Live Out of the Box

Tei of Rogue Ink has just written a super uber-excellent article on writing -Save Your World. Write. It kinda works like a how-to-get-started writing article but written in such an insightful manner with a fast upbeat flow that it doesn’t feel that it’s lecturing what to do.

Writing inspires more writing. It’s a cycle –and a good one that ought to never cease like for example, this piece I’ve written below was inspired by her post.

Read on…

Joseph Campbell talks about a hero’s call to adventure, the starting point of the hero’s quest in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In the Power of Myth, he said, “That’s why it’s good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.” That’s why Campbell’s my man.

Folks, we live in a couch potato society. Our bums are so worn out flat from constantly sitting down and staring at the ubiquitous flat screens. Our eyes are straining. We are gasping for breath. We’re stuck in a dead-end job we hate but we bear to make ends meet and feed the kids. We got tight deadlines. Reports. We come in super early in the morning and work late through the night. We gulp down that caffeine and sleep under our desks at nights. Overtime. Then we wake up and repeat the next day. By then we are choked and we want to get out of there and fly but we’re imprisoned in our cubicle, barred by our front door and locked in our own personal cage.

We live in The Waste Land –”a sociological stagnation of inauthentic lives and living that has settled upon us’ (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth). In other words, routine. A monotonous boring life. It “evokes nothing of our spiritual life, our potentialities or even our physical courage’ (Ibid). How can physical courage arise staring at spreadsheets for hours? Or marking paper after paper? Friends, the Fisher King cannot produce. Fertility is gone. There is no birth. No growth. We are stuck not in a cycle of death and rebirth but a cycle of mind-numbing stagnant dullness. Our fates are like that of Sybil (the prophetess in the Greek myth with Apollo, not the one with split personalities).

No wonder Monster Camp, Dungeons and Dragons and RPGs are popular and have struck a cord with people. Deep down we have an innate need to be heroes. We look back with nostalgia at the Dark Ages and wish to be those knights going off in search of the Holy Grail and forgetting the fact that they never have the comforts of indoor plumbing. Or become seafarers traveling to unexplored terrains for spice, silk, gold and a big chest full of treasure and fight bloody pirates and become part of a nefarious mutiny involving Long John Silver. Never mind that sailors in those days seldom take baths and lice, rats and other parasites abound in ships and that good pirate novels never care to mention where these guys take a dump. We want adventure for god’s sake! For once in our lives, we’d like the courage to do something stupid and outrageous like throwing our computers out of the window from the 42nd floor, walk out of the office and buy a one way ticket to go on that very same day to Madagascar. It’s as close as we’ll ever get to riding the Firebolt up in Hogwarts.

I’m saying this now because I’m afraid I’m becoming the prophetess, Sybil. I can feel myself sinking in that quicksand of despair and soon it would almost be impossible to escape. I’m getting sucked into the rat race, the 9-5 (nowadays, the 9-9), papers stacked up till they reached the ceiling and my mind annoyingly humming, “Backlog! Backlog!”. Because rather than have a ball and chain wrapped around my feet, stuck to the desk, marking papers, I’d really like to go out there, fly and embark on my own hero’s journey. To fight with Balrogs, sail with Sparrowhawk, swing from tree to tree with Mowgli, battle the Dark, hide with the lost Boys and see the Wizard of Oz….

Wouldn’t that be just cool?

The call of adventure still beckons!

With shaking fingers, a student chose a topic among the jumbled mess of rolled papers in my bag. He then went to the center of the room and began to speak with a faltering voice, his eyes darting to and fro nervously until he couldn’t think of anything else to say. This goes on for a long time –he and his classmates engaged in a staring game until the timer buzzed.

I’ve been teaching my class improv speaking these days and this is a common scenario. Improv or improvisation is the ability to perform without any preparation. It’s no wonder Chinese students have a hard time learning this stuff because their education system doesn’t allow anything like this. The thrust is to memorize, not to learn, to do what you’re told, not to question. So to think upon the balls of their feet, to whip up and expand a topic in a nanosecond is anathema to them. They’ve got to unlearn everything that’s been fed to them which is –gods! tough because they tend to cling tenaciously to the skirts of old ideas their teachers taught them and I have to pry their fingers off one by one. But it’s not only Chinese students who are scared of improv. To anyone who’s terrified of public speaking, what more of a nightmare could you ask for if you’re asked to speak on a topic you just knew a minute ago?

But I’m here to tell you that there’s nothing to be scared of. You just blew that monster way out of proportion with your imagination. The truth is we have been doing improv everyday of our lives. When you talk with your friends, you don’t have a rehearsed script right? When you drive to an unfamiliar place, you don’t practice how you’re going to get there in your bedroom. You just do. Whenever something unexpected happens (and that’s always), what do you do? Improvise.

Shit, I’ve spilled juice on the cuff of my shirt. Roll it then.

Our PC (or Mac, if you prefer) isn’t working for our presentation. No problem. Here’s the whiteboard and a marker.

I’ve got no instruments to make music with. Here’s a table and your hands. You can whistle too right?

Improv = creative problem solving

To go through life, you will need a lot of this.

But how can this improve your public speaking skills (besides joining Toastmasters)? Well, the more you practice improv the less terrified you’ll be of speaking spontaneously in public (and let’s face it, sooner or later this will happen). Here are some tips I’ve taught my students and am now going to share them with you.

