to feel helpful in what felt like a direct and meaningful way.  Supporting clients with their computer use is pretty detached, and writing is about planting seeds on the wind.  As an EMT, I would be helping people in ways that were obvious, immediate, and vital.

I never suffered from some of the delusions that get some EMT's in trouble.  I'm not a trauma junkie.  I'm not in it to save lives.  I don't see myself as a battlefield medic.  But, even the most minimal view of what we do on the ambulance seems helpful: making sure that people get to the hospital with an open airway and a pulse, hopefully feeling a little less panicked than when they called us.

Being an EMT, though, I get to see a lot of different pictures of being helpful, and it's often thought-provoking.

Last night, for instance, we were called to be on stand-by for a structure fire.  What that means is that there's a building on fire that might have people in it and might take a while to put out.  We go the scene, park the ambulance near the fire, and set up a help station.  We make ourselves available to any patients who might have been injured in or overheated by the fire, and we provide rehab for the firefighters.  Rehab consists of bottles of water, cooling damp towels or ice packs, and a quick check of vital signs to make sure they're still healthy enough to continue.

So here's the scene last night: a house fire on a wooded country road, ~ 23:00.  It's a trailer home and there are four people inside.

We respond pretty quickly as an ambulance.  On our way to the scene, the first fire unit on scene radios that all four people are safely out of the home, no worse for wear.  There aren't even enough fire trucks on the scene to start fighting the fire or truly rescuing people.  Basically, the people got out of the building on their own.  (We were very relieved they made it so easily!)

The rest of the time, about two hours, was about putting the fire out.  With dozens of people there to help.  There are something like half a dozen fire trucks on the scene.  Our three-person ambulance crew is there.  A two-person fire and rescue team from a nearby town is there.  A police unit is there.  Some neighbors are there.  A couple utility crew are there.

At any given time, there were about half a dozen fire fighters actively battling the blaze.  Others were in support or taking breaks to drink water.  There were never any patients. Three fire fighters asked for their blood pressures to be taken, but no other vitals or full rehab.  There were more bottles of water than any of us knew what to do with.  The police really had no task, as there were not rubber-neckers, and there was no crime in the fire.

Then, at about 01:00, as we were all pulling out, the Red Cross team arrived to see if any of us needed water and to make sure the occupants of the home were okay.

A lot of people, on hand.  Doing a few things, for sure.  But mostly just being there.  Just in case.

Do I doubt that any of us were being helpful?  No.  But it does make me realize that being helpful isn't necessarily about doing something. 

Blue Raja: Well, there's the Sphinx.

The Shoveller: Yeah, I've heard of this guy. He's a big crime-fighter down east.

Mr. Furious: What's his power?

Blue Raja: Well, he's terribly mysterious.

Mr. Furious: That's it? That's his power?  He's mysterious?

Blue Raja: Well, terribly mysterious.

The Shoveller: Yeah, plus he can cut guns in half with his mind.

Sometimes, I think, being helpful is about being present and making yourself available.  As humans, it's in our nature to sometimes feel like we're wasting our time or that we should somehow be doing more.

But do you feel led to tell any of the people from the fire last night they weren't being helpful?

Me neither.

.Nevets.

When Bravery Fails

All---

So a good writing friend of mine e-mailed me directly after I posted about being brave and asked if I would still feel so strongly in favor of taking the brave chance if my bravery had come to naught.   I answered her but thought it was an excellent question and wanted to address it in some way publicly.

It's taken me a little while to decide how I want to approach this.  Finally, I decided to be straightforward up to a point and just beg your indulgence for the places where I fall short of complete vulnerability.  Because the truth is, I have been brave and failed.

There was the time when I showed a girl a group of oblique, experimental love stories to the girl they were about, knowing she was intelligent, and hoping she would get the message.  "I wish someone would write stories like that about me," she said.  "Someone did," I told her, holding my breath.  "I know," she said. Her eyes sparkled dreamily.  But my love was mature and adult and she wasn't ready for that.

