I just wrote on BlogHer about a recent study conducted out of University of California, Irvine in conjunction with the US Army about how not checking email at work makes you more productive and less stressed.  The topic came on the heels of the derecho that tore through the East Coast, taking with it electricity along with our trees.  I had email on and off for days, and I’m still digging out of all the messages that came in that I didn’t deal with in a timely manner and now need to deal with in a huge pile.  My life experience doesn’t mirror this study.  At all.

But here’s the thing: the people in the study knew that they not only weren’t going to check email but that everyone would be understanding if they weren’t replying to an email in a timely manner.  They were given permission to not do one aspect of their job — dealing with written communication — and their hearts reacted accordingly.  If my boss said to me: “go work on your own.  I’m not going to expect you to check email this week,” I may relax too knowing I have one aspect of my job off my plate.

But that isn’t how life works.

People email you and they expect that you are (1) reading their email and (2) if it requires an answer, that you’re going to answer in a timely manner that is dictated by the importance of both the subject manner and your relationship.  I would love to see a follow up study using these exact same subjects, but this time, have their email access cut off while they know that everyone else still has access to email and people are sending them messages, expecting them to keep up.  Are they still relaxed; still humming through work?

Or would they do what I did during the derecho which was constantly obsess about when electricity was going to return?

Email obviously distracts me from work (as do blog posts, come to think of it), but it’s not just a time suck.  It’s what makes me feel connected to the larger world as I work from home.  It brings those happy distractions, those human connection moments, that make me more productive at work as I touch base with family and friends (or react to amusing emails from my workmates).  Do I sometimes get stressed when I see how much I have to do and my blackberry keeps buzzing with messages — of course.  But the alternative isn’t to cut out email from the work day but to give yourself short email-free work bursts.  I’d much rather deal with 50 messages at the end of every hour or so than to wait until the last hour of the day and try to pound through 400 at once.

But that’s just me.

And I will admit that my email account mixes business and pleasure — I have work and social emails coming into the same account.  Perhaps if I had a dedicated email account used solely for work that never received a personal message I may feel differently, but I think those work-focused email accounts are the exception rather than the rule.  I don’t know many people who never receive a social email on their work account.  And in regards to this study, email is email: in turning off checking work email during the day, you’d also be turning off checking social emails during the day.  And without those, my world would be a fairly grey place.

I need those little social email distractions from time to time.

What about you — how would you feel if you couldn’t check email from the proverbial 9 am to 5 pm?

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

Fixed form poetry is meant to free the mind by providing a structure much in the same way a house frees the person who lives inside to focus on things other than the elements outside. The next form we’re going to look at is the haiku.

Before you shrug your shoulders and say, “anyone can write a haiku,” I’m going to tell you that you’re correct. Anyone can write a haiku which is why they’re such a popular poetry form with the elementary school set. But few can write a good haiku. Few can use those 17 allotted syllables wisely.

Yes, I used the term syllables because I’m writing this as an American. Traditional haikus use 17 morae (not syllables) because Japanese is a language that is known for its moraic qualities. Think of mora as the length of the syllable. You can have long syllables or short syllables, and nowhere is this clearer than when you think about the different ways the British and Americans pronounce the same word.

What do college students live in? A dormitory. If you ask an American to say the word, they will give you four short syllables — dorm-i-tor-y — and we stress the first syllable slightly. If you ask someone British to say the same word, they will give you three syllables, with the third one held for two brief counts instead of one — dorm-i-try. Both words have four morae, but in one case (the British one), two mora are combined to make one syllable.

Do you see now why traditional haiku artists are cranky when we wave our hand and say, “Morae are too hard to work with! Let’s count syllables instead.” Morae are harder to work with inside English, though they aren’t as difficult to work with in Japanese, a very moraic language. There is more evenness in the time it takes to say each part of the word than there is in English.

We actually touched on this idea of morae back when we looked at meter in the villanelle lesson. Remember when I told you about the other poetic feet beyond iambs (trochee, spondee, pyrrhic, anapest, amphibrach and dactyl) — all of them are essentially counting morae. For instance, a trochee foot is three morae (though it has two syllables). It’s a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Helpless. Help is stressed and it counts as two morae. Your mouth forms the first mora (hel) and then your lips close to say the second mora (lp). The “L” in help actually travels between the two morae. Less is unstressed and brief, and it counts as one morae. The exact opposite happens with the iamb. You have an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. Again, iambs are comprised of three morae.

So, forgive me traditional haiku masters: since we are working in English and not in Japanese, I’m going to let everyone count syllables instead of morae. Because I’d rather have you focus on subject matter and the juxtaposition vs. get hung up on the sound of the words, especially since English doesn’t mirror Japanese.

So let’s go with the traditional count of 5, 7, and 5. In Japanese, it is 5 morae, 7 morae, and 5 morae. In English, we’ll count it as 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables (but now you can also understand why correct haikus often don’t follow that 5, 7, 5 syllable count — those poets are counting morae even in English.

Traditional haikus always work with juxtaposition of two images — the images push against one another and in effect, heighten one another. Let’s look at a famous haiku by Kobayashi Issa for a moment:

little snail
inch by inch, climb
Mount Fuji!

It’s also written less directly as,

O snail

Climb Mount Fuji,

But slowly, slowly!

Both are translations so they don’t fit the pattern when written in English though it does in Japanese (katatsuburi / soro-soro nobore / fuji no yama). But it’s a perfect example of that idea of “kiru” (which means cutting, and is the term used to explain the way the juxtaposition should be used).

It’s a snail, a tiny thing. And then the image pulls back and we see what he’s climbing — Mount Fuji, the largest thing. Tiny meets large and tiny becomes smaller whereas the large becomes huge. That is juxtaposition or the kiru of the poem. And all haiku try to employ some type of slash that gives the reader greater understanding of the two parts.

There’s additionally a second kiru. Mount Fuji is a spiritual place and Buddhists believe it’s a gateway since it reaches up into the sky. This is a tiny snail — the lowliest of beings. It oozes. And it’s climbing… wait for it until the last morae… Mount Fuji. It’s juxtaposing this spiritual space with the tiniest being and showing the importance of all life on earth. We are all struggling to climb the figurative mountain of life, regardless of size or circumstance.

There is one last part of kiru that will be familiar to you since we just studied sonnets (see, there is a reason for the order we approached these fixed forms!). Kireji is the term for the actual slash — the element that changes your understanding. For instance, the word that separates the two images that you’re juxtaposing. It’s the Japanese version of the “turn” or “volta” you saw in the sonnet! Kireji is a cutting word or piece of punctuation. It can be as simple as a comma or as complicated as a word.

The last part is the idea of “kigo” or using something from the natural world. In this case, we’re looking at a snail and we’re looking at a mountain. And we get a sense of the season, since kigo often refers to the seasonal element of the poem. In this case, it’s spring, a time of year when snails are plentiful. (I think… I know snails hibernate, but I don’t really know a lot about the life cycle of the snail.)

Homework: try your hand at writing a haiku now that you know more about the form, and make sure you post a link in the comment section below if you publish one on your blog so we can hop over to read it.

Minutes after I published that last post, Josh called me over to Seablue’s container and pointed out that not only was the shell still open, but the shell was empty.  Seablue was in several large oozy chunks over the sand.  Which may or may not have been a bad thing.  I mean, we were taking it to be a bad thing, but since we’re not bivalves and know very little about abra albas, we can’t be certain that this was the horror show we were imagining it to be.  Still, we sat down with the twins and had a long talk with them about pet death and pet owner responsibility.  There were many tears, but in the end, it was decided (with a strong influence from Finding Nemo) that Seablue and Milky White would return to their families in the ocean via the toilet.

