Missed it by *That* Much

Remember this?

Well, I ain't on the list. And that's good.

Living the Peter Principle

I last read Dr. Laurence J. Peter’s “The Peter Principle” back in 2009 and made a vague reference in a blog post about the book to stretching/breaking myself in a new position. It took me a minute to remember what I was hinting at back then, but that was also the same year I began teaching at BYU-Idaho, so that’s got to be it. 

My conclusions, eight years on:

1.  I certainly did hit my level of incompetence as a newspaper editor. Never again.
2. I have not yet hit my level of incompetence as a technical writer, even after I was left as the sole writer at RWMC making me the de facto lead.
3. HOWEVER – No. 2 being said, I was leading a department of one. Myself. Me, myself, and I. Had there been others, well . . . I’m pretty sure I would not be reporting things as rosy.
4. I have reached my level of incompetence teaching at BYU-Idaho. I won’t be moving on to any higher position in Online Learning or anything else.

Final assessment: I’m OK with this.

I’m happy. I’m earning a good living. I am close, still to that level of creative incompetence I talk about in my Goodreads review of the book.

I feel a lot more optimistic about things now, now that we’re past the bloated many writers stage at RWMC, now that the successive rounds of layoffs are over. I feel like I’m doing good work – a clear sign I have not yet reached that level of incompetence.

So today I was asked who the “lead” writer is at RWMC, a pertinent question now that we have merged with AMWTP and their bevy of writers, plus one from INTEC, are moving into the same building I’m in. I had to answer “I don’t know.”

This tells me a few things:

1. It’s not me. If It were me, I’m sure I *would* know.
2. I don’t really care who it is.

I took on the mantle of acting lead writer simply because there was no one left to hand it to. If Danny – who succeeded Greg as lead of the technical writers at the Site just about a month ago – sees fit to give the title to someone else, I’m not going to protest. I’m happy doing what I’m doing right now.*

*Side note: A little black beetle either just fell out of the ceiling or just popped out of my keyboard. I’m not sure which. Not sure I want to know, either. It’s now crawling happily along the cord to my mouse.

For the Fourth

Happy Statehood Day!

Penny Lane

You have to know, first of all, I don’t care much for The Beatles.

Oh, sure I enjoy watching Ringo Starr in “Caveman.” And their song “Yesterday,” well I like that one quite a bit. But generally, their music is pretty insipid (their songs make about as much sense to me as the video embedded below). And they’re oh-so-stuck on themselves.

But there’s no song that conjures more memories of elementary school for me than The Beatles’ “Penny Lane.”

I only need to hear the opening bars of this tune and I’m at Lincoln Elementary near Idaho Falls, Idaho. Stinkin’ Lincoln, our enemies in Ucon and Iona called it, due to its proximity to the sugar factory that snowed our playground with ash and the stink-sweet mixture of wildflowers and burnt sugar.

More specifically, I’d be in the combination gym/cafeteria at Stinkin’ Lincoln. Drawing a series of concentric circles on a chalkboard. Or attempting to jump rope. Or performing other feats meant to help us refine our fine motor skills.

And we couldn’t stop until The Beatles had finished wailing out “Penny Lane.”

Sometimes the record – brought in by one of the teachers or aides, I never knew – would skip:

In the pouring rain, very strange. Very strange. Very strange. Very strange. Very strange. Very stra –

And one of the aides would wrench the needle across the record to a new groove, and The Beatles would continue singing and we’d continue jumping or drawing circles and then this nonsense song about the pouring rain and selling poppies and fish pie and blue skies and that fireman with a picture of the Queen in his pocket would end, and we’d go back to class.

Second grade, I think. The year I was with Miss Kidd, in the “old building” at Lincoln – we had a campus, consisting of the “old building,” with offices, classrooms, gym/cafeteria and a second floor fire escape that was a slide and we were NEVER to use it unless a fire was burning; a “new” building with four classrooms and a little library tucked between them; and later on the district bought the neighboring LDS Church building and converted it into more classrooms. I’d gone there to church as a kid, so I knew all the neat places to hide. There was one classroom you could get to via a flight of stairs, and the only way out was down the stairs or out a window and the windows didn’t open, so the school didn’t use that classroom and they blocked the stairwell but sometimes we’d try to sneak up the stairs but someone was always watching.

Mrs. Kidd. There’s another lady connected to a song:

Wishy-wahsy, wishy-washy, we get the clothes so clean!

She’d sing this, arms akimbo, and we’d follow enthusiastically because we were second graders and we loved to sing and we loved Miss Kidd and we loved the wishy-washy song. The rest of the words are lost. But there is a tune. Not by The Beatles, fortunately.

And so on. I could probably go on for pages.

But all of that is triggered by one song – Penny Lane. Just imagine what you can do with your writing and memory if you sit down with a box of photos, a little music, a trinket or two, as you begin to write your personal essays. You’ll have a lot of memories to pick from.

That Lonely Hermit

There are days nothing comes out.

And I could say I feel empty, but there is something there. The stomach gurgles. The liver does what livers do. The heart pumps and the blood circulates and the brain, oh, the brain is never empty. The brain is a cavalcade of cartoons I watched when I was five, six, seven. Random bits of high school ephemera – Hey everyone! I’m reliving the day I failed that test in chemistry, watch as I fail to place more than 20 elements in the correct position on the periodic table!

Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon . . . then something about the noble gases in a column. Argon and xenon and such. And forget the transuranic elements in their neat, out-of-place rows. I certainly did.

The brain is never empty.

It’s a replay. It’s “What’s My Line.”

Why was Dorothy Kilgallen famous anyway?

Columnist, journalist, and game show panelist. A reality star before reality television.

She’s now a rising star in my post-reality television show, scrolling endlessly in my brain.

If you want time to pass slowly, be alone.

Have plenty of things to do. Because in ideless, being alone doesn’t make time pass faster.

Have things to do. And do them. You’ll get them done, alone.

And time will pass slowly.

There’s never enough to do when you’re alone. So you invent things to do, often to the detriment of the things you should do. That’s why, in part, some of my refuges have crumbled and are no longer habitable. But I am the best organizer of unimportant paperwork in the outer solar system.

Oh, paperwork finds you, even in the digital age. And just like the transuranic elements, they cry to be ordered properly in the ur-space where they should not exist lest they push radon and the supposed oganesson out of their tidy columns. Organize your papers, you organize the universe. Einstein said that. Or at least should have.

Or maybe it was Mr. Waite, the chemistry teacher, who said it. He may have said it to me, after grading that quiz on the periodic table.

See me now, Mr. Waite. My life depends on others’ knowledge of chemistry in making the machines that make my food and air. And lucky I am that they knew where to keep their transuranic elements. But I repair the machines and sometimes tweak the code, trying to find that right mix of chemicals to feed me but not give me space-gas, which I’m told is a problem not uncommon in the outer solar system where I live.

I owe a great deal to Wally. Wally lives on Titan, and repairs the food replicators there. He passes on to me bits of code of his own invention, and updates from the corporate mongrels who refuse to help me because I stole one of their machines rather than bought it. He speculated the deuterium-heavy water I produce on Iapetus may contribute to my excessive gassiness. But he is no chemist. He is a fiddler, a coder, and tinkerer, and organizer of paperwork like me, except he falls to either side of the crack, not into it to dwell with me.

“There are worse things to smell than fart,” he reminds me.

Yet there are still days nothing comes out.

“It’s all in the code,” Wally says. “Sometimes the best thing you can do with the code is to futz with the numbers. It’s only food, so what can go wrong? Get too farty, unload the Sulphur, or stop eating the eggs.”

He also sent me Hanna Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. “You’re in danger of becoming a cult of one,” he said. Though he didn’t say why. Because I have not cut myself off from others. Except by distance.

And there’s that pesky matter of time.

Because even Wally, not far distant on Titan, is still millions of miles away physically. But save he construct or commandeer a craft, he may as well be in the Trappist system, orbiting Betelgeuese, or in heaven or hell for that matter. He cannot get to me except via radio waves, which still take minutes to arrive.

And they limit his free radio time.

I point out he’s likely member of a cult, too.

“At least my air doesn’t smell like a fart,” he replied. “Most days.”

Loneliness, Arendt says: “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

Yet I was alone on a planet populated by billions.

A Princess of Mars Is A Little Weird

I have been highly entertained by “A Princess of Mars”.

The story is pulpy, of course. Confederate War Hero(!) somehow ends up on Mars rather than getting slaughtered by Indians in Arizona, and because he can jump, he’s befriended by a warlike race that ordinarily kills just about everything else they encounter, including their own kind. He’s chummy with them until a humanoid female (see yesterday’s entry) shows up as a prisoner, and now, as you can see, he’s leaping to her defense.

Given the direction he’s taking in this drawing and the state of readiness of his opponent – sword up and dagger drawn – you’d be certain Our Hero John Carter would be batted out of the air with that sword and then gored several times with the dagger, while the Barely-Clad Damsel looks on and his blood gushes out of his many fatal wounds.

Not so. He conquers, of course. And his warlike hosts applaud, probably because they want to kill the BCD at a ritual event I haven’t gotten to yet in the book.

And it you ask me, it’s pretty cruel of Our Hero to jump on this guy as he looks like he’s trying to pop a squat out there in the desert. Of course, it’s also pretty cruel of this guy to be doing that given the BCD’s location in the Squat Zone, but you know, I guess they have to fit everyone in the picture.

Our Hero is also prone to high and mighty speeches, viz:

“As you know I am not of Barsoom; your ways are not my ways, and I can only act in the future as I have in the past, in accordance with the dictates of my conscience and guided by the standards of mine own people.”

In other words, as a guy who fought for the preservation of slavery. But, you know, nobility and such. Also, he’s pretty flowery with the Martian, considering he’s only been studying the language for a few days.

And that comic, puzzled beast in yesterday’s entry? Our Hero has already bent it to its will so it will be willing to help him escape his benefactors when the time is right, with the BCD in tow. And will probably be the beast dropped from the narrative as soon as it’s inconvenient to continue having it in the story.

The beast is named Woola. I kinda like that.

I don’t remember the BCD’s name, but she’s from some place called Helium.

Also: One of the Martians in this tale is named Tars Tarkas. From whence, no doubt, Harry Harrison got the name of the slobby sergeant Tars Tuckus in “The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted.” So there is clear antecedent for reading pulp if you want to write good fiction.