I’ve only done half of my math chapter for the day, and don’t really feel up to doing any more.
I also feel pretty justified in stopping, considering that my head is swimming and I’ve thrown up twice today.
Wish I hadn’t though.
Jun 042012
Jun 022012
After several tries with struggling with the explanation, and one heavy helping talk from my mother, I have completed the chapter in Algebra of Pythagorean Theorum!!!
There’s still a lot of the book left to go, but I will survive. I have plans to carry out, and being incapable of doing algebra is not allowed in the future of these plans.
May 302012
One of the books I’ve read most recently is Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher, and as opposed to Under The Never Sky, I enjoyed it immensely.
Well, I guess “enjoyed” isn’t really the right word for this book. It’s not the type of book that’s meant to be laughed over, or enjoyed as a break from heavier books, because it is heavy.
Thirteen Reasons Why is about a girl who committed suicide, and recorded her thirteen reasons for why she felt like it was the only way she could escape from all the things that hurt her, and is a dual perspective novel from her part, and the part of the boy listening to them.
And it’s a very lonely book, really. It’s powerful, solid writing, with well developed characters, and even a lot of things that I would normally dismiss as “Telly” are actually acceptable because of how it is done.
I’m normally very cold-hearted when it comes to reading books, but I was actually really sad at the end of it. I have known people who felt as alone as Hannah, who were scared that they didn’t have any choices after the things that had happened. None of them committed suicide, they found their ways out, but I’ve seen how the loneliness of the things that other people think of as light-hearted play or minor teasing can actually hurt and scar far more than can be seen.
It was a brilliant book in its brutality, and I just hope that we can work on changing the world so that there are fewer Hannahs pushed away.
May 262012
This week, I read Under The Never Sky by Veronica Rossi.
For such an intriguing and compelling title and premise, I was disappointed. It started strong, with compelling characters, but then started to fall flatter as the story went on.
It’s a tale of a girl named Aria, a child growing up in a haven where she never wanted for anything, and a man named Perry, who has fought his entire life to live in the rapidly growing barrenness of the world. When Aria is thrown out of the haven after the son of a bureaucrat fucks up and burns up a faulty dome and she and he are the only survivors, Perry finds her in the wastelands, while searching for his kidnapped nephew, against all better reasons and his nature, he ends up saving her life.
I was really disappointed in it. Although she began strong, with five characters in the first chapter that could have made a fantastic tale on their own, she killed three of them off, and might as well have killed four for all of the effect that the other survivor has on the plot. She sets up strong characters in the tribe that faces the wastelands, and then only shows one of them who’s an exile anyway, because of inadequately explained tribal laws.
She does decide on an overarching plot that could be really powerful, through Aria wanting to go home to her mother, and Perry wanting to find his nephew, and peeling back the layers of both societies, and then flips around at the climax to reveal that it wasn’t anything like they’d thought, including with zero foreshadowing for the twist (and despite a twist being something the audience didn’t expect, the difference between a twist and a good twist is being able to go back and see the little things that were hinting at it all along), and then letting the whole of their goals fall apart with no visible repercussions on both of them. It’s rather like “Oh, I just had my entire view of my family and culture shattered. Time to go do something else! *dances off into the sunset without a care*” Also, in order to achieve this, instead of showing the fall out, she twists characters that before were reasonably interesting and flawed enough to be human into monsters that are easier to justify killing.
Very disappointing indeed.
It’s twists and plays like that, that remind me of why I write fanfiction, or rather, one of the two reasons. The first one, and the most prevalent one here, is “Why didn’t this twist make sense, and how can I tell the story in a way it does?”. The other one I’ll undoubtedly go into another time, but in this case, had I enjoyed the story enough and still wondered what would have happened if she’d developed along the lines that she first began with, and perhaps I would have ended up with something vastly inferior to the original product, or (in a very, very rare outcome) perhaps superior for taking the time to go back and try it a different way. Most of the time, people who do this don’t have the writing talent to pull it off, and while the ideas are sound, they end up collapsing in on themselves in just the same way as the original story.
I would most likely have the same problem.
Now this is her debut novel, and I will cut her some slack because she has the room to grow and change and find her way in story telling, but it’s definitely something to keep in mind.
So for the first time in a month, I actually went and picked up my Algebra book in the hopes of completing it this summer, now that the spring is mostly gone.
And to my rather big surprise, once I got rid of (most all) of my hang ups, it wasn’t that hard to do the chapter I’d been boycotting.
Most of what it wanted me to do was to write down how to convert exponents and radicals to positives or negatives depending on the problem. This took a little bit of reading and rereading the steps, but it actually made a lot of sense in hindsight.
