7 line story

Once upon a time there was an office worker who hated her job.
And every day she drove the 10 miles to work, usually speeding because she couldn't bring herself to leave home on time.
Until one day while she was speeding along, she ran into a trash can someone had left too far from the edge of the road.
And because of that her rearview mirror smacked against her passenger side window, cracking the glass in the mirror.
And because of that she took the car to the dealer who said it would cost $400 to replace the mirror.
Until finally her father thought the dealer was trying to cheat her, so he called his friend at Joe's Auto-Body, who said he'd do the job for $100.
And ever since then the office worker decided never to go to the dealership for car repairs. She still speeds to work, though.

Explanation: We did this in my improv class one day. The idea is you can summarize any story in 7 lines if you stick to the outline above. It's pretty easy to make up a story in that format, but it's surprisingly difficult to shoehorn events from your real life into it. I think it's good practice, though.

"Until one day" is the easiest line. It's where the break in the pattern--the event in your life that was out of the ordinary--occurs. People who can't tell stories well (I include myself) usually jump right to this line and often forget about the other 6. The first 2 give context: Most stories have a few different people in them. "Once upon a time" forces you to figure out who the main character is. "And every day" forces you to define what normal is, so people will know when something abnormal occurs. Lines 4-6 are all about heightening. A story's no good if it's just, "This one weird thing happened this one time." You need a plot twist: how did the one weird thing cause something else? One plot twist isn't enough, though. It's too predictable, so: how did that something else cause a third thing to occur? Having that chain of events gives you forward motion, which you then cap in a climax on line 6. Then, line 7 is the moral or punchline. It's your chance to explain why the story was worth telling in the first place.

So, I think I'm going to try some blog posts in the 7 line story format. It's not like I'm using this thing for anything else, so maybe I can refine my storytelling skills.

Laurie Anderson

On Saturday, I went to see Laurie Anderson, an apparently pretty famous performance artist (I know nothing about art!), give a lecture about Andy Warhol's Electric Chair at the National Portrait Gallery.

It was... I don't really know what it was. I ended up talking about it afterwards with a bunch of different people who ended up at a series of gallery openings on 14th st afterwards. (Including this opening, at which I felt completely awkward and out of place, because Washington is not a fashionable place, but I'm pretty sure every single person in the tiny minority of Washingtonians who *do* pay attention to fashion was in that room. With me and my frayed jeans and t-shirt.)

She'd obviously prepared ahead of time. She had a whole outline worked out, an interesting powerpoint presentation, and even a working audio element (a really cool excerpt from a talk by William S Burroughs). But it seemed like nerves just took her over. As an ex- occasional debater, I sympathized completely. It was like being a novice debater getting up with just a vague outline of a speech to give a rebuttal to the team with the biggest reputation on the circuit. You just blank. On one level, you know you have interesting things to say, but on another, why are you even pretending to be on par with [former Nats finalists OR PhD Art Historians]. So you stumble through, trying to just hit all the points on the outline, and hoping it isn't going as badly as you think it is. But as you look down at that outline, you think "Why did I even write that? What does that word even say?" Your outline was supposed to be a series of guideposts to jog your memory of the larger speeech you had planned in your head, but all of a sudden, the larger speech is gone, and you're trying to madly reconstruct it from scribbled shorthand.

The result was flashes of what could have been a really great speech by a clearly smart, interesting woman. But the tangents never led anywhere, and they'd just sort of fizzle out instead of getting back to the main point. There were a ton of nervous verbal tics (like, um, so...). The whole thing took an incredibly long time--she ended up throwing out the second half of her speech because 45 minutes through her 1 hour time slot, it was clear she wouldn't have time for it. The kiss of death was when, at one point, she apologized for how badly the speech was going. You never do that. I didn't get a lot out of my limited debate experience, but that's one thing I picked up right away. Never do anything to draw attention away from the points you're trying to make. Yeah, your poor speaking skills might be the elephant in the middle of the room, but if you want to have any chance at all of people remembering anything except that elephant, you. cannot. acknowledge. it.

I'm glad I went, and she definitely got me thinking, but I can't say it was good. Not bad, necessarily, just... screw it. I still have no idea.

improv

Last night was my improv class's showcase. I forgot how much of a rush it is to be in front of an audience. In class I often got nervous participating because I felt like I was nowhere near as funny as my classmates (even though they were always super supportive), but when we were all up on stage together, I finally internalized that I wasn't performing *for* them, I was performing *with* them for the big mass of faceless people in the audience. And when you have a group of people up on stage who you're looking out for, and who are looking out for you, it's energizing, not scary.

Anyway, now I need to go see the professional troupes perform. And I think I need to sign up for the next level. I was sort of wavering and thinking maybe I'd just do the 1A class again, or maybe I wouldn't take any class at all, but I like improv, and I want to get better. I think I need to keep getting pushed beyond my comfort level in order to improve, so level 1B makes the most sense.

