Paul Tevis

A Penny For My Thoughts

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:34:52 GMT

Today, the story-telling game I've been working (slowly) on for the last two years is shipping from the warehouse to customers. My comp copies arrived last week, and I'm amazed at how an idea that started as some notes scribbled in the back of a bus has turned into a tangible thing. I'm a little overwhelmed by the whole process, so I'm not really sure what else to say. You can read more about it, check out the promotional website, or order a copy.

Also: Woot!

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Listen To The Cookie

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:10:52 GMT

I have a weakness for mediocre Chinese buffets. While there are downsides to this failing, the advantage is that I get to enjoy fortune cookie fortunes often. I suspect I'm not alone in being unable to read a fortune without mentally adding the words "...in bed." (For any Green Hills Software engineers, current or alums, who happen to be reading, I also occasionally amuse myself by adding "...while using the Service Router.") With this in mind, the fortunes that have accumulated on my bedside table recently range from the slightly funny ("Don't worry about the stock market. Invest in family.") to the fairly amusing ("You will receive an unexpected gift from an acquaintance.") to the absurd ("You would prosper in the field of wacky inventions.").

Sometimes, though, the cookies are on to something. On Thursday, I was in the middle of pushing forward on some of my plans for the project I'm managing at work. I was meeting with some resistance, so I decided to get out of the office for a bit and grab an early lunch by myself. I was worked up and nervous, and I had hard time concentrating. I spent most of lunch working through my reasons and questioning whether or not this was the right thing do. At the end of the meal, just as I was getting ready to head back to work, I opened up my cookie and read the fortune inside.

"Assert yourself, your ideas are worthwhile at this time."

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Read Down The Wind

Fri, 29 May 2009 06:22:42 GMT

Every so often I have the honor (and pleasure) of narrating a story for PodCastle (or their big sister, Escape Pod). This week they released The Dreaming Wind by Jeffrey Ford, which I recorded for them back in December. I almost forgotten about it, and it turns out I wasn't the only one. Due to an editorial mixup, they ended up getting two recordings of the story, one by myself and one by Rajan Khanna, and they posted them both. Whichever of the two versions you prefer, I'm glad I was able to read another story for them, and I hope I get the chance to do another one soon.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Lacking Sleep, But Ok

Fri, 08 May 2009 13:02:03 GMT

Last night, as the Jesusita Fire burned rapidly to the west, Gwen, the cats, and I left our house to go stay with our friends Roy and Michelle. They eventually ordered an evacuation for our house, but we were long gone by then. So far as we know, the first hasn't gotten anywhere near our house yet. The fire was very unpredictable yesterday, so they were very aggressive about ordering evacuations. Hopefully we'll find out more about what's going on today, but the bottom line is that we're safe.

Arete, Purpose, and Virtue

Wed, 06 May 2009 14:19:48 GMT

I find myself compelled to write about arete.

In college, I played Sir Thomas More in a production of Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons. I can't put my hands on it now, but I recall at the time reading something (possibly by Bolt himself) about what the title could really mean. How could someone truly be "a man for all seasons?" What is a man for? And if he has a purpose, how would we know what it was?

(In a moment of sychronicity, Gwen just walked in wearing a shirt from that production of A Man For All Seasons.)

The ancient Greeks had a concept called arete. In a nutshell, arete is the idea of "excellence" or "virtue" but applied to fulfillment of a particular purpose. So a sharp knife has arete, because it is well-suited to cutting, and that's what knives do. The problem is that I keep applying the lens of arete to how I see myself.

It's not really a problem so much as an ideosyncrocy, I suppose, but it's intellectually challenging. I see myself as acting not out of some cosmic sense of Purpose, but out of a sense of being in the moment. Over the last few years I've turned away from long-term plans and large-scale ideas in favor of constant re-evaluation and re-prioritization. How does arete work in that context?

One way out to see myself as acting purposefully, that my individual actions have purpose even if there is no grand, overarching Purpose to my life. When I act, I want to achieve something. Acting in an effective way towards whatever that specific goal is, then, can be said to have arete. But I'm not sure that really resolves my conundrum.

Virtue and arete are slippery things for me. On a poetic level, I'm attracted to them, but on a rational level, I have a hard time pinning them down. Expect to hear more about them as time goes on.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

And By "Monday" I Mean Wednesday

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:57:13 GMT

As I mentioned last week, things have been productively busy. I'm within spitting distance of wrapping up the text for the game writing project I've been working (too slowly) on for the last two years. Yesterday my group turned in our project for the business class I'm taking at City College. Lots of career-related things are working out. All of which means I keep expecting something bad to happen.

