Word Life.

Last week was one of the loneliest weeks of my life and I'm happy about it. Instead of continuing to push things away and postpone thinking about them, I brought all my thoughts inward and came to terms and made some important decisions. It was almost like I finally digested the reality of things, which felt really good. I felt much more aware and at peace this week. A certain edge that I used to have years a go is starting to come back I think, which could be exciting. I've also realized recently that I enjoy language very much. Not just different languages (which are great) but accents, word chose, intonation, and generally just the way different people choose to same the exact same thing. So this post is the first of a multipart post on my thoughts on language and word chose. The theme of this thought flow is written language.

Sometimes I feel like I was meant to be a product design major. I've always thought about the way that I package things. One of my teachers in elementary school once told me, "I enjoyed your paper but you always sound like you're trying to sell something." I actually took that as a compliment, although she definitely meant it as a bad thing. I think you need to think about your reader and what they're going to get out of your writing. This blog is a perfect example. If I didn't want the reader to get anything out of it, it would be a Hello Kitty Diary underneath my bed. I think a lot about what people might take away from everything I write (even party invites, personal emails and notes). For every blog post I actually publish, I have about 2-3 post I just sit on. I think of every one of them as a piece, a product. Anyway before I weird you out with my idiosyncrasies, let's move on.

I've always been preoccupied with the way writing flows and making sure the way I start something I write keeps the same personality and somehow ties up loose ends and surprisingly returns to the opening sentiment in a Magellan like voyage for the reader (when we used to freestyle in college, I would call myself MC Magellan sometimes because when I would try to come back to the same line I started with when I passed the mic. People thought that was pretty stupid but I guess, a little funny). That's why speeches were entertaining to me. Speeches have a clear objective and you plan on giving the audience something, whether that is a feeling or a message (or if you're really on your game, both).

Now let's truncate this idea of written language down into a simpler form: Quotations. I have always been somewhat obsessed with quotations. In high school, I had a binder with two clear plastic openings on both sides. Everyday I would have a new quotation on each side and it became something that everyone in my class would walk over and read. I started out with famous quotations and then started making up my own. If you want a quotation that you write to seem famous, just put quotation marks around it. So in my room now I basically have an entire binder of quotations about everything from life, to girls I was into at the time, to what was going on in the world. I love the ones about girls because I would make them all cryptic and good friends would understand them but other people just took them as actual quotations about life. ZINGA! I got them!

Today I am basically out of the quotation game and have shrunken the scope down even further to a Rick Moranis size level. One day I was thinking about where I want to be. I thought about characteristics I would love to embody and about where those characteristics could someday lead. What I basically drew up for myself was a character map (not to be confused with a "character map" for computers you technophiles). It was four words/characteristics that I want to always hold on to and the fifth characteristic is where they would lead. Another way to think about it would be four corners and the fifth characteristic is the center of the rectangle. Physically drawing it out helped quite a bit too (I need to see things to properly absorb them). So if you had to do the same thing, what would your four corners be? What would be the four steps on your path to the fifth? The plan is to have the four words framed between my bed, the bathroom and the kitchen with the fifth above my door, so every morning I have to walk through the set. I think about the words a lot and in some ways I think they have helped me stay on track. It's nice to think that in such a goal oriented society, you can break larger goals down into words and act upon them.

People absorb the words you use. I realize that more than ever now at a company where basically everyone reads every word of everything I write. People don't skim but rather break apart every line. That's not to say that people should freak out about writing or get nervous. It's more to say that in a language where you can say any sentiment in a hundred different ways, shouldn't you choose the words that best represent you? And if you do draw out that four corner diagram of yourself, you'll find that you get a warm fuzzy feeling anytime you use one of those five words maybe because subconsciously you've become that way.