College Applications

Any teenager can tell you that preparing and submitting college applications is an unpleasant experience. Recently I was thinking back to my own high school days and I remembered one particular part of the college application experience that stood out. Growing up in California, it was a no-brainer that I would be applying to one or more schools in the University of California system. My English teacher was one of the staff at my high school who had the responsibility for giving suggestions and help to students to improve their applications and thus give them a better shot at getting into the universities they were applying to. One day my teacher was talking to the class specifically about the University of California Admissions Board and what they liked to see on application essays. She told us they favored essays with stories about how applicants overcame hardship and then read us an essay that apparently had gone over very well with the Admissions Board. It was an essay by a girl who came from a poor family that couldn't even afford to buy her a calculator and who, despite all the social and economic factors working against her, triumphed and graduated as one of her high school's top students. It was the sort of heartwarming story we all love to read about, but my teenage brain was immediately bugged by a question. I raised my hand, and when called upon I asked my teacher what this affinity, on the part of the Admissions Board, for tales of hardship meant for the rest of us. What about those of us whose parents had worked their butts off to make sure we never had to go through any of that? Had they unintentionally put us at a disadvantage? There were no answers for my questions - the discussion just moved on and I didn't try to press my inquiry. Later on, though, I did joke with some other students that I would one day be an intentionally horrible father who destroyed my family's livelihood, just so I could give my kid a good sob story for his college application essay.

Big Friday

For the last few weeks I've been keeping to a the publishing schedule for this blog of putting up a new post five days a week, Monday through Friday. If you've read this blog for awhile, you know that most of the writing pieces I publish are on the shorter side, but on occasion I'll type up something longer. Granted, when I say that a post is "longer," that is relative to the normal length of my posts. I read a number of blogs whose authors regularly crank out posts that are at least 2,000 words, and compared to them my big posts are minuscule. Still, as part my practicing the craft of writing, I've been thinking that I ought to publish more of these longer posts, so for the month of March I'm going to try to commit to publishing one longer piece of writing per week and just see how it goes. I'm thinking Fridays will the days when these somewhat longer pieces of writing will go live, and in my mind I am referring to this as the "Big Friday" project. This year March has only four Fridays in it, so it should be a good testing ground to see if I can consistently produce longer posts over a short time frame. Depending on how it goes, I might continue the Big Friday project in the future months, or I might discontinue it if it doesn't work out.

Return To Sender

Last week a box arrived in the mail from Groupon. Inside was something that I have desired for well over a year now, however I did not open it. Instead, I printed out a return label, and two days after the box came to my door, I took it to the post office to have it sent back. Inside that box was a PlayStation 4. As a gamer, I had wanted to get a PS4 since it launched, but various things have kept me from doing so up to this point. Two weeks ago it looked like the waiting period was finally about to end. I saw online a notice that Groupon was running a good deal for a PS4 and I clicked the link to investigate further. A standard, new PS4 costs $400, however a vendor had new PS4s on sale for $350, and Groupon had an online code you could use to take an addition $50 off the price, bringing it down to $300. There was free shipping, so with the applicable taxes the final bill for purchasing this PS4 would have been about $309. This PS4 even came with a game as a nice bonus. It was a limited time offer, but there was more than 24 hours before the offer ended, so I thought it wise to take a day and think it over. I slept on it, and after some more pondering the following morning and afternoon I decided that this was probably the best deal I had yet seen on a new PS4, so it was time to take action and make the purchase. The only downside I saw at the time was that I would have to create a Groupon account, which I knew would flood my email inbox with all their email offers. "That's ok," I thought to myself, "I'll just unsubscribe as soon as the emails start showing up." So, I created an account, and started the transaction. I clicked the Buy button, applied the discount code, put in my credit card and mailing information, and after double-checking everything I clicked the button to finish the transaction. The processing screen came up and lasted a few seconds. When that finished I was expecting to get an order confirmation screen, however instead I got a notice that the order had not processed and instructing me to contact Groupon's Customer Support, along with a reference number which they could use to find out what had happened. Now, I completely understand that technical glitches sometimes occur, so I sent a detailed message to Customer Support with the reference number and an exact description of what had happened. I figured that it should be a simple problem to fix and I thought that within a day or two everything would be resolved and my purchase would be pushed through as originally intended. Sadly, this would not be the case. The next morning I had an email reply from Customer Support, which was the start of a long chain of emails that demonstrate what happens when Customer Support does not carefully read what you type, despite your best attempts to be clear and concise. They understood that I was trying to buy the PS4, but for whatever reason they didn't understand that I was trying to purchase it with the discount code, so they eventually pushed through the transaction at the non-discounted price. When I learned this, I sent a polite but distressed email letting them know they had made a mistake and asking them to cancel the order before it shipped. However, they were not able to fulfill that request either, so my card got charged the wrong amount and the box with the PS4 was on the way to my residence. I sent Customer Support a final (again, polite and professional) email letting them know that they had made a mistake, and later in the week I went ahead and printed out the return label, even though the box had not arrived at that point. I was going to send this PS4 back. The PS4 inside that box was something I had desired for awhile, but Groupon had botched the order and as a matter of principle and personal integrity I could not give business to a company that had screwed up on such a basic level and then repeatedly failed to fix the problem. Also I wasn't going to pay $350 (plus tax) for a PS4, as I knew that with patience I would eventually find another good deal. When the box arrived I didn't open it - I just held it for a minute and then put it on the table. Opening the box and seeing the PS4 inside would tempt me to keep it, which in my mind would be akin to letting Groupon get away with their little debacle. No, there would be no opening, no reconsidering. Two days after the box arrived I drove to the post office and handed it off to them to deliver it back to Groupon. I was close, so close, to owning a PS4, but unfortunately I had no choice but to send it back.