I almost wrote that sentence as "All of which means I keep waiting for something bad to happen." That would be lie: I'm not waiting. I've got momentum, and I plan to use it.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:17:14 GMT

The last two weeks have been a blur, and now I'm off for a weekend of camping with friends. I promise an update on Monday with what's been going, because it's pretty exciting. But now, it's time to hit the road.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

I've Got The Brain On The Brain

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:10:59 GMT

I just bought my ticket to hear Oliver Sacks speak at UCSB.

Dr. Sacks is a neurologist and a frequent guest on my favorite radio show and podcast, Radiolab, where he talks about strange things our brains do. This is a topic that fascinates and terrifies me. I have a lot of unresolved questions about the nature of the mind and its relationship to the brain. (I was a Philosophy major in college, which only exacerbated the problem.) I love movies that raise issues of consciousness, memory, and personal identity like Memento and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Heck, I've even written a storytelling game about these ideas.

Dr. Sacks has written several excellent books about his experiences with patients suffering from neurological disorders that might best be described as "philosophically challenging," so I'm excited to hear him speak. The second chapter of A Penny For My Thoughts starts with this quote from his classic work The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, and think it sums up what I find interesting about his work:

The patients essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patients personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Gather 'Round The Fire

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:09:45 GMT

This week has been about getting back in touch with my inner extrovert.

It took me a long time to realize that I am an extrovert. When I was a kid, I didn't have many friends, and I spent a lot of time alone. That meant I must have been an introvert, right? Sure enough, every time I took a Myers-Briggs test, I came back as an "I." Nothing simpler than that right?

It turns out that while I thought of myself that way, it was only because I hadn't been in situations that let me think otherwise. It was only after four years of college and about five years of post-college life that I realized, "Hey, I really do draw energy from being around lots of other people, don't it?" (This stands in stark contrast to Gwen, who really is an introvert and finds those same situations exhausting.) But eventually I figured it out, and I got comfortable with it.

Over the last year, however, I've interacted with people (particularly online) a lot less than I have in the past. This is mostly due to my efforts to cut back on and refocus my activities. But As a result, people didn't email, IM, or call me as much as they used to. What I failed to do until recently was recognize that my diminishing social contact was my fault.

Earl Nightingale talks about expecting things from the world. It's simple: the more you serve the world, the more you receive. And it has to start with you. You don't expect the stove to get hot, he asks, before you put wood in it, do you? That's precisely what I thought was going to happen. I'd let my fire, which I'd spent several years building, burn down, and I needed to put more wood in it.

That's what this week has been about for me. I've been posting here, dipping back into forums, getting back in contact with folks, and generally trying to warm things back up. What's surprised me is how quickly I've seen a change, not only in the world, but in myself.

Let's keep that fire going. If I've let things grow a little cool, talk to me, leave a comment, or IM me, or email me, or whatever. I love to connect with people. I thrive on it. And I can't believe it took me this long to figure it out.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:19:31 GMT

Numerous people have introduced me to the Cult of Done Manifesto, which holds a certain terrible fascination for me. Caught as I am in the never-ending development cycle for A Penny For My Thoughts ("The smallest game ever to take two years to finish!"), I can't deny its appeal. But as I was talking with Ryan today, I realized that for me, it's the Scylla to perfectionism's Charbydis. The true path is between them, sometimes towards one, other times the other. My struggle is to recognized when I've gotten too close to one of them, so I can row at top speed toward the other.

With Penny, it's time to head for the Scylla. Yes, there are warts. No, it's not perfect. But it is time to get it done. There is no one right way to do things; it's a matter of picking the right tool for the job. For this job, right now, this is the right tool.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Smart Is Dumb

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:37:48 GMT

The problem with being smart is that I think I understand stuff.

My particular version of this problem is that I think I understand something I've encountered before. I heard or read or see something that makes sense to me, and I think, "Oh, I get it." And I do. I just don't internalize it and act on it. And then, some number of months later when I see reference to the same idea again, I skip over it, because I think I already understand it. But I don't. I know it, but I don't understand it. And the dumb part of being smart is that I don't let myself go back over the idea again in detail, reflected against my experience since the last time I encountered it.

(This happens with all sorts of ideas and to a frustrating extent. Rather than make a list, let's just assume that if I've written about it here, I've gone through this process with it.)

If I'm lucky, I'll finally encounter the idea after I've once again failed to fully understand it. If I'm lucky, I'll not realize that it's same idea until after I've consumed it again and let my experiences shuffle around it. And then, if I'm actually smart (and don't just think I'm smart), I'll finally understand it and let it make a difference in my life.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Internet Micro-Fame Is A Drug

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:38:07 GMT

As someone who has been publicly recognized for my work, I often worry that if what I'm doing isn't recognized, how could it possibly be as good as what I did before? Is my best work behind me?

