“He shoots…he scores!” (or, writing goals) December 31, 2008
Posted by philangelus in writing.5 comments
Goal-setting for a hockey player is easy: “Get the puck into the net.”
Goals are especially important for writers because we don’t otherwise have a means to judge our performance. In setting goals, however, we must be careful to make “us-dependent” goals rather than “them-dependent” goals.
A goal that is us-dependent is a goal realized through your own effort. It does not involve anyone else’s response.
- I will write one poem every week.
- I will keep a journal.
- I will attend the writer’s group and bring something to critique.
A goal that is them-dependent relies on others for its fulfillment.
- I will get my novel published this year.
- I will write a column for the newspaper.
Publication and contest wins are beyond your control, which is part of why writing is so frustrating. You can improve your odds tremendously with market research and a sparkling query, but you cannot guarantee acceptance. The editor might not even read your query. Is that rejection truly a measure of your skill? The publisher might have just accepted a piece similar to yours. The newspaper may not have any funding. While important, this sort of goal is not an accurate gauge of progress.
A writer’s goals should combine the two types. If your ultimate goal is to be published, then use that…but add in others.
Just for example, my goals for 2005 were:
- Get a novel published.
- Get 12 pieces accepted or get 100 rejections in the process.
The first was not dependent on me. I could submit all I liked, but if my genre wasn’t snapping, I wasn’t going to sell, and I didn’t. The second, though…
I was guaranteed to achieve one part or the other of the second goal if I submitted 111 pieces: two pieces per week, and some weeks three. Plus, every rejection letter, rather than being disheartening, carried me closer to my goal!
As it turned out, I did get 12 acceptances that year, so I made my second goal. I didn’t sell Seven Archangels: Annihilation
Finally, is your goal achievable? If you’ve never written a poem before, publication in The New Yorker is less achievable than the goal of bringing one highly-polished poem every month to your writing group. Also, the goal must be challenging. If it doesn’t involve enough effort, we’re more likely to let it slip, and achieving it would be meaningless.
Your take-away: Set goals, but make them reasonable, and make most of them dependent on your own effort. Then get the puck into the net.
Fruit and bad fruit December 29, 2008
Posted by philangelus in religion.8 comments
Ivy points out every so often that in Judaism, Satan is not hateful but rather another righteous servant of the Almighty, only one charged with testing God’s people. It’s a job along with any other, kind of like an undercover cop who tries to buy narcotics but isn’t himself breaking the law.
That’s not the Christian view, which goes with Jesus’s statement that Satan was a liar and a murderer from the beginning, and is God’s enemy.
Ivy and I have discussed this a few times, and here’s a problem: Jesus tells us that we can know a tree by its fruit. In other words, if the outcome is bad, we can assume the thing itself was bad.
But the New Testament states that all things work together for the glory of God for those who love Him. In other words, if something bad happens to you, God can turn it to good.
This muddles up the whole fruit industry. It implies that over the long term, the fruit of everything is going to end up being good, and that makes it difficult to figure out whether something is from God or otherwise. And it implies that anything Satan does is going to be “perverted” by God in order to achieve goodness, and therefore Satan is actually in the service of God. (Whether he wants to be or not is another question.)
I’m taking the Christian line on this one, but the next question is, if God turns evil into good (which He does) and if you can only tell the tree by its fruits, then in the long run all the fruit is good fruit, so we’re working in the dark here. Right?
Discernment is a lot trickier than I thought it was back when I was sixteen and I knew everything.
Last week, I had another thought, and I’m running it here in the interests of being corrected if I’m wrong.
Good tree will produce good fruit. That much is a given.
Bad tree will produce rotten fruit. But here’s the next thought: that inside that rotten fruit, there are seeds.
And those seeds can become trees themselves. In other words, in the heart of that rotten fruit is the makings of something which can go on to become a source of goodness for all of us.
That’s how God turns evil into good. Some things are going to themselves be good. And other things are bad and then fall apart, rot away, and their residuals become the source of other good things.
A man’s child is murdered. That’s clearly evil. He uses his grief over the child’s death in order to raise awareness, prevent crime, and safeguard other children. The seeds of the rotten fruit become good fruit-bearing trees for the future.
The tools are there to discern. We just need to be able to reconstruct whether we’re dealing with ‘the first fruits’ or the second generation fruits.
Help me, Retailers! You’re our only hope! December 28, 2008
Posted by philangelus in sarcasm.10 comments
On December 27th, two entire days after Christmas, I went grocery shopping.
