Yes I’m a nerd

List

GraceLeave a comment

a series of names or other items written or printed together in a meaningful grouping or sequence so as to constitute a record

I am a very happy writing nerd today.

As part of the Visiting Writers Series at my university, two editors from well-known literary reviews are putting on a week-long, one credit workshop on editing and publishing.  It meets for three hours in the evenings, so I was initially a tad concerned about this loss of such a large chunk of homework time (not to mention dinnertime!).  Still, I thought, when else in my life will I get this kind of opportunity, to spend so much time in a relatively small and intimate group receiving direct feedback and advice from a successful editor and writer?

So I went last night, our first meeting, and we worked with lists.

As evidenced in previous posts, I organize my life several times a day, usually centering around lists.  I list the meals I need to take time to eat, the homework I need to do, the extracurricular projects I need to complete, the friends and family I need to call.  Listing things, for me, is already powerful in that it corrals my thoughts and lends them sequence, categorization, order.

In the workshop, we extended this philosophy to creative nonfiction, producing lists under thematic headings.  We began our sentences with “I remember,” listing memories that may not have come in order but nevertheless hung together coherently by virtue of their status as List.  We scribbled down things we hate, love, or are embarrassed by.  We listed aloud the nuances that distinguish memoir from essay.

Many of us lauded the catharsis of writing this way, of simply letting the thoughts stream out and trusting that the format of List would make them somehow One Thing.  For me, particularly when writing I Remembers, the experience was both aching and freeing.

In one of my other classes, Shakespeare Before 1600, “list” tends to have another definition.  The Bard uses it to mean “wish” or “desire,” as his characters tell one another, “Do what you list.”  Sometimes the lists are even a physical place, referring to the barriers of the tiltyard where noblemen jousted and wore their ladies’ favors on their lances.

These associations bring new depth to our modern understanding of “list.”  To create order out of a jumble of tasks and thoughts, to explain and group discrete ideas, one must take into account one’s own desires, as well as the desires of others.  Occasionally, one must also be aggressive and run at the list head-on, barreling through it and emerging victorious with a series of unhorsed opponents lying prone on the ground.  (I speak metaphorically of course, although if anyone knows how to joust, please let me know in the comments because that is awesome.)  We “list” things to discover “what we list” and what is worth “going to the lists” for.

Choose and/or Combine:

Sequence.

Wish.

Combat.

Definitive

GraceLeave a comment
  1. most reliable or complete, as of a text, author, criticism, study, or the like
  2. having its fixed and final form

I’ve been noticing this word a lot lately, particularly on Pinterest and Buzzfeed.  It seems like nearly every post involves a “definitive” ranking or roll call of some pop culture reference.  But by definition, every list cannot be definitive.  There are too many other people waiting in the wings of the Internet to rank the Pretty Little Liars’ season 1-infinity outfits, or the best animated Disney films (ALL OF THEM) or the things all 90s kids remember.

Some of these lists I might be willing to believe, considering the source.  Oh My Disney, for instance, might have a reasonable claim on being the “most reliable” place to find a list of the Disney princes’ hairstyles.  But they fail the second definition in that these lists, however authoritative the source, will never be in their “fixed and final form.”  Just try Googling “definitive ranking of” and finish the phrase with your own favorite fandom/fruit/fish family.  See how many results turn up.

definitive

124,000 search results in 0.36 seconds.  Nice work, Google.  But do these really deserve the title “definitive?”  Most can probably be dismissed out of hand because of their purely opinionated basis, with little or no authority to back them up, and the rest – well, as long as someone else comes out with their own “Definitive Ranking” next week, none of these will ever be the “final and fixed form” of the list.

Which begs the question, why are we so fond of this word on the Internet?  If the fluidity of our medium means that in the next hour someone else with more authority can come along and write their own post about the subject, why do we grasp at the title of “definitive” for ourselves?  The very place we publish these things undermines our credibility.

