Nagareru mama, sekai wo hashiru

I'm ho-ome!

And it's an extraordinarily complex feeling. One of the most textured I've experienced. It doesn't quite fit into the rubric of happy or sad, relieved or disappointed, though all of those are facets of the feeling. A few things I want to write down before I shower, because showers are second only to good nights' sleeps in tempering our emotions, and I don't want to temper this one before I record it.

I'm relieved, of course. I've lived in this house all my life; I grew up in the room where I'm typing this post. This is not a hotel or someone else's house. I don't have to set up my laptop and fiddle with wireless networks. I don't have to find out whether the water is potable. I don't have to appraise the bathtub or curtains for adequacy. I don't have to fold out a bed or toss out the sleeping bag, nor test the mattress to see if it's safe to fall onto. I don't have to find an unobtrusive corner to empty my pockets on. I don't have to figure out where "gratitude" lies on the continuum from passive to active with respect to my current host. (Well, maybe a little.) The space I'm in is made for me to live in, and that is a relief.

I'm baffled, because although I spent forty-six nights on the road -- which felt like twice as long, three times, to the point where I can hardly remember what I was doing the last time I was in Fort Myers and look around my room with perplexity at what all these things are doing here -- the memory of the journey is already fading away like a dream. This old familiar place, so dense with memories itself, is drawing me back into that life and away from this one. Could it really have happened? Can I really have driven from here to Vancouver and back? It seems more likely I made it all up and spent the last forty-six nights zoning out on the Internet like usual. And with that thought comes a sense of great loss which I hope washes away in the shower, because it's so important to me not to forget what I did and all it meant.

I'm disgruntled, because my parents are both exhausted and couldn't give me the king's welcome that on some level I wanted. Mom is recovering from acute appendicitis and the ensuing surgery; she just got home from the hospital yesterday and is hardly walking, much less jumping up and down with excitement. Dad has been doing all the legwork involved in ferrying Mom and Grandma (who developed a carcinoma on her nose) to and from various doctors and doing all the chores that the ladies couldn't attend to, all on a bum foot with a six-month case of tendinitis and an artificial hip that needs replacing. For them, my being home is one more in a series of stressful events; they took it pretty much in stride, because they didn't have the energy to do anything else. And the whole place feels somehow bleached, like it was left in the sun too long and faded away into dotage while I was gone. I'm not sure the person I was yesterday fits into the place I'm in today. See also: Heraclitus, river of.

And perhaps above all I'm wondering where my closure is. You would think that finishing a journey would leave you with a sense of accomplishment, a tome to close and file in your mind's library. But no, I still feel like I might have to leave for another town tomorrow. Maybe it's just force of habit at this point, thinking "where next?" and "what now?" as I have most nights for the last month and a half. But I have the sinking feeling that it's not that: that I'm not feeling closure because I haven't left the trip closed. The roads may have come full circle, but the journey is not over and never will be until, perhaps, I die or go mad. There is so much left to do. I have an appointment with my shrink tomorrow; I need to get Blackbird's oil changed; my suitcases need unpacking; I need to call about our stove being broken; and I have a list of people banging down my door for tutoring now that I'm back in town, which will lead to further journeys, these down roads I've already wandered and am not really looking forward to treading yet again. I'm coming to the conclusion that no matter how many times one asks "Am I done yet?", the answer is always "No." Sometimes I'm in the mood to find that beautiful.

Kingsway

I drove to Granville Island first today -- peninsular in truth -- an oddity, at once for tourists and Vancouverites, where toy stores flank the artists' spare boudoirs. I saw a fleet of private yachts for sale, so many that the bay they rode were parched. I dined there at an overpriced cafe (organic free-range eco-chicken breast -- they'd call it vegetarian if they could) and walked the rather overcrowded ways. I almost bought a plush toy fennec fox, but didn't like the roughness of its locks.

