But alas, this post isn’t about me, but something Erykah said. When someone asked her some long convoluted question that seemed more of an attempt to get attention than anything else, Erykah took it in stride and said “First, I am a spiritual being. Second, I’m a human being. Only after that am I a man or woman.”

I’d like to expand that last part. Only after that are you man or woman, black or white, rich or poor. At our roots, we’re all genuinely good people. We all feel the same emotions, have similar desires, we’re all trying to do the best we can.

Leaving the event, I spoke with a wonderful woman, Ama, who was born and raised in Brooklyn. After talking for a while, I asked her to help direct me to the subway station as my Google directions were useless (as a side note: it’s 9:30 at night, the sun has set and I’m knee deep in the heart of Brooklyn).

Ama didn’t recognize the station name, but promised that she’d help me. Grabbing the first person to walk by, she demanded directions and wouldn’t let the person go until we knew everything we needed. Ama then told me she’d walk with me to the station.

We talked as we went, discussing spirituality, veganism, herbal remedies and politics. At one point, Ama looked at me and said “It’s dangerous. You should be more careful of what you’re doing. This is Brooklyn and it’s dark.”

While I appreciate Ama’s warning and especially appreciate her willingness to walk a good six blocks out of her way for me, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Erkyah had said. You see, I like to think most people ARE genuinely good and it’s okay putting myself out there like this because in the end, we are all human beings.

And Ama, you proved my point as you did good. Now it’s my turn, and all of ours, to do it back.

One of the concepts that struck me most was this idea of the broken window. The book said that the thing that serves as the catalyst for building degradation is a window breaking and not being fixed. After a window breaks and doesn’t get fixed, the entire buildings would slowly fall apart with property damage and graffiti and the whole nine yards. In one experiment, an abandoned car was left outside an apartment building for a week and nothing happened to it. However, after a window broke in the building, the car was picked apart within days.

Why?

The reason behind this concept is this idea of accepting disrepair, or of allowing things to fall apart. Looking beyond programming, I started seeing the broken window in every aspect of my life. Here’s an example:

First, my new apartment. When I first moved in, I was meticulous about cleaning everything and making sure I kept everything in tip top shape. However, I didn’t feel like washing my dishes Monday morning before work, and when I got home, just added my dinner dishes to the pile, feeling too tired to clean them out. With this acknowledgment of my willingness to let the place go, I began leaving my clothes lying about when I went to bed and began to become slower about cleaning the cat’s litter. I wasn’t consciously deciding to let the place go, I had simply created an opening which I recognized in the back of my mind and followed through with.

The moral of the story is, be wary of the broken window. If you start to notice yourself letting something go, take action to fix it, before it spreads throughout every aspect of your life.

While I will keep you guys updated as I move closer and closer towards the novel, I’m going to keep those posts exclusively on the writing blog. So if you’re interested in how they progress, check them out there! But in the mean time, this blog will return to mostly focusing on odds and ends that I think about, with the occasional post on writing.

The first is the 401K offers. Most companies offer you some kind of percentage of your salary for which they’ll match your investments in your 401K. This amount will be anywhere from 2-8% of your income.

The second option is the stock purchase plans offered by companies. These plans will give you discounts on the companies stock, offered usually about once a quarter, at a 10-20% discount. Once again, you’ll be allowed to do this with a percentage of your salary, between say 5 and 15%.

So it’s pretty obvious these are important, but it’s not as obvious JUST how important these are. What’s so great about them? You’re basically guaranteed a GREAT interest rate on your money, and an easy way to save it.

Think about it… if you put 5% of your income into your 401K as matched by your employer, it’s the equivalent to putting in 10%. Without doing any sort of clever research on investments or anything, you’ve just doubled your investment in minutes. While extended over it’s lifetime, the earned interest rate will taper off, you’ll always get some growth on this money which will be a solid percentage in the long term.

Likewise, you’re buying stock at a 10% discount. Again, now when you buy that stock, you’re getting a solid asset with an immediate 10% growth on your investment. And where your 401k money is stuck in there until you retire, your stock becomes available for sale after a few months from your purchase, meaning you can cash out and just take your growth on your investment if you really don’t want that stock (given a relatively stable market of course…).

Again, these plans aren’t going to immediately bless you with millions of dollars. However, with relatively no work involved, both opportunities allow you to see a significant growth on your holdings. So do it.

The method in which I thought of conveying this story was through a running journal. A track athlete documents their work outs each day, marking how much they’ve ran, how they felt during the work out. But in addition to the physical details, the runner will include all of their emotional details… what they thought about on the run, why they thought about it, etc.

Utilizing this set-up would allow me to go deeper into the narrator’s psyche than a normal journal would. Why you ask? Well, you write in a journal when you want to confide in it. As such, it means that you can’t really highlight certain moods as easily in this respect. The narrator talks when the narrator wants to talk. However, by utilizing something that the narrator sees as an obligation, you can see periods of days where he simply reports how the exercise was, and other days where he writes lengthy thoughts. It will almost come across as if the narrator’s reluctant at times to share his thoughts with the journal.

The topic for the story can be anything, though the one I’d been playing with was the idea of settling in a new community. Each day would include an anecdote about something I’d done that day in settling into the community, or something I noticed about the community.

This story concept produces some cool opportunities for a piece as it has you revealing more and more about your narrator with each day’s brief glimpse. I say brief, because we’re talking a newspaper clipping, so each chapter would be 400-700 words. These restrictions would help change the direction of the story and make it an interesting format to explore.

