focus silentbob clarity 040308 ... lotuseater sucof, dammit! 040308 ... Q An object of special interest to a person who perceives the object through perceptons that it reflects or emits. Examples of perceptons are photons, phonons, neuronal electrical signals, and pheromones. Sorry to be so clinical, but that's what focus is all about. See kissing. 040309 ... lotuseater clinical... tee hee do you mean cynical? 040312 ... eatpaper i cant. they're all around me and they know the truth. they know and they wont tell. 040313 ... PeeT on what's right, not what's wrong. 120416 ... n o m no more distractions 120731 ... unhinged so easily defeated 120801 ... no reason when i find myself focusing inward too much, i try to read the news and invest in things outside of myself. it's pretty damn hard sometimes, though. 130326 ... Risen I'm trying so hard to focus right now. I've reorganised my whole room. All my paperwork. But there's this blank space on my wall where she used to be, and my eyes wonder there far too often. 140302 ... unhinged is out the window now that my mind has such pleasant fantasies to unravel 140302 ... Pilgrim Soft is best 140303 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Attention deficit high definition = focus is not actually the problem. I just can't see the forest for the twigs. Denomination, presbyopia (my eyes say not literally; they are myopic in a grey-blue sort of way). But the problem about not getting things done is more about motivation. Or that whenever I get motivated to do something I get scared. My eyes are the wrong colour, that's it. Maybe if they were "starry violet," spending an afternoon surrounded by selected texts - Anne of Green Gables, the Norton Critical Edition of A Clockwork Orange, and my journal from 1999-2004 - and trying to focus my eyes just right so that they fuse into some kind of original novel would be worth it. 140303 ... portals to discovery indeed (Yes, my eyes will fuse into a novel. I'll be blind, but at least I'll have a book to show for it. Please no; I'm glad I can see.) 140303 ... epitome of incomprehensibility It starts when newly-adopted orphan Anne Shirley cracks her slate over Alex's head and kills him. The courts don't believe Anne's defiant testimony, the statement that Alex merely ("Merely! because, oh, it wounded my very soul, my VERY SOUL, Diana") whispered "Orange!" in her ear to tease her about her hair colour. They reason, no, the girl is too shy to say that he tried to grope Diana's as-yet-small breasts (which he did, too, but Anne didn't notice) and that Anne, most rightly, defended her "bosom friend" (a rather immature court writer snickers at this wording). Alex's parole officer is secretly glad to see him dead. Mr. Gluteus, as he's called, didn't want to go through the paperwork of having his new, and frankly repellent, client deported from Canada back to The People's Especially Democratic Republic of Great Britain. Mrs. Lynde, Marilla and Matthew's outspoken neighbour, says, "Well, Marilla, you know I pride myself on speaking my mind. Land sakes, but you musn't think that child killed the boy on purpose. Why, in my opinion, that boy was nothing but trouble. Reformed! Humph! Only Providence knows, but in my opinion you can't reform a London street [offensive stereotype that doesn't reflect Alex's ethnic identity]. But I'm telling you, Marilla, this is a regular Avonlea scandal." That night Anne Shirley, face white and grey-green eyes ablaze, pens in her secret diary, "I am not sorry. Not a bit. If any other horrid boy makes cruel remarks about my hair, I will find him. AND I WILL KILL HIM." 140309 ... . . 140310 ... past it teeters and spindles about the snapping strings of the wobbling web. read? write? not when my mind slips from liquid to gas, spilling away. 231108 ... e_o_i past, I reveled in the sound of that paragraph even as the feeling is frustratingly relatable. And ha! I finally found my early draft of Anne-of-Green-Gables-as-serial-killer - I knew I'd put something like that on blather. (Now it's a poem and Anne has different literary victims - Gilbert, Pollyanna, Hazel Motes from Wise Blood, and Milly Bloom from Ulysses. I don't know what made her do it. Do I need a motive? Janet would probably say so.) 231109 ... e_o_i Speaking of Janet, my off-and-on creative writing teacher, she said in her last email that I should a) finish my novel b) decide what my character's main goal is in order to better focus the novel. I disagree with b), but I haven't found a nice way to say so yet. So I just sidestepped that in my reply. Yes, I think character motivation is a way to propel scenes, but I don't know if it needs to be a thread running through a whole novel. It *could* be the focus, but it doesn't have to be. It's just one out of many ways to do things. And not having a definite answer for b) isn't what's stopping me from doing a). The thing is, everything takes me a long time and I can't afford to quit one of my money-earning jobs. And if it's this hard for me to devote time to a project outside my money-earning jobs, what about people who are actually poor, and not just Lower-Middle-Class-But-I-Went-To-Europe-Last-Summer poor?? Or maybe it's just that I need focus. Not imaginary Carol Winter. 231109 ... e_o_i Carol does need something to be angry about, though. She could be angry her parents moved her to a new school. 231119 ... raze one eye is better at it than the other. i can never remember which is the weaker of the two until i force each of them to fend for themselves and compare notes. sometimes, on mornings that are too cruel to be counted, i'm afraid the blurry objects that surround me will never come clear again. would my other senses grow stronger to compensate for something less than blindness? or does that only happen when the film cuts to black? 240228 what's it to you? who go blather from