What Lasts When We Lose?

I know I promised that my next posts would be analyzing certain aspects of 10,000 hours, but I must commemorate January 12--a day late thanks to the end-of-term insanity yesterday.  So here's the break in our regularly scheduled programming.

January 12 is always a bittersweet day.  Bitter because it’s the anniversary of the day my family had to start living without Josh, and sweet because it is a day when we all come together and remember him.  This year marks eleven years, and as crazy as this might sound, I’ve only visited my baby brother’s grave a handful of times.

As a writer, I appreciate the graveyard-visit scene as a powerful symbolic, romantic gesture.  Having a character hold a one-sided conversation at the final resting place of a loved one is a great device for revealing inner feelings in a way that’s touching enough to overshadow how contrived it all is.  Do real people actually do that?  Any time I’ve actually thought about giving it a try, it just seemed awkward in my head.  (I watched an episode of Bones recently in which Agent Booth encouraged Dr. Brennan to speak to her mother’s grave.  Brennan thought it was weird, too.  I’ll admit, I felt a little vindicated.)

Another thought:  It is a widely accepted ideology, regardless of religious affiliation, that a human body is separate from the actual person.  So a body in a casket isn’t actually the man or the woman, it’s just what’s left behind.  We treat the bodies of our loved ones with certain respect and ceremony, but this, like the graveyard visit, is symbolic and really mostly about helping the mourners gain closure.

I’m not sure why visiting a graveyard doesn’t speak to me the way it does to others, but I know I have my own symbols that I hang on to.  For example, a Special Olympics cowbell sits on my desk at school.  I bought it long after Josh’s death, but whenever I look at it (or use it to startle a roomful of rowdy students to immediate attention) I think of Josh, his medals, and how proud he was of them.  When students ask about the bell, I get to talk about him.

I also have a collection of three miniature Harley-Davidson motorcycles that my friend Tony gave to Josh.  He loved them, and they had a special place on a shelf where he placed them just so.  I claimed them for my own after losing Josh, and they sit on my bookshelf at home.  When I look at them, I remember how much Josh loved motorcycles, and how any person on a bike was a “buddy.”  It was always fun to see a tattooed, leather-clad tough guy covered in piercings and chains on a motorcycle break into a grin when he noticed Josh in our car exuberantly cheering him on. 

Those motorcycles also remind me of how much Josh meant to our friends.  Josh was a great collector of people.  I think a lot of them might feel like they adopted Josh into their own lives, when the truth is that Josh adopted them.  Unless it was Power Rangers vs. monsters or Walker Texas Ranger vs. the bad guys, Josh didn’t know how to pick sides.  He knew only to be loyal to his friends, and he’d cheer for those buddies just as much as he cheered for his brothers and sisters.

But cowbell, motorcycles, gravesite—all of those things are really just things.  They have powerful symbolic meaning, but ultimately, they’re just objects that won’t last forever.

As I have witnessed the loss of too many friends, family members, and coworkers, I’ve come to realize that the one thing that can’t be destroyed or taken away is how these people have changed me, inspired me, or made me laugh.  Those experiences are not symbolic.  They are real.  We become the true memorials to the ones we’ve lost.

So I thought about what Josh left me. 

I learned compassion, to treat others equally, and to follow the Golden Rule even when people are different.  I learned this by watching many people treat Josh with love, and a few treat him with fear.  I learned it by watching Josh accept everyone, even scary guys on motorcycles that most people would avoid sharing direct eye contact with. 

Josh also taught me to see the positive and to seek it in adversity.  I don’t think I’ve yet faced any challenge so great as the ones Josh faced.  If he could come through those things smiling and laughing, then I can do the same with my trials.

I learned that “cool” doesn’t matter if you have to sell your soul for it.  Real friends recognize your value and seek to change you only when you’re threatening to self destruct.  Being ourselves is a unique kind of cool that others are free to accept or deny, but if we’re willing to accept others’ individual coolness, they’ll be more willing to accept ours.

