More than I can chew

Hello and shaloha, my homepeople. It's a pleasure to have you on this website today, especially since there are at least 20 or 30 others to choose from. I hope you're all doing well. Personally, I could be doing a little better. You see, I have a problem, and I want to get it all off my chest here and now...in story form, of course.

In college, I took four creative writing courses and absolutely loved them. The first of those classes allowed us to write whatever we liked, and after dabbling in short stories for a week, I switched over to writing poetry and never really looked back. More specifically, I almost exclusively wrote in specific forms and meters instead of free verse (which I referenced in last week's post). There was something about trying to be creative within a defined (and often rigid) structure that gave me a much, much greater sense of satisfaction and accomplishment than the free verse variety. In fact, I had trouble writing not in meter. I tried once, and my professor happily pointed out that I slipped into a rhythm a few times in my lines. Why did I like it writing in meter so much? I believe it all boils down to the degree of difficulty.

Allow me to back up a little before I move forward. It's not that I don't enjoy well-written free verse. I do, and I even just read an entire book written in free verse that was fascinating. It's called Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow, it's about modern day werewolf creatures, and it's like nothing you've ever read. That format worked surprisingly well with the subject matter, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I personally don't like writing in free verse though, and here's where I'll sound a little snobby: I feel like anyone can write crappy free verse, but it still takes skill and planning to write crappy meter. In fact, really crappy meter turns into crappy free verse, if that makes sense. Which brings us back to the degree of difficulty thing: it wasn't enough for me to think of a topic and want to write a poem; I needed the extra level of fitting it into specific metric feet to get my full sense of accomplishment.

And that's a problem I see in my life at times when it comes to creative projects. The higher I set the degree of difficulty, the lower my chance of success will be. Some of you longtime readers might recall the humble beginnings of this blog. I wrote one day, then another, and then another. From that point, I decided that I had to do it every single workday (including holidays) or it didn't count for some reason. It took me a year to finally switch to once a week, and that came with some hefty internal struggling - even though I was almost completely out of topics.

One might reasonably think that I'd learn my lesson, but I keep coming back to this problem. The most recent example is what led me to this post. Back in a late '08 post called "Twinkle Twinkle," I casually mentioned that maybe I should write down something new that I learned every day of 2009. That, in and of itself, is a fine idea I think. After I told myself that I was going to go for it, I just couldn't leave well enough alone. "Maybe I could write the thing I learned in a rhyming couplet," I thought. "That way, at the end of the year, I'd essentially have a 730-line poem!" I thought about it more and ditched that idea, realizing that I would often have more content than would fit in what would amount to twenty syllables. So I went the other way: I chose to make a book out of this. Each day, I would learn something, but I wouldn't just write it down like a list of new facts. Instead, I would start by telling a story, which would cause me to question something, which I would then look up and find out the answer. If each day ended up being about a page in length, I'd end up with a (hopefully) interesting book of over 300 pages that I could then shop to publishers. How cool would that be?

So I began. To show you the full range of my lunacy, here is what I wrote for January 3rd, 2009:

I'm reading a book by Nick Hornby right now in which he talks about the various books he's purchased and read on a monthly basis. It's taken from a series of articles he wrote for The Believer, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. In May of 2008, he started and stopped a few books, but "nothing took." "At least I have some fun facts at my disposal," he wrote. "Did you know that if you wrote out the human genome one letter per millimeter, the text would be as long as the river Danube?" He doesn't specifically say which book that was from, but of course I was not aware of that. Still, I didn't feel comfortable saying that the thing he learned that day would be the thing I learned on this day.

What struck me most about that fact was that it posed two more questions for me.
First, the human genome is written in letters? I'd never pictured it or tried to, but I doubt I would've pictured letters. And second, I guess the Danube is long, but I have zero idea whether it's five or five hundred miles (or kilometers, I suppose).

So I looked stuff up. According to Wikipedia, the human genome "occupies a total of just over 3 billion DNA base pairs." That sounds like a lot. A sample base pair looks like this:

ATCGAT
TAGCTA

I'm now remembering Adenine, Guanine, and other -ines from science classes back in high school, thereby making sense of this whole thing. "One letter at a time" for each base pair with over 3 billion base pairs...I'm guessing that's a damn long river. Let's check.

Sticking with Wikipedia for ease, it tells me that the Danube is "the longest river in the European Union and Europe's second longest river after the Volga." How long is that? 1,771 miles or 2,850 kilometers. Wow, that's a long river. How does that compare with the Nile? Well that one is 4,132 miles or 6,650 kilometers, aka "long ass long." So what did I learn today?

You would need to write out the human genome letter by letter about 2.33 times to make it the length of the Nile.

