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05/25/2008
Running Away with the Circus...
Well, one more weekend is biting the dust as bedtime approaches, and it's back to work tomorrow. These past couple of weeks have been quite intense at work, and as a result, I've been experiencing some strange form of creative whiplash this weekend. Actually, now would be a good time to take a week of holiday, to continue my little explosion of "other-than-work"-ness ideas that I got going in the mere two days of the weekend.
It all began with a song that got stuck in my head not too long ago. I heard it on the radio on the station that doesn't announce what the songs are, so I got up out of bed after hearing it and wrote a couple of (hopefully) key lyrics on my white board so that I could google it later and find out what song that was. I had the words "balame per te" on my whiteboard for a couple of weeks and today I decided to google them, which resulted in more or less nothing useful. Then it hit me that I have heard this song before, and somewhere out of my subconscious popped the words "Cirque du Soleil". Eventually I just went to find all Cirque du Soleil lyrics and looked for a song that might be a good candidate. Sure enough, there it was: "Ballare" was the name of the song that had been stuck in my head. I wanted to buy it on iTunes, but before I did, I thought I would see if I could find the song on YouTube so I could listen to the whole thing, rather than the 30-second clip they give on iTunes.
As it turns out, on YouTube, you can see the spectacular aerial pas de deux which goes with this song, from the show Dralion. This is the song I had in mind, but when I saw the pas de deux, my jaw was pretty much in my lap the whole time. I thought about how incredibly cool it would be to be part of something so spectacular, and next thing I knew, I was looking up how people get hired into the Cirque du Soleil.
Now of course, I wouldn't ever try auditioning as these guys for a couple of key reasons:
- Fear of heights, falling, and in general, having only the grip of two sweaty hands standing between me and certain death (or at least maiming) on a stage 60 feet below
- Lack of physical aptitude. I've never EVER been able to do the splits, have never had much upper body strength, and last time I did a somersault in the air, it was over the handlebars of a bike and ended in a very ungraceful thud into the gravel.
BUT, say I practiced cello 5 hours a day for the next God-knows-how-long, maybe I could audition as a musician, and wouldn't that be cool! Except for the fact that I don't have 5 minutes a day to practice (details, details), what a great plan! Or, better yet, take my singing out of the shower and audition as a singer. Oh, the drama! And herein was born the plan to run away with the Cirque du Soleil.
Now of course, this is a completely unsensible plan, but how cool to dream of something exciting, where I didn't need 40 pages of documentation to make even the slightest change to something... ah, the freedom!
So that was the culmination of a weekend which otherwise involved the following:
- Discovery that the tree in our front yard which I thought was an ash tree is actually a honey locust. Who knew there was a tree and an insect with the same name?
- Researched the types of seaweed that would have been available to the characters in my novel, and discovered that seaweed can be burned and the resulting "kelp" can be used in glassmaking - a convenient tidbit of information which plays right into my plot.
- Trying to choose a water fountain feature for my parents' backyard. I think we'll just have to come to terms with the fact that we'll never agree, and I'll just let my parents decide what they're going to put in there.
- Looked into whether able-bodied people are able to join a wheelchair basketball team. This was a lark almost as big as the Cirque du Soleil thing, since as I mentioned I'm not strong in the upper body, and I suck royally at basketball on my own two feet; a wheelchair won't help things.
- Went for a big long walk on Saturday night which I thought to myself, I should try to work up to running this sometime. I thought it was my "big achievement" run, but when I mapped it out on MapMyRun.com, it turned out only to be a measly 6K. Wow. I don't know how people routinely run 10K or more. The farthest I have ever run in my entire life is 4K, and I remember thinking I was about to die. But something in the back of my mind is telling me I should get into the habit of running. All I have to do is actually DO it.
- Worked on the plot of my 3 Day Novel for 2008. Hopefully this will work out!
Anyway, that's what happens when my imagination gets too much time to run wild - I end up dreaming up all sorts of crazy things, and next thing you know, I'm trying to figure out how to go from being a mechanical engineer to a circus musician. Yikes! Maybe it's a good thing tomorrow is a work day.
23:12 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
05/10/2008
Literary Books and the Wandering Mind
I'm about 50 pages into Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which has been in my to-read pile for at least a year now. It's one of the books that looks interesting in terms of the overall concept of the story. In general, I'm not a fan of literary novels, nor am I a fan of Canadian Literary novels. So far, this is the only book of Atwood's that I've even been remotely interested in reading.
The Handmaid's Tale, like many literary novels, is so far kind of devoid of plot. The 50 pages have been describing routine life in the Republic of Gilead and in this one Handmaid's life. It's an eye-opening environment worth describing, but the whole thing is spent describing this environment and mundane daily life rather than actually doing something. So far the plot consists of this handmaid going shopping for eggs and meat, looking around her room, and walking down the street. I hope something interesting happens soon!
In these 50 pages though, I've come to realize what it is I don't really like about literary novels. They try to make too much of my (the reader's) thought process explicit. We all know about bad novels with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, or the ones that treat the reader like an idiot by explaining the dead obvious. These are the ones containing passages like, "Kayla was backed into a corner by the machete-wielding madman, who smiled like the cheshire cat beneath his black mask. She shook like a leaf and screamed. She was really really scared." Obviously (or, Hopefully) novels like this will never sit on the bookshelf of timeless classics. To me, many literary novels are a less obvious but equally potent version of this.
As I read The Handmaid's Tale, I realize that Margaret Atwood can get away with something pretty plotless so far because she's allowing us into the Handmaid's mind, and the Handmaid is toying with random observations, snippets of thought, and out-of-the-blue comparisons in her mind. For example, the Handmaid walks past a wall where there are bodies on display, hanged. The Handmaid comments about the unoccupied hooks on the wall, "The hooks look like appliances for the armless. Or steel question marks, upside-down and sideways." What's good about the whole passage where the Handmaid is observing the bodies on the wall is that it really shows how emotionless her reaction to them is. She observes how things look and makes visual connections only; she represses emotional connections. But the whole novel is like this; making random connections. This is often how my own mind operates too: I'll see or hear something, and make weird connections to other things in my mind, unusual comparisons, etc. My problem with literary novels, then, is that the author is trying to do this, and my mind would normally also be doing this, so they interfere with each other. I guess it's kind of like doing chest compressions on someone who is already living; you can interfere with the heart's natural function. When I read a novel that is constantly making the connections my wandering mind normally would, it interferes with the smooth running of my mind and it gets irritating.
I suppose those people who are not bothered by this problem, and who love this sort of literature, fall into one of two categories:
1. They can focus so intently on the novel that they can reign in the wandering mind.
2. They just don't make any connections on their own; they have to wait for authors to do it for them.
Anyway, I'm going to try to make it through The Handmaid's Tale because I am fascinated by the context, even though my semi-conscious "back of mind" is having a rough go of things!
10:53 Posted in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this