2016 Writing Project - The Format

This is the first of three or four short posts I'll do, one per week, on some of the general ideas I have for my 2016 Writing Project.

When thinking about the story in my head, one of the first things I've considered is the format of the story itself. While it could exist in a more traditional book format, in my mind I've always thought of it taking an episodic format - something like you would find in a tv show, web series, or even like what you'd see long ago in magazines where a story is split up across several editions. Along those lines, the story has slowly been emerging as a series of smaller stories that add on to each other and push the plot towards its conclusion. The story also covers a period of several years, which I know books can do, but I think the episodic format better handles the time jumps that I have in mind. Since everything related to this project is still in the embryonic stage, lots of things are still open to change and maybe I'll end up taking yet another format for the story, but right now episodic is how it looks.

International Audience

When I was gathering the word count information I used for a previous post, (found here) I took a look at the audience statistics and was quite surprised by what I found. This blog doesn't get a ton of views, but it has gotten visitors from some unexpected places. Below is a screenshot I took of the breakdown of lifetime visitors to this blog.

While it also shows the different types of browsers and operating systems used by visitors, my primary interest is the list of pageviews by country. The United States, as expected, holds the number one spot with the vast majority of visitors, but after that comes Russia, which I've never visited (I've never been to Ireland, Australia, or China either). Just a little further down the list are a number of European countries that I've traveled to and written about (France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, and at the bottom, Spain). These countries are more understandable, as I know many of the visits were actually the result of me logging into the blog while I was overseas and then viewing it after publishing a post. That said, I know for a fact that I did not visit the blog 17 times when I was in Germany back in 2012, so a few of those views from European countries must be people from there checking out the blog.

Until I had looked at these audience statistics I honestly had no idea that this blog had any international readers. I'm both humbled and flattered to know that there are a small number of people who have read this blog from outside the United States. If any of you international visitors are reading this, I just want to say thank you for visiting and reading. Hopefully you've found something here that you enjoy.

Let It Go

While on the flight from Paris to Minneapolis last November, I finally saw the movie Frozen. I also for the first time, and in context, heard the whole length of the hit song "Let It Go." I stopped regularly watching Disney movies sometime when I was a teenager, but I remember many of the songs from those movies, and I can't deny that Let It Go is an incredibly catchy song that will likely rank among the most popular songs in any Disney movie. Awhile after returning home, I went to Youtube and looked up the song to listen to it again. I quickly found it on one of Disney's official Youtube channels, but I also noticed that Disney had produce many other versions of the song in various foreign languages. One video that Disney had produced had the song being sung in 25 different languages (not simultaneously, but with a different singer singing different sections of the song). I was quite impressed with this video and noted that Disney had even gone so far as to include both Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish, making a distinction that not everyone knows about. There are even a few sections for languages from smaller ethnic groups, such as Catalan and Flemish. After watching the video it occurred to me that Disney is one of the few entertainment companies with means of producing something like this, and I scrolled down to the comments section to see what other people thought. I mean, this should be the sort of Youtube video that ought to get a lot of positive feedback, right?

Oh, silly me. I had completely forgotten that the Youtube comments section is the internet's cesspool for hatred and inflammatory remarks. Instead of celebrating the achievement of this video, there were instead a large number of commenters complaining about how their language wasn't in the video or how terrible a particular section was. This was rather disheartening and I soon closed the tab with the video and moved on. I haven't revisited the video in some time now, so hopefully the comments section isn't so abrasive now, but I do wish people could stop complaining for a minute and just appreciate when a person or organization goes through the effort to make something like that video.