The ChickieNob took the loss of her bivalve exceptionally hard.  Some people may have asked her to put it in perspective, but I think she had put the loss into her own unique perspective.  She really had fallen in love with Milky White in an extraordinarily short amount of time.  I fully believe that.  She really had thought that she’d have years with her bivalve. (Even though her brother consoled himself by saying, “Abra albas only live two years.  We have no way of knowing Seablue’s age.  I mean, his life didn’t start when he came into mine.  Therefore, I’m choosing to believe that Seablue was two and ready to die.”  Whatever helps you to sleep through the night.)  It’s funny to us, but it isn’t funny to her.

I know some people are surprised by how deeply they’re mourning the passing of Nancy.  I went through my drawers and set aside a pair of socks she sent me when I told her I wanted to be the sort who did roller derby but knew that my pacifist tendencies didn’t mesh well with the game.  It’s hard to mourn someone you know through their blog because — like Milky White — it’s not always clear-cut for those around you.  We know what mourning a family member looks like.  We know what mourning a friend looks like.  We even know what mourning someone estranged from you looks like, or the loss of a celebrity or public figure.  Yet I still don’t think we know what mourning a blogger looks like.

There are some bloggers that I know in a different way than their family members or their face-to-face friends.  They share intimate thoughts; perhaps because they know that they’ll never have to face their readers, own up to someone they only speak to via email.  Our blogs can be like confessional booths, the readers the priests on the other side of the wall granting us the absolution we need in order to keep moving through our lives, in order to keep liking ourselves.  We share such deep truths.  It is impossible to read a person’s raw reality and not have their story affect you.

Books remain on our shelves forever, taking on a life separate from their creator.  When I think about Hogwarts, I don’t think much about JK Rowling.  I think about Harry Potter.  The characters become the focus; the author secondary.  I think we sometimes transfer that character ideology to blogs, forgetting that they’re personal stories written by real people.  And real people die.  I think this because I see the way we argue with a person in their comment section, believing that it’s our right to shape their story, shape their view point.  That we’re just interacting with the character, as if we’re creating an interactive piece of fan fiction with the comment section.  But bloggers are real people.  And real people die.  I think sometimes we believe that blogs will never end; that the story will keep going indefinitely and we can jump in and out of it on our own timetable.  That’s the beauty of Google Reader — the blog waits for us; the story waits for us.  But then a blogger dies and you realize that the story doesn’t wait for us.  The story keeps going whether we’re ready for the next thoughts or not.  Because bloggers are real people.  And real people die.

Maybe I’m repeating that because I need the reminder as well.

It is strange to mourn a blogger.  You can always convince yourself that the blogger just hasn’t had time to post.  That the story will continue at a later date.  There aren’t the daily reminders that you get with the loss of a family member or a face-to-face friend.  Sometimes you need to repeat it over and over again to remember, so you don’t forget.

All I know is that words get under our skin, thoughts get under our skin.  That we change each other with every single post.

The ChickieNob had trouble sleeping last night.  She started crying again when I kissed her goodnight and she said that she knew she did the right thing by returning Milky White to the sea, but that the right thing was also the hard thing. (Please don’t disprove the plotline of Finding Nemo in this moment; not helpful.)  And then she kept saying, “I just wasn’t ready for it.  I knew it had to happen, but it makes me so sad because I just wasn’t ready for it.  I didn’t know this was going to happen.”

And maybe that is why the loss is so unnerving; it’s the suddenly.  We are mourning the suddenlies of life, that any one of our stories could grind to a halt when we least expect it.  That sometimes we don’t know it is going to happen, but we need to process the news nonetheless.  That life cannot pause for suddenlies just so you can find the time to take them in.  It feels like a carousel ride abruptly stopping, and we are thrown forward without the ability to hold on.

One of my favourite songs is a Naomi Shemer poem called “Al Kol Eleh.”  That link contains a fairly dreadful translation, but I do love the opening stanza: Over the honey and the sting / Over the bitter and the sweet / Over our daughter, our baby / My God, watch over what is good.”

It’s this reminder; that you can’t have the honey without the bee, and with the bee comes the sting.  You can’t have the intense love you feel for a child without realizing the fragility of life; that death is just as much a possibility as living.

