Forse Trepanning, Forse Frontal Lobotomy

My brain feels like mush.  Mushy mushy mush.  I have been speaking Italian more or less, every day, often without another English speaker to assist my awkward construction and attempts to explain complicated ideas in very simple terms.  In the process of breaking down my brain to the molecular level by continuous attempts at speaking another language, I have realized two things.  The first is that I should just stick to small talk.  The second being that Italian does not quite lend itself to the elegant wording that make me so happy in English.  That isn’t to say that Italian does not have it’s own style and nicely turned phrases, but I have become frustrated because English and Italian do not work the same way!

More specifically, there are certain concepts that can be translated exactly and ideas that have no translation one way or the other.  This is, of course, the same when dealing with any two languages.  What I find frustrating, is the simple things, such as not utilizing synonyms when one feels a word or phrase has been used too much (buono/a, mi piace, che bello, etc).  In English we have a wealth of words that mean somewhat the same thing that can be substituted when one has been overused.  I like cookies, I enjoy reading, or what have you.  In Italian, as far as I understand (and perhaps this is also because I am in rural Italy) I just have to continue with “mi piace”  (I like) until I find something “non mi piace.”  If I want to use something synonymous it just gets complicated beyond my tenuous grasp of the language.  If I want to be more than “felice” (happy) to attend the New Year’s party tomorrow then “non vedo l’ora” (I can’t see the hour, meaning “I can’t wait”) thereby entering the realm of not just idiom, but conjugation.

I have been studying the grammar for some time now, so conjugation is not “una cosa che fare paura” (this actually translates to “something scary” literally “a thing that causes fear” crazy, I know) but I am starting to find myself out of a comfortable depth.  I fancy myself quite competent with the English language.  Not only am I able to present my ideas with a modicum of organization; but, I like to think I have a sense for the subtlety of nuance that many English words carry.  What am I to do when the nuance is removed from the words and posited in the construction of a phrase?  I am finding Italian word choice to be very limiting (perhaps a good thing since I don’t really know what I am saying half the time.) 

Yesterday I was speaking with an Irishman (not a man-child)* who has been living here in Italy for many years and speaks mostly Italian with his Italian wife and son.  He made the comment that to him, Italian is the language of emotion, and English is a working language.  He can only best express his feelings through Italian, and he uses English only for functional matters.  For me, I am struggling against this paradigm as I am struggling against the constraints of how Italian is less about the specific word and more about how every word in a sentence qualifies the previous.  Often, when starting a sentence one needs to know exactly what one wants to say beforehand.  Hence not having two words for “something scary” but five.  At least in this example the order of the words correlate between translations.  As my dad pointed out, Italian has not seen “the superlative inflation of adjectives” hence a lot of “mama mia” and nothing that really correlates to “awesome.”  Again, I am stumped every time in conversation with an Italian after I have said “si, si” for the eight hundredth time. 

So, after my conversation with the Irishman (again, not the man-child) I started to think about how I use English to convey emotion.  Often times, when writing about Christina’s feelings, the words feel trite.  Everyone has felt shy and out of their depth when confronted with real world problems with their first big break out of college.  It is exactly those feelings, and how we navigate those early work crises that develop our character, work ethic, and sense of professionalism.  But I wonder if they sound trite to my ears because English does not have the capacity to express emotion properly because in English, specific emotions are expressed in specific words.  Italian uses whole phrases to create meaning, why has English developed in a way that is so much more economical, and is it also less precise because of that economy?  

*I thought about putting a link here to my ex, but that would be a) childish and b) horrendously unprofessional.  When the idea came in to my head I entertained it for only a couple of seconds.  I don't like to think I am that girl.

Doing the "pretty."

Happy Holidays.  You're Welcome.