Can you believe there were no Valentine’s Day cards out yet? Our retail outlets are failing us.
What will become of those who did all their Christmas shopping on November 4th (just in time to enjoy the all-Christmas all-the-time radio programming)? The ones who didn’t have to take advantage of the “last minute shopping sales” on December 1st? These sweet folks truly want to stimulate the economy, but there’s nothing for them to buy!
Please, please, O Retailers — please put out your Valentine’s displays. We Americans truly need eight weeks of red hearts, red heart-shaped boxes, mile-long racks of cards with red envelopes, and boxes of cartoon characters telling us how much they love us.
Socked in at Christmas December 27, 2008
Posted by philangelus in family, knitting, sarcasm.11 comments
I felt like I messed up every gift I was giving to my Patient Husband this Christmas. Three weeks ago, the print I’d ordered him off ebay arrived several shades darker than it had appeared online. The seller apologized and will get me a new one mid-January.
I struggled with the online image of the print until I’d lightened it enough to see the various shapes, printed that and framed it, but it was just so lame. “Hi: this is a placeholder for your real gift.” So I had one of my Patented Brilliant Ideas, the kind that make all seven household guardian angels shiver and say extra prayers.
I’ve never knitted anything for my Patient Husband. I decided I would knit him a pair of socks.
You’ll have to keep in mind that no sock I’ve knitted has ever fit the foot for which it was intended. My first socks, for me, fit my six year old daughter. My second socks, for my son, were too small for him. My third pair of socks, intended for the baby, ended up being too big for his four year old brother. They’re all nice socks, but they never fit. You’d think I’d have figured that out before buying yarn and needles and commiting to this lunacy.
Ivy told me, “Of course ten days is enough time to knit a pair of socks!” Moreover, the yarn I’d picked would be “a quick knit.” All was golden.
My first attempt at the socks resulted in a cuff that would fit an elephant. My Patient Husband saw me knitting and commented that they were too big for anyone. I said the sock cuff was supposed to be 11 or 12 inches around, according to the book. He said no way. So I measured his calf and came up with 11 inches. Ripped out the whole thing and cast on again.
This time, it worked. I got to work.
Many times, I doubted. I panicked about how much yarn I needed and bought some more. (I didn’t need to: there was enough.) I panicked about the gusset decreases (I should have done those differently) and in the end I realized the horrible truth: there was no way I could complete a pair of socks by Christmas.
I finished and bound off the toe of the first sock on December 23rd. I carefully and gently wrapped my one single solitary sock, and put it under the tree.
That was the last gift my Patient Husband unwrapped, and when he saw there was only one, I said, “I ran out of time,” and he laughed, and I laughed until there were tears streaming down my cheeks, and we were both (literally) in stitches.
He tried on the sock, and yes, it does fit. It’s lovely. (He tried to say “they’re warm” but then he corrected himself. It’s warm. He would wear it now, but he’s not too good at hopping.) He said it was funny that I’d been knitting the thing in front of him all this time and he hadn’t realized it was for him.
I’ve now cast on the second sock. And yes, I’m an idiot. But you’ve been reading here long enough to know that yourselves.
Merry Christmas, and a “hoppy” New Year. 
Weblog tour: a holiday memory December 25, 2008
Posted by philangelus in angels, religion, weblog tour.add a comment
The weblog tour is back! Long live the weblog tour!
The new topic is a holiday memory. So let’s travel back in time to my days as a Neophyte Philangelus.
By this time I’d been talking to my guardian angel for about eight months, and as Christmas came up, I realized I was getting gifts for so many other people I loved, but there was no real way to give him a gift too. I wanted to, but it wasn’t something I could figure out.
If you think about it, an angel doesn’t need anything, and we’ve established already that angels don’t eat. I’m pretty imaginative, but I was at a loss. What do you give a being who has God?
I decided, eventually, more God.
Then, being a little insane, I decided to surprise him.
For a minute, I want you to imagine the impossibility of trying to surprise a being who is paying attention to me all the time, and for the record is smarter than I am. Clearly I was going to have to be sneaky in a record-breaking kind of way.
(This same situation becomes a plot-point in the romantic comedy my literary agent is trying to sell, by the way. Back when I was 16, it seemed fool-proof, but that only proves God was looking out for fools. In the novel, it doesn’t work out very well, and I’d caution everyone else: don’t do the thing I did. Okay?)
Two weeks before Christmas, as I went to bed, I talked to my guardian about something that had happened earlier that day, and then pointed out how badly I’d messed it up. I told him I was sure the other person would NEVER forgive me.
