What's it going to be then, eh?

The question that makes the title of this post is used throughout Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. Each time it's asked, the main character, Alex, is being presented with a choice. Sometimes seemingly mundane, but always leading to whether or not he's going to continue his life of violence and crime or...not.

The theme of choice and particularly choosing to do good or bad, is raised throughout the book. The question is actually asked outright in the book: If someone only can do good through compulsion, that is, without really having a choice in the matter, are they really good? Are they really human if their ability to choose is taken away? And at what price to society?

I really enjoyed the story. As a character, Alex was engaging and interesting even if not likable. There were no other truly main characters, just people who pop in and out of Alex's life. The book is said to be dystopian, which it is, but it certainly doesn't get into details about the society as a whole. That being said, I certainly still got a feeling that the times Alex was living in were bleak and dreary. Also, because the story focused on one character and had a few prominent themes, the writing felt precise and the book was certainly not too long.

The novel is known for its heavy use of made up slang. After the first few paragraphs I wondered how many people quit reading at that point and considered it gibberish. The language was a distraction at first but it did have the effect of making you feel like you were in a completely different place. It also forced you to concentrate down to the word level while reading. And it was an interesting exercise to realize how quickly person can adapt to different terminology. Within a few pages certain words were understood and their meanings incorporated into the sentences without too much extra thought.

One thing I noticed is that the language seemed to blunt the effect of the ultra-violent scenes. When my brain had to process a little bit longer to say, "Ok, that word means blood, and that one means face..." the picture then didn't pop up as clearly in my mind. Whether the fact that the violence didn't always come across as horrendous as it was, was a good thing or not, I'm not sure.

The last chapter was originally omitted from the American publications of the novel. The publishers had their reasons and my feelings are that it should have been published as a whole from the beginning. If someone doesn't like the work of an artist, they can make a derivative work or an abridged version, but it should not be recreated with parts missing and still titled with the original name. That being said, I was a little dismayed when I finished the book and realized that I didn't particularly care for the last chapter. I really wanted to be able to love the real ending so that I could internally sneer at those publishers.

Alex goes through a change in the last chapter and it seemed too contrived. All throughout the story, Alex pushes the blame for his problems out to others. Time and again when he was responsible (sometimes solely so) he finds a way to rationalize his situation to be other people's fault. He blames his friends, his parents, the government, the police. Granted, there was some blame to be spread around, but Alex pushed it all off.

It was hard to buy into the idea that a person can go from raping and murdering his way through his teenage years to suddenly discover around age twenty that he just wasn't into it anymore.

So rather than a sudden change from ultra-violent to non-violent, I would have liked Alex to suddenly realize the negative affect he had on people's lives. Once he came to that realization, then he would have made a choice to stop being violent. Instead, he just grew out of it without learning anything or really making a choice; he just didn't feel like causing violence anymore.

But I'll still take the real ending with my complaints over the trimmed story for the sake of hoping to sell more copies.

Reading for Writing

I used to read voraciously. Over the past several years my reading has dwindled to a handful of websites, blurbs from the newspaper, and rarely a novel. I can point to having kids as a reason this has happened and there would certainly be some truth to that, but that's not the whole story.

I've read comments from any number of people (people in a position to know) that say that one of the biggest components of being a writer is reading. (Some have even suggested that a writer ought to spend half his time reading and half writing.) You read to see another writer's style, how they handle certain situations. You read your favorite genre and your least favorite. You read to research, research, research, to keep up on current events, and to expand your general knowledge.

I always feel that I need a good chunk of time before sitting down and writing, and those chunks of time can be few and far between. Reading, on the other hand, fits into those smaller windows; it's much easier to pick up and put down something you're consuming than it is something you're creating. And since reading is essential for writing, by squeezing in some word consumption at various intervals throughout the day, I'm helping move the grand goal forward.

Awhile ago I renewed my subscription to National Geographic. I read it cover to cover every month. The variety of topics discussed always develop into an idea or two for a story, which I then make sure to throw into an electronic document so that more thought can be put into it at some yet-to-be-determined date. So I've at least had that going for me.

