What a Bad Day Looks Like

Since my last post mentioned bad days interfering with writing and art projects, I decided to focus this post on what my bad days look like.

Of course, since no two bad days are identical, I can only give rough overviews of how mine tend to go.

The mornings:

Three things tend to happen here: I wake up extremely early (before 7am-ish), I wake up extremely late (after 10am-ish), or I didn’t go to sleep the night before. Normal waking up for me is between 7am and 730am with or without an alarm.

After waking up, the fun of getting up begins. These are two entirely different processes. Waking up is I’m awake. Getting up means getting out of bed. It’s always hard to get out of bed, but even harder on a bad day. Part of the lies depression tells is that “you can’t screw anything up, if you don’t get up.”

Getting to work:

Since unemployment/self-employment is a normal part of my life, my work day begins with starting up the computer, checking messages, and either prepping a Word writing page or an art page (either on the computer or on my drawing table).

Some bad days that Word document may sit empty or only get a few word thrown in. The art project may still be a blank sheet after several hours of “work”. Other bad days, the Word document is deleted multiple times because nothing feels right when I reread it. The art project may now consist of multiple pages tossed aside, or started-and-stopped sketches over multiple pages in a sketch book.

End of the work day:

I may still be on attempt three of reading the same two or three paragraphs in one of the books I’m reading. I also may have spent three hours staring at the page and comprehending nothing of what I’ve read. Normally, I’ve got at least one nonfiction book I’m reading for research and one fiction book I’m reading for pleasure and research.

Work breaks:

My main work breaks usually involve World of Warcraft gaming, Facebook stuff, or random internet browsing. On the really bad days, I accomplish almost none of them.

Other features of the bad days:

  • brain fog where my brain feels like mush
  • eating is either eating way too much all day long or forcing myself to eat the one meal I will eat that day
  • random napping throughout the day

The really bad days have found me laying on the couch with Ancient Aliens or some other similar program that requires no critical thinking skills running in the background alternating with napping. Throw in overcast/rainy days or winter days and just about everything on the nonproductive side escalates.

Clipart stolen from Clipartmax.

On Used Book Sales, Hockey Playoffs, and Other Excuses

This past week or so has been a busy week in some regards and a not so busy week in other regards. Here are some of the excuses I have for why I didn’t write much this past week:

There were a couple of used book sales in the local area at the tail end of last week. Somehow, my wife and I managed to make it through both only spending about $30. It helps that we both have book lists of specific books were chasing at these book sales.

Also, the NHL playoffs are ongoing and the Boston Bruins and the St Louis Blues, two teams I follow, are both still in the playoffs. I’ve had way too many late night sessions watching or listening to games go overtime. As a result, there’s been some further twisting to an already twisted sleep schedule.

And last, and certainly not least, this past week has been an off week for me productively due to anxiety and depression days. Since my own experiences with anxiety, depression, and ocd are a focus for this blog, I decided to not make excuses, apologize, or hide the fact that sometimes bad days will interfere with writing and art projects I am working on because:

  1. It’s not fair to anyone who follows this blog for the mental illness stuff.
  2. It shows that good and bad days are just part of the deal, even when you’re properly medicated. and
  3. It’s not being honest with myself and one of the reasons I write this blog is that there’s too much bad information about mental illness floating around.

Clipart stolen from Clipartmax.

You Suck by Christopher Moore

I just recently finished reading You Suck: a Love Story by Christopher Moore. Christopher Moore is one of the few nongenre authors who I actively seek out the works of, but unfortunately have not read enough of.

While this book is a sequel to a previous book, Bloodsucking Fiends, you can actually read this one without having read the first book, with minimal confusion or lostness. Trust me on this, it’s exactly what I did. Through a handful of techniques, the previous book’s story is summarized within the first few chapters without taking the form of a boring summary.

