The Open Window

The boy lay bathed in sweat on his bed, awake. Water covered every inch of his body, and as he lay there in only his briefs there was nothing to absorb the flood of perspiration. His hair was matted and soaked. The sheet was sticking to his back every time he moved.
His eyes were red and swollen. In desperate need of sleep, he closed them a few times and tried to rest, but he was too uncomfortable. Something was making his brain itch. Something would not let him sleep.
He was alone in the apartment, but he had been alone many times before. Nothing so simple as being by himself should irritate him. It shouldn't. He tried to think of something else.

People were passing in the street below and adding to the din of Harbor Avenue. It was late, but quite a few were out and about, but as he heard them milling below, it reminded him of his being alone and he had to turn to something else. He picked up a paperback book and began reading a dog-earred page, but soon he remembered it was a murder mystery. That would never do. He tossed it on the bureau.

God! He was sweating buckets! He knew he should open a window or two, but it was his wont to keep every one closed and locked. The doors were locked also. He dabbed at his neck and face with a damp handkerchief. It didn't do much good so he took a clean one from one of the drawers in the bureau. Hundred and thirty-nine dollars that bureau had cost on a Labor Day sale. It looked like crap. He was sweating and the wood felt sticky.

Still searching for something to do, he picked up a comic magazine. It was light-hearted enough, but when he finished with it, he realized there were no more lying around.
He lay down again on the sweat-soaked sheet and closed his eyes, but it was useless. He could not sleep. Something would not let him. He did not, as a rule, suffer from insomnia, and could find no rationale for this perverse sleeplessness. He could say it was too hot and there was little air circulating in the room, but he had fallen asleep under these conditions many times before. He could say he was overtired, and the room was not dark enough, and there was the din in the street, but these things also he had hitherto conquered.
He sat up again and turned on the radio on the night table. Out came a song he had heard many, many times before. Listlessly, he lay there and let the words drone through his head:
Ahm gonna give ya mah love, girl,
Gonna let it fly in through yer window.
Ahm gonna make love to you...

Suddenly, it came to him. He had certainly locked the doors as soon as his folks went out, front door and back, and shut the windows, but he was not quite sure about the window in the kitchen, at the other end of the apartment. True, he could not feel any breeze blowing through the apartment, but it did not settle his mind. He was afraid to leave his room to check on it, but he knew he would not be able to fall asleep until he did. Well, then, he thought, he would just stay awake until the folks came home. When Mama and Frank got in they would open most of the windows, but that would be all right because the three of them would all be there in case anyone ever tried to break in or something.
No! He couldn't stay awake until that late. Besides, they might be tipsy. He should be asleep when they came in.
Why should he be so paranoid about an open window? That was silly, right? To prove to himself how silly he was being torturing himself in this dreadful heat, he opened his bedroom window a few inches, opened it a crack as Frank would sometimes say.
He could hear noises from the pier and sounds of people below on Harbor Avenue more clearly.

Then he thought, sure, this is fine. There's nothing outside this window but the street. There was a fire escape leading up to the one in the kitchen, and it came up from a dark back yard.
He must get up and close it or he would never fall asleep. He was afraid. Afraid enough to feel a chill, a chill which, even in this heat, was not welcome. All he had to do was go out and close it quickly, twist the lock and go back to bed. That was all. Then he could even open his bedroom window all the way. That was safe enough. There was no fire escape out there.

Slowly, he crept through his doorway to the sitting room, and from there, slowly, ever so slowly, through three more rooms to the doorway of the kitchen.
He stood there looking across the room at the window. It was wide open. The short cafe curtains were fluttering in the slight breeze, which he could now feel hitting his bare chest, making the short hairs of puberty stand on end. He felt a sickening sensation inside that adolescent chest.

Breath held fast, he strode across the room and stood before the window, ramshackle window, cheap curtains, slightly soiled and billowing carelessly.
Why had he felt so frightened? God! He felt like such a wimp!
Oh, well, might as well get it over with. It was best to play it safe anyway. He was not afraid anymore, but he thought, with a fire escape outside, this one window should be kept closed, and yes, maybe locked also.

He reached up, put both hands on the window to bring it down, and then it happened. A man stepped out of the darkness where he had been standing and stared open-eyed into the boy's face.
Slowly, the boy's fingers lost all their feeling and his legs wouldn't hold him up. His vision blackened and he fainted dead away, crumpling in a heap on the floor in front of the window.

Blackboard Updated

Well, it seems our platform is going to be updated before the next semester begins. We received an announcement that we're moving up to Version 7.3. We're only a little behind. In researching, I see the app is up to Version 8, which looks quite different from what we're using currently. I really enjoy working with BB because you only have to take care of things once and then the system grades and maintains the work so it can be reused each semester, but of course students find things to complain about.