There was the time I held a photography exhibition in college as a non-art major, something rarely done at my school.  It was the most public exposure of my creativity.  I took a chance in my subject matter and approach, sort of bridging the gap between art and photo journalism.  The exhibition was an utter failure, and I heard almost nothing but a week of terrible comments.  There were exceptions, a few who got what I was doing, but most thought it was boring, uninspired, unoriginal.

There was the time when I was a kid and I gutted out a surgery that had a long, painful recovery and ended up not resolving the issue.

There was the archaeology expedition in the middle of nowhere in Alaska where I fell and cut my neck open with a log in a river that was thick with bacteria and decay.

There is the list of foods that I still cannot eat because of smell associations from the maceration room.

There is all the work, dedication, and excitement that went into relocating from Alaska back to Indiana to go to grad school and pursue forensic anthropology, only to find out, at the end of an incredibly painful year that I have a long-diagnosed, severe learning disability that did not interfere with field work but made the graduate classes literally just about impossible, meaning that I had just short-circuited my entire academic career by taking a chance on a second masters rather than taking either a safer-bet PhD program or research assistantship.  My life, in many ways, remains in a vortex because of that.

So, yes, sometimes you act in courage and things don't work out.

But then, other times you act in courage, and you get to jump out of helicopters into swamps, dig in cemeteries from 3000 BC, evade a drug cartel in Mexico, help put away a man who killed three people on a whim, or marry your precious soul mate.

And when you don't win, at least you were brave.  Acting in fear, you never win, and at the end of the day all you have is your fear.

Even with the trade-off losses, bravery wins.

.Nevets.

Grab the Brass Ring!

All---

I have a rally deep and meaningful post that I was going to do today, but it was a long day at work, and I had EMT class after that, so I'm going to save deep and meaningful for tomorrow.

Instead, I'll quickly remind you that you can click here to Nevetsize your Halloween!  A ghost story, written by me for your specifications.  An audio recording of me reading it.  (I've done radio and voice acting!)  And either the greatest coffee mug ever or the greatest teddy bear ever.  (See them at CafePress.)

And I figured this will be the night I'll introduce the November contest.  This November 6th, it will be the 10th anniversary of when Rose and I got engaged.  To celebrate that, I'm going to write a blogsclusive short story (500 - 1000 words or so) outside my usual realm of experience: a romance.  Some flash  pieces I've written have prompted Lori, Deb, and a few others to suggest I should try such a thing.  Well, I finally am, and I will post that story here sometimes between the 6th and the 13th.  There's enough going on that I want a flexible deadline for this.

BUT, NEVETS! you say.

But what? I say.

BUT YOU SAID IT WAS A CONTEST! you say.


And it is! I say.

Here's the contest part.  It's not a blogfest, and it's not an experiment, but anyone who lets me know they're going to do it, then writes a story completely different from what they normally write, and posts it to their blog with a link back here, will get their post cross-linked and will have a chance to be one of five randomly selected winners, each of whom will receive a signed copy of my own story and a Nevetsized item yet to be determined.

BUT, NEVETS! you say.

But what? I say.

BUT THAT'S SO GENEROUS! you say.

Generous is how I rollz! I say.

Hey, 11/6/2000 was an early Christmas for Rose and me.  I'll make it an early Christmas for you, if you take the chance on stretching your writing muscles.

.Nevets.

Tactless Tuesday: Listen to Captain Sisko

All---

Benjamin Sisko: I'm no writer, but if I were it seems to me I'd wanna poke my head up every once in a while and take a look around - see what's going on. It's life, Jake! You can miss it if you don't open your eyes!
-- "The Visitor," Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Aside from outting myself as not only a fan of Star Trek, but of a huge fan of DS9, I share this quote with you in hopes that it might punch some of you in the face like it punches me in the face every time I come across it.

Here's the context. I'll even remove all Star Trek and sci fi from the setup, so those of you with a negative reaction can move on and get to the meat of the matter:

A young man, in his late teens, has found his passion for writing. Everywhere he goes, he says potential plots. Everyone he interacts with, he regards as potential characters. He spends every waking moment thinking about his writing or with his nose buried in his writing. Sure, there are other responsibilities and he takes care of those, but as soon as they're done it's back to writing. He's not a slacker because of writing; he's just obsessed with his craft.