A few weeks ago I picked up a novel that I had some interest in reading ever since my wife told me I might like it after she had read it for her book club. I think part of me was afraid to read fiction because I might realize the stuff I write is complete garbage compared to a real author's work (and therein is the "whole story" as mentioned from the first paragraph). Well I did start it and I purposely picked it up during free minutes here and there and during my lunch break at work. This felt good because I was working on polishing two habits at once: better use of those random free moments and reading for writing.

I also thought it might be worthwhile to share my feelings about the book I read, Life of Pi. Here is my review of the novel.

A Story that will Make You Believe in God

This review of Life of Pi will contain some spoilers. Not huge plot details, but enough generalities to give away some important parts. You've been warned.

Overall, I really liked the book, but since I can always find something to complain about, I will.

The book started with a note from the author. Right away I was confused. I knew Life of Pi was fiction, but the author's note was written like it was a true story. This wouldn't be a problem if it was stated to be written by someone else other than Yann Martel, the author, but since I was led to believe the note was written by Mr. Martel, I was confused.

From early on, it's apparent that Pi survives his ordeals. It's stated that the story has a "happy ending" and since the premise is that Pi himself has related his story to the author, he obviously doesn't get killed during the telling of his tale. There were plenty of times of great suspense during the novel where wild animals are pitted in close proximity to Pi and the young man has to use the very few resources around him in order to survive. I found myself feeling tense and nervous during these chapters (and loving it), but not as much as I could have since I knew all would be well in the end.

A few times throughout the novel I caught myself thinking that Martel was presenting a lot of interesting information, but it almost felt like he was just informing the reader of said information rather than moving the story forward. It reminded me of Herman Melville's long chapters about everything cetacean in Moby Dick. I will admit that Martel's informative musings were more interesting to me than Melville's, but that could simply be because of the difference 150 years has on what an audience finds more interesting: the body types of whales or all things to do with surviving months at sea. When I later read that Martel extensively researched a number of different topics for Life of Pi, I wondered if he just couldn't resist regurgitating every interesting thing he had learned rather than tying it all tightly into the narrative.

A few criticisms aside, I really enjoyed the book. It was a great story that moved deftly from moments of action and suspense to moving imagery of life, death, religion, and survival.

The book takes an interesting twist near the end that really shakes things up and almost makes a person want to start reading the book over from the beginning right away to see how it comes across with this new knowledge. This was the first time I really thought about the claim made by a fictional person in the author's note that Pi's tale is, "A story that will make you believe in God." I had initially scoffed at such a claim as just being something to say to try to pull the reader in. After reading the last part of the novel, I realized it didn't mean it was going to actually change a person's belief in God, but rather it was making a statement about the very nature of a faithful belief.

The first part of the book is heavy with Pi's love of three major religions. He angers some people in his life because he doesn't choose one religion, but finds things he loves about all of them and so embraces them all. And just like Pi chose certain parts that made sense to him, moved him, helped him to explain life, so too must the reader choose which of the two stories we're to believe. Do you believe the good story or the ugly story? But there's more to it - the good story has parts that are too fanciful to be realistic. So, to believe the good story, you also must be able to explain those fantastic aspects by attributing them to an intervention of a higher power.

And I think that was the author's point on religion: We want to believe the "good story", so we find a way to believe, even if that means relying on something not based on hard evidenced facts, but on faith.

Sleep

I stay up too late. I've decided that this is the cornerstone of my bad habits, the one that, if picked away at enough so that it crumbles, it will make all subsequent knocking down of other bad habits easier while simultaneously making the building of positive habits that much easier. Lack of sleep can have a whole pile of negative side effects. Cranky moods. Lethargy. Messed up metabolism. Foggy thinking. Really, pretty much anything a person wants to accomplish is more difficult if that person is sleep deprived.

I had realized that this was a problem for me years ago but any attempt to adjust my sleep schedule would never last very long. Each week and each night I had intentions of going to bed earlier, but it seldom happened. When it did happen, it wasn't because I had finally conquered my inner anti-sleep demon, it was because it was the end of the week and I was exhausted.

Now I'm trying it again and have been doing really well for the past week. Why will it work now when it hasn't in the past? Not sure. Maybe it's because I'm looking at it as a means to an end. I'm not doing it to simply get more sleep, I'm doing it to make it possible to fulfill other goals later.

...And Breathe.

Am I really posting on this blog again after nearly two years of silence? You bet your ass I am.