And to doubly prove my point (and ensure that this is the longest UOPTA post of all time), here is January 5th:

I was standing in my boss's office with another co-worker today when my boss turned on his computer. His desktop is a pretty picture of bright stars and what I'm assuming are galaxies. Out of nowhere, my co-worker said, "Ah, the Peacock Galaxy." "What?" my boss asked, and the co-worker pointed out a bright part on the screen that looked a little like a peacock if you squint and/or are extremely high. "Is there really a Peacock Galaxy?" I asked. "Eh, I'm just making stuff up. But I think that's it," he replied. "Hold on," I said, "either you made it up or it really exists." "It exists in my mind," he said, rendering himself completely useless.

I went to Wikipedia and found zero entries for "Peacock Galaxy." When I just tried "Peacock," it took me to a page for a star called Alpha Pavonis in the constellation Pavo. "Alpha Pavonis was named Peacock, for obvious reasons," it told me. Uh, not obvious to me. So I dug around some more online and found another site the spelled out that "pavo" means "peacock" in Latin. "Wait a gosh darn second," I said to myself, "Pavo just means 'turkey' in Spanish."

I consulted an online English to Spanish (and vice versa) dictionary to get more information. As I knew but confirmed, "duck" is the similar "pato" and "turkey" comes out as "pavo." What does "peacock" tell me in Spanish? "Pavo real." Yeah, enough of those fake turkeys already. I'm talking to you, vegans.

I went to find out more about peacocks to see how close they were as a species to turkeys. I guess they look alike, come to think of it, once you get past the showy colors. As it turns out, a turkey is in a different genus than the peacock, but that's not my learned item of the day. Nope; it's this:

While a male is called a peacock, a female is technically a peahen. Together, their group is amusingly called peafowl.

I think you may see my dilemma. I was having fun and truly learning interesting things, but I set my sights way too high. I'd get to the end of the day and think, "Oh crap, did I learn anything today?" Then I'd try reliving conversations I had, and on the off chance that something stood out, I'd have to go back and find a story to tell to lead to that fact. On several occasions, I had to start scouring the internet to find something to learn before the day was up. The task was becoming far too arduous, especially since I decided at some point that none of that information should overlap with what I was writing in my weekly blog. Brilliant, Peter, simply brilliant.

At the end of January, I began questioning if I should abandon this task. I hated to even think of doing that, but I looked at the calendar and thought that was probably the way to go. Before throwing in the towel though, I was going to press on. I got through February 10th successfully, and then my lovely wife and I went away for the weekend. I sent myself text messages during that time of things that I should write about upon my return. The messages said, "Find origin of 'shoe-in,'" "something about steroids - start with A-Rod," and "Who was Ft. Lauderdale named after?" Well folks, those text messages remained just that, and I never got back on the horse. My desire to up the proverbial ante outweighed my actual ability to complete the task. Part of me was mad and disappointed in myself for being my own creative project's downfall. The other part of me felt great about abandoning the idea, because it was taking a lot of time and stressing me out when I had to search for new information.

So what's next for me and my high bar-setting? I don't know. I'm going to try to regulate myself for a while, and if I get an idea that makes my eyes twinkle, I'll try to keep it on the simpler side. I can always go back and rework it to be a Spanish palindrome in iambic pentameter, or whatever ridiculous thing I decide to attempt.

With that, my friends, let's take a palindromic race car over to the Car Watch.

For once, I have clear-cut examples to illustrate the point I've been trying to make about license plates all along: if it doesn't quite work, just abandon the idea instead of forcing it. Longtime and devoted reader Sue sent me this plate: "IAMUNEC." I can only assume that the driver meant to say that s/he is "unique," but there is a major flaw with that attempt. Just like a plate from a while back that read "D UNIK1," botched attempts at spelling "unique" make it instead look like "eunuch." Therefore, "IAMUNEC" is proudly telling the world, "I have no balls." On the extreme flipside of this example is a license plate that my loving mother-in-law sent me. It read, "8YPICAL." I like it; I like it a lot. Way to use all of the weapons at your disposal, Mr. or Ms. Car Owner.

My homey Rockabye sent me a plate that was immediately received by the 14 year-old who resides in me. It read, "LUV DKC." Oh sure, go ahead and argue that someone's initials are probably DKC, but you're not changing my stance on this one.

Lastly (and possibly conversely), my friend Dusty sent me this license plate: "IH8PORK." Wow, this person must feel very strongly to put that on the license plate. Hate? Geez, I bet Orthodox Jews don't even hate pork. Did pork kill the driver's family or something? Is the driver an ostrich farmer who was about to trademark, "The other white meat" as a slogan but got usurped? Look, I hate mustard and tell people that fairly often, but even I think that this great dislike of a foodstuff is over the top.

Ok, I'm done. I've written enough for this week (even if two large sections were simply cut and pasted). I'll be back with more stuff next Friday, and I still have about 38 "what I learned" entries to supplement any shorter post. In the meantime, Sunday is our little buddy Noah's 0.5 birthday, and Tuesday is my cousin Carrie's birthday. Think happy things for them. Take care, everyone, and feel free to write me at ptklein@gmail.com with anything that crosses your mind.