1. Decide on the tone of your speech. Is it serious, funny, passionate or sad? Let’s say the topic is about hair (and I’ll continue using this example all throughout). I then decide I would definitely want my talk to be funny so that means I’ll only be using humorous content.
2. Decide on the theme or your creative interpretation or take on the topic. So how can I be funny with the topic of hair? I could talk about my experiences in finding hair in my food at the restaurant and that it often comes in all colors, texture and sizes –long, short, curly, kinky, red, brown or even purple.
3. After browsing through many Toastmasters sites, I’ve come across a way Toastmasters effectively deliver their idea during improv. It’s called PREP.

P- oint (introduction)

R- eply

E- xample

P- oint (conclusion)

1. Telling stories is a great way of making your topic long especially if they’re drawn from your own experience. You feel more sincere and natural because it happened to you. People respond more to stories and when they walk away, it’s more likely they will remember what happened to you in the toilet than your talk on Darwin’s theory of evolution.

But you won’t suddenly become an overnight speaking sensation on these tips alone. Like everything else, you’ve got to practice. “Stage time! Stage time!” 2001 world Public Speaking champion Darren LaCroix would say. I didn’t get to where I am now, confident and comfortable in speaking in public (although my voice will still shake a little). I used to be scared. Then I became a teacher which requires speaking in front of people for at least 4-6 hours a day, 5 days a week. That’s a lot of stage time. So even if it’s with family or friends, as long as it’s a breathing person, practice.

And here I leave you with a funny improv toastmaster video and some topics my students have made themselves (try using PREP on it, if you can).

1. Mia went shopping with her friends. (??!! I know. Seriously)
2. You like dog. Why?
3. If you’ve got Doraemon’s (he’s a cat with round fists in an old Japanese anime) hands, what would you do?
4. Which came first –the chicken or the egg?
5. If you were a spy who has lost your cover and diplomatic immunity, what would you do?
6. I like sleeping.

And last one, my all-time favorite.

1. I am 18 and I really like to play with myself.

Here’s an awesome site on public speaking with lots of great resources and materials: Six Minutes blog

Related posts:

Strip Down- Getting Rid of the Non-essential Things in Life

What’s the Rush?- Why People Are Missing Out on the Important Things in Life

Focus on Your Strengths. Steer Around Your Weaknesses

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Cartoon from Linda Moran

I just came back from the office after staying up late there till 9pm. This is our final week of classes. I’ve just started marking my Mt. Everest load of papers and the grades are due next Tuesday (by the way, our chair’s insane for imposing such a tight deadline. Doesn’t she know it takes at least 2-3 weeks for teachers to mark all students’ papers after last day of class? Totally deranged and mental!).

If I could outsource this task of marking papers, I totally would.

One of our colleagues from China (but spent the later part of his years in Canada and the US) recently insulted one half of the population of foreign teachers in our campus by sending out an email to all the staff. The topic was: To switch or not to switch on the air-conditioning. That’s the question. He was totally in favor of switching it off and replied, “Doing away with air-conditioning allows the bodies to sweat. In doing so it enables people, especially some foreign teachers, to lose weight.”

When I read this in the office, you could hear a pin drop at the stunned silence that followed after everyone read their mail.

Hello dude! What are you insinuating?

Most importantly, what the hell were you thinking?

Different people have different body structures according to their body needs especially if they come from another country where the climate would require a totally different physique. Not everyone can be stick thin as the Chinese.

After a stampede of furious people stormed into his office, he sent a mass-email apology. This was also after he received a couple of private hate mails that all but screamed: you ass!, you jerk!, insensitive bastard, and all other hateful derogatory ouch!-garnering superlatives you can think of.

When asked why he sent that kind of reply to everyone on campus, he said that he “wasn’t thinking”. Oh cool, let’s write an offensive email telling big dumb foreigners to lose their flab. Send to everyone in the entire college? Oops, did I just click the SEND button?

To warn people of his stupid behavior my good friend aptly suggested that a sign be put on him: OPEN MOUTH. INSERT FOOT.

Comic Page by Yamato Nase

Tonie has given me a manga about talking penises in order to help me out in my writing as it’s been developing in a snail’s pace (if she’s really serious in helping me out, she could’ve checked my decades worth of papers). But honestly. I’m not that desperate that I would read about arguing penises. My story doesn’t have anything to do with the lower part of the male’s anatomy (hmm…unless it’s a sci-fi plot and they happen to make those into deadly weapons that shoot laser beams. “Watch out! I’ve got a secret weapon!” And then write a scene where intergalactic guys are all shooting off each other, lasers bouncing off the walls and destroying civilization. Hey, it could work). But my curiosity was piqued so I sneaked a look. The mangaka wrote 15 chapters. Yes. All about talking penises.

I was at a loss for words.

But the story’s really funny and original. Because of a car accident near a penis shrine, one boy’s spirit is now imprisoned in another guy’s dick while his real body lies in a comatose state in a hospital. Meanwhile, two guys’ cocks got swapped and the organs with their own unique personalities meddle constantly in their lives putting them in embarrassing situations.

There’s this scene where the mangaka, Yamato Nase is struggling to come up with a title for her series (who wouldn’t? Helloo! Talking Penises!). Here’s some:

The Angel inside my Pants

A Hello from the Window of Society

Let Us Meet in the Toilet

My Lower Part of the Body

And last one. Wait for it…

Open the Zipper and Hold Me

The series gradually came to be called “Chinko no Tsubuyaki” –“Chintsubu” for short because chinko (Japanese word for penis) is too offensive.

That settles it. I’m going to write a novel in Ayn Rand fashion called The Existential Cock. It’ll be about a penis setting off on a quest for its purpose in life except wait…. most penises already know their one and only purpose beforehand.

But can a piece of writing about a sexual organ ever be literary and be taken seriously? Then I remember The Vagina Monologues.

It’s not so impossible after all.