Moving to deviantART

Hello,

Because I spend most of my time in deviantART - posting my artwork and poetry - I'm discontinuing this blog. Look for me at http://kbyshimru.deviantart.com/. See you there!

Mel Lewis

Poetry site: tiny words

tiny words is an online magazine of haiku and micropoetry. Check out the poems on this site - they pack a lot of imagery into a handful of words. If you'd like to try your hand at writing a tiny poem, use the "new ice" photo here as inspiration, and post your poem to its comments. More than 200 have been added so far. Here's a reformatted version of the "new ice" poem I posted:

New ice
in your "Good Morning"
What did I forget
this time?

If you add your own, let me know.
Enjoy the tiny poems!

"This Chorus has Ended," or why I got kicked out of 8th grade chorus

Are girls' voices supposed to change during puberty? Mine did in between 7th and 8th grades. I sang high soprano in 7th grade chorus. When I tried out in 8th grade, yeesh. It wasn't pretty. I wrote a poem about it 2004, well after 8th grade.

This Chorus has Ended

At twelve years my Voice dropped off a cliff;

    Soprano plunged to Alto.

High C cracked as the suicide claimed

    my beautiful Hallelujahs.

A final note forged by Puberty's hand:

    This chorus for us has ended.

In sorrow, my Range sharply fenced in its scale.

    Now

            like a cow

                            I low.

Why is this in my blog? Counts as "some other stuff." But also I remember the process of creating thi,s and I like to document paths from point A to B. 

This was a Creative Writing class exercise at a local community college. Part 1: I was given five words to incorporate into a poem: blackberry, cliff, cracked, chorus and one other I can't remember. Part 2: rewrite it and feel free to toss the five words out. 

Though I don't remember the original poem, I do remember that the work "cracked" triggered the memory of my voice cracking as I tried to belt out the high notes in the chorus try-out, the notes so easy to reach the year before. From there I got the words "voice dropped", and I already had "cliff," so "suicide" showed up next and so on. I let my brain do its own thing (felt very right-y), and got a pretty good draft going. Then the logical part stepped in and started organizing, architecting, crafting, etc., possibly a bit too much.

This happens often when I write. The left brain wraps up the story or poem, as if it's socking the right side in the arm and yelling "Last hit!" The right side is too wimpy to swing back and is nowhere near fast enough to catch the other side.

Thoughts in graphic form

One way to get stuff out of your head is to draw it out. And I mean that in multiple senses of the word "draw." I've been using the Brushes app on my iPad. It keeps me entertained on airplanes and in waiting rooms, and it's much less expensive than oils, acrylics, gesso, brushes, canvas, and such. If you want to see what helps the right side of my brain recover from atrophy, visit my deviantart.com site: http://kbyshimru.deviantart.com/.

Welcome back

Welcome back to me. I have a book recommendation. Check out A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, by Daniel H. Pink. Those of us bean-counting, engineering, analytical types often characterized as Left-Brainers can benefit from learning to be "whole-minded." Develop the right side and the skills/abilities it handles: big picture, pattern recognition, design, invention, empathy, some other touchy-feel stuff you think you hate.

It's not a pile of fluff, though. The last quarter of the book is a portfolio of tools and exercises. For example, keep a design notebook. If you see something cool, note it. If you run across an example of poor design - like the dirt-collecting step below my car door that my left leg cannot avoid when I get into and out of my car (so my left pant leg is always grubby) - note it, too. It's about paying attention to the artistry (or lack of it) around you. Or take the short "Spot the Fake Smile" test on BBC's site at http://tinyurl.com/2u7sh.

Pink also refers to research mentioned in Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence. IQ accounts for only 4-10 percent of career success. I agree. I work with many high-IQ people. But it ain't what you know, it's what you do with what you know. So get off of your butt and do something.

And if you read A Whole New Mind, or part of it, let me know what you think.

In the air above my hair

Apparantly all of my passwords hover together over my head about ceiling height. Every time I start to type in a password I look up and continue to stare at the ceiling while I'm typing it. I return my view to the screen (sans HGS - I look at the screen) when I press Enter.

I'm not sure what will happen if I use my PC outside.

"What the . .. ?"

I just read my first post and thought, "What the heck? Where did that come from?" Originally I'd written the reasons for starting a blog - to make room in my brain for new thoughts, concepts, and ideas by moving the oldies from their organic container to a different storage device (hence the blog); to analyze the oldies and figure out how they came to be and if they are of further use; to get feedback from people to determine if any of these ideas and thoughts align with generally-accepted reality or if I'm just creating my own version; and to help myself and others think better and faster.

Of course, I can't think a thought, or write one down, without launching a full-on analysis of its source and how it relates to other thoughts, then (probably a consequence of many years in Marketing) editing it until it is no more than a sound byte (or is it bite?).

Maybe that's good and maybe it isn't. An irresistable urge to rewrite is, I suspect, tied to a need for people to think I'm smart. At this moment a little voice is chanting, "'Perhaps' sounds smarter than 'Maybe.' Change it, change it now!"

Let's call this the Hermione Granger Syndrome, or HGS (xref Harry Potter for details if you don't know what I mean). I'll attempt (I mean try) to keep HGS from affecting my posts. However, all of a sudden I'm absolutely fascinated with the whole HGS thing. I've just admitted that I seek approval from authority figures and intentionally (though perhaps subconsciously) try to cultivate a persona of smart girl.

Whew! And now I know the real reason I started this blog. Therapy.

Have a nice day.

And speaking of thinking . . .

Research the genealogy of ideas. Study the evolution of each. And leverage that knowledge to selectively breed new ones.