Where is the solution?

Alpha tweeted this fable about "the good Christian girl". It sounds eerily familiar, especially the voices of those knowing ones.

To quote Mr TDH: "There must be a better way. Right now it's all hit-and-miss." His contention is that the church isn't very helpful, and largely leaves it to chance: if you're lucky, you meet someone, he likes you, you like him, you date, you get married. If you're unlucky, you don't meet anyone; or you meet someone, you like him, he doesn't like you, and nothing comes of it.

I don't know how the church could help in this area, though, and neither does Mr TDH. Nobody seems to have the answers. All the "answers" given by those knowing ones are the wrong answers. I know, because I've heard a lot of them!

Practising (heroic) self-restraint.

*grits teeth*

I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate.
I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate.
I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate.
I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate.
I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate.
I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate.
I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate.
I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate.
I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate. I will not retaliate.

Desktop wallpaper

Can't think of anything to write, so decided to show my desktop wallpaper :p

Current work desktop:


Previous work desktop (Oct 2008):


Previous home desktop (right now it's blank, I just reformatted the PC):


I like flowers a lot. You'd never have suspected, right? :p

Behind every great man...

Patched up one of the holes in my literary education by reading James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small this afternoon. Yes, yes, I know. It was indeed a grave oversight. But it's fixed now.

My writing has been deteriorating, I can feel it; when I mentioned this to my immediate boss, he said that's because I've been reading too many student scripts. I can well believe it. The other day I was grading essays on the topic of arranged marriages, and caught myself wondering if there is an i in arranged... as in, "arrainged". Horrors!

My boss further said that the only way to remedy that is to read more. So, being an obedient employee -- *cough, cough* -- I'm taking his advice.
 
 
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For some reason I got interested in Herriot's wife. In the book, he says they spent part of their honeymoon going around farms and testing herds of cows for tuberculosis, so I thought, "Man, this woman sounds like one of a kind. I can't imagine any other woman taking that sort of thing very calmly!" Imagine not turning a hair when your husband has to spend part of your honeymoon working, and you have to follow him into barns and fields with splotches of cow poop, to help him take notes as he does that work!

I wondered how much of the book was autobiographical, so I looked it up. Apparently that really was what happened! Not only that, I discovered that his wife had an important role to play in his success as an author because it was she who'd encouraged him to write his first book. Wikipedia says he'd always wanted to write but couldn't find the time, and he finally started because his wife urged him to do it.

Reminds me of something I read recently in Shaunti Feldhahn's book, For Women Only. Discussing the results of a couple of surveys she conducted among 800 men, she says many men revealed that they secretly feel inadequate, like an impostor; they're trying their best, yet at the same time afraid that people will find out they're merely faking it, that they don't really know what they're doing at all. And she said if a wife provides affirmation for her husband and helps her husband feel like he can safely be himself with her, he'll be able to become all God intends him to be.

Sounds like common sense. Shaunti does delve into more detail about how men would like their wives to respond; I won't go into all that here, but I kept thinking how nobody would ever have heard of James Herriot if his wife had not given him the support and confidence to start writing. After all, it's hard to brave rejection when you're a first-time author sending your manuscript around to agents and publishers. And, considering he had a busy veterinary practice, it must have been hard for him to find the time to write, too. She must have been a pretty extraordinary lady, I think.

On waiting

Maura Kelly comments on Marcel Proust's work:

His narrator (conveniently named Marcel) can help a reader to re-live the emotional experience of longing in a way that makes it feel deliciously exquisite -- the way it can in childhood (think of the wonderful anticipation you used to feel on a happy Christmas Eve, or even how you would almost burst with the most enjoyable impatience as you waited for those brownies to come out of the oven).
 
By the time we get to adulthood, however, whatever pleasantness we used to associate with waiting often gets subsumed by anxiety: Will he ever, ever call? Will I get the job? Will I ever write -- or sell -- my novel? Because in childhood, we wait for things we know are coming; in adulthood, we don't know if so many of the things we are waiting for will ever come.

And it's true what she says -- not about Proust's writing because I certainly couldn't comment on it, not having read it -- but about waiting: because as an adult, you realise there are so many factors, elements, conditions out of your control. That's why I believe in carpe diem, seizing the day... you change the things you can, because there are are enough things you can't. So instead of sitting there and mourning about what you can't make happen, do something with what you can.

Sounds like...

Lightbulb moment: Conceiving the idea of a website that analyses people's writing and matches their writing style to that of a well-known author.

Genius: Writing the code to execute said idea.

Irony: Margaret Atwood trying the site and discovering she doesn't write like herself. ("Oops," said the guys behind the code. "We'll make sure to train the database with more of her works.")
 
 
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I apparently write like David Foster Wallace, whom I'd never heard of. A Guardian article describes his writing thus: "He wrote long books, complete with reflective and often hilariously self-conscious footnotes, and he wrote long sentences, with the playfulness of a master punctuater and the inventiveness of a genius grammarian."

Well, that doesn't sound so bad, does it? I think that writing analysis website is simply trying to tell me that I'm wordy. The New Yorker comments that Wallace "conjured the world in two-hundred-word sentences... his prose slid forward with a controlled lack of control that mimed thought itself." Michiko Kakutani, writing for The Guardian, was less kind, describing Wallace's novel Infinite Jest as "a self-indulgent book badly in need of editing... clocking in at an unnecessarily long 1096 pages", although she did add that it was "some wonderfully powerful writing". Ouch.

Geekiness

Someone recently suspected me of being a geek in hiding. (Hi, Django! :p) When I mentioned this to Mr TDH, he replied, dead-pan, "Gee, I wonder what could possibly have given them such an idea!"

My former housemate used to call me a closet geek and laugh at the fact that I was geekier than she was... she, an IT graduate who didn't use any of her IT knowledge.

Looking at the diagram below, I think I'll take it as a compliment ;)


image from The Great White Snark