Hallowed Evening Planning

I'm going to stay at home.

Elaboration to come later. SRSLY.

Generally speaking, my Halloween traditions have been non-existent, so they've been consistently inconsistent throughout the years. When I was younger and more naïve, I alone of the family had stood vigil at the door till midnight with a variety of leftover candy. After doing that for a few years, I realized that there were far fewer people appearing far less often than I would've hoped for. This left me with plenty of extraneous candy regardless of how freely I distributed it. This doesn't mention the fact that I often spent the last two hours doing nothing.

I'm not quite sure when the next change took place, but after a while I just stopped caring. At first, I attempted to shut myself off from the world which didn't work very well since I had failed to account for the glow of the computer screen. Nothing ill occurred on such a date, but I did get plenty of people knocking on my door, at least plenty as far as a hermit would be concerned. With careful planning and application of masking tape, I can hide my electronic presence on even the brightest computer screen. Like most Americans of late, I too have evaded tradition on the basis of wanting to keep to myself. When I reflect on such, I often wonder whether I'm robbing future generations of the joy and pleasure of trick-or-treating with my callousness on a night of such fond childhood memories. I then go off on a fairly predictable tangent from there which I'd rather not discuss.

In any event, at some point when I acquired friends (gasp!) I was invited to their Halloween festivities. During such period we'd do...well, more or less normally what we'd do. That was play D&D/MTG for the most part while the host's parents did the trick-or-treating routine. Later as we "evolved" the games would change, the people would change, and it became more of a movie night than a time of gaming, though we still do so from time to time.

But since I work Wednesday nights, and with my friends...uh...unaccounted for, to put it briefly, my Halloween plans aren't really there.

Okay, well, since I have about 180 more words to fill, I suppose I'll just fill it with more or less random gibberish. I remember when I was younger during Halloween I once dressed up as a military soldier, a mummy, and a pirate. The last two didn't go so well. I'm not quite sure what possessed me to try and wrap myself in toilet paper, but that was an embarrassing night. I remember once we had the cheap "spiderweb" decoration from a store and I tried applying it, but it ended up looking like wool stuck onto my outdoor bush, which was hilarious I suppose, and kinda stupid since no one was at home to hand out treats, anyway. The kind of bags I loved for Halloween were those pumpkin decoration bags, especially the jack-o-lantern bags since you could "hide" your laziness at taking out the bagged leaves as Halloween decorations. You get both for the price of one, what's to lose?

BTW, Rachel. What's the fun in only having one? Ooh, that rhymed.

Well....

When I forget to post a prompt, you get to take it easy.  So.

What are your plans for Halloween?

I drive my car this way to work

Basically, I call it order when I see someone's thoughts arrived at the point of a pattern I can recognize. A pattern can be appreciated if it is both elegant, complex, but underlined in one greater category. It's very important that they arrive at one category, because the pattern, no matter what method of madness, is useless without its point. It cannot reach the mind of another person unless it has some kind of piercing device or other instrument of probe (i.e. a point, a conclusion, a goal, a hypothesis)— I go nuts when looking at the design of a circuit board; they're beautiful, but meaningless to me. I can see patterns, but they're too complex to understand. If I had one frame of reference (one point) wherein I could look at them, then their meaning could be appreciated as well as their pattern. One reason I love poetry is because of how much of an art it makes of patterns. For example: (and yes, I'm basically using this blog as pretext to impose this poem on your reading-person)

My Autumn Leaves

by Bruce Weigl

I watch the woods for deer as if I’m armed.

I watch the woods for deer who never come.

I know the hes and shes in autumn

rendezvous in orchards stained with fallen

apples’ scent. I drive my car this way to work

so I may let the crows in corn believe

it’s me their caws are meant to warn,

and snakes who turn in warm and secret caves

they know me too. They know the boy

who lives inside me still won’t go away.

The deer are ghosts who slip between the light

through trees, so you may only hear the snap

of branches in the thicket beyond hope.

I watch the woods for deer, as if I’m armed.

Now, I ask you, why is this poem good? What makes it stand out? The pattern, of course! The syllables form a pattern that make the writing (which is mostly commonplace language) very unique. Why does, “I drive my car this way to work” sound so much better than, “I drive my car to work,” though they mean the exact same thing? This poem’s organization creates a pattern delectable to our mind’s ears. I picked it apart today while tutoring (Claire can testify, I hung the picked-apart poem on the board). The poem has no more than 10 syllables for each line, excepting 4 lines which a 2 sets of 8 syllables in sum and 9 syllables in sum. The 9 syllable and 8 syllable lines are exactly one line apart starting 2 lines from each end.The poem is 14 lines total, with 10 marks of punctuation, and 12 words of more than two syllables (only 1 three syllables). There are 120 words in total. What does all this mean? Absolutely nothing, unless you like math. Then, the patterns to find are a pleasurely pursuit.

