 I love So You Think You Can Dance, though I never watched an entire season of the show. That's because my favorite part is the selections. American Idol got famous for discouraging people for doing things they are bad at. So You Think You Can Dance is the exact opposite, encouraging people to continue doing what they find joy in. The cast is so passionate about dance that, they simply love to see people enjoying it.
This is awesome logic with one convent. If you find joy doing bad things like rape, robbery, murder and taking over the world, then you absolutely should NOT continue. Now, my passion is writing. I love, love, love do it. But perhaps your passion is making art out of dryer lint. Perhaps you love to fling pumpkins or race lawnmowers. You do not have to be good or great or anything but you to find joy. What about you? What things do you love to do? Do your friends and family give you a Simon Sermon or are they more akin to the So You Think You Can Dance panel? Status currenlty in limbo.
White Cat acquired Cover of Darkness and is currently accepting submissions but haven't sent anything to the magazines existing authors what the status of their work is. I've sent two queries and am waiting to hear back. I'm actually a pretty patient author about these things, but writers can get lost in transitions. It happens. Now, Doubtful Doug, the little voice in my head that loves to be pessimistic says I won't know for certain until the issue is published without my story in it. That's what I'm fretting over today.  Once upon a time, in the exotic land of Nashville-- you could be from Belize or New York-- there lived a ninety-seven headed turtle.
Each head said, "I have a good idea." Sometimes this turned out to be true and sometimes it didn't, but most of the time it was hard to tell. So, all the heads took turns letting each other lead. Mostly, the turtle just wanted ice cream from Baskin Robins. All turtles love ice-cream but turtles with ninety-seven heads are especially fond of it. True fact. And so the turtle made a little progress towards Baskins, when one of the heads said, "I have a great idea! Lets got to Taco Bell." "I want to go fishing," another said. (Which makes much more sense than tacos as far as turtles are concerned.) And so the turtle went a little this way and a little that way, often heading in the vicinity of its goal but never quite getting there. At last the turtle stumbled upon a truly good idea and then another, but it was already tired from being pulled in so many different directions. It felt overwhelmed but it refused to give up on any of the directions it wanted to go and thus it spent a lifetime in Nowhere, always just outside of Somewhere. I know exactly how this applies to me. How does this apply to you?  I've written at least once how everything is everything. I was reminded of this again tonight as I finished out a productive day with a spider solitaire.
Four suits spider solitary is tough to beat, but the deck was in my favor. I turned over all the cards on the first deal and as the computer dealt each subsequent hand, the cards kept falling in my favor. And I thought to myself, be careful how you play your hand. Even when all the cards are in your favor, you can still lose. Then I thought about how things really are going good with with the writing. Just last week I went to an in person critique group with a fresh off the press story, expecting... I don't know, but certainly not what I got. There were about ten writers at the meeting and the only element they critiqued was the title. It was a pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming moment. Either that or it was one hell of a hallucination. But everything is everything and so a before-bed game of solitaire reminded me of a thing an aspiring writer should never forgot: don't count the game one until your last cared is played. In other words, keep your triumphs in perspective and push yourself to always do better. The elephant gag is my favorite. Okay, the elephant and the door gag are tied for favorite. What's yours?
 A bell curve is a statistical form of measurement. Take anything, eye color, ability to play baseball, how many people eat cheese on Tuesday and you can make a bell curve. Take any group of number of people and the majority of those people will be "same as others" regardless of what you're comparing. This is how statisticians measure normal. When I first learned about the bell curve I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to make a bell, not a bell. Unless your sample of people is two or less, it's pretty impossible. So today I took a statistical measure of one person. The result looks like this: normal
 Training an intern for GGP. It didn't actually look like this, but man life would be so much better if it did.  Hint: my work does not involve levitation. It does involve staring at a computer screen and typing, but that seemed rather redundant since that's what you are doing right now.  An friends came from out of town so I did weird stuff with them including kissing an Elvis statue.  I ate 7 lunches  I didn't eat 7 breakfasts.  I did eat 10 dinners. (On the days you skip breakfast you can have a second dinner. It's a rule.)  This is what happened to the intern who didn't do any of the work we agreed upon. (And wasted my time getting trained.) I could have used those three hours to watch reruns of Mash or Gilligan's Island! * No interns were harmed in the making of this post. That happened after.  I read a lot and wrote a lot and did tons of stuff on the computer. (No. It was not porn. Get your mind out of the gutter. I reserve that for Sunday mornings. Sheesh.) * Portions of this blog post are entirely untrue.
** Portions of this blog post are entirely true. |
Mariel R. is an ESL teacher, horse trainer, writer, editor, sporadic blogger, and lover of beer. She lives in South Korea with two house cats, three horses, a German Shepherd and three barn cats . 
Bear (Gom in Korean) then (above) now (below)
Geumbi (Goldy in English) R.I.P February, 23, 2018
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