Posts Tagged "Twilight Sparkle"

Investing Time: When It Backfires

Posted by Sharif S on Aug 14, 2013 in Blog Ends | 0 comments

So my best friend growing up, Mike, made this observation about me: “You work really hard so that you don’t have to work harder later.”  He told me this when I said that my summer should be easy because of how far ahead I was on my thesis.  So the class to begin preparing someone’s thesis would be easy.

My thesis prep class is a one on one class with a faculty instructor.  By then end of the summer you need 60 pages of ready to print work.  I gave her about 90 pages on the first day.

As you might have expected, this did not go as planned.

Meeting 1

She pretty much said that master’s thesis is supposed to be representative of the work I’ve done at during my master’s degree.  She didn’t feel the poetry worked well with the fiction and so the poetry was kicked out.  Also she didn’t kick out my fiction, but she just didn’t really talk about my other stories.  She just said “Unicorn Hunting” is ready for print.

Finally she said that it would be in my best interest if we worked on a short story from scratch together so I could have one more solid, finished piece in my arsenal.  We decided we would work on new work for meetings 2 & 3 while using meetings 4 & 5 to edit.

Meetings 2 & 3

The story I decided to write was ambitious and beyond my current skill as a writer.  I had to develop more in order to do it justice.  My adviser really guided me on exactly how to do it.  I really can’t imagine the story coming out as well as it did without her help.  Although, because the idea pushed me so far beyond what I was used to, not surprisingly my submissions were almost always tardy and short on pages.

I was supposed to give her a short story for meeting 2 and a new short story for meeting 3.  I gave her half of a short story for meeting 2 and the second half for meeting 3.  On top of that those pages were several hours late.  She didn’t seem to mind, but I felt like if I were a better writer I could have managed the deadlines.  So it just felt overwhelmingly like a personal failure, even though what I was doing was actually a personal best.

 

Between Meetings 3 & 4

In between this time I wrote The Art of the Dress: Lesson on Criticism

After the a lot of trying to think smarter rather than work harder, I still ended up working a lot to fix up the story.  She replied with an e-mail saying that she wanted to talk about the story, which I mentioned at the end of my last post.

I had no idea what I could possibly do.  I was getting some slight anxiety over it.

Meeting 4

I must have had at least some sound logic in the Art of the Dress post.  It turned out she liked it.  I must have been reading into things from a place of insecurity, because she said she could sign off on it after a few slight revisions.  Finally, all that hard work paid off and we were done!  Ahead of time!

 

Note: My thesis adviser is the nicest person and would never say the things I wrote in here for humor.  USC mostly has a fantastic faculty of caring individuals, but you do hear the occasional horror story.  I know this was told in the style of complaining, mostly for comedic effect.  However, since my adviser didn’t let me be lazy, I’m that much further along in my work.  And perhaps next year when I finish my final project, I’ll get to skate by on the work I did this summer, though I doubt it.  I guess the real lesson I’ve learned is that I’m not the type of person who should get annual passes to theme parks.

Read More

Reading Chinua Achebe Part 1: High School

Posted by Sharif S on Mar 24, 2013 in Blog Ends, Writing | 1 comment

So like many people I learned about the death of Chinua Achebe through Facebook, and then confirmed it with Wikipedia.

I’ve only read three things by Achebe: Things Fall Apart, a short story I hated and don’t remember, and some essays that gave me mixed feelings.

Things Fall Apart is one of my “which books had a profound impact on you” books.  I’ve read it about 4 times.  The only long form piece I’ve read more is Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

High School: Okonkwo was me.  Full of rage and ready to pounce on anything that would give me the opportunity to fuck it up, verbally or physically.  I once had a place of status among my friends, but I learned what depression is and began questioning my faith in God.  This was around the time many of my Catholic friends were going through confirmation.  I talked with them hoping that they could help me with my crisis of faith, which I don’t know if any of you have had this before, but it hurts.  But my questions were echoed to members of my friend’s churches, and they were told that I was “the devil trying to lead them from the path of Christ.”  I wasn’t the devil, but I was burning into impotent ash.  I was a kid who was lost, confused, and in pain, but I guess that’s just as dangerous to people whose faith is no stronger than wet newspaper.

Religion had seemed to take away all of my friends.  My best friend who taught me how to make inappropriate jokes decided that he was going to become a priest.  And apparently one who wishes to be like Christ cannot hang out with sinners.

My grades were falling.  Nothing made sense.  I was fighting with my family, friends, enemies, strangers… everyone was my antagonist.  The people who understood me seemed far away.  They weren’t in the honors classes.  Yet this fucking book understood.  The people I skated with understood.  They appreciated that I was the voice of reason while at the same time down to punch someone in the face.  My English teacher understood and came to my rescue when things got out of hand (Forgive me, but I’m not ready to tell that story yet).

I was a slow reader, still am.  I needed longer with the book before returning it to the library.  My English teacher knew that usually I would just prematurely surrender the book.  This time I wanted to finish it.  My English teacher was understanding.  The best English teachers are.  I think this is why Holden trusts the English teacher in Catcher in the Rye.  This is why the written word won’t die.

I went to New Mexico with my mom for a few days.  My mom told me to use this as an opportunity to relax but also catch up on the school work that had seemed too pointless and overwhelming during my state of depression.  I took Things Fall Apart with me.  The TSA opened my bag, because one of their sensors said my public school textbooks had suspect chemicals, which were later cleared as not being a bomb.  I told my English teacher about this, and she told me to throw the book away.  I told her that the book seemed just fine.  She then told me to keep it and pretend we had to throw the book away.  Then she pulled out a little card with student’s names and book titles.  Next to mine she crossed out the words Things Fall Apart.  It’s on my bookshelf, just behind my green screen.

Reading Chinua Achebe Part 2: Community College

Read More