I tried to think of places I use or hear this word in my everyday life.  I realized that I, too, want to create something “most reliable and complete,” hopefully in a “final and fixed form.”  For several years, I’ve told anyone who would listen that I want to write the definitive work on the Arabian Nights.  That obsession is worthy of its own post(s), but now that I think about it…can I really claim for myself that my eventual tome will be the definitive work?  Or is it something that others will have to decide about my work later?

How does one dare claim this word?  It’s just daunting.  And yet, I applaud those who put forth their opinions and personal research with this brave word attached – as repetitive as it is to see so many supposedly definitive lists on Pinterest.

A Day Off

GraceLeave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about intentionality lately, about how much control I have over the way my life is going right now, when it’s a good thing to hold onto those decisions and when my grip is getting a little too white-knuckled. For the past few semesters I’ve had plenty of say in how my schedule and general way of life is set up, but sometimes that level of ostensible control results in high hopes that are inevitably dashed when circumstances arise in which I can’t control what happens.

The flip side of this is that I tend to be far more intentional about the new tasks and opportunities I take on, rather than making conscious decisions to give myself a break, so I accelerate the pace at which I hurtle through life when I should probably be putting on the brakes.

For instance, when a Three Day Weekend such as this one rolls around, and I’m a little under the weather, I still can’t help but spend the day making a list of all the things I need to get done. I may be curled up on the couch under a comfy blanket with Scrubs playing on Hulu, but I’m also scribbling down every single tiny chore/assignment/personal goal for the weekend in 15-minute increments and religiously checking all three of my email accounts and color coding my schedule for the next week and…

I can’t seem to give myself permission to slow down, even for one day. I feel like I have to make up for the fact that I slept in this morning so my afternoon and evening had better set world records for productivity – even though I have Monday off and this was only the first week of classes so I don’t actually have insane amounts of work to do (yet).

Part of this discomfort with taking time off is probably linked to the similar discomfort I feel whenever I spend much time off-screen. You know what I mean; even when I don’t have anything pressing to do, my go-to entertainment is usually mindlessly scrolling through Tumblr or checking web series Twitter updates on my phone, and trying to step away from the screen once in a while is surprisingly difficult.

I’ve made small steps. I used to turn on my laptop to go on Pandora while I was getting ready in the morning, but I kept checking emails or opening other new tabs between putting on jeans and putting on a shirt, and then again between eyeshadow and mascara. Now when I feel like listening to music, I turn on my iPod and find that I’m ready a lot sooner and feel less scattered in the morning.

Of course, then I go out to the kitchen and check my email (all three of them) over breakfast. But hey, baby steps, right?

For now, I’m going over to a friend’s house and giving myself the evening off. The To Do List of Doom can wait.

Emphasis

GraceLeave a comment

Emphasis: special stress laid upon, or importance attached to, anything

I like to overthink single words sometimes, particularly when one keeps following me around in my everyday life. As the new semester gets underway and I introduce myself over and over in all my new classes, I find myself confronting the word “emphasis.” It crops up as professors describe what we will emphasize this semester in our coursework, in the rules they would like to emphasize most, in my own descriptions of myself as I say I am an English major with an emphasis in creative writing.

I’ve often wondered why there is no Creative Writing major, why it must remain a subset of English. We can’t simply major in English; the university requires us to eventually choose one of four emphases. For all intents and purposes, when choosing classes or giving someone the short answer to what we study, we are in fact Creative Writing, Rhetoric, English Education, or Literary Studies Majors. But the language we use (and of course language is vital to us English Emphases Majors) divides us based on which part of English studies we choose as our focus. The language surrounding these courses of study is actually a bit of a mouthful (just imagine capitalizing all that on my diploma: English With an Emphasis in Creative Writing) but they’ve never bothered to change it.

My professors, for their part, have “just wanted to emphasize” so many stipulations and contexts and phrasings that they undermine the weight they desire to lend those things. Not everything can actually be that important; emphasizing every other thing, particularly when three other professors are doing the same thing in all my other introductory lectures, actually ends up losing meaning.