Yesterday I read this in The Artist's Way:

Fame is a spiritual drug. It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear waste, it can be a very dangerous by-product. Fame, the desire to attain it, the desire to hold on to it, can produce the "How am I doing?" syndrome. This question is not "Is the work going well?" This question is "How does it look to them?"

The point of the work is the work. Fame interferes with that perception. Instead of acting being about acting, it becomes about being a famous actor. Instead of writing being about writing, it becomes about being recognized, not just published.

We all like credit where credit is due. As artists, we don't always get it. Yet, focusing on fame -- on whether we are getting enough -- creates a continual feeling of lack. There is never enough of the fame drug. Wanting more will always snap at our heels, discredit our accomplishments, erode our joy at another's accomplishment. [...]

What we are really scared of is that without fame we won't be loved -- as artists or as people. The solution to this is concrete, small, loving actions. We must actively, consciously, consistently, and creatively nuture our artist selves.

When the fame drug hits, go to your easel, your typewriter, your camera or clay. Pick up the tools of your work and begin to do just a little creative play.

Soon, very soon, the fame drug should start to lessen its hold. The only cure for the fame drug is creative endeavor. Only when we are being joyfully creative can we release the obsession with others and how they are doing.

Yep, that's about right.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Things And Time

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:35:16 GMT

Time is a problem for a dabbler like me. When I want to do something, I want to do it well. I've learned enough to know that if I want to do it well, I need to do it regularly. There are only so many hours in the week, which means that if I want to do something, I need to not do something else. The problem is that I want to do everything. This inevitably means I want to do more things than I can do regularly, and thus I end up clinging to things that I do infrequently, taking time away from things I could do well, and spiraling into an overbooked and yet unproductive schedule.

Sigh.

As Gwen has said before, I don't have a problem with commitment. I have a problem with decisions.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Korea: In Search Of Adventure

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:44:47 GMT

My sense of time while I was in Seoul was distinctly screwed up, due to both the time zone difference and to working the night shift. By the time I left the customer facility on Tuesday morning, I had come to terms with the idiosyncrasies of my schedule. Working nights meant that I would be able to do touristy stuff until the early afternoon, provided I was willing to push myself a little. Encouraged by my initial foray the previous day, I decided to give the subway a try.

I'd heard and read that Seoul's subway system was very friendly to English speakers, but I hadn't anticipated how friendly. All of the signs were in both hangeul and Roman characters, and the pre-recorded announcements on the trains were in both Korean and English. The stations were incredibly well-signed, and there were maps everywhere. I can't say for certain that it was the easiest public transportation system I've every used, but I can't come up with a better one right now.

I did manage to have two misadventures getting onto the subway. I first had a little trouble buying a T-money card, caused by my inability to speak Korean and the price being listed incorrectly in my guidebook. The cashier kept trying to get me to do something I didn't understand, but I eventually realized that the problem could be solved by handing over more cash. (T-money, by the way, is totally from the future.) Then, as I was rushing to catch the subway train that was just about to depart the station, I didn't quite look at the sign and ended up on a train going the opposite direction from where I had intended. I had been planning on taking a short jaunt over to the COEX Mall as an exploratory mission, but I was now headed the wrong way. Undaunted, I looked up at the system map, pulled out my guidebook, and decided to take the leap and head further afield.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Free Time? What's That?

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:58:10 GMT

I have a strong tendency to take my "leisure activities" pretty seriously. When I wanted to start exercising regularly a few years ago, I suddenly jumped to doing triathlons. When began taking improv classes in 2007, I quickly transitioned to spending three nights a week at the theatre. I'm an enthusiastic person, and I can't seem to dip my toe in the water without jumping in with both feet.

That's why this article hit me where I live. In particular, this bit:

Stop Expecting Results

Progress is good, and skill building is great. Yadda yadda yadda. If you have fun hitting the driving range, then dont worry about perfecting your swing. If you like to cook, stop stressing that the new recipe youre trying is going to stink. As soon as we expect a certain quality of results, weve turned fun into work. Goals are okay, but try to give yourself a lot of leeway to reach them.

I've talked before about needing to enjoy the feeling of doing something and not just enjoy the feeling of having done it. This is a step further: sometimes I need to just do the thing, with no expectations or goals. I need to just do it and immerse myself in the moment. I need to let the process of doing it be enough, without the need to be better at it. It turns out I'm actually pretty good at figuring out what I need to do, if only I'll get my brain out of the way.