Seasons Greetings from Italy, Peru, the Internet, wherever

I know I promised to blog about all my emotional travails, but frankly I don’t really want to talk about it anymore.  All my friends, half my family, and my therapist have all heard about it and I believe I am chatted out.  For the purposes of my blog narrative, all you really need to know is that I found out I was being played by my ex and he now will have nothing to do with my life outside the occasional workday.  He tried to start a Words With Friends game that I am ignoring.  I am ignoring all of my WWF games though, there are only so many times one can play “zax” before the thrill is gone. 

The bigger anxiety has been over my brother and while I have not discussed this stress with nearly as many people, this anxiety has nothing to do with romance novels or my writing, and I just don’t like to talk about it.  I just thought it important, in the event someone makes a movie based on this blog, that I have a life beyond books, movies, tv, romance, and boyfriends. 

At least, I would like to think my life is more expansive than that, but now that I have a couple of things I actively don’t want to think about, I am having trouble remembering what I occupied my mind with before evil men started being mean to me.  (Is “evil” too strong of a word?  Hmm…)  I believe I cannot remember because I used to be bored before all of this upheaval; I just never had anything I actively did not want to think about. 

So, I took myself off to Italy for the holidays.  Well, I usually go to Italy for the holidays but this year the vacation was much needed.  Not only was this the first year that I have worked every day(ish) for the last six months, but all the stress I had been experiencing for the past three weeks or so was starting to hit untenable levels.  I really needed to get out. 

The upshot with all of this physical distance is that I have loads of raw material for my writing.  Granted, the majority of it has gone in to those long unsent letters that we all write to those who have wronged us; but, since I am never sending them I can always use that handy cut and paste option, thus using my pain for artistic purposes.  Additionally, I have discovered new “create your own” opportunities on the internets, so as soon as I take some pictures (new phone and computer, thus necessitating some “fotogroups” as my Peruvian tour guide used to say on my hike to Machu Picchu back in 2005) 

I will have a whole slew of new examples of formal creativity.  In the meantime, here is the holiday card my step-mom made.  I know it is slow, but it is totally worth the wait.

My Italian trips are usually a bit of a whirlwind with scores of social obligations.  Tonight I will be rehearsing “We Belong” in the style of Pat Benatar for a non-holiday music holiday concert in my dad’s town on the 26th.  So, now I have plenty of performance anxiety to deal with as opposed to family, travel, or romance anxiety.  I think I will take the performance anxiety any day, because the show is going to end eventually.     

Beans and Beanie

I am very clumsy and prone to accidents.  Right now I am typing this very slowly because I cut my left middle finger open on a can of pinto beans yesterday morning.  Later in the day I rolled over my foot with a A-frame dolly with about 30 pieces of 4’x10’ lauan.  I have bumps and bruises all over me.  None of this, however, is as frustrating as my sinus headaches, which are completely out of control and vary with the weather.  If it were something I was causing I could shrug it off like my finger and purple toenail, chocking it up to my lack of innate grace.  Having no control over my headaches (even drugs don’t cut the pain) just makes the pain that much more unbearable.

I told you all about the day a couple of months ago when I woke up with one of my pressure headaches but couldn’t let the day pass without working on my novel.  I had planned the whole week to spend this day working on a section where I needed Christina, my heroine, to be confronted with the poverty of not having any ambition to make it in New York.  I needed her to see what it would be to not take the opportunities when they were given, leading to a coasting and dependent existence.  Sadly, my head hurt so badly I couldn’t look at the screen of my computer.  My solution was to call my ex since we had been on friendly terms, he owed me a favor, and I couldn’t think of anyone else who would be willing to transcribe my ramblings.

You guys remember this, right?  I talked about it when I was discussing word choice.  Well, now I am going to talk about it in terms of character development.  You see, that day I created Beanie.  My ex named him, though.  Beanie is another man-child content to sloth about and mooch off of his hard working parents.  I hold a lot of disdain for him, I hate asking my parents for money, and I am constantly striving to get beyond a mean and meager existence.  I am jealous of Beanie because he doesn’t think about anything too much, and he is content to wake up on a couch that is not his own. 

