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Independently Dependent

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Hello Loyal Readers! 

I come to you with an exciting creation. It’s written by my friend Jocelyn Simms, who wished to remain anonymous. Let me know your thoughts – either through the comments here or by shooting me an email. 

Cheers,

Julian 

P.s. If you want to publish something on my blog (either under your own name or under Jocelyn’s), reach out: Julian.w.wise@gmail.com . I have dozens of loyal readers and the coveted #1 page-rank on Google for people who search “Julian Wise comedy cooking humor punctuation grammar blog”. What a reach! 

Independently Dependent

It’s not easy to admit that I’m waiting for love. It sounds like the stupidest, corniest thing to say. But it’s true. I want to be in love. I want to feel the way I do when I listen to Ben Folds’ The Luckiest. I want to feel swept off my feet, full of butterflies and fireworks. I want to feel the ease and comfort of knowing I have a person who is in it for the long haul. I wouldn’t say I want to be a wife. I would say I want to be a partner. 

When I was younger, I didn’t concern myself with love. “Falling in love” and “meeting the one” were rites of passage. They would happen when I was older. 

When I hit high school, I wanted a taste. Just a taste. I knew my relationships wouldn’t last forever, but I thought being young and in love was a rite of passage too. Everyone gets to experience it. It’s tragic if you don’t. It’s like you did something wrong, held yourself back, or failed to make some sort of effort. I can’t think of a single highschool movie without a love story. But it doesn’t work that way for most of us. At least it didn’t work that way for me. 

Some of the happiest times in my life have come from convincing myself I was finally part of a partnership. Freshman year with ______ was easy. Junior spring with ______ felt magical. My favorite parts of college were when I filled this gap in my soul with a guy and a creative project. _____ and I got his band on national television. ______ and I revolutionized undergraduate art. _____ and I produced a film viewed by thousands. I loved those guys, I loved those projects, and I loved those teams with everything I had. They may not have been romantic, but these were fucking partnerships. We were in it to win it, together, to the very end. And those endings were always tough for me. I cried when ______ moved. I fought for a closer friendship with _____ so I wouldn’t feel the emptiness between projects. I held hands with _____ and cried outside his dorm when we graduated. I knew it’d never be the same.

For most of my life I’ve followed my mom’s advice. Focus on school; you don’t have time for boys. That will be later. My innocent highschool relationships and creative teams gave me enough to hold me over. But I long for that intimacy. That trust. That depth. That sense of belonging with another person. I know it won’t be easy. I know there will be rises and falls. But I feel like I was made to be a partner. Half of a dynamic duo. Maybe it’s just my clock ticking, but as I get older that gap seems to widen and deepen and it feels more and more impossible to fill. And as that happens I become even more desperate to fill it.

Sometimes I wonder about the received wisdom that everyone has a soul mate… it’s just that some soul mates have already left Earth. Maybe their life was tragically cut short. Maybe they’re still around but life threw them off course. Or maybe some people end up alone, never finding a partner, because that wisdom is wrong and their partner never existed. 

Being part of a team is the one thing I can’t do by myself. That scares me. And learning how to live alone feels like I’m giving up. It feels like living a shadow of my life. And the older I get, the more I feel like I’m running out of time. I worry that jetting off on a romantic weekend getaway just won’t be the same in my 30s. People won’t be as forgiving of us making out in the rain in the middle of the street or trespassing on the beach in the middle of the night. We should know better. There are still so many things I want to do while I’m young and dumb and in love.

Isn’t it sad? Isn’t it pathetic? That I so desperately want to fall in love. And all of the incredible friendships I have. The loving family I’m part of. The incredible education I have and expansive career possibilities. They just aren’t enough. Isn’t that selfish? Disrespectful? Immature? 

As much as we pretend we can get rid of these feelings, they still linger for some of us. And that’s okay. It’s possible to live full and happy lives on our own. But it’s also okay to want to be in love. I’m coming to terms with it. It doesn’t make me weak. It doesn’t make me less independent. It just makes me human. We all have wants, needs, and desires. We all feel a sense of purpose driving us to become who we want to be. Among many other things, I want to be a partner. I hope that it can be a reality. I really want it to happen soon. 

John Prine

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John Prine died today. He was my first concert. He wrote every song I love that I don’t remember who wrote. He wrote this poem, too, but he wrote it through me. I’ll miss him. One day I’d like to see him again.

I had a feeling I could be someone.