I forged ahead to see the space museum, a disappointing place that seemed as though it came from when Atari was high-tech and people were impressed by flashing lights. They spent their budget, every silver cent, on simulated-motion rides to Mars and one enormous planetarium; the rest was photos you've already seen. The writing and the acting both were canned, but I'll admit their starry sky was grand.

Vancouver's half Chinese, and I've been told their dim sum is the continent's most lush. It falls to someone else, alas, to praise such fare firsthand, for I could not discern the way to lay one's hand upon those buns: I tried three places, failed to eat three times. My Western expectations led me wrong; I wasn't seated, told to seat myself, or shown a counter whence to order food, but entered indistinguishable space. I couldn't tell the patrons from the hosts, and no one stood to say hello to me. As I don't know a word of Mandarin, I ended up with more pan-Asian fare, a chicken moo shu at a nearby place where printed menus put the English first. Authentic it was not, but to be fair, it tasted more substantial than thin air.

The day's redemption came at Shakespeare's hands: I'd made a reservation for a show at 8 PM beneath a circus tent, a yearly celebration of the Bard. I came at six to snag a better seat (the waiting's part of this tradition's lore). I passed the time conversing with a guy from forty minutes north, a frequent guest who told me all the things I should have done instead of the museum and the park. Some I will do tomorrow, some I can't; we live and learn and hope to rule ourselves. At eight the kings and earls began their rounds -- corruption, wisdom, treachery, and woe, all written to become a grand cliche. Richard II is an awesome play.

But I'm exhausted, sore, and still without a clear plan for the morrow's parting joys. As Calvin said, it's hard work having fun, and right now what I need's a bath and sleep. For them, then, I will quit my pen and ink. Blank verse is somewhat harder than you think.

Heisenberg for Dummies

I've been continuing my perusal of "Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes" (WEF) with great interest. The book's writing style is a little dry and sometimes unhelpfully general, but it's been helping me clarify assumptions about what I'm doing when I write -- as well as when I "conduct my research."

The scare quotes are there because what I'm doing is not really ethnography. I'm not going native; I'm not embedding myself in a foreign culture for long enough to understand the culture from the inside out. I certainly don't agree with Kino that three days is long enough to understand any culture. As a result, when my culture is different from my subject's -- which in one way or another it will be most of the time -- I will lack a certain amount of context. Fortunately, WEF reassures me on every page that the activities and perceptions of an ethnographer are inseparable from the behavior of his subjects anyway, and stresses: don't worry about it, just record it. If you're somewhere in Africa studying an indigenous clan that eats goat colons and they notice the food they're offering you grosses you out, record how you reacted and what they did about it. Their response to you is a source of insight into their culture. (And your reaction is itself a source of insight into you, which is of little concern for an ethnographer but of quite a bit of concern for me, since Lover's Lanes is about me as well as my interlocutors.) This is profoundly relevant to Lover's Lanes; if I commit some kind of faux pas or make an assumption that turns out wrong, it reveals a way my subject's culture is different from mine, which may become a natural angle from which to approach their love story. And if it doesn't, it may at least reveal another way that I'm sheltered, presumptuous, or an asshole, which is painful for me but still makes a good story.

On a related note, WEF makes a big deal about "inscription versus transcription." There is no way, it insists, to transcribe an experience in the field. Even if I copied down all my audio recordings word for word, the record would still lack description of movements and gestures; even if I took a video, the record wouldn't capture my internal state or my subject's. There is no way to show everything. Therefore, the process of writing field notes is a process of inscribing: it's a subjective and skillful act in which I implicitly decide which parts are important, which parts to de-emphasize, and which parts to leave out. I decide how to construct the narrative. (Sometimes a real ethnographer's field notes are not even a narrative, but for my purposes they need to be because I'm telling a story.) This is not really news to me, since I've quite consciously gone through this process twice now, but it's useful to be reminded that there are many ways to spin the same tale. So just as my actions and questions shape my subject's narrative, so my perceptions and choices will shape mine.