So while I may have a poor record of cemetery visits, I recognize that I go out into the world every day with a unique perspective that Josh helped shape.  I interact with others, view my surroundings, and look at myself using this perspective.  I’m a better person for having been his sister, and this recognition of his influence is, I think, the most authentic and lasting memorial possible.

So if you’re reading this and have memories of Josh, what did he teach you?

The Magic That Is 10,000 Hours

“You have to write ten books before you can publish one.” 

I’ve heard this adage and various versions of it many times, but it wasn’t until I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers that I finally understood what it really meant.  In the book, one of the issues Gladwell discusses is the 10,000-Hour Rule, which states that in order to truly master a skill, an individual must put in 10,000 hours of meaningful practice, regardless of natural ability.

He cites a study by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson in the early 1900s.  The violinists at Berlin’s Academy of Music were divided into three groups.  Students in group one could become world-class soloists, those in group two could play professionally, and those in group three would not likely make a living from their playing.

All of these students had started playing at approximately five years old, and at that age practiced two or three hours a week.  At around eight, the differences started to emerge, when those who would end up in group one started practicing more than the others.  By the time they were twenty, they’d each racked up—drumroll please—10,000 hours of meaningful practice.  Group two had totaled about 8,000 hours, and group three had totaled 4,000.  Ericsson found similar results with the pianists.

The thing he didn’t find was naturals—musicians who were so naturally talented that they could attain higher levels with less practice.  (Gladwell debunks the myth of the natural by showing how Mozart, widely known as a child prodigy, didn’t compose his earliest masterwork—No. 9— until he had been composing for ten years.  His truly great pieces came after twenty years.)

Ericsson also didn’t find any grinds—people who practiced more, but couldn’t break into the higher levels.  Of course, there is a baseline to consider, since these students all had what it took to attend an elite music school.  The thing is, once they proved they had sufficient talent to meet the baseline, hard work separated them.

Gladwell then quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin:  “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.  Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do.  But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time.  It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

So that’s why you have to write ten books first!  But then I wonder what counts as practice, how someone can get those 10,000 hours, and what the "baseline" is for writers.  These will be the subjects of my next few posts, so stay tuned.

My Top 10 Books of 2011

I love to read, and it's a big prerequisite for writing.  A while back, I started keeping track of all the books I read, so here's the complete list for 2011.  From these 76 titles, here are my ten favorites with links to Amazon.  They're not in any particular order--I just listed them by author last name.  Keep in mind that they were all published at different times; I just read them in 2011.


The China Study by T. Colin Campbell: In looking into vegan nutrition, this book/study was referenced over and over again by many different experts.  I decided to go to the primary source, and I am glad I did.  Basically, it was a giant study with thousands of people that ultimately showed a link between what we eat and our health.  It sounds kind of obvious, right--you are what you eat.  But Dr. Campbell found things like a link between casein (milk protein) and cancer.  Most of our western diseases--heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc--can be linked to our western diet that is heavy on the animal products.  READ THIS BOOK.  It will change your life.  Even if you don't "drink the Kool-Aid" and join me in a more vegan way of life, you'll still learn a lot and be more educated about the food and nutrition industry as well as the various research and studies done in this field.

One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde: This is the sixth book in one of my favorite series by one of my author heroes.  (I even named my dog Thursday.)  Basically, the series follow Thursday Next, who can book jump and enter fiction.  It's this whole alternate-reality thing that's too complicated to go into but I'll just put it this way:  The Thursday Next Series is Harry Potter for book nerds. And one of my favorite things about the series is it keeps getting better (a lot of series do the opposite).  In this book, the Bookworld is teetering on the brink of an all-genre war, and Thursday is the only one who can stop it.  Unfortunately, she's nowhere to be found, so the powers that be turn to the bookworld Thursday (the character who plays her in the books) and ask her to play the real Thursday and help smooth things over.  It's an interesting twist for Fforde to switch points of view after five books from Thursday's perspective, but it worked.  What can I say--he's one of my author heroes, which makes him a genius.