Other random things from the showcase:

• I ran into a girl I went to high school with. She's apparently in one of the professional troupes. Random.
  


• My class was all going to meet up in a bar afterwards for a celebratory drink. When I lost track of my classmates after the show, I just headed over there, but the bar was closed. (Not really surprising at 10pm on a Sunday night, I guess?) That was a little disappointing.


• On my way back to my car afterwards, I got followed by a homeless guy.


• I *really* don't know my way around DC, and I got pretty lost driving home. Eventually I figured out that I could just drive from Gallery Place (where the showcase was) back to U Street (where the class was), because at least I knew how to get home from U Street. It was a bit of a circuitous route, but it worked.

Students Turn Anger at Faculty Cuts to Action

This is a headline from The Sophian, my college's newspaper. I had to read it at least 5 times before I could parse it into a grammatical sentence. At first I read: "Students turn [anger at faculty cuts to action]". But "Students turn [noun]" didn't make sense, so I decided they must mean "angry" instead of "anger". Like "Students turn angry at [faculty cuts to action]". But then I thought, what the hell is a "cut to action"?

As you read a sentence, you subconsciously predict what its structure will be. You start fitting the words into that structure as you go along, revising your guess if you come across words that don't fit, and usually by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you've figured out its grammar and you know what it means. Except, every once in a while, you haven't and you don't.

In part, this sentence fooled me because The Sophian is really crappy. I expect errors in that paper, so when my sentence structure didn't work, I didn't automatically assume I was wrong; I assumed they'd just made one of their frequent grammar screw ups.

That's not the whole story, though. I think also, the phrase "call to action" is so common that when I saw "cut to action" I tried to fit it into the same pattern.

Also, when you're using the verb "turn" to mean "transform," I think "turn X into Y" is much more common than "turn X to Y." The latter sounds like it's out of a fairy tale or a fable. I'm a dork and love Google book search, so from Hans Christian Andersen:

"Mortals, on the other hand, have a soul, which lives forever after the body has turned to dust."

"I was looking at the deep river and saw how it plunged down from the cliff, turned to spray..."
"The old Phoenix turned to ashes..."

"...nor could he know whose eyes had been closed and whose red lips had turned to dust."

"...all about the murdered young man, whose head had now turned to dust..."

In a Sophian article, which is decidedly different from your average fairy tale, doesn't "Students Turn Anger at Faculty Cuts into Action" make a whole lot more sense?

I think so.

women are stupid?

Really, Charlotte Allen, what were you thinking? hilzoy put it nicely:

Note to Charlotte Allen: if you find yourself having to argue that you are an idiot in order to make your case, you might consider the possibility that an idiot like yourself is unlikely to get much right about women, or for that matter about anything.

Two things really bug me about the fact that this piece of shit got published:

1. You know the Post booked her because they wanted controversy for controversy's sake. When an article can be summed up as, "Women are dumb. No really, they are, myself included!" it pretty much has no redeeming qualities. There will be a huge number of letters to the editor over this piece, and then the Post will congratulate itself on addressing such a hot-button issue. Look at the huge volume of reader response! It's sleazy.
   
   I get that papers make all sorts of questionable decisions to increase circulation. (The creation, a few years ago, of an entire section of the newspaper where no news is allowed to appear jumps to mind.) Generally, I don't care that much. (Hey, I like doing the Kakuro puzzle on Sunday mornings.) But, I think the line should probably be drawn at completely illegitimate, factually unsupported, offensive opinions expressed solely to marginalize an entire section of society. Because the thing is, as illegitimate and ridiculous as what she said was, she said it in the Washington Post. And that lends a veneer of credibility to it.
   


2. Which relates to the other reason I'm so pissed off about this. People will believe the most ridiculous, outlandish, obviously false things if you repeat them enough. Politicians do it all the time (Bush is a master at it); If you say the same lie enough times, it starts to sound familiar, and if something sounds familiar, then surely there's at least a *little bit* of truth to it. This is why, for example, some ridiculous percentage of the US population thinks Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11. It's why a lot of South Carolina voters in 2000 thought that John McCain had an illegitimate black daughter, and a lot of voters in 2008 think that maybe Barack Obama might be Muslim. Even though almost everyone who comments on this article will denounce it as nonsense, it still adds to the background noise, and it makes it incrementally more acceptable the next time someone decides to recycle 19th century notions of how women are the stupider sex.
   
   And what's worse is, there's nothing anyone can do to stop her ideas from seeping into the culture. If you address her idiotic arguments point by point, you legitimize them. You concede that what she had to say is worthy of debate. But if you refuse to address her arguments because they're beneath your contempt, then they just stand there, unchallenged.
   

Way to go, Washington Post!