Imagine me saying “never” the way a 16 year old does, when everything is either Never or Always. I worked up into a panic, and then I did something I used to do a lot: I asked him to go to that person and make sure it was all right. Just smooth things over if the other person was angry at me. Make sure it would be okay. Please? Please? And then, GO!!! (in that hyperactive way I had back then) Go now!!
I waited a moment.
I flew out of bed and darted into the kitchen and grabbed my mom. I whispered to her, “Buy me a mass card. For my guardian angel. For Christmas. It’s a surprise. Don’t talk about it again.”
Smooth, huh?
I fled back to my room and dived into bed into the same position I’d been in and started talking again. “I hope they’re not upset….” blah blah blah. Figuring, when he came back he’d think I’d just never stopped talking. Which, in those days, I probably never did.
A few days later, my mom told me, “I did what you asked,” and that was that.
Christmas Eve, as I put my presents under the tree, I saw the envelope with my name on it in my mom’s handwriting. I peeked inside and saw it was a mass card, and I left it there.
Christmas morning: everyone started opening presents, and as I took one, I thought toward my guardian, “And there’s one under the tree for you too, Angel!”
Later that day, when gifts were opened and we’d gone to church and dinner had been eaten, I went to stack all my presents in one place, and I looked for the card to keep it and put it in my journal with all my other angel-related stuff.
The card was gone.
I turned the house inside-out. I looked in all the gifts. My mother and I opened the paper trash and opened every bit of wrapping paper, hunting for that card, and we couldn’t find it. I looked over and over, and I was so disappointed that it was gone…until I realized, he’d taken it.
And I felt awesome: maybe I’d surprised him after all! And maybe he was glad about it.
Merry Christmas to all my readers, and have an awesome holiday. I won’t be posting on Boxing Day, but we’ll be back in business on December 27th.
–
Other stops on the tour:
http://meganeileen2005.typepad.com/ twinkletoes
http://thatsloanegirl.blogspot.com/ CathyF
http://wryexchange.com/ Wry Exchange
http://www.absentmindedhousewife.com/ beckygoesape
http://verycontrary.wordpress.com/ Contrary
http://amandagorby.blogspot.com/ amanda_tg
http://whatsmylife.blogspot.com/ grinningcomb
http://nolechica.livejournal.com nolechica
http://addierambles.blogspot.com andra
http://la-eme.livejournal.com MsMoonbunny
http://mischief0617.wordpress.com/ CrowGirl
http://www.housewife2000.blogspot.com housewife2k
http://fatgirlartist.blogspot.com/ Amy Rose
http://lulupop.wordpress.com Lulupop
http://robandkrista.blogspot.com/ CelticGemini
http://anime-coroner.livejournal.com/. AllyKat
http://www.drunkenhousewife.com/ The Drunken Housewife
http://ladyj3000.blogspot.com/ LadyJ3000
http://heartstart.livejournal.com Heartstar1
http://deltatangosgbs.blogspot.com/ afbluebelle
http://sarahesperanza.wordpress.com/ SquishyMooMoo
http://sinkingtent.blogspot.com/ ladiedeathe
http://divine-misse.livejournal.com Shotochick (only readable by those that have a livejournal account)
http://mrsbart.blogspot.com/ MrsBart
http://rainhaville.blogspot.com RainhaDoTexugo
http://kimberlysstories.wordpress.com Kherbert05
http://sisterlilbunnythecorpseflinger.wordpress.com/ Lil Bunny
http://whatweareuptonow.blogspot.com/ Andi
http://www.kehinde.com/blog Ivy
Heaven scent (yeah, that pun again) December 24, 2008
Posted by philangelus in family, religion.6 comments
About two years ago, I was dwelling on the nativity when it occurred to me how good newborns smell.
Ask on a parenting board what the best part of holding a newborn is, and half the moms will tell you, “The smell!” Of course, modern hospitals do their best to eliminate that by whisking away the baby for an unnecessary bath (they’re establishing that the baby is their territory) and thus the newborn smell is fleeting.
But during a homebirth, you get to “keep” that smell for a little longer. It’s sweetness and softness, and it’s peaceful. I can’t describe it better than that.
As an infant, Jesus would have had that smell, so I tried to envision Mary doing the new-mom thing and putting her face next to his, kissing his forehead, resting her cheek against his cheek, and inhaling that newborn scent as deeply as she could.
My next thought was, Jesus was born in a stable. And one of the features of stables is things which, in the interests of tact, do not smell so good.