The word even keeps popping up in conversations with my friends about grad school and all the importance placed on the prestige of what we do after graduation. With all this Capital-Letters-Implied EMPHASIS on Advanced Degrees and Networking and Impressive Job Offers and Financial Success, anything less than that is dramatically disappointing…but the funny thing is, I get the feeling that actually attaining All! The! Things! would simply be meeting expectations. We’re expected to excel. We’re expected to outshine. So when we do, these accomplishments that had so much “emphasis” are suddenly just par for the course. Rather like the word itself, they have lost their original weight.

Like many overused words, then, I suppose I should be more intentional about using emphasis in my own life.  As the definition states, emphasis should be special, particular, discerning – not just tossed about willy-nilly.

On Ordering Books for Next Semester

Aside GraceLeave a comment

I despise ordering books.

I have requested that my password for my campus bookstore account be reset no less than five times, but has the email shown up yet? Nope. So here I sit, with a cart full of books that will probably be gone by the time I can finally sign in to pay for them.

Now, I realize that compared to my engineering and accounting friends, I, the English major, have it pretty easy (read, cheap). My textbooks, which tend to run along the lines of writing handbooks, are more like guidelines than actual requirements, not to mention most of the novels I read for class can be found at Half Price Books even cheaper than renting from the campus bookstore.

However.

It never seems to fail that I forget to order books until only a few days before the new semester, and that means that the rental and used book options are more limited, increasing the price and causing me extra stress when something inevitably goes wrong with the website. The whole process is just annoying, and I would so much rather spend money on the books I truly want to read.

How do you cope with ordering required materials, whether for school or work?

New Year – Now What?

GraceLeave a comment

Have you ever noticed how the end of an old year seems like the perfect excuse to let good habits slide, because in a week or so you’re going to start new ones anyway? Maybe that’s just me. So I’ve been thinking about past resolutions I’ve managed to keep and new ones I’d like to try, and I’ve got it divvied up by a few different areas of my life:

1. This blog!

My posts here have been…irregular to say the least.  I’ll have to see what my work and class schedule is like, but my general goal will be to post at least twice during the week and once a weekend.  Fingers crossed I’ll be able to make this blog into a real thing!

2. Health!

The Southern Belle and I were pretty good about keeping up a workout routine this semester…until Dead Week rolled around.  Then we tended to go for Starbucks over the gym.  But I’d like to resurrect that workout routine with both cardio and strength training, as well as continuing to avoid packaged dinners.  I should probably also take my boyfriend’s advice and drink more water.  And eat more veggies.  You know.  General healthy eating.  But also not beating myself up over occasional slip-ups.

3. Communicating!

I seriously need to keep in better touch with my family.  And friends from high school.  I’m also filing more consistent journal writing under this, because I need to be better about communicating with myself and articulating what I’m feeling.  Along this same vein, I want to be better about keeping myself informed on what’s going on in the world, because for most of 2014 I seriously had no idea.

4. School!

This is my job right now, but I need to keep it balanced and give schoolwork the value it deserves, no more and no less.  Part of this is my resolution not to do homework at home.  Instead I’ll be utilizing the office I get a key to because I’m a managing intern for my school’s online journal (yay, power!).  I’ll also try not to rely on my tutoring shifts as time to get homework done – as nice as it is to get paid to do homework, it’s not a good habit to rely on that opportunity and then get annoyed with my students when I have to, y’know, actually do my job.

5. Fun!

I want to try new things.  I actually promised my boyfriend I would even *gulp* go skiing with him.  This semester I’ve realized that I got into a habit of writing off certain activities or aspects of life just because it’s easier to define myself that way.  For example, I tend to laugh about the idea of me going skiing because I’ve just automatically said that I hated it for so long.  I know that if I were to agree to try it, people would make a big deal out of it, so I don’t admit that actually I might be willing to try it again.

