Personal Journal

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First off, I sucked on three cold-eze lozenges throughout the night because I’ve had a sore throat going for days. I plop them in my mouth and stick them outside my teeth, between cheek and gum, and they dissolve without my noticing, and I don't wake up with a sore throat. Well, cold-eze are filled with a lot of zinc, and some other sort of gunk that really leaves a film on your tongue. I’ve been up and moving for six hours, and nothing yet tastes right. My coffee tasted like zinc, my breakfast, my lunch, my friggin pepsi. It’s laced any other flavor with its heavy metal sourness, and I’m starting to get annoyed that my taste buds are being robbed.

But yesterday Jean and I had a long discussion about things. Well mostly we talked about insecurities, and difficulties sharing feelings, even between one another. Those are hard discussions to recount. For Jean, who is very afraid to trust, and who admits to being one who will push people away before she risks emotional pain, that kind of discussion is very difficult to have. It’s not really for me. I know that being hurt sucks, but I also know that the recovery process isn’t too intensive; you don’t have to “exercise” a lot to get over emotional hurt. The best thing to do is to learn how to not think about something unpleasant.

I’m probably no better than she in terms of sharing things that are difficult to talk about, things where you fear what someone’s reaction will be. I haven’t told her about how I want to better separate myself in times when I want to write, or just be by myself. I’ve let some allusions go about that, though, prefaced it, if you will. And we’ll probably have that discussion soon.

Overall, it has made me feel calm about the relationship. Since we had our real confrontation with my willingness to end the relationship if the quarreling can’t be brought under control, she’s made an effort to be nice. I have, too. It takes each of us and both of us to examine the assumptions we make in deciding how to respond to one another. It’s good to see that the effort has payoff, that we’re capable of connecting deeply, not just superficially. It’s a relationship with real potential, not just some convenience association.

I have surprisingly little to say in my journal today. Ah, the campfire creative… What have I done?
I decided to get into this campfire creative – to give myself a place to write a piece of fiction where the results really didn’t matter, and quality was secondary to production. Well, I was accepted to it, and my initial problem with it is that some of the writers are sloppy. Writing quality is one thing, whether you write something literary or poignant. I’m not reading for that. What I mean by sloppy is that there are words missing from a sentence, verb tenses intermixed within the same paragraph, misspellings. Ugh!

Truth be told, though, I can work around that as long as clarity is there. Some of the omissions have left glaring holes in clarity. The only major problem that I see is that one writer has written a character who will clearly be dominant among the various parts, and I’m the kind of person who reacts strongly negatively to such a thing. Each writer should have some self-restraint so as not to overshadow what anyone else is trying to do. I’m nervous, now, wondering if I’m going to create a character only to see someone else just squash it into the ground with his own.

We’ll see. I have a good character building in my mind, and we’ll just see where these people take it. A couple of the writers are clearly good, too, so maybe that will make it all the more enjoyable. Frankly, I just want to have a good time writing my little character’s story down.

The other thing that bothered me in that campfire was that in the 4 reviews it had, it clearly did not merit the average rating of 5.0. Sloppy writing is by definition not perfect. I’d hate to learn that this site is dishonest in its reviewing scale. Look, a 5.0 should be damn rare, as should a 1.0. If everyone rates on a scale of 4.0 to 5.0, then by the scale applied, a 4.0 becomes garbage, and a 5.0 not much more meaningful than a 4.5, which is “ordinary”. I played a roleplaying game where players rated each other from 1 to 10. Well, I rated some games as 7 for a while, and got yelled at for lowing the averages. I didn’t play much longer after that. Is that strange of me? Is critical honesty an alien concept to people? I haven’t rated anything lower than a 3.0 yet (because nothing warranted it, and 3.0 is an okay piece of work, by and large). Frankly, I expect people not to turn in much below 3.0. I expect that people proofread their own work enough that they can self-critique their work into a respectable 3.0 (which I think is fully respectable). So I don’t think that there’s a bell curve where I should review as much at 1.0 as I do 5.0. Maybe it’s because I’m older, then? I don’t know. God, I hope I don’t make enemies before I even get started. I would be very disturbed if people in that campfire began resenting me for my reviews…


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn