You know how I asked if social media had the potential to do more damage than good?  Yesterday’s comments were literally the catalyst that set life back on track for myself and the ChickieNob.  There were both the smart words that you handed to me that I could pass along to her in order to help her make sense of the idea of broken promises (and whether to keep hers), but there was also this… intangible wave of support… I’m having difficulty putting this into words.  I guess it’s like this: you know how when you do a trust fall, you have that moment when your body touches down against all the hands and you’re cushioned?  That’s how I felt receiving your comments and guidance.  And once that happened, I was able to take a deep breath, clear my mind, get the next idea for the ChickieNob, and move forward.  I wish I could write more concretely about it, but it involves other people and therefore doesn’t feel quite like my story to tell.  But suffice to say that like Pippin, we’re on the right path.  Because of all of you.

You’ve probably noticed that I’m thinking a lot about external validation lately.  Sort of hard to hide it when you write three posts (1, 2, and 3) about it over a month, not to mention the Ashley Judd post.  It is hard to grapple with the idea of this thing — the Internet — which brings such joy and such tsuris.  That the very same thing can unite us and divide us — sometimes on the very same day.  You can write a post, get ten comments that validate your feelings and make you feel connected to something and additionally get ten comments that negate your feelings and make you feel alienated from humanity.  Or not get any comments or page views at all and feel equally isolated.

It is very easy to feel alone — to feel lonely — amongst the billions of people on the Internet.  It is as if all of us are traveling the same road, the same tubes of the Internet, yet some feel as if they are in a car and some feel as if they are in a bus.  And some of the bus people might wish for the solitude of the car and some of the car people might wish for the camaraderie of the bus (I’m picturing the camp bus more than the public transport here in town), though many are fine with how they’re traveling this road just as long as they are free of blown tires and other obstacles.

On a good day, I feel like the blogosphere is humming.  It hums, at least, for me.  I like dropping in on all the various blogs along this road.  I like my phone buzzing to tell me that people are communicating with me.  It’s all good.  On a bad day, it sounds like out-of-tune guitar strings.  I feel stretched too thin.  I feel lonely amongst everyone else.  But mostly, it feels out of my control — it always IS out of my control, but on bad days it also feels out of my control.  There is nothing I can do to make it right, to make it hum again.  It ebbs and flows even as my actions remain the same.

I realized the finger trap nature to the Internet long ago — the harder I tug, the more stuck I get.  It doesn’t help to tug at the collective Internet.  Sometimes the only thing you can do is step away, or deep breathe and continue to do the same actions knowing that the waning will once again wax.  Or vice versa.

I’ve been turning off my phone for two hours every day while I do yoga or go running.  It started with yoga; the studio just felt like the sort of place where I should shut out all external distractions — even good distractions.  And then one day, I realized that the time I had the phone off had become a sanctuary instead of a stress.  It had a starting point and an end point.  It wasn’t long enough for lots of things to pile up that would need my attention.  It was just this little bite of time where I had no access to this thing that brings me happiness and stress and where the Internet also had no access to me.

I have never had a desire for a long digital sabbatical.  If someone wants to unplug, I think they should unplug.  If someone doesn’t really want to unplug, I don’t see a reason for them to unplug just because there are posts on the Internet saying how great it is.  I don’t think it’s the only way to reach a place of balance where you can allow the Internet to wax and wane without dragging you with it. (Though I think even if you’re cognizant of the movements of the Internet — or friendships or relationships or fill in the blank with anything that has the tendency to change over time — you can’t help but be emotionally affected if you become emotionally affected.  It’s hard to talk yourself out of your feelings.)

It is two years on from when I wrote about the way the Internet can affect my mood.  I am no closer to being in a place where the Internet doesn’t affect my mood.  It feels a bit like the position “crow” in yoga — some days I can get it and some days I can’t, and I don’t really know why that is nor do I have the strongest desire to be master over this position.  Even when I have it, I can’t hold it very long.  And that is how I feel about the Internet and the validation I take from my writing or interactions with others.  I sometimes get it and I sometimes don’t, and I have no idea why.  It sometimes affects me and it sometimes doesn’t, and I have no idea why.  I have been trying to let it go and move with it rather than trying to make it move with me.  Sometimes I am successful and sometimes I am not.

Which is why I start this same conversation over and over again with you.  I keep returning to the same ideas and broaching the same topic with new analogies or new entrances with the hope that one day it will all make sense.  And until then, we can talk about it; acknowledge it.  Allow each other to know that we mostly grapple with the same thoughts just with different specifics colouring them.

I smacked myself in the head with the side of the car door on Sunday.  After the initial writhing around, holding my temple, cursing everyone around me, the pain lowered to a dull throb that lasted for several days*.  All I wanted was to undo the moment, go back in time, not open the car door into the soft space on the side of my skull.  Being in physical pain sucks.  Being in physical pain due to your own clumsiness sucks hardcore.

*******

I have a tendency to mentally run away on the what ifs.  Not the good, daydreamy what ifs, but the terrible, dark, horrible what ifs that rarely serve a purpose beyond allowing me to feel fear before I need to feel fear.  Borrowing trouble.  Pre-mourning.

It’s not as if I ever run out of these thoughts for myself, but I do them for other people too: people I care about such as the twins all the way to people I don’t know such as Aimee Copeland who lost her leg to a flesh-eating bacteria.  I read the news updates because my heart goes out to this girl and her family, and then I start thinking, what if it had rained that day? What if her trip had been cancelled?  What if too many people wanted to go on the zip line and she never got her turn?  Completely unhelpful thoughts even for Aimee herself to grapple with because what is done is done, and she can only move forward from here.

And yet I can’t stop mentally fiddling around with the future and past as if we are all Playmobil people in a Playmobil town to be manipulated and moved around by unseen hands, stories erased and restarted when they hit outcomes we don’t like.

*******

The same quote keeps popping up in various places, though I’ve been unable to trace the origin of it.  It goes something along the lines of “worrying is praying for what you don’t want.”

I wish there was a way for someone to tally my daily thoughts for me, every single one that passes through my brain, and tell me at the end of the day if I did more hoping or more worrying (because wouldn’t hope be praying for what you do want?).  I fear if I tried to do it myself, I would skew the results, either thinking more terrible thoughts than usual because they’re the elephant that I’m not supposed to think about or thinking more good thoughts than usual because I want to be the type of person who hopes more than worries.

But it isn’t really a matter of evenness.  Doesn’t worry weigh heavier than hope?  Hope carries us away; it’s the balloon that we’re holding that makes us sail forward.  Worry is like holding an oversized crate that makes your arms and back ache as you struggle to move it to the basement storage room.

*******

The ChickieNob asked a question recently that I couldn’t answer.  Many people, altogether, had taken a pledge.  The ChickieNob took the pledge to heart, bringing it up from time to time, especially when she noticed other people bending it.  One day, she realized that some people had broken the pledge, this promise that she made that she took very seriously, and she sobbed on our ride home.  She asked me from the backseat why she should ever keep her promises if other people break theirs?

How do you answer that?  Do you give her the cold hard truth that some people are careless at best and cruel at worst?  Do I soften the message and tell her that sometimes people will break a promise, but the broken promise never tells the whole story?

I wanted to pull the ChickieNob Playmobil figure out of that game, and start over, resetting up the plastic town.  I wanted her to unlearn that life lesson, to undo every decision that brought us to that place.  Because what if she takes this lesson to its logical conclusion?  Why should she trust others or make promises herself?

We all grow up and learn through trial and error who to trust and who not to trust; we know there are people out there who have our back no matter what, and we also know that there are people we are friends with as a matter of convenience and some people who we should avoid at all cost.  We learn about all the various shades of grey; that no one in this world is black or white, but that we are complicated, simplistic, wonderful, terrible beings.  And sometimes every single one of us breaks a promise.  And sometimes breaking that promise isn’t even indicative of how much the promise meant to us in the first place.

I know she will be fine in the end, because she needs to be fine in the end.  Because there is no undoing of things.  There’s only forward.

How would you answer her?  Why should she keep her promise to others if those people are not keeping their promise to her?  Is there a big enough difference between a promise and a statement, and should we be teaching kids (and some adults) to make statements instead of promises?

* No, I didn’t go to the hospital.  But I also have never made a promise to go to the hospital when I accidentally smack myself in the head.

Karen made a very interesting point on my post about the drop in comments.  She writes:

Before blogs, we read newspapers, and we did not write a letter to the editor for every item we read, but we talked about interesting stories at work, school, the dinner table or over the back fence. The conversations were no less rich and even more dispersed than in the digital realm. The advantage of digital conversations is that we have not only the means of gathering those scattered conversations but dropping in and participating in them.

Which raises a really important question: is it healthy to have our words and ideas widely critiqued by everyone and anyone?  Authors and poets know that having your work reviewed is part of the act of publishing; though it isn’t part of the act of writing.  You can write for the joy of writing and even allow people to read it, but never receive feedback on it, which isn’t the case with traditional publishing.  Books that are published by traditional publishers are reviewed, newspaper and magazine articles are discussed in letters to the editor, and the author has the potential to see these thoughts (though you can always avoid reading reviews).  It goes with the territory, much like how report cards are part of teaching, though they may not be the thing most teachers think about when they make the decision to go into education.

But those reviews, a long time ago, were written by professionals.  They had a job and understood the responsibility that came with that job in writing honest critiques of published works.  With the exception of letters to the editor written by people who are passionate enough about the subject to do the work of taking out a piece of paper and writing down their thoughts and slapping a stamp on an envelope — things that discourage those who are not passionate from voicing their opinion — most authors never heard anything about their writing except from reviewers and book sale figures.  Sure, there were letters that trickled in or comments made directly to the writer. (I’m assuming usually gushy since how many people have the ovaries to walk up to a writer and say to their face, “I think your work sucked.”)  But the feedback was slow-coming, usually thoughtful (which doesn’t always mean kind, but at least criticism that is usable), and small in quantity.

And now we have this non-traditional publishing medium — blogs — where people receive feedback on their writing almost instantaneously.  And it’s not from people who write reviews for a living, who are keeping in mind the code of ethics that govern their profession.  The comments are written by me and you, and we’re hardly following a code of ethics except in the most personal sense.  Some of the comments are fantastically helpful; so many moments in life were easier because your words were with me.  And some of the comments are hurtful; even without intending to be.

And it raises the question: is blogging really healthy?  Is it always a good thing to receive this much feedback about your words and thoughts?  Have we taken something that is good in small doses and brought it to an unhealthy level?  I don’t really have an answer: I’m asking you.

It goes further: is it healthy to have our lives critiqued?  To have people not responding to the words on the screen but writing about our beings in general?  It used to be that the people who entered the public’s opinion were mostly celebrities who knew — like teachers and report cards — that critique came as part of the job.  But now there are so many people offering up their opinion on celebrities (who they are as human beings; even though we don’t know them) and on a daily basis, regular people enter into the realm of virtual celebrity from computer shooter Tommy Jordan to breastfeeding cover mum Jamie Lynn Grumet.

Again, I don’t have an answer, but it does give food for thought: in taking the conversation that used to be held at the backyard fence and bringing it onto the Internet not only for other people to eavesdrop in on but for the subject to be privy to as well, have we done more emotional damage than good?  Or is the good enough to balance out the potential emotional damage?

One of my favourite movies growing up was The Incredible Shrinking Woman with Lily Tomlin.  The main character, Pat Kramer, is an ordinary woman who gets sprayed by some perfume that causes her to shrink.  Shrink to the point where she tumbles into the garbage disposal in the sink.  Shrink to the point where she becomes microscopic — not discernible to the naked eye.

I liked the movie because what child wouldn’t want to crawl into their dollhouse?  But it was also scary to see her shrink, and as an adult, I watch the trailer with not a small amount of trepidation.  Who the hell wants to watch herself disappear?  Watching things or people fade away can be frightening.  You know, people… blog comment sections…

There has been talk around the blogosphere about comments tapering off; where there were once vibrant conversations, there are now only a few people talking.  And yet the same people report that their overall stats haven’t fallen.  Readership for the most part remains constant, but the discussion has tapered off, almost as if it has been sprayed with experimental perfume and we’re witnessing the Incredible Shrinking Blog.

Like the film, we sort of know what caused it, but we don’t (1) understand how it happened or (2) how to undo it for our own space.  I mean, it’s obvious to the viewer (and from my vague memories, the characters in the film) that the perfume kicks it off.  But we (and they) don’t know how this perfume is causing someone to shrink nor how to reverse the effects and get Lily Tomlin back to her normal size.  Replace the perfume with the terms diffusion and consumption and you have the cause (yet not the how or the solution) to the blog comment situation.

Diffusion refers to all those other social media sites which are absorbing the conversation.  I think places like BlogHer provide the proof in the pudding — they bring the Twitter conversation, Facebook conversation, and actual comments all into a single space below the post.  If only comments were visible, as they are on this blog, you’d think that people weren’t talking much at all.  But if you start seeing the tweets and Facebook comments (not to mention the numerous other social media sites from Google+ to Pinterest), you realize that the same depth of conversation is taking place; it’s just diffused across multiple mediums.

And it doesn’t really matter if you are on other social media sites.  The reality is that a lot of your readers are there, and that’s where they’re talking.  Hence why there is nothing you can do on that front to shunt people back to the comment box; nor would you want to get rid of all those other social media spaces in order to bring the conversation back to a single place.  Social media sites bring conversation as well as take it away, plus they fill other community-building gaps.

Consumption refers to the medium on which people are reading blog posts.  Many people read on their phone or tablet, which makes commenting annoying at best.  Add in obstacles such as auto-correct and word verification forms, and it sometimes feels like leaving a comment is more work that it’s worth.  I have a tendency to read a post, mark it unread so I’ll return to it once I’m on the computer and can comment easier, and then unfortunately let things pile up so I never get to it at all.  Good intentions; poor follow through.  I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only person who is reading blogs in a medium that is not conducive to participation on said blogs in the same way that computers are the perfect medium for jumping into the conversation.  It’s one thing to type out 140 characters from your phone.  It’s another to write a comment with 50+ words, pulling in quotes from the main post to highlight your point.  Blogs were created for a medium (computers) on which they are no longer the sole way they are being consumed.

By the way, this is aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall based on assumption.  But doesn’t it sound like it could be true?

So we know the likely cause — diffusion and consumption — but we don’t know how these things that were supposed to add to the conversation ultimately took it away.  Do blog comment sections need to change in format to reflect our new needs?  Should blogging software pull in all mentions of the post across the Internet and compile them under the post so people can see all the threads of the conversation in one place?  Should we create a method for a person leaving comments from their phone to be able to bypass the need to fill in all the fields such as name, email address, blog url and only focus on the comment box (moving from field to field is one of my problems)?  What about everyone getting rid of comment verification boxes so people don’t have to suffer through captcha guesswork in order to leave a comment from their phone?

And we don’t know how to reverse it, to bring back the conversation to the comment box.  I have to admit that I’d rather have it there than in other places because I like being able to return to other people’s thoughts and see them in conjunction with my own.  Words on other social media sites are great in the moment, but irretrievable in the far future.  But I don’t want to give up talking about blog posts in other social media spaces.  And I’d never want to give up reading from my phone or tablet because the reality is that I also read more now than I did before.  I’m more likely to read a blog post while I’m waiting somewhere alone whereas I used to only read blog posts on the computer.  And if I couldn’t get to a computer, I couldn’t read.

The only thing I think people can do to bring back the conversation is to talk openly about it.  Tell your readers that you also love hearing their thoughts in your comment section so you have it in the future.  Make it easy for people to comment by getting rid of obstacles such as difficult-to-utilize from a phone log ins and word verification forms.  Or, change the way you view the change: accept that diffusion doesn’t mean drop-off.  There may be fewer comments than before, but there is more conversation all around.  The reality is that the blogosphere has always waxed and waned, and perhaps we’re just seeing it at one point of the cycle.  Even without doing anything, we may find that the conversation makes its way back to the comment box on its own.

At the very end of The Incredible Shrinking Woman, the main character — now so tiny that no one can see her — falls into some household cleaners which cause her to regrow to her normal size.  Of course, the movie finishes with the open question of whether she stops growing once she reaches her original height which is answered with the shoe splitting open.

How amazing would that be?  If not only did people figure out a way to reverse the trend and bring people back into the heyday of blog conversations but caused those conversations to grow exponentially.  Think of how much good could be accomplished by people actually talking things out.

Have you noticed a drop in comments through your overall blog traffic remains pretty much the same (obviously, if your traffic has dropped, there are different causes at work)?  Are you conversing on other social media sites about other people’s blog posts?

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.