And then after I was properly shamed by how relatively easy the math turned out to be, I went on a walk with the lovely lady basset hounds.
This, while not as academically productive as math, was much more fun. I got to catch some sunlight so I won’t burn to death this summer, and smell the wonderful smell of grass, flowers, trees and the metal depot courting fire hazards again. I got to see at least eight different kinds of birds; from the common sparrows to a kingfisher (unidentified due to being seen from about a hundred feet away) and a red tailed hawk in the middle of circling.
The sun was warm, the dogs were well behaved, the ground was the right type of firmness, solid enough not to trip me up, loose enough that I wasn’t skidding and slipping on hills. It was a beautiful spring walk.
May 152012
Today I finished John Green’s The Faults In Our Stars, and it was an extraordinary profound book.
“Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.
“Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning author John Green’s most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.
This is the synopsis for the back of the book, and it really is what it says it is; ambitious, heartbreaking, brilliant and tragic. There are dreams found and dreams lost. Wishes made and regretted, and wishes made and cherished. There is a sense of remembering why we choose to live, and what it means to be nearly inevitably condemned to a short life, and how it can seem to be a cruelty or a blessing to have those days cut short so that as we live them, we understand even better how fleeting it all really is.
I rocketed through the first hundred and twenty pages easily, and then was stopped by the granting of Hazel’s wish and how her ideal fell apart in the face of reality, for about two and a half weeks. Today I went and read the last about seventy I had left, and was again blown away just by the brilliance of the feelings within. I’m usually cold-hearted enough to not cry at the end of books, but this one had physical tears springing to my eyes, it was that potent.
I highly recommend it for anyone, because it isn’t a celebration of tragically beautiful innocent cancer patients who are really just “too good for this sinful earth”, or a story of death, but because it is a story of life. And those are the stories we need the most.
A: read about serial killers and psychopaths for studying persistent mental problems in both, and B: read a book about a girl who’s currently in remission from cancer.
I think if it weren’t for my cuddly sweet basset hounds, I probably would have given up on both out of sheer depression/fear.
May 032012
Today’s Ted Talk was about inspiration and leadership, told through classical music.
He pretty much left me speechless, the ideas that he brought up are still too tangled for me to put them down with coherency, but I think it’s an absolutely amazing video.
He says two things that currently are making me think the most, that echo pleasantly in my head. “It’s one of the characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he’s leading to realize whatever he’s dreaming.” and “Who am I being, that my children’s eyes do not shine?”
Those two lines, combined with the music that he plays and my own long day are rendering me incoherent. I might see if I can get some poetry at least written.
May 012012
Today’s Ted Talk was about how a moment can change how you want to look at life from now on.
The speaker had been on a flight from New York, flight 1549, that ended up landing in the Hudson river due to running into canada geese that clogged up and broke the engines, forcing the pilot to turn about and land in the river since they didn’t have enough reaction time and altitude to land back at the airport. Through good piloting and really good piloting, no one was killed or severely injured in the crash landing, with the most major injuries being a gash on one person’s leg and mild hypothermia from standing on the outside of the plane in 30 degree weather partially submerged.
But the scars of something as terrifying as an object that we trust to be safe turning out not to be linger on in the shadows of the mind; Wikipedia states that many of the passengers reported signs of post-traumatic stress disorder; sleeplessness, panic attacks and flashbacks. Many of the passengers on the plane have talked about what it was like to think that they were suddenly going to die, that this was their last few minutes.
One of the people who did is the man of the Ted Talk video above, Ric Elias, and how he ended up changing his life afterwards.
Some of the comments below happily missed the point of what he was talking about, seeming to think that what he was talking about having done with his life was change from looking to the future, to looking only to the present, being the best that day, and deriding it as being a serious issue.
But that’s not what he was saying, not at all. What he was saying that changed for him the most in the wake of the accident, was what his true goal in life was, what thing mattered most to him. Being the best father he could to watch and guide his children as they grew up.
So I finished redoing what were probably the most annoying two chapters in the book today, and tomorrow I am NOT going to repeat a single problem, and go onto another chapter.
I’ve been avoiding doing this book for going on four years now, rather stupidly, since it really isn’t that hard in hindsight. And it’s actually been really helpful in helping me grasp the math in a way that doesn’t make me want to shred the book up.
Why is this? It’s really easy; there are conversations between the much younger author and his grandmother, who taught him how to do algebra. Undoubtedly, they aren’t completely accurate, but they are smart, they are helpful, and they are funny.
It’s a lot easier to want to engage in that book when the explanations make me laugh.
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