So here we have the juxtaposition of this heavenly newborn smell against the pungent scent of animal output, and abruptly I realized that’s kind of like how the world works. Because, being blunt, sometimes life stinks. But if life stinks, then God still smells all the more wonderful — among all the garbage, the only sweet-smelling aroma.
You don’t get smells often in Christmas carols, but if you attend a Christmas service that uses incense, try to remember that the first incense to meet Jesus’s senses was an earthy animal smell.
And at the same time, a young mom found herself astonished and quiet as she rested her lips against her baby’s softness and inhaled the scent of Heaven.
Santa’s handwriting December 23, 2008
Posted by philangelus in family, kiddos.8 comments
At the dinner table, Kiddo#2 said, “I don’t think there’s really a Santa.” She laughed nervously. “I think it’s Mom and Dad!”
This was a month ago. I looked at her, puzzled, and said, “Huh?”
She said, “I think you guys buy the presents!”
It’s about time she’ll figure it all out, of course, but Kiddo#3 was right there, so I asked a few more generic questions and let the conversation change course naturally.
She brought it up again a couple days later, and I asked her what she thought. She told me she isn’t sure.
I asked her why she thought Santa might not exist. “Because it would be impossible to go around the world overnight to give everyone a present.”
Sounds logical, I said. I asked her why she thought Santa might. “Because,” she said, “in order to leave presents, you and Dad would have to get up in the middle of the night, and you’d never do that!”
Clearly she has no idea what life is like with a newborn. But I digress.
The thing is, she knows and at the same time, she’s not ready to give it up. She genuinely likes the fantasy, and at the same time, I suspects she realizes that confirming what she “knows” would make her less a child.
She did write a letter to Santa this year. She wrote that she wanted a yo-yo and “a horse just like the one I drew at the bottom,” and painted a picture of a brown horse. I deposited it into the Post Offal box for just such a purpose, and Santa wrote back a note with a candy cane attached.
“Mom,” she breathed in an awed hush, “Santa says he knows how hard I’ve been trying to be good.”
And, ever the forensics expert, she pointed to the bottom of the note. “This is Santa’s handwriting.”
The handwriting’s on the wall, Santa’s or otherwise: this is her last Christmas as a bright-eyed innocent. Next year, she’ll be helping convince Kiddos#3 and #4 that an amusement-loving philanthropist owns flying reindeer. For this year, however, she’s holding on with snowflakes in her heart and a candy-cane clutched in her hand, knowing someone’s proud of how hard she’s trying to be good.
Hanukkah lights December 22, 2008
Posted by philangelus in family, kiddos, religion.6 comments
I was looking for something with a flashlight when Kiddo#3 said to me, “Remember when we celebrated Hanukkah or Kwanzaa?”
I admitted I remembered neither of those things. Because, as it turns out, we have never celebrated Hanukkah or Kwanzaa.
It’s true that if I were forced to change religions right this second, I would convert to Judaism in a heartbeat. My religious studies degree had a concentration in Judaism. And I do try to keep aware of the Jewish calendar and the holy days, just because it feels right to me. But I don’t celebrate the holidays. More like I honor them in my heart. I wouldn’t have involved the Kiddos.
I had no idea where Kwanzaa came from in this equation, though, so I asked Kiddo#3 what he meant. He could only repeat, that time we celebrated Hanukkah or Kwanzaa? Take note of that uptick in his voice at the end, denoted by the question mark. He’s actually asking me *which* we celebrated, not whether. In his mind, it was a done deal that we’d celebrated one of them.
His school takes the three weeks before the “winter break” to let the preschoolers explore Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and Christmas. The kids learned a bit about each of the holidays in a very generic rough-and-ready fashion. No deep theological truths were imparted. I did appreciate that the holidays weren’t simply ignored as they were in Angeltown, but rather that we have a diversity of songs and holidays to choose from rather than pretending we’re all going out and buying a ton of gifts to celebrate the start of the ski season.
All well and good, but my son really wanted to know which we’d celebrated, and he wouldn’t accept when I said we’d never celebrated either.
But then, as he insisted we had, something triggered in my head, and I said, “Honey, that was a blackout.”
It was a dark and stormy night — really, it was, sometimes there are just stormy nights, and this time it got suddenly dark because the power went out. And what did I do? I found our flashlights.
And then I got out candles.
I placed the candles in our ubiquitous flower vases (every time we get flowers, they come in a vase) and had them in different rooms, or carried them through the hallway. Somehow, my son retained that memory and when his teacher told the children about the Menorah, he translated it into his own experience. The darkness. The cold. The curiosity. The tension.