2016 Writing Project

For the year 2015 I made a list of goals to fulfill by the end of the year and on December 31, 2015, I finished the year having accomplished most of them. For 2016 I think I may do something similar, but the list of goals will be shorter. One goal, however, stands out amongst the rest. There's a work of fiction that I've been meaning to write for many years now and I'm thinking 2016 should be the year I finally get serious about working on it. I've had the idea for this project since around the end of my senior year of high school, and over the years since then I've slowly come up with and written down ideas for fleshing out the plot and the characters. The last few months, however, I've been getting a flood of thoughts in my head about this project and I'm feeling the urge to get writing before the stream runs dry.

Now, before any of you get excited about this project of mine, I need to warn you that the story in my head is not a particularly good one. Much of it is either cliche or blatantly taken from other pieces of entertainment I've seen/read/heard over the years. If it was ever sent to a publishing house, it would be relegated to the "slush pile" - that massive expanse of terrible writings that publishers get every year from amateurs like myself. Then again, seeing as how works of fiction like 50 Shades of Grey and The Da Vinci Code somehow became successful, maybe my garbage writings actually stand a chance.

I'm going to try to do this. The project might never get finished, but I feel compelled to give it a go. It will likely never get published anywhere, not even on this blog. At the moment I'm not quite ready to discuss too many of the details, but as part of the project, over the next few weeks I'm going to type out one post per week with some of the generalities of what's in my head. I have no idea how this is going to turn out, but if nothing else it should be a good learning experience.

2015 Word Count

This past weekend I thought it would be worthwhile to collect a few basic statistics on my blogging from the year 2015. Specifically, I was curious to see how many words I published last year and the average word length of my posts. Unfortunately, Blogger does not seem to have a word counter amongst the analytical tools it offers, so I had to do this the hard way, by copying and pasting each post into a Word document, doing a word count there, and then logging the data into an Excel spreadsheet, from which I could get the statistics I was seeking. This is what I came up with:

In 2015 I published 67 posts, with a total of 51,508 words. I know that's rather small compared to a lot of people, but it's quite an achievement for me. The average length of a post was 769 words. Granted, the average is skewed by several of the longer Europe 2015 posts. I would guess that the average for non-Europe posts was closer to 250. Below are the six longest posts from 2015, which were all the ones that came out to longer than 2,000 words. No surprise, five of them are Europe-related.

1. Venice: Dream's End  -  2,842 words
2. Siena: The Battle of Tuscany  -  2,200 words
3. Zagreb: Stone and Water  -  2,153 words
4. Remembering Big O  -  2,133 words
5. Paris: The Three Day Campaign  -  2,097 words
6. Cinque Terre: Ascension  -  2,067 words

I had known that the Venice post was the longest of the year, but I didn't realize just how far ahead it was of all the others. Whereas the other five are all close to each other in the low 2,000s, the Venice post came close to nearing the 3,000 word mark.

Looking forward to 2016's writings, I think I'll end up doing this exercise again, though hopefully I'll have found an easier way to do it by then.

Breaking the Rules

Believe it or not, I actually do strive to be a better writer, despite what the quality of this blog might lead you to believe. Every now and then I read what other writers have to say about being a better writer and try to learn from them to improve my own craft. Some time back I read an article by another writer and one of the tips he listed for being a better writer was to learn the rules of writing, and then break them. When I read that I felt a wave of smugness washing over me. Even though I don't know all the rules of writing, I'm pretty sure I'm breaking lots of them, so I feel like I'm already a step ahead.

Scalia

This past Saturday, the United States Supreme Court lost one of its judges when Antonin Scalia passed away. Scalia was at times a controversial figure, adored by many on the political right and reviled by many on the political left. At the news of his death I knew that some of his detractors would break out in celebration, but I have to say that I'm dismayed, indeed disgusted, with the sheer level of vitriol I've seen coming from some of the people who did not see eye-to-eye with him. If you were to believe the things going around on social media, you would think Scalia was the worst traitor to America since Benedict Arnold and should have his corpse dragged behind a car and paraded through the streets. Never mind the fact that Scalia's friends and family are now mourning their loss and coming to terms with the ever-present reality of death that infects this planet we live on. I know I shouldn't be surprised that a figure like Scalia would be on the receiving end of this much hate, but it still horrifies me to see what some people have written about him since the announcement of his death. My only hope is that Scalia's family might somehow be shielded from the worst of it.