You’ll only feel by listening 

to the same song, 

fifty versions, 

but none better than the downtown boy

with hair like Dylan

accepted to Yale when I was

but dropped out 

and now plays to a Farmers’ market audience–

an empty picnic blanket and me. 

At 24 years old,

he looks more like twelve

and sings folk like a wizened bluesman.

Will he go anywhere

or stay in Fairfax forever,

wearing the same uncool shoes

as the classmate I bullied in 4th grade. 

If America’s misfits come to San Francisco

and SF’s go to Oakland,

where do Oakland’s go?

We’re only fifteen miles north of The City,

but you can believe in the stars having a plan for you

and we’ll still believe in you.  

If you move too quick,

you hit the speed of loneliness

like a too-fast car,

breaking the sound barrier,

collapsing into yourself,

emptying out.

We all feel that way. 

Some of us become. 

We all pass away. 

Musings on the future of work (or, why you should be excited–not concerned–that I’m currently nocturnal)

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Individuals (and small teams) have always been the ones acting, but now they’re more movable (you could imagine the Google phone team basically “stealing” the Apple phone team by wooing them over. This seems unlikely 20-100 years ago). The game for corporations, therefore, becomes more along the lines of “make an environment that’s attractive to the right sort of individuals/teams”. Now, this is probably obvious for anyone who asks the question “why does every startup have pingpong tables and free lunch?” but let’s take it a step further:

The top performers have always been eccentrics. Weirdos. I live in a van and drive around the country. (Not that I’m necessarily a top performer, but I’m certainly working with more successful people than most people who have the job title “writer”.) These are people who will form their own unique strategy for working (I’ve been nocturnal for the last week because it seems to help my novel writing).

This is mainly interesting to me because it creates opportunities for people to create highly-specialized products/services that assist very specific (i.e. unusual) people with very specific needs.

If an individual is such a great, high, top performer, they often have an assistant. I bet the assistants for top performers in many fields have similar jobs, though, and there wasn’t previously enough value created by these oddballs to warrant tools to help them.

Now, we’re recognizing that (a) no number of Walmart greeters could equate to one Sam Walton (just as no number of gazelles would ever hunt a lion [it’s a bad analogy but you get the point]), and (b) we can see how much value Sam Walton created (he built Walmart!) as compared to your average joe, so we’re able to create tools that will help, say, the 10 Sam Waltons in the world be 1% better, which is huge value but would previously be uncapturable. (Or, more accurately, provide tools to make the 1000 people in the world who are 2 orders of magnitude lower than Sam Walton be 5% more effective.)

I guess, what I’m saying is: could someone please make me a business-casual onesie that I could wear in public?

I put the punctuation outside the quotes.

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I put the punctuation outside the quotes. I also hyphenate adverbial constructions ending in -ly. I know these are “wrong”. I understand they’re conventions. The conventions are stupid.

A sentence ends with a mark of punctuation. A quotation may include a mark of punctuation in the quote: 

  • David said, “Where are we going?”
  • Did David say, “Where are we going?” 
  • Did David say, “We are going north?” 

Oh shit. You see the problem? It’s that third sentence. The one where your English teacher would demand the question mark go inside the quotes, but putting it inside the quotes is misleading. 

An English sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a punctuation mark. This system works. It doesn’t need to change when it’s in a fucking quote. 

I’d punctuate that last, dastardly question like this: 

  • Did David say, “We are going north.”?

Why? Because David spoke a fucking sentence.

Let’s reverse it. What if the sentence is a statement and the quotation’s a question? 

  • David asked, “Where are we going?”. 

See what I did there? I tossed a period into the sentence, after the quotation marks. Why? Because “David asked, __________” is a sentence. It should end with a punctuation mark. Omitting the punctuation makes us assume it’s a question… and David’s quoted query doesn’t make my statement an inquisition. 

Some will be uncomfortable with these ideas. “But my English teacher taught me…” Well, tough titties. Language lives. We grow and improve it. Did you know the word “okay” comes from a mid-1800s comedic misspelling of “all correct” as “oll korrect”? Is it stupid that old-timey people misspelled words for humorous effect? Yep. But aren’t you glad we now have that damn valuable word? Language is for communication. If it works, use it. 

Maybe punctuating outside the quotes “looks ugly” or “feels weird”… but think of our children! They’ll live in a much clearer grammatical world. They’ll inherit a world where the sentence is the sentence and the quote is the quote, where you can tell whether the person said a full sentence or not by checking the quote itself. 

  • Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon…”.

Without the ellipses in the quote, you’d assume that as his whole sentence. With the ellipses, you know he continued. 