One day, his dad is taking him on a trip to see something that's once-in-a-lifetime. The young man spends his time on the trip holed up and working on his story.

That's when his dad utters the magic words: "I'm no writer, but if I were it seems to me I'd wanna poke my head up every once in a while and take a look around - see what's going on. It's life, Jake! You can miss it if you don't open your eyes!"

This really hits home with me now, as it did when the episode first aired. When I was a younger man, I spent every spare moment with my writing. (Check yesterday's post if you don't believe me!) In college, when I wasn't doing homework, I was either working on photography or writing. For a while it was songs, not fiction, but it boils down to the same thing. When I gave up writing (more on that another day) I spent most of my time looking for something to fill the void. When I came back to writing, I was pretty much back to the old ways.

And I often still am.

There's work, there's my wife, there are things I have to do. But when not otherwise obligated, I'm writing, or blogging about writing, or talking to writers, or thinking about writing.

Here's the thing. Unless you want to write about writing, or about someone who spends his or her life trapped by obligations, you need to experience more than those two things in order to write. You need to do other things. You need to interact without it being about writing. You need to stick your head out of the rabbit hole and check out what's going on.

I've recently started volunteering for my local EMS as one way of doing this. It's not work, church, marriage, chores, or writing. It's something different. Just one avenue to just plain experience life. I may learn nothing from it to incorporate into my writing. But I will learn more about what it is to be a person in this world, and that will make me a better writer.

So, to all of you, I give the same directive as Ben Sisko gave to his son Jake, and that an elderly Jake then passed onto a young writer who idolized him:

Poke your head up every once in a while and take a look around - see what's going on. It's life! You can miss it if you don't open your eyes

.Nevets.

The Fight Against Burn Out

All---

Like many other writers, I have more demands on my time and energy than just my writing. I have a straight job. Mine is a pretty good job, all things considered, but it is a salaried management position and that means that it has a lot of fair claim to both time and energy. (I thought being a grad student was bad about that, but then I was only beholden to myself, not to people paying a paycheck.) I also have a wife, and my relationship with her is my top earthly concern. Throw those together with health issues and some aggressive goals to try and advance my writing career, and I'm realizing that I'm burning myself out pretty quickly.

How do y'all manage it? I'm serious about this writing thing, and I hope to be doing it full-time some day. (Yes, I will sell my artistic soul on the commercial market if I can make enough bucks to live on. Someday.) But it is not in my nature to slack off at my regular job, and I certainly cannot let my relationship with Rose become less important to me.

And yet I feel like I need to address these things in a different way or I'm going to totaly crash in a couple weeks and be useless to everyone.

So how do y'all do it? How do you manage your time, your priorities, your life's needs?

.Nevets.

Writing Persona - Another Character?

All---

I've been absent pretty much for a couple days now. Friday was my dad's retirement dinner and then a late show of Star Trek. Both were much better than I had anticipated. Saturday was Rose's birthday. Woohoo! And today was Mother's Day. Good stuff. No blogging, though, and no real writing until I through the final 600 words into a short story called, "Vengeance and the Offending Page," which I hope to have prepped for submission Monday or Tuesday.

I still managed to get a couple of flashy fiction pieces written. I like this one. It feels pretty Utena to me. This one is mostly a gag piece. But it does lead into my topic for today...

I've always been surprised at how I get characterized by my writing. I've been called edgy, macabre, dark, pensive, anxious, all sorts of things like that. In reality, I'm a pretty boring guy who gets along well with just about everyone and avoids conflict like the plague.

Do any of the other writers out there have this experience? Where their writing gives a strong impression of personality to their readers -- and that impression is pretty opposite their true personality?

While I eschew post-modernism as much as I can, I can't help but think of the implications this question has for the notion of the author as the hidden character in the story...

.Nevets.