The things that divide us

Yesterday I finished telling Erica's story. I think the writing went pretty well, though the end felt a little rushed for some reason. I need to write to Erica and find out what she thought. (I'm pleased to say Alice liked her story.) It's difficult to write stories from other people's lives, because even fifty minutes is not a tenth of the time it would take to really understand everything in full context, and I don't have my interviewee here to correct me as I write -- "oh, it didn't really happen like that, though." As I wrote I thought of many questions that went unasked during my interview with Erica, interesting tensions I could have teased out. I realized that there is no such thing as a biographical vignette. A life is like a wiki, everything linked to everything else, and to understand one thing really you need to understand everything. So in the end any vignette is only a sketch, incomplete, suggesting the reality, hinting at it, maybe caricaturing it, but not really encapsulating it. For that you would need a book. No, a book is not enough. You'd need to live it. And even then.

This is actually a fairly substantial obstacle for me. My two subjects so far have been my age, my race, and approximately my culture, not to mention that they're my friends. If I'm worried that I don't have the proper context for telling their stories right, what the hell am I going to do when I interview a fifty-year-old black Baptist in Memphis or an Orthodox Jewish Holocaust survivor in Brooklyn? I talked a while ago about how love transcends such barriers, but its circumstances don't. The greater the divide between my background and the other person's, the more I will take for granted that I shouldn't, and the more they'll assume I can take for granted that I won't.

What's more, it's hard to approach a person you expect will be dissimilar from you. Tonight I visited a local New Age shop I probably end up in on some afternoon once every couple months to buy incense or admire the pewter figurines. I'm on their mailing list, and tonight they had a party for their owner's birthday, so I stopped by. In the best case, I hoped to do an interview; in the worst, at least I'd get some experience managing crowds. Well, I didn't get my interview. Partly that's because it was noisy, but really it was that the people there were mostly hardcore New Agers and at least fifteen years older than me. I did have a couple conversations, but for one reason or another I didn't feel like asking either of the people I talked to for an interview. I was intimidated and I wasn't really sure I wanted to hear their stories. This is a problem. I have a couple solutions I'm turning over in my head, but I think I'll avail myself of the weekend to think more about them before talking them out here.

Erica's story in 15 minutes

I had an interview Sunday evening with another friend of mine, whom I'll call Erica. Like my interview with Alice, this one turned out to be long, about fifty minutes. This time, though, I tried to sculpt the conversation in a way that made sure to outline something interesting within the first fifteen minutes. I'm going to see how well I did by telling Erica's story two different ways. Today I'll pretend that Erica had to leave after fifteen minutes; I'll write her story based on only that part of the interview. Starting tomorrow I'll tell all fifty minutes of her story, reorganizing the first fifteen to fit the broader narrative. First, though, a technical issue. I've heard now from two of my readers that you've had trouble logging in to comment on the blog. I've now switched to a form of commenting that won't require you to log in. The disadvantage of this system is that the comments section might get spammed; if that becomes a problem I'll have to switch back, but for now commenting should be easy. You can also always write to me at the email address on my business card. Now, without further ado, the short version of Erica's story...

"The whole semester I got the feeling, okay, I really like him, is there something I need to do about this or what, and I waited the whole semester . . . and it never went away, so at the end of the semester I finally told him that that's how I had been feeling."

"So you were thinking maybe there's something there, and you want to explore that?"

"Yeah. I guess I put it in his hands, or something like that."

Erica and I are sitting on a bench outside a hair salon. We talk against a backdrop of traffic noise and chattering pedestrians. Everyone in the shopping center is going somewhere except us. Our travel takes place through memory.

Erica first met her boyfriend, Leonard, in middle school but didn't begin dating him until her fourth year of college. "We dated twice," she explains; the fourth year of college was the first time. I wonder out loud when, in that interval of about nine years, Erica and Leonard realized they had feelings for each other. Erica recalls an email she got in high school -- "it was one of those stupid chain forwards. And one of the questions was, Do you like the person who sent this to you? They were so dumb, but I remember writing something like... I plead the Fifth. 'Cuz Leonard sent it to me and I didn't want to say I like him."