The brightest always seem to be able to log in, do their assignments, and log out without any issues, while the (for lack of a softer description) slackers always have problems. "I couldn't finish the quiz. The system locked me out." "I finished the quiz, but I didn't get the correct grade!" And we don't even make use of adaptive release. If there were criteria to be met before being able to proceed, it would probably cause more problems than the teachers have time to handle.

MacMillan's English Campus (MEC) was not popular with the students, even though the exercises were relatively easy. I think because it worked too well at what it was supposed to do. I love all my students (when I run into them at the mall, that is.), but very few show innovation or enthusiasm, and most just go through the motions. Was I like that at their age? It was so long ago, I don't remember.

To give an idea of how long ago that was - I remember one semester, early in the term, when our English teacher predicted that a song just beginning to get airplay on the radio (remember when the major source of music was the radio?) would be a big hit before the term's end. The song she was referring to was "Light My Fire" by The Doors!!!

Anyway, it's a new era. Now we work online so much. Back then, there wasn't even a line to be on. And so, Blackboard is being updated. I'm looking forward to the changes, but not the excuses. By the way, I've been listening to a lot of indy music, and I predict...oh, nevermind, I never get this right.

What's Happening at The Office?

The latest episode just wasn't funny. Everyone except Pam and Jim showed their mean side. Ryan was the worst. He's become so nasty since his promotion. I suppose later the writers will try to convince us that his coke problem brought out his nastier nature, but after seeing everyone scratching at the walls like that, who cares?.

Discussing this with a friend, we came to the conclusion that this fourth season should be scratched when the show goes into syndication, except for maybe the dinner party episode which was pretty funny.

Having seen all of the British version, most of which made me cringe, I thought the Americans had made the comedy way more palatable. Now, I'm not so sure.

Anyway, I'll keep watching for a while, and hope things come around to where they were, character-wise.

Some Interesting Sites Noted

Check out what Emily Jo Cureton has done by illustrating some of the words she finds each day in the crossword puzzle in the New York Times. New York Times Crossword Drawings. Her work and that of many more illustrators is featured on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog.

Watch some Brickfilms. Not sure what they are? They're video clips made with Lego (usually parodies of cinema films). You can find loads of them on YouTube or you can search the source at Brickfilms.com.

For insightful reviews of new (and some older) movies visit Cinematronics by Álvaro. His reviews are en español. I find myself agreeing with his viewpoint more times than not.

To hear the latest indy music being made (also accompanied by insightful reviews) visit Ryan's Smashing Life.

Lifehacker presents hundreds of tips and tricks for you to try out on your computer, and they offer many helpful hints on how to give new life to things around the house that you might have been thinking of throwing away. You can also find Free Download of the Day here, wherein you get to try out software, sometimes fully functioning versions that are given away on a time-limited basis. You have to act quick or lose opportunities.

BigThink is an ambitious online project that brings together the views of experts from a range of different fields across the world and enables users the opportunity to interact and make their own contributions with an easy-to-use and accessible interface.

I have all of these sites on an RSS feed so I am constantly made aware of updates. My aggregator is Bloglines. You should check it out and sign up for free. There's nothing to download, but whenever you sign on, you can find all your favorite blogs and news in one place. I used to waste hours surfing all over the 'Net for interesting information. Now I just spend a couple of hours poring over my growing list of favorite sites.

Click to scribble

The Other Half of the Rent

Pending resolution. This is an ongoing matter.

If the devil only knew...

April 23rd, 2008

Rating:

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

This was a finely made, riveting movie. Some reviewers in the NY Times Readers' Reviews say the scene on the porch between father and son didn't add much, or has been done better before, but for this viewer it was a gratifying explication for the motives which began the terrible events here related. This was the kind of thing missing from such highly rated (and Oscar-rewarded) stories as There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men. When those films were over I did leave the theater wondering why such pathological characters were the focus of our current crop of "great story-telling movies." Unexplained motivation leaves me cold.
In Before the Devil... Lumet has not missed a beat. Everything we need to know to be involved in these characters' tales is included. Sterling performances by all in an excellent display of cinematography, from Amy Ryan's few scenes up through the histrionics of Hoffman and Finney. Pooh to anyone who finds fault in this film, and Coen brothers, take a lesson in how to involve your audience in caring about dysfunctional characters. It's not enough to just be quirky and photograph it beautifully. It helps a lot to include even a small scene supplying motivation.

- michaelbrown7

The Last Lesson

Dear Haojun:

Thanks for your nice letter. I can tell from your tone China is very excited about the return of Macao. I hope the transfer is as smooth as that of Hong Kong. You seem all caught up in the festivities and they seem less worrisome than the Y2K business and millennium madness we are experiencing over here. I wonder how you are doing vis-à-vis computer problems. We have not exchanged e-mail in quite some time.

It has been a long time since we last communicated. I know you have been very busy redecorating your new home. It must be coming along beautifully. Perhaps you can send me a photo.