But Torey, you might say, if you haven't had anything to say in this long about your stuttering, what could you possibly add now?

Good question, and thanks for asking it, friend! The answer is, I still might not write about stuttering all that much, but that doesn't mean that this little slice of the internet can't be refocused on something else while retaining its original long-term plans. More about those continued long-term plans later.

Whenever I think about myself - who I really am, who I want to be, experiences I've gone through that have changed me in little or large ways - I've realized that my speech doesn't factor in to the picture my mind paints. When my mind wanders, which is frequently, and it's jumping from my daily stresses to my dreams, it's never about stuttering. Furthermore, if I chose one thing to change about myself, I can say with certainty it would not have anything to do with speech production.

So all that being said, is it any wonder why my blog posts here slowly spread themselves out until pretty soon I was approaching a two-year hiatus? How can a person expect to write on a regular basis about something that isn't that important to them?

I started this blog on a day that doesn't happen very often and with a quote that fit the narrowed focus of the blog, but that quote is still equally as relevant to the new widened focus. See the quote here.

The original idea was to have a slow and steady change to my speech from where I was at point A, to where I wanted to be at point B. I'm keeping the idea the same, but expanding it from "speech" to "my life." But I've actually pulled back even a bit more than that to focus on the processes of getting to where ever it is I might want to end up in my life (I say "where ever" like it's unknown, but it's really not).

The processes that I will focus on will be habits, fears, and motivation. If I make the changes and realizations in the right direction, I'm expecting this to help in all aspects of my life, speech included. That being said, the grand goal of all of this is to get to the point where I regularly do some writing, of the fictional type. I'm aiming to shield my eyes from those bright lights, squint a little, and be happy with what I see beyond.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Secondary Behaviors

This is a follow up to the plan outlined in the previous post.

With the help of my clinician we created a video tape of us having a conversation. Upon watching it I felt two things: disappointment and embarrassment. The disappointment was because there wasn't a lot of physical struggling, the kind that I feel every time I speak for more than a few seconds. I was expecting to feel uncomfortable about watching myself talk, but something else was apparent immediately that I wasn't expecting: I was using a whole heap of interjections. Long strings of "ums" and more individual ones thrown in between words. What bothered me about it, even more than the struggling that I had been looking for, was that, at times, it took away from the coherence of what I was saying. I've always been afraid of that and hear it was, right before my eyes and ears.

So we talked about what to do next. Where do we go from here? One option was to make another recording. I told my clinician that since the ultimate goal of this summer project was to get me to be able to accurately practice my physical secondary behaviors, why not just have me give it a shot, instead of talking and worrying over the tape? I felt that, if allowed to, I would talk around it all day until July came to a close and then I would never have given it a real shot. The part of me that was scared of trying this really wanted that to happen. With my feelings out in the open, we decided that during our next session together, I would just try to voluntarily create some struggling and see where it went. I knew this wouldn't be easy and I wasn't sure if I would be able to make myself do it. Luckily, while walking back to my office after the session, I had an idea for a way to allow myself to get warmed up to the thought of going through with this. And since there was a stuttering group the next night, I had the perfect opportunity to try it out.

The group meeting was lightly attended. It was Jerry, an SLP named J, and a communicative disorders college student named E. I liked being the only person there with a speech problem because it meant I pretty much had a two-hour 3-on-1 therapy session. Selfish, but true. So I presented my idea, knowing that they really couldn't say no to the stutterer at a stuttering group. I had thought up a game that, if all went according to plan, would help to ease me into the practice of voluntarily fucking up my face to match how I uncontrollably fuck up my face all the time. The rules are simple: One person makes a goofy face and then the other people have to all make the same face. Then the next person gets to make a stupid face of their choice while the others get to mimic. The faces can involve some movement and sounds if desired. My plan was that after a few back-and-forths, that I would already be feeling pretty silly about making childish faces, so I wouldn't feel that much sillier jerking my jaw a little to try to simulate what I do while speaking. Aside from me needing to explain the rules several times to Jerry, it went quite well. I felt that there was just the right amount of easing in mixed with a dash of secondary behavior. It produced a number of laughs too.

