Tuesday, April 9, 2013

JCCC3 Cruise Journal / Day 3

When I got back from my vacation two months ago, I wanted to write up my experiences and share my journal right away. But I got sick and life sucked me back in and I wasn't able to overcome that and get back to it. Until now. Posted in real-time fashion, I hope you enjoy reliving JCCC3 with me two months after the fact.

--------
Day 3
  • Feel terrible, and lots of waves, but getting by.
  • Calf muscles still sore
  • But 100% not sunburnt, so there's that!

Again, thought some things I wanted to write this morning while lying in bed, but didn't move because deemed sleep more important. Now regret it, as don't remember.

It bugs me that sometimes I can't figure out what I want to do. I have all these things in my head that are things I should do, and I suggest them to the “Want to do” calculation committee, but I'm never sure if that's what I want to do. A lot of times I know I want to write, but what? I know I want the results to be blog posts or neat things, but writing generally happens best when you have the idea and then choose to write to deal with the idea.

Ah, two things come to mind: 1.) Writing because you have to vs. because you want to, and 2.) the idea of a color-changing temperature guide that you put in hot drinks to determine if you can drink it or you will burn your tongue.

On the latter, Jessica says I should write a blog post on it. I can see the video in my head now: “Always burning your mouth on coffee that's way too hot?” (Insert clip of person drinking then pulling back with burnt mouth, hand comes up.) “Tired of not being able to taste for a week because your tongue is burnt?” (People nodding with wrinkled noses.) “Did your over-eagerness to eat cause you to shovel risotto into your mouth before it cooled?” (Person spitting risotto back onto their plate.) “Then you need Mouth Savers (or other name, perhaps one that is cooler-sounding)! The tool to take the temperature of your food and drink before you dig in! Mouth Savers' unique color-changing technology allows you to know when your food is just right. (Goldilocks! That's what we'll call it!) The patent-pending design changes colors to let you know when your food goes from 'Too Hot!' to 'Just Right!'”

On the former, I had a thought last week about how I know what that means now, and I can see examples of it in my life. [With this I'm referring to the idea that I've heard a lot of professional writers bring up, which is that to really be a writer is to write because you have to, not because it sounds fun to do. Not to write for the money, or the notoriety, but because you have to get that stuff out of your head. And only after you're going to be doing it anyway, to care about the other stuff. That's all highly paraphrased of course.]

Mike Phirman was fun in concert, I might look into a few of his songs. John Roderick gave the best performance of his I'd seen yet. He started off with a long story about flying planes. He also played a new song for us, saying he wanted to for all we've done for him. It was great because he told us that a few of the performers had taken a pledge to work up some new material for the cruise, and he himself had been in a bit of a writing drought for awhile now. Zoe Keating was great, but unfortunately many of us were sleepy. I wish that sounded like more of a compliment, because really, bad music doesn't put you to sleep, it puts you on edge. Great string music relaxes me and makes me peacefully sleepy. She must have a complicated set up for her looping.

Zoe Keating working wonderous melodies on her cello and laptop



Had a belly ache all day today, so took a lot of down time. Did a lot of reading, so that was nice. Maybe it's best since start time is 8am tomorrow, plus excursion on St. Thomas. Our towel animal today was unidentifiable. Small head, two tails.

Not sure what towel animal this is...


1 comment:

Unknown said...

I'd say the towel animal was intended to be an elephant.