I will start with the sweet.

It may have taken a long time, it may have been an accident, but the ChickieNob is now the proud owner of a clam-like animal, a bivalve called an abra alba. (You’ve never heard of an abra alba?  Neither had we.  Thank you, Google.)

We went to the beach to get over the insanity that was not only the derecho (another word we learned this week thanks to the Google-machine.  It’s the name of a land hurricane) and the subsequent power outage, but because we also had to attend a wedding in the middle of the power outage (and did I mention, there was also no water) AND I got my period on the 16th day of my cycle in the middle of said wedding and obviously had nothing with me because who the hell carries tampons with them on the 16th day of their cycle?  The whole day was something of a goat rodeo.

So after the wedding, we went to the beach with a set of friends who also hadn’t any power, and while I was standing by the water, I noticed the waves were bringing in these clam-like animals that would immediately burrow down into the sand.  I managed to catch one of them, and I held it out for the twins to examine.  “Look,” I foolishly said.  “It’s a baby clam.”

“I love him,” the ChickieNob announced despite the fact that she had just met him and her brain was surely a little addled from the lack of electricity.

“You can’t love him.  You don’t even know him.”

“I love him,” the ChickieNob said simply.  “Can I take him home and have him live in my room?  I’ll feed him… things.  And take care of him.  And make salt water so I can clean his bowl.”

And even though it clearly was a bad idea, I not only agreed to this but caught a second one for the Wolvog.  She named hers Milky White and he named his Seablue, and they lived in the hotel room inside sand-and-water filled water bottles.  And — G-d help me — they thrived.  They ate and burrowed and stuck out their siphons and seemed generally happy in the abra alba sense of the word.

And by fuck, those abra albas grew on me, and I came to love them too.  Especially when Seablue opened his little shell and poked his mucousy appendages out and we all cooed at how smart he must be to open his shell like that.

I will end with the bitter.

As many have heard, Nancy from ANewLifeofNancy (the name of her blog changed a few times over the years), died this week.  I don’t have any details; I only knew from other people’s comments on her Facebook page.

Every single person in this blogosphere adds their unique voice to create the whole, and even one missing voice leaves a void.  I’m remembering Nancy today as the roller derby queen.  As someone who never backed down, someone who brought honey with the sting, sweetness with the snark.

I’d like to leave you with an old post of Nancy’s; one of my all-time favourites.  If you knew her, you probably remember this one.  If you didn’t know her, you will realize why the blogosphere is different today without her here.

First and foremost, before we get down to the Roundup Extravaganza, I want to thank everyone who Facebooked, tweeted, posted, purchased, emailed, talked about, and cheered on Life from Scratch when it was the Daily Deal.  It felt like my Bat Mitzvah; I felt so loved, so cared for.  You made me want to sing my Torah portion…  I mean, give you all a hug.  So thank you.  Thank you thank you thank you.

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As I said last week, in lieu of the normal Roundup, in order to celebrate the 400th (which is really the 300th) Roundup, we’d have an extravaganza where people could honour the posts that have stuck with them over the last 100 weeks or so.  So, without further ado, the Roundup Extravaganza.  And no, the list isn’t closed; it’s just getting started.  It may take me a little bit to upload them to the list, but check back all weekend since I’m sure more will go up soon.  To add another post to the list, fill out the form.

1. From IF to When
2. by the brooke
3. Bio Girl
4. The Shifty Shadow
5. The Road Less Travelled
6. Write Mind Open Heart
7. the misadventures of missohkay
8. Three Little Birds
9. Hapa Hopes
10. Nest Building 101
11. Chasing Our Stork
12. The Infertile Voice
13. Bloodsigns
14. What the Blog? – Jennandtonica
15. Single Infertile Female
16. Stirrup Queens
17. Stirrup Queens
18. 88 Highbury Corner
19. The 2 Week Wait
20. Creating Motherhood
21. To add another post to the list, fill out the form.

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The normal Roundup will be back next week, which means the normal second helpings will be back too.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 29th and July 6th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.