What are you trying to improve on in 2015 (or are you just staying your wonderful self)?

It’s Beginning to Sound a Lot Like Christmas

Aside GraceLeave a comment

I sat in Starbucks yesterday working on an essay and found myself grinning like an idiot when John Denver and the Muppets came on singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Singing along under my breath to Miss Piggy’s “BA DUM BUM BUM” earned some alarmed looks from the students around me, but I didn’t really care. Christmas music makes me so happy. Even when I’m stuck at school until only a week before Christmas (yay finals!) and it feels like I’m missing out on all the anticipation at home that makes the season so wonderful, I can dance around in my kitchen to Dan Fogelburg and sing along to Idina Menzel in my room and it feels something like the magical season I remember from being a kid. We only haul out these CDs once a year, but I never fail to remember every single word. They’re carved deep into my memory, an accessible form of time travel as this thing called growing up slowly seems to steal some of the magic left over from childhood.

Making a List and Checking It a Lot

Grace1 Comment

This couldn’t be happening. It was always right here. I put it in my backpack every single morning – how could I possibly have forgotten?

But my beautiful, organized, color-coded, checklist-sporting planner was conspicuously absent from the set of binders and notebooks in my backpack. An empty pocket where my life should be.

This may sound a bit overdramatic, but it wasn’t until I had to spend the day without my planner that I realized how much I use it. It’s not so much the actual planning – I can remember assignments pretty well, and there’s always the syllabus if something slips my mind – but the security blanket part of it. You see, I love to make lists. Lists of chores, lists of assignments, lists of miscellaneous emails that need to be sent, lists of time slots in which to accomplish each of these separate, color-coded sets of things. It has become my habit to rewrite, reorganize, and otherwise revamp any and all of these lists whenever I’m bored, nervous, stressed, or overwhelmed (oh look, there’s two lists in this sentence alone!) or at intervals throughout the day. It’s how I convince myself that I have my life together. My planner gives me the proverbial handle on things. When I flip through and see the scribbled beauty of its check marks and highlights, it both soothes and empowers me, like the montage of Elle Woods buckling down and kicking ass at school while “Watch Me Shine” plays in the background. (I may or may not also watch that montage whenever I need some quick motivation.)

So at first, I felt adrift without my planner there to guide me. I reached for it at all the usual times. When Spanish class got boring, I made do with scribbling funny nicknames on my boyfriend’s practice test, to which he retaliated by adding “Her Majesty” to my own name. When I had to go last for a presentation, I made mental notes and adjustments to my prepared talk and asked a few questions of the two people who had gone before me. Now, as I sit at work waiting for people to walk in (I’m on receptionist duty this hour), I’m working on another post for this poor, neglected blog.

Generally, when life is a bit too much, seeing it all written down and prioritized helps me stave off anxiety and further stress – as I said before, a security blanket. But maybe, just maybe, I need to put the planner down every once in a while. I did survive a whole day without it and I didn’t go too crazy. Besides, what good is there in being organized if I’m not really present?

The Many Layers of Lizzie Bennet

GraceLeave a comment

Yesterday I received my very own copy of The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet. And today I finished reading it. All 377 pages of it.

I have loved the Lizzie Bennet Diaries ever since my freshman year of college (NOTE: If you have not watched them, stop reading right now, go to YouTube, and watch them. All of them. Right now.), and have only grown to love them more as I rewatched them over and over again (occasionally I find myself just binge-watching all 100 episodes plus the related secondary arcs in a matter of 48 hours. Much like reading the book. But I digress). At first I simply enjoyed watching the creativity of updating Jane Austen’s classic novel and translating it into modern media. Then, on the second or third go-round, I started to think about the online community Lizzie was creating. So I started scrolling through the comments section below the videos, reading the conversations people were having, the reactions. I even commented a few times.

I was absurdly proud when my comment became the top one on Episode 18.

