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Posts Tagged ‘television’

  1. Rewriting: When Avoidance Strikes

    November 9, 2014 by Diane

    hand opening red curtain on white.

    If you peeked behind the writer’s curtain this past month you probably saw an empty chair. Before that, you saw a whole lot of slumping going on. Rewriting a novel requires hours at the keyboard, leading to tense spinal muscles, shallow breathing, rounded shoulders, a stiff neck and the dreaded dowager’s hump.

    The solution? Avoid rewriting altogether.

    So, for the sake of good posture, I actively engaged in avoidance behavior.

    I bought a stack of books to read, added them to the tower of books on my dresser, and avoided reading them.

    I sat in front of the computer and contemplated the ceiling.

    I checked out Write-Track, an online goal-setting community of writers—a super idea for those who actually write, a lousy idea for those searching for nifty ways to avoid writing. It’s too easy to spend time setting up goals and not actually meeting them. Besides, a community of productive authors eager to support each other sort of takes the wind out of avoidance.

    I contemplated my Twitter account.

    I stood in line for forty-five minutes among hordes of Halloween revelers to contemplate a Day-of-the-Dead display at Steve Job’s house, even though I scoff at a holiday where we feed junk food to kids and carve up healthy food and set it on fire (as summed up by a fellow reveler). But there I was, sporting a cowboy hat and bandanna, stepping through the portal to observe a grisly display of college students and computer geeks outfitted in white lab coats covered with blood, gouging out eyes and entrails and wielding heavy knives in some surreal medical laboratory—a spectacle that prompted me to immediately turn around and high-tail it ten blocks back to my car and drive home to contemplate the television.

    I practiced yoga postures.

    I meditated.

    I even checked the refrigerator for something to stuff in my mouth—my usual mode of avoidance.

    Oh, I was becoming an expert at the game.

    And then I attended a lecture on the spiritual aspects of good posture.

    Or so I thought.

    I drove downtown and strode into the bookstore and found a seat in the back of the event room, and quickly realized that good posture was not the subject of this particular lecture. At one point the speaker said, (and I paraphrase here), “Standing in front of the refrigerator looking for something to stuff in your mouth is CRACK if it has nothing to do with nourishment. And 99.9% of the time it has nothing to do with nourishment. Ditto for yoga and meditation and anything that is used as a means of avoidance.”

    Well.

    Something about that speaker started to piss me off.

    I had sacrificed my writing time so I could learn to sit properly in a chair. Instead I was being lectured about avoidance. I got up and left.

    But something niggled at me. A question. Is writing a form of crack too? Is writing a means to avoid loneliness, or personal problems, or the feeling that life is out of control?

    I had to admit…sometimes it is.

    I use writing, sometimes, as a drug to escape anxiety. That apprehensive feeling starts squirming within and I make a beeline for the laptop instead of just sitting with the unsettled feeling, observing it.

    Sometimes the writing process itself is unsettling. Why? Because it’s friggin hard work! Because I’m lost, or stuck, or overwhelmed, or afraid I might suck–or God forbid—shine. So I skedaddle away from the laptop. Which, truth be told, is exactly what I had done.

    I felt disgusted with myself. This had nothing to do with poor posture. The whole avoidance thing had lost its charm. I was mindful of the game now. I had turned the camera on myself and the house of cards had tumbled down, as the speaker put it.

    So I forced myself back to the keyboard.

    I positioned my fingers on the home keys.

    I avoided avoiding.

    Takeaways this week:

    Ask yourself if you’re engaged in any activity as a means to escape an uncomfortable feeling. If the answer is yes, sit quietly, close your eyes, and allow yourself to observe the feeling. Don’t participate, just watch, like you’re watching a movie. You’ll notice the discomfort change. Everything changes. It’s the law of nature.

    There’s a difference between stepping away from a rewrite to gain perspective or recharge your energy, and avoiding the project altogether. Don’t kid yourself. If you’re swapping that siesta for a one-way ticket out of novelville, you know you’ve crossed the border into Avoidance.

    Bad posture is less about mechanics and more about going unconscious. When I notice I’m slumping, I remind myself to come back from whatever astral plane I’m frolicking on, and be in the body.

    If you want to set some writerly goals and track them online among a community of fellow scribes, check out Write-Track.

    If you’re squeamish about gory stuff, and queued up to check out a Halloween display, look around. If there are no children under the age of ten standing in line with you, let that be a warning.

