What I’ve Learned So Far

Your work is unbeautiful, all right let it be unbeautiful. It will grieve you, but it must not discourage you. Nature demands a certain devotion, and she demands a period of struggling with her. . . . It is the experience and hard work of every day which alone will ripen in the long run and allow one to do something truer and more complete. . . . You will not always do well, but the days you least expect it, you will do that which holds its own with the work of those that have gone before.

–Van Gogh

Sometimes late at night (after 9 p.m. qualifies for me) I find myself reading powerlifting articles online. Probably not the very best use of my time, but I’m fascinated to imagine how far I could go with weightlifting, especially since I’m not very strong now. (Hey, I did do three sets of nine pullups earlier this week, so I’m not a complete slouch, but it’s not like you’d look at me and say, “Wow, you must lift weights.”)

My own goals for weightlifting are open-ended, and short of challenging for the weird world records in the sport (which require outstanding genetics, anyway), I don’t put any particular goals off the table. My plan is to keep working from one peak to the next indefinitely. If I tap out my desire at some point, I’ll let you know. I also have the clear expectation that I’ll be a better runner and swimming one year, five years, and ten years from now.

But what about you? How fit are you now? How fit do you intend to be in a year, five years, ten years? What are your fitness goals?

You may know that November is National Novel Writing Month, when folks from all over commit themselves to . . . well, you can guess what. If I were less snowed under with work, school, more work, and other projects, I might take a crack at it. And maybe in the distant future I’ll give a try to The 3-Day Novel Contest, which is held over Labor Day weekend each year (for something like 20 years running now).

The point of each contest is to get people writing, with enough emphasis on speed that they can’t afford to slow down, get “blocked”, etc. And while I’m sure many of the products of these contest/festivals are not publishable, they do serve the tonic purpose of helping lots of folks get that novel they’ve been sitting on written.

Ponder this, though: there are plenty of pulp writers — including literarily acceptable ones like Georges Simenon — who kept up this pace as a matter of course. You’ve got your Ryoki Inoue, your Simenon, your John Creasey, and so on. The speed at which these people compose boggles the mind.

So, how fast can you write? Have you tried these time-bound novel-writing contests? How fast would you write if you could?

In case you just can’t get enough of my bloggery, check out this post I wrote for Worldchanging Austin:

Memo to Vinod Khosla: Every Little Helps.

Dig me criticizing a billionaire, yo.

Pleaes do yourself a favor and read this Jeff Zaslow column from the Wall Street Journal. Be sure to watch the accompanying video to get a load of Pausch’s zest for life . . . probably just weeks from his own death.

A Beloved Professor Delivers
The Lecture of a Lifetime

What would you say in the last lecture of your life?

(Thanks to my pal Audra for pointing this out on Facebook. If by any chance you’ve been reading this blog for a long time and think Pausch’s name is familiar, see this post, which references a great time-management talk of his.)

. . . meaning 98 days left to make 2007 something special.  What is your 2007 about so far?  What will it be about by the time it’s done?

While I’m at it, when’s the last time you contemplated doing something that could become the stuff of legend?  What’s stopping you?

Full of possibilities today . . .

There’s a great bit in John McPhee’s A Sense of Where You Are that talks about the very last shot Bill Bradley made in a game at Princeton’s home gym. I don’t have the book handy, but if memory serves Bradley made a running left-handed hook shot from 17 feet while going away from the basket. When you’re playing on the playground and you make a killer shot like that, you say, “That’s one to quit on,” and then you pack it in for the day.

This morning I spent (wasted?) more than two hours on the hardest Sudoku puzzle I’ve ever done. It’s possible that my brain was working somewhere below optimum, but mostly I think it was just a really hard puzzle. The bad news was that I spent so much time doing it when I might have been doing other, better things. The good news is that (a) I finished it, and (b) I let the experience of having to take so long drive me to a better answer about how often I should do puzzles like this going forward, viz. not at all. In other words, this was a Sudoku to quit on.

Maybe I’ll let myself do more Sudoku, crosswords, Scrabble,* or whatever when I’m done with my Ph.D. and have a couple of books published. For now, though, I have bigger fish to fry.

~

* A follow-up to my earlier post on Scrabulous: Finally I’ve uninstalled it from my Facebook altogether. It was fun, but waaaay too distracting. (Also, I have a lot of smart, word-nerd friends who kept beating me . . .)

The First Rule of Holes: stop digging.

Community leaders in Austin is working to Bag the Bags in Austin. If you’re concerned about the environment, getting rid of plastic bags is a good thing. Reusable bags are much smarter, and it’s not like paper bags are an alien concept for retailers. So, those of you in Austin, give Bag the Bags your support.

Thinking bigger . . . what if we stopped building coal-fired power plants altogether?

“Your goals must be so clear that it would be possible for a stranger to look at your situation objectively and give you an absolute “yes” or “no” response as to whether you’ve accomplished each goal or not.”

–Steve Pavlina, “Do It Now“

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

–from Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard”

My dad sent me this link to a performance from Britain’s Got Talent, a t.v. talent contest for amateurs. Please do yourself the favor of watching the clip, as well as this followup from the show’s semifinals. If Paul Potts can melt Simon Cowell’s heart, he can melt yours, too.

Potts’s performance of Puccini’s “Nessun dorma” sent me scrambling to YouTube to find Luciano Pavarotti singing the same song, which was a signature piece for him. YouTube did not disappoint: I found this performance from 1980 (at Lincoln Center), this one from 1982 (at the Royal Albert Hall), and this one from 1998 (from Paris). All three different, all three amazing.

Pavarotti lived his life in the public eye; Potts has toiled in obscurity for years. Both of them can rightly claim the last line of “Nessun dorma”:

Vincerò! Vincerò!

I will win! I will win!

Now if you’ll pardon me, I have to go dry my eyes.