Hopefully you’ve now found your groove of 15 minutes a day.  Let me repeat something that was in that last lesson: if it’s going well, stick with it.  Now is not the time to try to bring it up to an hour. (Unless you’re a full-time writer, and then your problem wasn’t finding time; it was using time and forcing yourself to write… and that is a different lesson that we’ll get to in the future: making yourself write when you don’t want to write or getting over writer’s block.)  Stick to 15 minutes a day for a few weeks until not only your groove but other people’s expectations are set.  Then take a hard look at your schedule and see if you can afford to move it to a half hour a day.  If you can’t, stick to 15 minutes (you can write a book in a year working on it in 15 minute increments).  If you can, that’s when you increase your time as long as you can maintain it daily.  I promise you, years of bad writing habits have taught me this lesson well.

So today’s lesson: sestinas.  Some people put down on the form that they wanted to learn about poetry, and I’ve had a crap week and needed to do something fun.  So this lesson is really about playing with words in the form of a collapsing sestina, which is a non-rhyming fixed form poem.  I wrote similarly about it last month for NaBloPoMo, except your homework today will be very very different from the work you did over there.  So give this a chance even if you’re on the fiction or creative non-fiction side of this MFA department.

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.  Hmmm… interesting concept, right?  Believe me, we’re going to employ it a bit in our fiction writing too because it’s true: when we know we’re not being held against our will, being boxed in sometimes makes humans feel safe and comforted.  Think: hugs, cozy sleeping bags, sleeper cars on trains.

The sestina has six stanza, all six lines long, with a final three-line envoy. Unlike a lot of other fixed forms, sestinas don’t rhyme or have a set meter. Instead, they utilize six end-words in various ways, pointing out sometimes the subtle meaning shifts in those end-words depending on their context.

One of the easiest poems to look at in order to understand the form is Carole Oles “The Magician Suspends the Children” published first in The Loneliness Factor in 1979 which begins,

With this charm I keep the boy at six (A)
and the girl fast at five (B)
almost safe behind the four (C)
walls of family. We three (D)
are a feathery totem I tattoo (E)
against time: I’ll be one (F)

Ignoring those letters in parentheses for a moment, the six end-words are all numbers in this case: six, five, four, three, two, and one. Yet you can already see Oles playing with the form in the first stanza. Instead of the number two, she incorporates it into the word “tattoo.” Later in the poem, she uses “won” in place of “one,” “too” in place of “two,” and “for” in place of “four.” It’s a poetry form with a lot of leeway.

To see other usages of end words, check out Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina” or Ezra Pound’s “Altaforte.”

The second stanza takes those end-words and uses them again to end each line, except it mixes up the order. If you look at those six lines above as each pertaining to those letters in parentheses, the order then collapses upon itself — A, B, C, D, E, F becomes F, A, E, B, D, C (or last, first, second to last, second, third to last, third).

In the third stanza, it collapses again: C, F, D, A, B, E. If you look at the end-words in the third stanza, you’ll see that they are fore, wun, three, six, five, onto.

In other words, the full form of a collapsing sestina (since there are also sestinas that utilize the end-words as end-words but play with the order of the lines):

Stanza One: A, B, C, D, E, F
Stanza Two: F, A, E, B, D, C
Stanza Three: C, F, D, A, B, E
Stanza Four: E, C, B, F, A, D
Stanza Five: D, E, A, C, F, B
Stanza Six: B, D, F, E, C, A
Envoy: uses two end-words per line (with three lines total) with one word appearing in the middle of the line and the other word still being utilized as an end word.

Pretty cool, right?

Homework: Let’s have a little fun with this.  You know the Food Network show Chopped where the contestants open their baskets and have to utilize a set of mismatched ingredients and bring them together to form a cohesive dish? (“Contestants, open your baskets.  You have smoked oysters, grape jam, watercress, and corn chips… go!”)  I’m going to give you the six words to play with so everyone has the same end-words.  I’ve chosen words that can be utilized in numerous ways.  Once you’ve used one or two of your 15-minute sessions to play with words this way and write your sestina (since, you know the Chopped contestants only have 15 minutes too), either post your poem in the comment section below or post it on your blog and return with a link to your poem.  We’ll gather them up and have our own verbal episode of Chopped, except instead of chopping the weakest poem, we’ll just honour the most delicious one.

The end-words in your word basket: fair, to, sun, hope, rest, sing (will also accept for this last one, song).