The point? You could still sense a pattern from that poem, right? Organization is such: it can follow just about any method as long as it achieves the point that is able to reach people’s minds, never mind if they see the pattern! That tangle can fall in a terrible mess behind the point and people will still get it, as long as they have the point.

It’s kind of ironic...since this blog never came to a point.

BTW, Cameron. Do you have a death-wish, or do you not believe in the internet-zombie-ninjas?

Order? Order. Hmm. This prompt requires some thought.

In high school, I had a teacher who took immense pleasure in declaring "I don't know." At times, he would actually answer a few questions, but I think he achieved a strange, non-narcotic nirvana by denying any semblance of logocentric certainty. He drove me up the wall.

As I continue to stew over this question of order, which I'm sure I'm overanalyzing, a little angel with a harp is whispering, "Try, Meta-Michael. Just give this prompt a try. You never know what you'll discover while trying." On the other shoulder, a little man in business suit is whispering, "Just say you don't know. Just give up. Listen to me, kid, and we'll go places."

I usually listen to the guy in the business suit. But his suit is so last season, so this time, I think I'm going to give the angel-guy a chance. I'll try.

I agree with the previous posts published on the blog. Order in an essay is generally set forth by a thesis statement, and the ensuing paragraphs are structured based on a chronology or on a hierarchy of importance. Of course, not every essay needs a thesis, but a rational ordering of either time or importance, I think, is convention. Just about everything else in the western world revolves around these two orderings, and if art is a reflection of reality, then writing naturally reflects either a chronology or a hierarchy of importance. We eventually learn to sense these things subconsciously.

Additionally, no matter the audience or subject matter, all pieces of writing, I think, include some kind of introduction. An introduction serves as a portal into the rest of the piece, orienting the readers in their fictionalized roles. All writing also includes a conclusion in some form, which serves as a threshold to ease readers back into the reality.

In the tutoring center, I can tell if students' papers are ordered if students can explain how their paper is ordered. Is there a thesis? Are there body paragraphs that support that thesis? Is there an introduction and a conclusion? But then again...

Ah, heck. Maybe I don't know after all.

Order

We like what is comfortable. We like to sit in the same seat in each of our classes. If someone else sits in our seat, we feel awkward. We like to go to new places with friends. Really, we like to go anywhere with friends because it is comfortable. When we go to unfamiliar places, we are forced outside of our comfort zone, but having familiar people around makes the situation more comfortable. And if we found a dictionary that was not organized in alphabetical order, we would probably freak out. We like order, and when order is compromised, we do not know what to do. We lose our sense of focus and control, and we are not comfortable with feeling out of control. We gravitate to order, so if we found that unorganized dictionary, we would probably look for some sort of pattern with how it was arranged.

I do not know if we like order because humans are predisposed to like order or if we were taught to like order by our environment. I think it could be both. I think that humans were made to try to make sense of the world. We are here to find meaning, and our interpretation of meaning arises in a logical thought process which can be interpreted as order. Then, successive generations are taught to think in these certain patterns, so order was born. So, I do know that we recognize order because we have been taught order in one way or another, and it is almost inherent. We recognize order as logical thought processes that can guide a reader to a plausible conclusion. This can even occur in a dictionary. People who know the alphabet but have never seen a dictionary can logically conclude that the dictionary has a specific order because it guides the reader in a logical process.

Tutors can recognize order in a student’s the same way. If the writer can lead the audience through a logical thought process, the paper is obviously organized. But, the tutor can also recognize when a student does not have the best order. When one thought jumps from another, or when the conclusion is not conclusive, the tutor can show that the thought process does not clearly lead the reader to understanding what the writer’s intent is. Making sure that the writing can flow from one idea to another by including the transitions will help the writer. The writer needs to understand that not every reader will be able to make the implied transitions. The writer needs to think like the reader by including even the obvious thoughts the writer had. When a writer can include all of the details and nuances of their thoughts, the transitions and order will fall into place. Lastly, the writer needs to make sure the conclusion makes a good connection to a global thought. This means that the writer needs to make a purpose for the paper. It is not logical for someone to write a paper without giving it some kind of purpose. The writer needs to discover the purpose of the paper, and explicitly include that purpose in the conclusion, so that the reader can understand the order.

To go along with our discussion in class...

Sorry, I had to.. it makes me laugh