I dropped off of the face of the earth! What was that about? Where was I? Brooklyn? Chicago? In class? eating dumplings? having my teeth cleaned? twiddling my thumbs? browsing CVS or maybe Duane Reade? whichever one that has the incredibly convenient Chase ATM inside? Who knows! But I'm back; sorry if the people who are the pluses after the one of myself as readers of this blog have left, turned to other brighter, more active pastures. I'm here now though!
The truth is, I was in my first semester of class in the NYU MFA program and working part-time and generally hamming it up, fantasy not-yet-successful-but-working-on-it writer style, reading a lot of books and writing pages and poems and stuff. It was really pretty great but not so great for my blog-life, and now I wish I had made more posts about my progress. This might have been interesting for anyone thinking about an MFA, particularly from NYU. I'll do better on those sorts. Brings me to resolutions.
I've never done yearly resolutions because I make and re-make resolutions on a daily, if not hourly basis. My life is a constant internal reminder of my desire to have more resolve and be better at pretty much everything, while congratulating myself on minor completions of resolutions, in order to achieve goals I have written down and in my head like a little girl who writes a list of boys she wants to kiss. Write more, write better, smile more, no smile less who cares, cook more, stop buying lattes, make more calls, start saving, apply for this, submit to that, write more, etc. etc. I think guilt and fear are helpful instigators of productivity, and I'm good on those fronts.
But it's January and there have been some new-beginning things happening--like the locksmith finally let me into my mailbox, and I received cool packages from friends in both Korea and Taiwan, and my cat suddenly looks seriously humongous, and I cut my hair, and the Daily Show is back on--so maybe this year will be different.
1. Read more poems and non-fiction.
I've realized I'm actually more inspired to write when I read these things than when I read fiction. Reading fiction is great for considering plot structure, stylistic staples, language tricks, etc. but I have a hard time turning the consciously "craft" part of my brain off. Reading poetry on the other hand is much more natural and exciting and easier to get thrills from language in ways that aren't as simple to dissect and explain. I tend to cry a lot when I read good poetry; it feels silly; it's mystical; it's fun. I'm into Matt Hart's stuff lately, mucho. Heard him read at KGB and was wincing a little at how good it was. And reading non-fiction is inspiring too, kind of because the world is pretty fucked up, I guess. And bizarre.
2. Stop buying lattes.
They're very good, yes, but coffee in a pot does the job too, and do I or do I not want to save money to go to Italy this summer with E.L. Doctorow and the creative writing program? I guess that's not good for baristas though. Maybe I'll dart inside my favorite coffeeshops and tip them occasionally but stop buying lattes.
Read poetry and make my own coffee. I haven't figured out if I want to be smiling more or less. I mean, I know it's supposed to trick me into feeling happier or something, through mouth muscles and brain triggers, but then everyone will see me smiling all the time when I'm not happy as result of any immediate stimulation other than my own face, which seems misleading and weird. Leave that one off for now.
Do you know what's really bizarre? Marine life. Squid with elbows and giant aquatic woodlice and fish that replace the tongues of other fish. Imagine what fish on Europa would be like. But that's not really what you were thinking of, was it?
ReplyDeleteYou should smile more because it makes other people happy. Emotional contagion is extremely well-established in the literature; you should pay it forward. It's even possible that facial mimicry might induce a congruent affective state, so you should smile at everyone you see smiling; and you might feel happy, too.
In fact, maybe everyone should just smile all of the time. No, that'd be creepy. Or would it?
If everyone smiled all the time, the communication of the smile would lose value because we wouldn't be convinced of it's validity, the true happiness part, since I think its established that humans are too crappy to actually be happy all of the time, so the happy-inducing mimicry would fail. So you and I should smile all the time, plus maybe one million other people, but not everyone.
ReplyDeleteSmiling in the library: creepy
Smiling on the street: well-received
Smiling at the man throwing my salad together: very well-received
Smiling at myself in the mirror: totally weird; not recommended
Unless this emotional contagion is more instinctual than learned and processed communication, yes? Like even if someone put you in a cave as a baby and left you there with mouthless cows for caretakers and you didn't see a smile until you were say, 15, it would still make you happy when you saw it.
ReplyDeleteWhen you smile at the man throwing your salad together, do you waggle your eyebrows too? Like a Groucho Marx kind of thing. I'm sure that'd go over swimmingly.
ReplyDeleteI like your use of a cave better than Plato's. Maybe we could get Philip Zimbardo to come out of retirement for one last great unethical experiment. Finding mouthless cows might be a problem, though.
But it is an interesting question. We can observe that emotional contagion occurs in all social animals to some degree, but is that learned behavior as a consequence of being raised as a social animal? Anecdotally, I'd put forth the existence of the Crying Baby Domino Effect as evidence that there is an instinctual component.
If you're interested, a more...scholarly treatment can be found in "Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy" from the 2008 Annual Review of Psychology.
P.S. you messed up your apostrophes :(