Let me tell you why I have not written. Just as you are trying to improve your English, I have been trying to better my writing abilities in my native language. As I told you before mostly I write fiction. There is much need for improvement if I wish to capture a readership. I wish I had the abilities of our mutual favorite Lu Xun, but that is another story.

I signed up for a six-week online writing course and have made many new friends. Each lesson required us to approach the craft of fiction writing from a specific perspective. One week we had to pretend to be one of our characters so as to introduce ourselves to each other. I found it difficult trying to discover my own personality as if looking at myself from the outside. Another time we had to focus on point of view and how to use it to tell a story. For that one, I wrote the assignment three times before I settled on telling it in the second person. I wrote, "You say..." and "You go..." as if I were telling the character what to do. It was critiqued positively so I guess the rewrites paid off. And once, we had to interview one of the characters we'd created as if he or she were applying for a job in our stories. That piece took me a while before I settled on a magazine type interview wherein I pretended the reporter wanted to speak to "the man on the street" rather than a celebrity.

Each week I struggled along slowly and painstakingly trying to get better at the craft. However, this last lesson I found most difficult of all. It was concerned with conflict, complications and plot. How to build to a crisis and then resolve it. And I was at a loss. My conflict was I could not come up with a plot I liked well enough to post and perhaps develop later as I go into further courses.

My friend John suggested I use the tension filled story I wrote about the boy and the unlocked window, but I had written it so long ago, I found it sophomoric. I really felt uncomfortable using any of my very early writing.

Then he advised me to use two characters who have been floating around in my head for a long time without a story, but as I explained to him, they don’t have a story yet. They are just colorful characters without conflicts of their own. I need to think up some interesting situations to place them in, but for this exercise I was drawing a blank.

I thought of writing to you to ask for help with something that would seem exotic to my friends over here, but there wasn’t enough time and besides, many of the online students are not from America, so if I wrote of something I was unsure of I would just look foolish.

What to do? What to do? Time was running out.

I came up with a plan, which I am not proud to tell you. I cobbled together an unbelievable labyrinthine plot from a book I purchased a very long time ago. It wasn’t much help back then and I should have known better than to try to make it work for me now, but I was desperate to end this course with a completed assignment. I used the book’s suggestion to string together little bits of action that were supposed to coalesce into a complicated tale of vengeance. What I wound up with was a tepid second rate murder mystery and it was so badly put together and underdeveloped, it read more like a summary than a story. As the final day approached and no other ideas were forthcoming, I threw up my hands in exasperation and went ahead and posted my work.

I regretted my action immediately.

As was to be expected, it was met with a lukewarm reception. We critique each other’s work and a few of my fellow students said some kind things, but most, including my mentor, made it clear they did not think it was my best work. They were right.

I was ashamed. It’s only a writing course, you might say, and there is always tomorrow to do better. It’s true, but my pride would not allow me to let this hodgepodge represent me in my final assignment of my freshman course. I was not being true to myself, and so, I deleted it from the postings. Now, I had nothing to represent me.

What to do?

I went out to take a walk to clear my thoughts and saw all the signs of the coming millennium celebration. I also saw a dead pigeon in the street. It made me heartsick to think of how many hours flying the poor useless creature had put in to arrive nowhere, and here it was, a pile of crumpled feathers someone had brushed off the sidewalk into the street.

When I returned to my apartment building, your letter was waiting for me and it made me feel so much better. Every time we communicate, I realize how big this world is and how insignificant some of my “problems” are.

I read your letter and like a flash, I came up with an idea and must run now to re-post my final assignment. I realize where the conflict is and how it could be resolved. I must thank you for writing and unknowingly helping me to see what was under my nose all the time.

Thank you very much for the stamps and the magazine clippings.

Please extend my greetings to your mother and the rest of your family.

I will write to you again soon now that this course is finishing up and I will have some free time.

Your friend,

Michael

Eight Years

It feels like yesterday. Still in my heart. Still in my head.

The What-If Factor

Ineradicable cobwebs fill the corners of my life.
The ghosts of things that might have been haunt me though they haven't.

In my dream, we said some terrible things -
No, I take that back,
I said some awful things to you -
Hate-filled words, untake-backable words,
And left you in confusion
Wondering what you'd done.

Then I walked through fire -
Returning to a past which had not, could not happen.

I took the consolation you deserved for myself,
In the arms of someone who no longer was there.
After thinking how good it felt, I realized it could not last.
It was a chimera.

I saw clearly I'd given away the present for a past I could not reclaim
And thus, my future was obliterated.

When you woke me and you were still real,
For a brief moment there was relief,
But then I noticed cobwebs
Constructed of motes of sadness
And felt the heat of the coming fire.

Somewhere in this there's a formula for figuring probability.
Somewhere there's a path to get to the average mean.
There's the murk of the future and the bottleneck of the recent past
And glorious worlds at either end,
But I'm stuck in between.