What brings me to attention here is that Erica was given an opportunity to say how she felt, but instead said "maybe, maybe not." We could write this off as typical for high schoolers, but of course adults do it too. It's hard to take action. We pass the buck instead. Erica passed the buck back to Leonard. Leonard wrote something similarly vague back to her. And that is how two teenagers knew and liked each other for nine years before they started dating -- by which time they weren't teenagers anymore.

Erica says affectionately that Leonard "was always a wuss. He wasn't man enough to ever do anything about any girls." He didn't do anything when the two exchanged chain emails; he didn't do anything when he found Erica making out with her then-boyfriend at a Christmas party at Leonard's house. Not that the two were in constant contact. "There were some times when a year or maybe even more went by without us talking," says Erica, "but we could always pick up the phone and talk like no time had gone by."

At last something happened that does not always happen in true stories: someone made the first move. It was Erica. To earn their degrees, Erica and Leonard both needed to take statistics, a subject that was Erica's bane. Erica called him to remind him to sign up for classes -- "cuz he'd always wait till the last minute" -- and suggested that they take the course together. During that semester Erica felt her feelings strengthen, and at the end she told Leonard how she felt about him. "And what did he say?" I ask. "I don't even remember exactly how it happened," she answers. "Basically we both decided, okay, we'll start going out."

There was still more buck-passing to come. Leonard was studying to earn an associate's degree so he could transfer to a college three hours away. He didn't plan on pursuing a long-distance relationship, and he dropped hints about it to Erica but nothing more. The relationship was as full of false ends as it had once been of false starts. It took the intervention of Erica's best friend to force Leonard's hand: "She said, if you're planning on breaking up with her you'd better do it soon, because it's not good of you to string her on like that." Soon afterward, Leonard made the last move, where Erica had made the first. The romance had lasted just three months.

The cliche vision of romance is love at first sight, a chance encounter that leads almost instantly to one person leaping into the other's arms and both whispering "forever." But in real life the first kiss, at least in a potentially serious relationship, is so often a pearl years in the making, its story full of hesitations and ambivalences. So is the last kiss. And that's Erica's story.

At 11:38 PM, Brian glanced at his bookmarks.

Urgh, I forgot all about blogging today. Too many other things on my mind, I guess. I've been feeling lonelier than usual. Happily, I've got some stuff set up this weekend: a ball game with my dad tomorrow, and with any luck an interview on Sunday. But for today I have twenty minutes to write a blog entry, which means either I take a pass or I write something half-assed about something I happen to be thinking about, like Go or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. And frankly either there's a blog entry in those topics or there isn't, and if there is I'd prefer to wait until I have time to write something full-assed about them like usual. So I'll take the pass.

There is a topic I've been meaning to write about that I can say something about in the remaining thirteen minutes, though, and it's not something I feel is especially expandable. It's my tendency to begin sentences with coordinating conjunctions. The last three sentences of my previous paragraph all began with conjunctions, and I didn't do it on purpose. My AP English teacher always jumped all over me for that. He said it subordinated the sentence to the previous sentence and turned it into a fragment. Syntactically he's probably right if these conjunctions are treated as the same words as the ones that are used with commas to tie sentences together. But that's just how I think. Each thought is tied to the previous one with a statement about how they're related. Do they contradict each other? Does the second expand on the first? Am I drawing a conclusion? There are no better words than the conjunctions for invisibly guiding you as you try to reconstruct my thoughts from these symbols on a computer screen. I could say "however" and "furthermore" and "consequently," and sometimes I do that too. But those are big words that connote big ideas. Some days my ideas are small, and on those days my words should be too.

This, obviously, is one of those days. So that's today's post. And you see, I did end up talking a little about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after all.

One story building

Last week I wrote a pretty good story! It needs editing in places, particularly in the beginning before I was sure how I wanted to structure it, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the result. Distinctive, well-paced, some conflict, and with that wonderful somewhat inconclusive quality that separates much nonfiction from most fiction. If I can keep that up then on this journey I can at least produce something coherent enough to present to an editor as a strong first draft. I've got plans in place to do another practice interview, then interview a friend of Alice's who's a stranger to me, and then at last hit up someone for a story who hasn't already agreed to the chat.