As the titles indicate, it’s a story about vampires. Which, for me, can be a hit or miss topic. Dracula, hit. The Passage series, hit. David Weber’s Out of the Dark, huge miss – save your money and time, the alien invasion of the earth is stopped and humanity is saved by vampires who overrun alien base camps, hijack their drop ships, kill the alien commander, and fly the alien invasion ships back to the alien homeworld.

You Suck is a definite hit. Think Douglas Adams, Monty Python, the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost movies, and some of the funniest Doctor Who moments and you’ve got a pretty decent start of a hint of the comedy of errors that makes up this story.

This book is a must read if you’re a humor writer of any sort. Well, not necessarily this book, but any book by Christopher Moore is a must read.

Origins of Storytelling

As mentioned in a previous blog post, Literary Darwinism was a literary theory that I encountered in my graduate English classes. Because my master’s focus was composition, most of my time was split between literature and composition and rhetoric classes. If you’re looking for an interesting approach to English classes, I highly recommend the route I took since, aside from the handful of required C&R classes, I had a lot of freedom with course selections. I mention my education background because, to the dismay of one of my C&R instructors, I found a lot of connections between many of the texts and discussions in the C&R classes and the literary darwinism interest I was pursing in the literature classes.

One of the areas of literary darwinism that’s been on my radar, even before I knew there was such a thing in literary theory, was the universality of storytelling. While Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, one of my literature classes introduced me to the academic writings of literary darwinist, Jonathan Gottschall, an English professor, who wrote in one of his key texts: “Humans are creatures of story, so story touches nearly every aspect of our lives (2).”

Around the same time, I was reading Gottschall’s words in a literature class, I was reading a text by Thomas Newkirk, a writing instructor, for one of my C&R classes. In that text, I found Newkirks’s words stating that: “We are biologically predisposed to process experience through the lens of antecedents and consequences (5).” By putting writing and story into a biological context, Newkirk, and separately the instructor of the C&R class, were reinforcing the theories I was reading for literary darwinism background.

In building a background understanding of literary darwinism, I encountered a text by Dan McAdams, an evolutionary psychologist, who observed that: “Human beings are storytellers by nature. … The story is a natural package for organizing many different kinds of information (4).” With this text and a number of cross referenced Steven Pinker texts, I began to see a deeper connection of literary darwinism as it relates to evolutionary psychology.

Between the literary darwinism source material, evolutionary psychology material, and evolutionary biology texts cross referenced to Edward O Wilson, I was prepared for another text by another literary darwinist, Brian Boyd, an English professor, who often writes and edits with Gottschall, referenced above, and Joseph Carroll, the professor I studied under at UMSL. Boyd’s text includes the statement that: “Evolution builds many specific learning tracks into the mind. … And we will interpret something as story if we can. Babies and adults alike cannot help seeing a sequence of moving dots in terms of animate causality (1).”

Another text from another C&R class, with the same dismayed C&R professor, written by George Lakoff, a linguist, and Mark Johnson, a philosophy professor, helped my refocus that cause and effect relationship of story. Lakoff and Johnson wrote: “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. … human thought processes are largely metaphorical (3).” For me this is especially true, and exactly what I was doing in my own studies of C&R and literature, and literary darwinism.

Once we better understand the relationship between causality and storytelling, we can see stories and storytelling in the context that Gottschall placed it in when he wrote: “The problem structure reveals an major function of storytelling. It suggests that the human mind was shaped for story, so that it could be shaped by story (2).” [emphasis in original text].

Sources:

  1. Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.
  2. Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal. Boston: Mariner Books, 2013.
  3. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
  4. McAdams, Dan P. The Stories We Live By. New York: The Guilford Press, 1993.
  5. Newkirk, Thomas. Minds Made for Stories. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2014.

Clipart stolen from Clipartmax.

Peter Mayhew 1944-2019

Today is a sad day for storytellers and Star Wars fans.

Today, Peter Mayhew’s wife announced via his Facebook page, The Wookie Roars, that Peter passed away Tuesday, April 30.

For many of us, Peter, was better known by his movie alter ego Chewbacca the Wookie from the Star Wars film series.

Clipart stolen from Clipartmax.