So the next day at therapy, my clinician and I played the game too. It worked to the extent that it could. I was glad that I gave it a shot and took the initiative to come up with something that would help me try to voluntarily create those behaviors, but it was clear to me that I needed something visual to go off of.

Also, sometime after watching the recording, I had thought a lot about those nasty interjections that I saw and so utterly despised. I came to the conclusion that I've been using them to cover up the physical struggling I'm prone to do. I had undoubtedly used so many of them while having myself taped because I subconsciously didn't want to see myself struggling on the TV. After coming to this realization I noticed that I began to pay more attention to the interjections I was using in my everyday speech and there were times when I really over used them, again, to the point of where I was afraid of causing incoherence. This all gets neatly tied together when we decided to try some casual conversations during my therapy. I immediately liked the results. I was really noticing all the interjections and able to remove a large number of them. And since I was using those "ums" as a way to get myself unstuck or to avoid getting stuck, the outcome of me removing so many of them was that I showed many more instances of physical secondary behaviors – the struggling that we tried and failed to capture during the first taping. So the plan was obvious: Make another recording while having me concentrate on banishing as many of the dastardly "ums" as possible.

We created another recording under the above stated specifications and I really liked results. While it wasn't comfortable watching myself, I didn't feel embarrassed by it either and it showed a significantly higher number of struggling instances than the first one. That's where we sit right now. The next step is to transfer the recording to a digital format so that I can watch it more on my own and see what I think of it and to get comfortable with seeing myself do those things.

And it's out of context in regards to how it's said in the song, but I relate these lines to making a decision to break old habits and to form new habits.

Drive until you lose the road
Or break with the ones you've followed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmFi2snLr7o

I want to be like Mike

I hope he doesn't mind me talking about him and I hope he corrects any incorrect characterizations I might have made.

Mike is a friend of mine. Mike is an SLP. Mike is a stutterer. Mike is a former stutterer. When Mike talks about speech, he does so like no one else I've heard before. This is true because he speaks from his own experience coping, struggling, overcoming, anguishing, surviving, helping, learning, teaching. I don't always understand the importance or the depth of what I'm hearing, but I listen and try to absorb as much as possible because as different as we are, we're the same in the ways that matter for the topic of stuttering. Mike is the one that affected me profoundly with a single sentence, as chronicled here. Mike used to stutter. And by that, I don't mean some nice, simple repetitions, I mean the whole facial tension, twisting of the head type of stuttering. I know this because he's not only talked about it, he shows people exactly what he used to do. He can demonstrate his struggling whenever he wants to. He is exerting control over his speech by making mistakes at the time of his choosing.

I'm at a point in my therapy where it's great because I'm aware of blah blah blah. I realize my irrational fears, my idiosyncrasies, blah blah blah. I've also realized that I'm at a point where I'm comfortable. Being comfortable isn't a bad thing, but if I stay in that cozy spot and never push myself beyond it, then this is as far as I'm going to get.

A month or so ago, I talked to Mike on the phone for awhile. He explained that one of biggest positive steps he took in his therapy was confronting his struggling. He did this by being able to mimic at will his worst secondary behaviors. He suggested I do the same thing. His idea was this: Get a recording of me that shows a range of my worst struggling. Watch that recording over and over so that I become desensitized to seeing myself doing those abnormal things that I do everyday. Take note of what I don't like the most about it and practice doing those things so that I can eventually do them whenever I want. The point of it would be for me to able to have total control over my speech, so that I know I can act out those struggles when I want to. It's a way of confronting a fear and coming to a better understanding of my speech.

Right now I'm actually more nervous about properly producing the recording of my struggling than I am of trying to bring myself to voluntarily repeat those struggles. I'm afraid that there will be technical problems (we'll be recording to tape and since I don't own a VCR, we're going to try to transfer it to a digital format). I'm afraid that I (or my clinician) won't feel that what we recorded is a very good show of the worst of my worst. My fears are being a little magnified because I only have about seven weeks left to work with my current clinician and I want to get this recording right the first time so that we can spend as much time as a possible on the real meat of the task. I decided to write about this right now because we're going to be going at this for the first time on Thursday. Talking about it beforehand ensures that it's out there, i.e. I can't back out as easily if it really sucks.

But really, how bad can it be? All I'm trying to do is force myself to do something voluntarily that I do all the time anyway.