     

     

    Category Behind the Writer's Curtain | Tags: ,,,,,,,, | 8 Comments

  2. When Innocence Wore Your Brother’s Baseball Glove

    April 28, 2014 by Diane

    baseball glove

    There was a time when young men went courting. They knocked on the front door carrying a bouquet of flowers, greeted the parents, and waited in the alcove by the coat rack, filling the space with their maleness. They guided the blushing girl out the door with the lightest touch at the small of her back, and then began a series of door openings: the car door, the restaurant door, the door to the movie theater, the door to the Fountain and Grill for a milkshake, back to the car, to the front door, and then — a hover, a wait. Maybe a brush of lips against hers, then the tip of a hat and a jaunty stride to the car, waving over the hood before getting in and driving off.

    Those were the days.

    The days when innocence wore your brother’s baseball glove, your father’s aftershave, your sister’s hairpins, your mother’s face powder. When innocence smoked your uncle’s cigars and played your cousin’s board game.

    Those were the days when families talked over the dinner table instead of the blare of the television, when they gathered by the radio while mom clicked her knitting needles and pop smoked his pipe and the dog wagged his doggy tail.

    Those were the days when the good life meant a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence; a newspaper boy who delivered the news smack onto the front porch; a milkman who delivered a fresh bottle and hauled away the empties. It meant someone was there to tuck you in at night, to leave a light on in the hallway and the door open a crack. It meant falling asleep to the comforting murmur of your parents’ voices, maybe the faint strains of Artie Shaw on the radio.

    Not a bad scene. Not a bad scene at all.

    When did the stars begin to fall through the cracks? When did the stranger on the street become a prowler with bad intentions instead of a Fuller Brush man trying to make a decent living for his wife and kids?

    What happened to those carefree, innocent days?

    Maybe they weren’t so carefree after all. Maybe it’s just a trick of the memory, flickering images from old Hollywood. Maybe it’s a view of the world seen through the lens of my television, which only airs one station, now that the winds have interfered with all the other stations. One station. The one where everyone is perfectly content to Leave it to Beaver.

    I could invest in cable. The land of Suburgatory and The Sopranos.

    But, nah.

    I prefer the version of America before it outgrew mom, apple pie and baseball.

    Category Ain't Life Grand | Tags: ,,, | No Comments

  3. Squirrels in the Doohickey

    April 27, 2013 by admin

    Old-fashioned-TV

    It all started with the radio.

    We were doing fine, dwelling in the same living space, enjoying the same music. A little country, a little classical, a whole lot of evening jazz. We were relaxing to Beethoven and cooling off to Chris Botti and singing along with Blake Shelton and then, when I wandered over to the Big Band station, the radio turned itself off. A little Artie Shaw or Benny Goodman–click. Every time.

    The TV got wind of this. The TV decided to do its own brand of censoring.

    When I first hooked up the television I had a smorgasbord of stations. I was hooked. It saw I was hooked. It knew I could be spending time on more productive endeavors, like rewriting my novel. So it started eliminating the stations one by one until I was left with one station.

    One station, that aired the original Star Trek series and the old Dick Van Dyke show.

    Night after night I watched Bones and Spock and Kirk boldly go where no man has gone before, and then I watched Dick come home from the office, tumble over the hassock and get the wind knocked out of him.

    I checked the connections.

    I jiggled the cord.

    I called the people dedicated to fixing these problems, and a man wearing a hard hat drove up in a white van.

    He strapped on his tool belt.

    He clanked through the neighbors’ back yard.

    He clattered up the telephone pole.

    Twenty minutes later he was unstrapping his tool belt, flinging it into the back of the van and telling me I’ve got squirrels in the doohickey.

    “They’re building condos up there,” he said. “Sharpening their teeth on the wires. AT and T will want to replace all those wires running to the house. You can spring this on your landlady now,” he said, “or wait.”

    I opted to wait.

    Because I knew, I knew it had nothing to do with the wires; it had to do with the fact that my radio and TV were in cahoots. They were trying to control me.

    Okay. This is dysfunctional thinking. This is the kind of logic Bones might manufacture. Luckily, I had a Spock-like rational self who pointed out the sensible thing to do was replace the radio and deal with the faulty wiring. Luckier still, I had a wise self, a Zen-like Captain Kirk, who suggested the radio and TV were doing me a favor. They were telling me to spend less time tuning into them, and more time tuning into myself.

    So I did the mindful thing.

    I turned off the television.

    I pulled out the meditation bench.

    I settled down and straightened up and focused on my breathing and two minutes later I was channel-surfing in my head, my thoughts scampering around like squirrels in a doohickey. I found myself wondering, what’s next? Will the blender regurgitate my breakfast smoothie? Will the vacuum cleaner suck up my faux fur slippers?

    It could happen.

    To find out if you have Squirrels in the Doohickey, check out these 10 tell-tale signs.

    Category Fer Cryin' Out Loud | Tags: ,,, | 2 Comments

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