Then came the watch-through at the beginning of my junior year of college, right when all the undergrad stuff starts to give way to the “better plan something for after graduation in two years” pressure. Even though Lizzie’s story takes place in grad school, the connection between her fear of departing the Bubble of Academia and mine had strengthened. I was staring down similar questions of what I wanted to do with my life, battling similar tendencies toward prejudice, struggling with a similar workload.

Reading the book has added another layer to my experience of the LBD as a whole. Besides adding new twists to the plotlines and revealing specific details in settings we never saw on camera, the book even better translated Lizzie’s inner turmoil, not only over her sister’s love life, but over what to put online, what content she wanted to generate, what she wanted to contribute to the world.

And damn. As much as she procrastinated some of those decisions, girl got stuff done.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been…stuck.  I might elaborate a bit in future posts, but for now suffice it to say that I was sorely lacking in motivation to even go to class, let alone answer my professors’ questions about whether or not I’m considering grad school or what internships I’m pursuing for this summer.  All I ever wanted to say to them was, “I don’t even have a complete resume right now.  Leave me alone.”

As sappy as it might sound, reading about Lizzie Bennet’s success in pursuing what she loved, both familial and career-wise, helped jolt me at least a few inches back toward reality.  I’m going to make the most of this vicariously earned productivity – and not just by making blog posts.  Hopefully.

Honestly, that’s what amazes me about multimedia storytelling these days.  I adore books; they were the background to my childhood, and will always hold a special place in my heart.  But there’s a big difference between reading something and sitting down a week later around a cheese plate in someone’s family room to talk for a few hours, and being able to contribute to an immediate and growing shared forum. It’s fascinating to watch the communities that spring up around projects like LBD and Vlogbrothers.  Even SnarkSquad, the blog that got me re-interested in blogging and online content, has its own little band of followers.

Membership in such communities around multimedia projects extends well past mere Internet fame; because the narrative originates in a platform that allows immediate sharing of reactions to the content, a viewer also becomes a contributor in real time.  Passivity becomes a choice rather than a fact of the medium.

And discussion of the content is no longer confined to whoever else is in the living room while you control the remote.  Worldwide critical discussions take place every day around every type of narrative possible.  It’s beautiful and intriguing to watch as the swirling conversations on Tumblr connect with the YouTube comments which intertwine with the Facebook and Twitter threads.  We get to watch and read and listen to these amazing creative things – and then we get to join in.

Over here in my own little narratively nerdy corner of the Internet, I’ll be trying not to take that for granted.

Selecting a Library For Optimal Productivity

GraceLeave a comment

I have learned that I cannot do homework at home.

It’s just too hard to focus in a place that I associate with relaxation and hours of catching up on Hulu Plus. And I don’t want my apartment to become a place that I solely associate with homework, because then the stress and anxiety will just follow me home. So I decided to do the typical student thing and go to the library.

But I don’t like my on-campus library – half the shelves are empty, and the study carrels are carved up with generations of initials and crude drawings of genitals, and someone’s cell phone inevitably goes off and someone else is always laughing and it just doesn’t feel like a library. The other campus library, for engineering and science majors, though not actually exclusive to those areas of study, is little better.

The Honors library, on the other hand, is just quiet enough, with cozy window seats and cushiony armchairs and soft lighting. But it’s also incredibly small, and depending on the number of strangers in there, it can feel a bit like you’ve intruded on someone else’s class, which makes it difficult if you want to study with a friend. We can’t all have study partners like Elle Woods when she’s cramming for her LSATs.

My third and final option, then, was the public library downtown. This required driving, which was just as well since I left my laptop at home and would have had to drive home and back anyway. Off I went, laptop in tow, and I settled into a comfy chair in a back corner of the library surrounded by windows and the pleasantly gray day outside and I read my homework and made my discussion post and worked on my resume and just like that I had done everything I needed to do except go shopping.

Lesson? Libraries are magic.