One quandary that came out while I was writing had to do with who the main character of the story was. We're seeing everything through Alice's eyes; it's her memories, her experiences, her dilemmas. She's the main character, especially in the last couple installments. Yet she gets less direct characterization than Joel or his parents do. Alice tells you what kind of guy Joel is, but she mostly doesn't tell you who she is. I certainly can't tell you more about her than she tells me, because I'm writing this story under the pretense that Alice is a stranger. It's sort of a corollary of how in some first-person novels you can go the entire length of the book without discovering the narrator's name. All you know about Alice is the little she tells you plus what you can infer from how she talks and what she does in the story. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Should I at least introduce her as a blonde white woman in her twenties, single, who's lived in Fort Myers most of her life? Should I let that come out, or not, in the course of the story if it turns out to pertain to it? Or do these basic facts of biography always pertain to any story?

Another quandary: is it fair to Joel and his parents that I'm presenting Alice's judgments of them without a counterpoint? I suppose I could try to get in touch with them to get their sides, but I want these stories to be vignettes, not treatises. I don't think there's anything wrong with presenting only Alice's impressions, with the caveat that I've made the conscious decision to believe my subjects when I can. This credulity is necessary because of my format -- doubt on my part without opposing witnesses is gratuitous -- but it may also be desirable. I'm not going to get a lot of openness from my subjects if they feel like I'm looking for holes in their stories like some kind of itinerant trial lawyer. So I'll be gullible, which fortunately comes naturally to me.

The problem, of course, comes when someone is actually lying to me, or exaggerating to the point of lying. They're still telling me a love story, I suppose, but not a true one, and possibly a slanderous one. This is why I'm always going to use pseudonyms for anyone I haven't interviewed; I'm not interested in being an accessory to libel. If I should catch a major inconsistency in someone's tale, I'm not going to think of it as a lie but as a literary coup. I have to ask them to clarify -- since if their story isn't coherent mine certainly won't be -- but what an opportunity to see how people remember (or choose to remember) the events of their lives! If I necessarily let the subjects paint their own self-portraits through their storytelling, then how interesting it will be to see whether they are realists or impressionists, or whether they gloss over faults or exaggerate them...

Now all I need is subjects!

The world is not beautiful; therefore it is

I’ve mentioned Kino’s Journey in my very first post to Lover’s Lanes and again in my previous post. For some reason I’ve never bothered explaining what it is. It has to do with the nature of writing. You’re on one subject and you think of something relevant, so you include it, but then you can’t explain what it is or why it’s relevant without changing the subject. Good writers stay organized so that they’re not constantly referring to people you haven’t met yet; that, or they make the mystery of who those people are part of the experience of reading. Mystery adds depth. It reminds you that the narrator’s a complete human being, the sum of whose experiences will not fit in a book of any length.

With that in mind, I’m almost tempted not to tell you about Kino’s Journey. I could do that. Just let you wonder what left such a mark on me that I named my audio recorder after it. But then if you were really interested you’d just Google it and you’d get a sterile Wikipedia treatment of the show’s premise, cast, and prevailing themes. I’d rather you learn about it from me so you understand at least a fraction of why it’s so important.

What I want you to imagine is that the world is a collection of city-states separated by wilderness. These countries are works of man, and as such are all deeply dysfunctional; yet each has its own underlying logic, its own myth, its own beauty. There’s the land of perfect democracy, where by majority vote the citizens gradually ordered each other executed as traitors until only one citizen was left – an absolute king over a democracy of one. There’s the land of wizards, a place where the value of a person or idea is judged solely by what they contribute to agriculture, and yet where one woman lives who dreams of flight. There’s the land of empathy, where the citizens invented a potion that let everyone know each other’s thoughts – and where, terrified by what they saw in the minds of others, the people withdrew one and all to live like hermits.