With that in mind, we might as well get through the negatives of this book. First, the obvious, Russian names can be hard to tell apart. This book is no different as every character has their common name, as well as their name of endearment, and there are almost always two or three characters with dangerously similar names that you will mix up on countless occasions. Second, the book is long, there’s no getting around that. However, length isn’t really a flaw, and it wouldn’t be in this case, were it not for Tolstoy’s desire to end the book wherever he feels like it. You will find at least four or five spots during Anna Karenina where you will say, “Wow! What a conclusion! Tolstoy did a great job pulling everything together and bringing this book to a close.” However, you will be wrong, because Tolstoy DOESN’T stop and instead, extends the book needlessly until it ends with what I can only guess is excessive political commentary.

Despite those flaws, and my eagerness to dive into them, Anna Karenina is a great book. Of the Russian three (Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, and Tolstoy), Tolstoy’s writing is the easiest to digest. It’s light, entertaining, and great at creating enjoyable scenes. Tolstoy is able to bring the characters to life and make you empathize with their struggles. A social/political commentator, he’s able to subtly weave in criticisms of the government and to discuss the different social classes without making the reader feel like he’s sitting through a lecture.

How is he able to achieve all this? By recognizing that everyone has a struggle in life, no matter their social class. The book takes you through rejection, infidelity, and passion, and makes every character’s motives and actions understandable. You’ve got Levin, the hard working farmer who’s love is scorned early in the story, Kitty, who first rejects and then finds herself rejected in love, Count Vronsky, the aristocrat who follows his heart even as it forces him to cross paths with family and friends, and of course, Anna Karenina, who’s forced to choose between marriage and love, honesty and deception.

Anna Karenina is a tremendous story about love, and the choices we make in falling in love. The story expertly deals with every issue surrounding love and raises the question of whether it’s better for calm, content love, or for passionate, dramatic love. And of course, in doing that, it’s filled with great quotes.

Anna Karenina Quotes

“He knew so well this feeling of Levin’s, knew that for him all the girls in the world were divided into two sorts: one sort was all the girls in the world except her, and these girls had all the human weaknesses and were very ordinary girls; the other sort was her alone, with no weaknesses and higher than everything human.”

A – “I think that in order to know love, one must make a mistake and then correct it.”
B – “Even after marriage?”
A – “It’s never too late to repent.”

“If there are as many minds as there are men, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

“The peasants are poor and uneducated, we see that as surely as the woman sees the shriek-hag because the baby shrieks. But why schools will help in this trouble – poverty and uneducation – is as incomprehensible as why chickens on a roost help against the shriek-hag. What must be helped is the cause of the poverty.”

“Then he had considered himself unhappy, but happiness was ahead of him; while now he felt that the best happiness was already behind him. She was not at all as he had seen her in the beginning. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. She had broadened out, and her face, when she spoke of the actress, was distorted by a spiteful expression. He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has plucked, in which he can barely recognize the beauty that had made him pluck and destroy it.”

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”

“To live not for one’s own needs but for God. For what God? For God. And could anything more meaningless be said than what he said? He said one should not live for one’s needs – that is, one should not live for what we understand, for what we’re drawn to, for what we want – but for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can either comprehend or define. And what then?”

“If the good has a cause, it is no longer the good; if it has a consequence – a reward – it is also not the good. Therefore the good is outside the chain of cause and effect. “

The first question I had with this idea was the context. Is the story a general narrative a la Bridge to Terabithia, in which it slowly unveils these scenes as it builds up this powerful relationship? Or is it a letter to the friend, reflecting on your situation together? While the former seems the more logical and normal (after all, how many two hundred page long letters do you know about?), the second idea has stuck with me stronger. There’s a mention in the story Love in the Time of Cholera, about how the main character writes novels and novels of letters to his lover in an effort to fully explain to her how he feels. So why not try and capture that here?

So now the question becomes, what’s the purpose for this letter? If someone’s going to write a novel worth of letter to someone reflecting upon their relationship, there needs to be a pretty good reason for it. Initially I thought it would be a love letter, but as I thought about it further, I thought it should be a break up letter. There’s this song I really love called “How Do You Tell The One” by After 7 which deals with telling the person you love that you can’t be with them anymore. What better reason for a letter?

Imagine a man conflicted, writing about all of their great times together. As you read the letter, you envision him proposing at the end, and wonder why he’s taking so long with it. However, as you continue reading, you begin to notice some conflicted feelings, some negative thoughts. Finally, he reveals the pain he’s feeling and explains that he can’t do this anymore.

Well, I’m feeling it at least haha. Here’s the song:

Each chapter of the piece would be another item on the to-do list. Following the item would be an elaboration on the item, why it needs to be done, how it will be done, what usually happens when it is done. By doing this, you will slowly learn more and more about the character telling the story and the life that he lives, all through a simple list of items.

I really enjoy this story structure, especially for the subtleties you can slip into it through the list. However, I haven’t yet figured out what I want the story to really be about. The good news is that this can be where the reason for the to-do list can decide that for you. Maybe the to-do list is the list of things you need to do to get over your ex-girlfriend. Or the list of preparations for your wedding. The movie High Fidelity with John Cusack and Jack Black used this list concept as John Cusack talked about his “five best break-ups.”

So I have the location for the piece and the general setting, but another question that arises is the manner of telling it. One way that I’ve considered for this piece is a journal of the scientist’s days in prison. Another option would be to tell the piece through the trial’s notes, with the day’s proceedings shedding light on what is going on.

I thought this would be an interesting story for a number of reasons. First, while it’s set after the dictatorship, it reveals a lot about it as the man recounts his workings in the organization through his trial (I’m thinking something similar to how I imagine Stephen King’s Carrie is conveyed). It also forms a nice parallel to story #4 as it reveals more of what was going on during that story, similar to the way Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Shadow makes you better understand Ender’s Game.

I’ve played with the ideas of a number  of different character stories in this universe, but I think I’ll close with this one unless I get particularly desperate later on in the month.