For him, that night without power transformed into a holiday, a festival of lights in his memory.
And in the morning, power restored, we could rejoice at the invisible thing which made possible everything we took for granted until it was gone.
Maybe in a way he’s right that we experienced something holy.
Be wrong! December 20, 2008
Posted by philangelus in pensive, writing.11 comments
I love this comic:
About a year ago, Ivy asked me how to get more comments on her weblog. I replied, “Be wrong.”
She laughed, but it’s been my experience that the fastest way to get comments on this weblog is to be wrong — even faster than if I ask a question. The only way I’ve gotten them faster is when I posted on another forum, “Would someone mind commenting quickly as a mercy, so I won’t get flamed right out of the gate?”
On Thursday, I posted about capitalism not being an infinitely sustainable system, and I got a lot of posts correcting me, some correcting me about things I hadn’t even said — but regardless, the fact is, people commented because they thought I was wrong. I like that, because it gives me an opportunity to learn. Either learn what is right, or learn the way other people think.
I’m always surprised at the inverse proportionality on the number of comments to the number of page views. Some of my guardian angel posts have had amazingly high numbers of page views but only one or two comments. Some posts I feel are very sweet, touching, or otherwise well-written, and they get no commentary at all.
Part of the web is audience participation. We understand the changed nature of learning and the importance of dialogue. Very interesting to me is how people feel compelled to comment when they disagree but fall silent when they don’t.
What’s the take-away here? I’m not sure. Despite what I’ve said, silence feels like disagreement, and I strongly advocate that for most people, the worst you can do to them is ignore them. (This is especially true about passive-aggressive behavior.) No one likes being ignored. Disagreements may become vigorous, but in the fighting there’s contact. In silent agreement, there’s none.
So my takeaway would be, go to the next blog you’d normally read. And if you agree, post a comment. Tell that blogger you appreciate the fifteen minutes s/he took to write something that touched you, and say thanks. (Don’t do it here — if you do it here, it looks like I was self-aggrandizing.)
But my second takeaway would be this: don’t be afraid to be wrong. We all get performance anxiety, and especially on the web where we feel like we’re “always on,” it’s difficult to go out on a limb and speculate.
Well — speculate away. Someone will be sure to tell you if you’re wrong. And if you’re lucky, that someone will even tell you why.
God loves fools, drunks and me December 19, 2008
Posted by philangelus in religion.8 comments
Over at Conversion Diary, this jumped out at me:
“Man lives on truth and on being loved: on being loved by the truth.”
This seemingly simple passage gave me a real jolt. It came from the fact that it immediately changed my perspective of the relationship with God on its head. We (I at least) are constantly so focused on our part in the relationship – Am I praying enough?, Am I praying correctly?, Am I doing enough?, Am I good enough?, Are my thoughts on God and his presence (or seeming lack)?, and so on.
About two years ago, I realized that while I was doing the above (working on my relationship with God) that I’d structured the whole relationship in such a way that there was no room left for God to love me. I talked about this before in my little self-forgiveness discussion.
No one I spoke to understood what I was saying, that in the overall, I was so focused on “getting it right” that I never opened up enough to allow God to love me. There were other issues too that needed to be addressed (and trust me, my guardian angel addressed them, or rather forced me to address them) and over time, I was able to relax.
But I remember how I would tell someone, “I have been preventing God from loving me,” and every single person would respond, “That’s not possible.”
It is, of course. It’s possible to prevent God from loving me by framing myself as unlovable. If I position myself to God as “the person who does these things” then in my relationship with God I’ve put forward a pseudo-self and kept the real-self way down hidden. God can see it, but I’ve made it so God can’t relate to it.
That real-self is always very vulnerable, and the pseudo-self is so competent. See, we say: I pray, I fast, I tithe, I give to the poor, and I always wear my shirt on top and my pants on bottom. I’m pretty much unassailable.
Meanwhile, the real self, if we let it, would say, “Have mercy on me, O God, because I’m an idiot and incompetent, and I know you don’t really want me. You want the person I could have been.”
Two years ago, the answer I got was, “Actually, I’m not at all interested in the competent and unassailable person. Now, let’s talk about the incompetent idiot for a little while, because she’s very interesting to me.”
(Rough paraphrase.)
That was a very scary month or two. I’ve recently revisited the same issues. They’re tough to handle. But I’m beginning to realize that what the guest blogger at Conversion Diary said is absolutely true, that our inner peace lies in being loved, and infinite inner peace lies in being loved by the Infinite.