Through this beautiful, broken world travels Kino. She’s a young girl who escaped from the land of adults, where people have an operation to make them compliant executors of their assigned occupations, to find her own way. She rides a motorcycle named Hermes which she inherited from the previous Kino, a man traveling through the land of adults who gave his life to liberate our Kino. Hermes can talk, and as with a child every other thing out of his mouth (or rather speakers?) is a question. Kino, on the other hand, tends not to talk. When she does she hides behind allegory, or riddles, or banalities. Instead of talking, she listens. She travels to each country, staying no more than three days, listening to the people and trying to grasp the riddle the city presents. When she’s done, she moves on, often without comment, to the next country.

The countries themselves, of course, are allegorical to problems faced by real societies and for that matter by individuals. Kino is the vehicle we use to travel from one country to the next. But she is also an intriguing enigma in herself, and her internally contradictory and eternally wary psyche contrasts in its complexity with the simplicity of the places she travels. Kino and her world both stick in your head. But what sticks in your head most is the journey, because it’s through the journey that both the destination and the wayfarer are revealed.

I’m not out to recreate Kino’s Journey – which is an anime, by the way, as I somehow forgot to mention, you see how that happens? – with Lover’s Lanes. But the aesthetic of a journey that is about both the stationary points and the moving one – that’s what I want to capture. To the extent, in fact, that Lover’s Lanes wasn’t even my first idea for what to call this project. The Japanese name for Kino’s Journey is Kino no Tabi. Kino’s name sounds a lot like kinou, the Japanese word for yesterday. So my first idea was to call this project Ashita no Tabi – Tomorrow’s Journey, or Journey into Tomorrow. I rejected it because it was in Japanese and didn’t make sense and anyway I like Lover’s Lanes better. I’m just including this vignette to help you understand what effect Kino’s Journey had on how I think about this project. Without Kino’s Journey there would be no Lover’s Lanes.

On On the Road

You know what Jack Kerouac is not very good at describing?

Travel.

I've been reading On the Road, that Great American Classic of the Beat Generation, for the last few days. It turns out this book has a problem. You expect that a novel should move, because if nothing happens then... well, nothing happens. But what I've learned from On the Road is that constant movement does not make a good narrative. Here, take a look at this passage from page 15:

I went right on into Des Moines, about four miles, hitching a ride with two boys from the University of Iowa; and it was strange sitting in their brand-new comfortable car and hearing them talk to exams as we zoomed smoothly into town. Now I wanted to sleep a whole day. So I went to the Y to get a room; they didn't have any, and by instinct I wandered down to the railroad tracks -- and there's a lot of them in Des Moines -- and wound up in a gloomy old Plains inn of a hotel by the locomotive roundhouse, and spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty remarks carved into the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow windowshades pulled over the smoky scene of the railyards.

Do you see the problem? He's giving us all this detail, which might in principle be interesting, but we don't care. We don't have a reason to care. The characters are disposable. The setting is disposable (Des Moines appears on page 15 and is gone by page 16). There is no plot or theme to speak of. We don't have any reason yet to care about the narrator, Sal (remember, this is page 15). So Kerouac has spent over a hundred words explicating detail that will be irrelevant in another hundred words.

But it's not all bad news. There are parts of On the Road where you sit up and start paying attention. The weird thing is that it doesn't happen on the road. It happens when Sal starts getting attached to something -- some person or place -- and stops moving for a few pages. You actually begin to understand who he is, the tension in him between the needs for responsibility and for freedom, for friends and for individuality. He's less well articulated than Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye, maybe, but he's broadly similar and interesting. But then we pitch back into motion and Sal resumes describing how he gets from one place to another. That part is boring. And as for Dean, who most readers seem to regard as the piece's main character, his mind never comes to rest long enough to understand what he's all about. In fact, that is what he's all about. That's the point. And as a result there's nothing there to relate to, at least for this reader.