The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde:  This book brought on feelings of anger for my author hero--not because the book was lacking, but because it was lacking in the United States.  Since it is only published and distributed in the UK, I had to order this on Ebay (I just ordered the second one, released last November, the same way).  The book is the first in a series for young adults.  Teenager Jennifer Strange helps run Kazam, an employment agency for magical folk who do odd jobs, like rewiring your entire house in an afternoon.  Magic is highly regulated, and wizards have delicate egos, so much of Jennifer's work involves paperwork and politicking.  But her life starts to change when visions start prophesying the death of the last dragon by the dragonslayer, and many of the clues suggest Jennifer is that dragonslayer.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett:  The premise of this book is unexciting--750 pages about building a cathedral in 12th century England.  But it's not really about the cathedral, it's about the people who are brought together by the cathedral.  It all starts with a pregnant woman at a hanging and cursing the men who have witnessed against the baby-daddy.  About 740 pages later, the truth comes out about all of that.  In the middle, you have a varied cast of characters from evil villain to benevolent priest and everyone in between.  They all struggle to get what they want, whether their aims be altruistic, selfish, or just a means of survival.  Be warned, however, there is graphic sexual content in this book.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford:  This book starts in the 1980s with a discovery in the Panama Hotel, near Seattle's Japantown.  Crates and crates of possessions were stored in the hotel by Japanese families who were sent to World War II internment camp, were then sealed up with the closed hotel, and resurfaced when a new owner began remodeling.  Henry Lee, a Chinese-American resident of Seattle for his whole life, and a recent widower, is reminded of his childhood 40 years ago, and Keiko, the Japanese girl he befriended at school.  It's a very engaging story--I hesitate to call it a love story, but that's really what it is, just with a childhood innocence as Henry slips back and forth between past and present and begins to wonder what happened to Keiko.

Born to Run by Christopher McDougall:  You'll put down this book and say, "Wow!"  I don't even know how to explain it--memoir, biography, science, medicine, anthropology...it's all in there.  The book centers on the author's search for the Tarahumara tribe in the Copper Canyons of Mexico--a tribe known for running hundreds-mile races in flimsy leather sandals in the unforgiving heat with surprisingly few injuries or maladies common to the more "advanced" runner.  From there, his journey branches off into looking at various runner athletes and tribal hunters who actually run their prey to death.  Eventually he finds his answers, and much, much more.  This is truly a groundbreaking work--and if you're curious about those weird glovelike, finger-toe shoes, the answer's here.  Check out his interview on The Daily Show.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs: Jacob's grandfather was always telling stories about his childhood, showing pictures of his many friends with special powers--a levitating girl, a strong boy.  Jacob believed them all, but eventually outgrew them, seeing the stories as metaphors for his grandfather's difficult years as a Jew and soldier in World War II.  But after his grandfather's mysterious death, Jacob wonders if he was correct in his disbelief and sets out to discover the truth.

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson:  I learned about this book thanks to Jon Ronson's interview on The Daily Show.   For him, it all started when he was contacted to use his investigative journalism skills to figure out the mystery of a strange book being sent to various neurologists.  His search takes him into the middle of the psychology industry, both the doctors and the critics (most notably the Scientologists).  What he discovered is that psychopaths, who we generally equate with serial killers and rapists, make up 1% of the regular population and 25% of the prison population.  They also make up 25% of top ranking CEOs and other high-power positions where a lack of empathy might  come in handy. 

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot:  In 1951, cervical cancer cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks which turned out to be the holy grail scientists were looking for.  They wanted cells to run tests on, but "farming" cells was difficult because after a few generations the cells would no longer reproduce.  Henrietta Lacks's cells, known as HeLa cells, kept going and going, and ultimately founded multimillion dollar industries and helped develop vaccines and treatments for ailments such as polio.  Meanwhile, her family lived in poverty without any knowledge of this.  Over a ten-year period, Rebecca Skloot researched the cells, the woman behind them, and the ethics surrounding this sort of research.  Others had tried to do this before, but had failed to gain the trust of the Lacks children and other family members.  Here is a great interview on The Colbert Report.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett:  I won't go to into detail on this one since it was EVERYWHERE.  I'll just say that I really loved it.