Opportunities Knocked

It’s been a while since I’ve given good time to writing, but it really is my favorite passion. No matter how many leadership roles I’ve had, no matter how many math classes I’ve taken, no matter how many electives I’ve indulged in–nothing brings me back to myself like writing does. I often compare words to blood, the act of writing itself like bleeding–blood-letting, if you will, that cathartic process of expelling the bad humors while holding onto the good.

This week I’m continuing my series of writing exercises and wrapping up the chapter on what makes a story. The exercise is simple: Look back at opportunities not taken. I guess often we look at the choices we’ve made that lead somewhere, but forget the choices that did the opposite–those choices that led nowhere. In stories, however, it’s those choices that make something happen that we follow to the end. If we can identify those choices that cause the story to stop, we can focus on writing about those choices that take us places.

Once Upon a Time

There’s such a thing as irony, and when we lack it, we’re anemic (and that’s a thing called paronomasia, or punning, or wordplay). But no matter what we call it, what’s at the heart of my personal irony today is the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I have never seen it. But I have read parts of it, and I have read parts about it.

It began the second or third day of my Creative Writing class. We were covering screenplays and we were reading an example, and this was the movie my teacher decided to bring in. We read the opening of the script. We watched a couple clips on YouTube. We–rather, the people who had seen it–talked a bit about it. And then I ran to the library, checked the stock, and saw we didn’t have it. Ergo, I did not watch it.

Where’s the irony, you say? Here it comes, wait for it….

All the Beautiful People

Today things finally felt like they’re back to usual.

This made me happy. It was only a few moments after leaving my religion class that I came to my statistics classroom and as I walked toward my seat and saw familiar faces and one of my best friends I thought to myself, It’s good to be back in my old seat. To be honest, after two weeks of not being in class, I was afraid I might not have a seat to return to. I’ve witnessed it happen plenty of times before: Someone stops showing up to class and after an absence or two, someone else moves forward into the more favorable seat. It happened to half the class in chemistry. It happened with the boy I liked in precalculus. And we had worked together during class, so his loss was especially poignant.

Later in the day I felt something unusual. Something not just beyond two standard deviations from the mean, but something uncanny, something I haven’t felt in a long time, something that changes how we see the world and in fact changes the very world we see itself. And as I walked into the cafeteria, an overwhelming sense of gratitude filled me from head to toe as I realized what it was that I felt and I said, Today, today I know what I’m thankful for.

I am thankful for temperance.

Something About Driving: Stuck in Traffic

Time passed. I had every intent to write “Something About Driving” and finish it, but instead I got carried away, In Amarantis Sedicia, and never came back to it. Like that piece of creative nonfiction I mentioned, I wrote it, but then left it. Except here the story got clogged even before I got that far, coagulated in my throat and stopped moving.

At least frogs can hop out, you know? Clots just sit there till they kill you when you least expect it.

Something About Driving: Ignition

I’m in the car. Somewhere between South Carolina and Alabama it strikes me that I am not alone. Yes, this whole time I have been surrounded by four friends and coworkers and teachers (each possessing a varied combination of the above) that I feel I know well, but apparently don’t know as well as I could imagine I do. Here they are, the youngest among them exactly twice my age, and they’re identifying in me the things I’ve failed to admit to myself for years.

If I Could Tell the World Just One Thing

Ten years ago I was twelve. It was a Tuesday. We were already up, had gone about the day as usual. We were turning on the TV to watch MacGyver like we did every day. My mom was taking a shower before we had to leave. The only problem was, all the TV channels were interrupted by a live newscast each showing the same thing.

The scene was this: Two towers, a billowing cloud of smoke from the second.

My brother told me to go tell our mom, so I ran down the hall, banged on the bathroom door, and shouted the news to her. I didn’t know what it all meant, though: I was twelve, what did I know of World Trade Centers and terrorist attacks? To me a plane had flown into a building. It was tragic, maybe in those first few moments scary and exciting, but what did it mean to me–a twelve-year-old boy a thousand miles away?

The Scenic Route

Once in my lifetime I attempted screenwriting, but it was no pleasure of mine. I tolerated it. I might have minimally enjoyed it. But I did not love it and I vowed never to force myself to do it again.

Yet it’s the nature of my personal vows and the irony of the universe that if I say “never,” it returns “how soon.” So can you guess what the first topic is in my creative writing class. Yep, screenwriting.

Since I am now obligated to write a screenplay, if not many of them, I am determined to not only do it well, but to enjoy it marginally, and heaven forbid, maybe even love it! Since the formatting and style of screenwriting and fiction are so drastically different (a divide that I believe hinders my ability to love it more wholly), I’m going to adapt various scenes from my stories to the screen as a way of bringing together what I love with something I would like to love more.

It is as in learning: To master anything, you must associate it with something that you already know.

The Antithesis of Fear

The illusion of fear cannot be broken because fear is not an illusion. In fact, I feel, fear is the one true emotion that we can all experience without delusion. Science, I read once, has suggested that depressed people have a clearer, more realistic view of the world we live in; that happiness itself is not merely an emotion, but a mask, a lens that obscures the truth existing around us and lets us soften the corners of these sharp edges in our minds.

When we feel an absence of fear, it is only the alleviation of that fear that we are experiencing. When we feel fearless, we have not known bravery or courage, but have not yet seen a reason to challenge ourselves, to cause that fear plagued upon us each differently to rear its head and demand our attention.

But perhaps there is an antithesis to all of this. Perhaps fear, as the other end of an extreme spectrum, is not itself the only true emotion, but the only one within which our human minds can identify.

Philosophies of the Wolf

Once upon a time I met a man, a most spectacular specimen, with a mind as quicksilver and sharp as anybody’s, and we got to talking about philosophy, about truth and belief, what is real and what is merely perception. It was a provocative conversation to all extents of the imagination, and I must admit, perhaps foolishly in so public a forum as this, that the truest way to my heart is kindness and depth, and let me tell you, this man had both.

Then again, such sincerity is hard to feign, so perhaps it’s not so foolishly shared here anyways.

Regardless, such a deep conversation got me thinking, what is my personal philosophy? Do I even have one? And after some consideration, or years of consideration if you’d rather go back to when I first began to formulate the postulates of my intensities, I decided I do have a personal requiem of philosophies that I stand by. They are tenets and towers, facsimiles of faith and fiction, the philosophy of the wolf himself.

Two for One and One for Five

Or, Observations; or, Character Profiles of the Rabbinical Kind

This week’s lesson is not a lesson at all. This week’s lesson is a list; and not a list like last summer’s three precepts, pillars, or principles, but a list of names: five students, in fact. It teaches nothing, nothing at all. It is merely a forward to next week.

2.10 Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Zakkai had five disciples, namely:

Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Ḥananiah, Rabbi Yose Ha-Kohen, Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel, Rabbi Elazar ben Arakh.

Not very much to work with, is it? I pondered for a moment, I could discuss names, but that’d be a topic teaching little and lasting less, so I thought, if the point is to study, why not go until we have something to study? That is, this week, I’m doing TWO teachings! So let’s carry on, shall we?

2.11 This is how he characterized their merits:

Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus: a plastered well that never loses a drop;
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Ḥananiah: happy the one who gave him birth;
Rabbi Yose Ha-Kohen: a saintly person;
Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel: a pious person;
Rabbi Elazar ben Arakh: an ever-flowing fountain.