Lessons for Lover's Lanes? No one cares what interstates I took or what I saw out the car windows or what hotel I stayed at. Maybe they're worth mentioning occasionally -- I don't want you to lose the road noise in your ears as you read -- but as a rule if I'm not going to spend at least one full page exploring a person or place, it's probably not worth mentioning. Italo Calvino knew that when he wrote Invisible Cities, and now I know it too. And the narrative voice, the part of the book where you get to know the traveler and not just the travels, is crucial. Calvino knew that too. Kerouac perhaps not so much.

VI The Lovers

I know rather a lot about reading Tarot cards, at least for a layman. Ask me a question and hand me a pack of Robin Wood and I'll tell your fortune. But I don't actually believe the cards have any kind of supernatural power. I don't really go in for the supernatural; the way I figure it, it's outside my area of expertise. Science I understand. Art I sort of understand, at least to the extent I understand beauty. God is above my pay grade.

So why read Tarot? Because it's fun and because sometimes it leads you into new ideas you wouldn't have had without the cards as a creative springboard. I've been getting back into it lately, partly as a result of playing Persona 4 and partly because of a thread on a nearby anime forum some of you may be familiar with. I've done a few readings for myself lately. The weird thing is that -- if you impute any kind of consciousness to the cards -- all the readings have been rather insistent that Lover's Lanes is a good idea and that I should do it. I did a three-card spread on the project? The Sun, The Hierophant, the Five of Pentacles. Translated, that's approximately "this is going to cost you some money, but you will learn a lot (and/or teach others a lot) and have a stunningly positive experience." Last night I did a spread on relationships that indicated I should learn about them. And tonight I did a spread on impediments to happiness; at the head of the wedge to smash through the impediments was the Two of Wands (exploration, creativity, and faith) -- and the one card behind the impediments, the reward for smashing through, was none other than The Lovers. I shit you not. I don't even believe in the Tarot and I was overjoyed.

Still, I was even more interested in the parts that didn't fall instantly into place, since those are the ones that are a springboard to learning. Showing up as impediments were cards like the Ace of Cups, sort of the embodiment of the suit of love and emotion -- but it showed up as an external impediment, not a self-imposed one like, say, the Chariot (issues with control and direction), so it made me think about how other people's emotions might get in the way of my fulfillment in general and Lover's Lanes in particular. The Page of Cups was right beside it; generally court cards represent people, but I don't know who she is or why she might hamper me, so I assumed she was noise until her brother the Knight of Cups turned up as part of the solution. That made me think maybe both of these cards are me and I'm supposed to move from the Page to the Knight -- transcend being the messenger and write my own message. Which in turn bears on how I approach Lover's Lanes as a work of art. Not a demand, not even a suggestion. Just one path I could walk down.

Pen/Dragon

A cross-country love story road trip involves a lot of driving and a lot of thinking. Thinking without being able to write down what you're thinking is torturous when your memory is as bad as mine. I want to be able to write while I drive, or at least get my thoughts in order. So I've been doing some Google and Wikipedia research on speech-to-text software.

I knew going in, of course, that Dragon is the industry leader, as it has been for the better part of a decade. I had expected, though, that by now it would have a number of competitors, including at least one freeware program distributed through SourceForge or something. Nope. My admittedly rather cursory research indicates that all other speech-to-text software is focused on letting you give your computer oral commands, build a phone menu where you "press or say 1," and so on; Dragon is the only program I found that types text as you say it. Dragon is pricey, receives mixed reviews, and only functions when you're using the official Dragon microphone headset; I don't know how I feel about wearing a headset while driving.

So I was pleased, as I was reaching the conclusion that I might have to shell out for an inferior product, to discover by accident that Windows Vista comes with a built-in dictator program, Windows Speech Recognition. This is really cool, since I'm going to need a new laptop for this project anyway. Apparently WSR is slightly behind Dragon in terms of accuracy -- but I'm just going to be talking to myself, I don't need a 100% accurate transcription. I wish I could find some kind of demo version that I could test on my XP desktop.