I have been struggling to remember what I used to think about before family troubles and dude troubles began to hold a hostile occupation of my brain.  I secretly believe I was bored most of the time but didn’t have anything that I actively didn’t want to think about.  Today seems to have confirmed this feeling because I didn’t think so much about my life, but I also didn’t have much to think about otherwise.  I spent most of the day singing power ballads.  My point being, Beanie has a wonderful ability to float from day to day and meander from job, to activity, to napping in other people’s apartments without worrying about the bills, and rent, and the direction of his life.  On the other hand, I can’t see a very fulfilling future for this peripheral character either.     

Man Tit, I mean, Lit.

I have been saving up my blogging folks!  I didn’t have much to talk about for a while.  I was just editing, editing, nothing very interesting.   Now, however, I have headache initiated poor decision making which lead to interesting new characters, the completion of the first 25%, and a mess of emotional upheaval to chat about!  I am going to pretend that I never learned how to write a five paragraph essay and talk about the completion of the first 25%, thus leave the headaches and emotional upheaval for the future, or tomorrow, or whatever.  I am still mentally collating the feelings, events, and literary references I want to use when discussing my feelings and how I am going to use them to bare my soul on the pages of a $7.99 paperback.

So, I finished the first quarter of my book a couple of weeks ago.  I didn’t immediately jump on the blog and tell everyone because I was afraid that I would stagnate if I made a big hoopla over finishing something that I haven’t actually well, finished.  What I mean is, I have gotten the first bit in to a state that I would not be embarrassed to let a random stranger or harshly critical professor read.  It is a romance novel, so I am figuring that most critics account for generic rules and style.  If they don’t THEN I am in trouble.   As it is, though, I feel pretty good about accomplishing a base layer to the whole.  I feel like I have made something solid on which to build.  That is, of course, the definition of “base layer.”

I have also noticed that having attained this non-accomplishment I may have acquired a bit of snobbery, or perhaps it is merited disdain.  The other night at dinner with a friend in order to discuss the hinted at life drama, said friend and I met a wandering Irishman with intentions of writing “Man Lit.”  What is “Man Lit” you ask?  Well, I don’t really know.  I thought it was Nick Hornby and his ilk (see previous blog post) but apparently, since he approaches feelings through a medium (such as music, you really should check out that blog post) then he really isn’t actually exploring his feelings and it isn’t an honest expression of how men emote.  Which I think means this wandering Irishman doesn’t have a great grasp on metaphor, or sobriety.  Well, the sobriety is immaterial to the subject, but he was seriously drunk.   I thought about maybe inviting him to my place to talk about whatever his writing intentions were but the wandering put me off.   I say “wandering” because he was one of those dudes who just decided to move to America without a job or money and his first weeks were marked by couch surfing on strangers couches that he found through an internet forum actually for couch surfing.   I just ended a relationship with a 30 something man-child, so I decided I didn’t need to start hanging out with a 30 something wandering Irish man-child. 

Ageism is not actually what I am referring to when I say I have perhaps become snotty about the writing thing.  I am talking about my dismissal of this “Man Lit” person as a writer.  Granted, I asked him if he had anything written and his response was something along the lines of “nothing cohesive” (my words, he was drunk, remember, I am paraphrasing) which I took to mean he is doing a lot of journaling.  So my second question was “So, are you just doing a lot of journaling or do you actually have some notion of an overarching storytelling device?”  Which is when he said he didn’t consider himself a “writer” yet, but he really wants to express how men have feelings.  Either my snobbery is getting in the way of me being fair to this guy and not making him sound like a drunken wandering Irishman without a job, or perhaps my snobbery is just merited disdain for deluded 30 something man-children.  I have to go, the deep well of bitterness is overflowing in to my prose, and it depresses me.

Kisses!  Soon I will bring you all a manifesto about teen murder, lying cheaters, mid-Century British Female writers who retell fairytales using the word “cunt,” familial discord, and exorbitantly priced shirt-dresses.  Because really, it is a shirt…dress.