  • He finished the speech, “… in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”. 

Grammar should make writing clearer, not hold onto outdated structures. 

Join the resistance. Punctuate proper.

My Current Favorite Word

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My current favorite word is “pejorative”, generally for indicating what I’m not doing. I frequently need to separate a word’s denotations from its connotations. Take the word “manipulate”. Denotatively, it means “to create change by influencing something… in a negative way”. That latter connotation is not inherent to the act of manipulating itself. One could manipulate the world in a strictly positive way, by using ethical means for a purely desirable end. To communicate that, I would say something like, “he manipulates the world around him, but I don’t mean ‘manipulate’ in a pejorative sense” to isolate the facts from the opinions. (Why use “manipulate” at all? It’s the most denotatively-precise word; more direct than “influence” or hands-on than “alter”.) Pejoratives are judging, and I appreciate the ability to remove that opinion.

Traveloog Friday 191101 (Redacted Version)

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Start: [Redacted], New Orleans, Louisiana. 

End: [Redacted], New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Exciting Events: 

  • [Redacted] gave me $2 as backpay for [redacted] favors. Hilarious. 
  • Made [redacted] by snapping my fingers. 
  • Dinner with [redacted], wherein we discussed books and ideas and art. I like her. 
  • Cuddled with [redacted] for a long while. Watched her cook dinner, too. Both very intimate. 
  • Lots of [redacted]! Great. YAY! 

Real Realizations: 

  • [Redacted] is not withholding. She does the thing she wants to do irrespective of what someone else wants. That’s self-driven and irrespective of someone else’s desires, but it’s not withholding. 
  • The feeling of something being meaningful is just that—a feeling—and could be wrong. 

Quotent Quotables: 

  • [Redacted] talking with me: 
    • “How late are you staying up? I casually need one or two more shots.” 
    • “What?! You alcoholic!” 
    • “Of photos! 
  • The feeling of something being meaningful is just that—a feeling—and could be wrong. E.g. “When I nerd out about something for hours and hours, it’s not necessarily because it’s the most important thing in the world. It’s because I get pleasure out of the feeling of nerding out.” -[Redacted] 
  • “Sometimes I feel like life is just a series of obligations that repeat every day.” -me 
  • “I hate being organized when I don’t remember where I organized things.”-[redacted]

Commonplace occurrences: 

  • [Redacted] work. 37 mins, nothing happened, [redacted]. 
  • Completed my daily writing. 
  • Completed my travelog. 

Delicious Delectables: 

  • Boudin balls at Buffa’s. Delicious! 

Alluring Activities: 

  • Sleeping well! In bed to sleep before 1am.

Travelog Thursday 191031 (Redacted version)

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Start: Parked outside [redacted], New Orleans, Louisiana. 

End: sleeping in [redacted], New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Exciting Events: 

  • Wandered around New Orleans dressed in a couple’s costume: I was Draco Malfoy & Smidge was Dobby the House Elf. 
    • Drunk wandering is just as pointless as I remember. Trying to find that friend, avoiding places with covers, etc. 

  • Felt twice like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. 
    • When [redacted] and I were playing connect 4 as the night was coming to a close.
    • Wandering down Bourbon street sipping a delightfully fruity daiquiri.
  • Talked through [redacted]’s life goals and how he should choose a career by ability, not passion. 
  • Did two [redacted]. 
  • Phone with [redacted] to tell her I [redacted]. 

Real Realizations: 

  • People are the same everywhere. The difference is interests, topics, opportunities. Same people, tho. 
  • Sleep deprivation keeps people wired and happy. 
  • I don’t enjoy dressing up for Halloween. Too much effort, too little value. 

Quotent Quotables: 

  • “I’m gonna be a cow.” -[redacted]. 
  • “The first thing to attack in your enemy is their communications.” -[redacted]. 
    • I like this quote for its wide-ranging reach. Whether playing chess or in war with a country, the first thing to destroy is their ability to think. You knock out that ability by knocking out communications—between them and another or within one, itself. 

Commonplace occurrences: 

  • Work for [redacted]. 
  • Did [redacted]’s dishes. What a gift. 

Disappointing doldrums: 

  • [Redacted] with [redacted] feels oddly fractured again. 

Delicious Delectables: 

  • Cooked a steak and sweet potatoes for [redacted] & me. 
  • Chicken tenders at dinner. 

Alluring Activities: 

  • Hanging with [redacted]. 
  • Sleeping late.