Which of my current leisure-time activities I'm thinking specifically about is left as an exercise for the reader.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Up And Down

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:34:31 GMT

In what's becoming regular feature, here's a quote from this week's reading from The Artist's Way.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite -- getting something down. The directions are important here.

If we are trying to think something up, we are straining to reach for something that's just beyond our grasp, "up there, in the stratosphere, where art lives on high..."

When we are getting something down, there is no strain. We're not doing; we're getting. Someone or something else is doing the doing. Instead of reaching for inventions, we are engaged in listening.

When an actor is in the moment, he or she is engaged in listening for the next right thing creatively. When a painter is painting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon surrendered to the painting's own plan. This is often expressed as "The brush takes the next stroke." In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.

Art is an act of tuning in and dropping down the well. It is as though all the stories, painting, music, performances in the world live just under the surface of our normal consciousness. Like an underground river, they flow through us as a stream of ideas that we can tap down into. As artists, we drop down the well into the stream. We hear what's down there and we act on it -- more like taking dictation than anything fancy having to do with art.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Surround Yourself With Smart People

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:37:43 GMT

Two bits of recent wisdom from friends of mine (via Twitter):

Josh Roby: "Done is the engine of more."

Rob Donoghue: "Good managers are not sin-eaters, but rather stupid-eaters. They will knowingly eat the stupid of the company so that others can be smart."

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Korea: Food and Sleep

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:35:23 GMT

On the morning of my first full day in South Korea, I met up with one of my company's other employees for breakfast. Dick had been working with the customer on this particular project for about eighteen months, alternating between the US and Korea in roughly two-week blocks. Part of the reason I'd headed over on such short notice was to overlap with him, as he was supposed to be headed back home soon, but we'd never actually met in person before. He knew the area, and after breakfast we took caught a cab to the customer site. I'm glad Dick was with me, because I would have had no idea how to tell the cabbie where to go if I had been on my own.

I spent part of the morning at the customer site getting set up, but I couldn't actually get access to the machine (which I needed to do to diagnose the problem they were having) until the night shift. We'd expected that this was going to happen, so after lunch (which was pretty terrible cafeteria food) I headed back to the hotel to get a few hours of sleep before coming in that night.

That's not quite what happened. I figured that since I had some time available to me, I might as well go out and explore a little bit. I was staying in the area where most of the 1988 Olympic Games were centered, and you could tell. My hotel on Olympic-ro, which connected the stadium/sports complex with Olympic Park. On the median were sculptures of all sorts of athletes. Wondered around the area for several hours, mostly to get a sense of scale on my guidebook's map. Just as I was thinking about heading to bed, I started to get hungry, so I ended up in a restaurant in the massive food court under the shopping center next to my hotel. I chose that particular establishment because of the menu.

Pictures and numbers were my salvation, as I still had no idea how to read hangeul. When my waiter came, I pointed to the #29. It turned out to be rather good, and after finishing, I headed up to my room and slept.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Saying "Thank You"

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:01:11 GMT

In early 2005, Wil Wheaton wrote a series of posts on his blog about losing two of their cats, Felix and Sketch. At almost the same time, Gwen and I lost our cat Eliot to congestive heart failure. I remember sitting in the waiting room at the emergency vet the first night Eliot started having trouble breathing and thinking "This is like exactly what Wil was writing about last month." It was remarkably surreal, and yet it was strangely comforting. As the weeks went by, I knew that I wasn't the only person who felt like I did. I was all twisted up inside, but somehow reading what Wil had gone through helped me deal with, helped me take it in, and helped me cope.

Eliot's death was the beginning of bad stretch for me that lasted almost two years. It wasn't just about Eliot, but that event was the trigger for whole series of things that went badly for me. Even after things turned around, I carried the weight of his death with me. Two years before he died, our vet thought he'd noticed something irregular with Eliot's heartbeat, and he had wanted to run more tests. For some reason, we'd never had those tests run. And when we lost Eliot, I knew it was my fault.

Last fall, when we played Seth Ben-Ezra's A Flower For Mara at the Nerdly Beach Party, I finally realized how much I could still feel that burden hanging around my neck. It hadn't occured to me that because I still blamed myself, the idea of being a parent scared the crap out of me. Even though Eliot's brother (who has a milder form of the same condition) stayed healthy because of the treatments we'd gotten him and even though we adopted two more little fuzzballs who had brought us a ton of joy, I doubted my ability to really be responsible for another living thing. Julia Cameron talks about the focusing power of pain, how we seem to pay so much attention to the world when we're hurting. The pain of Eliot's death and the guilt I felt about it had seared itself into my mind.

Yesterday at OrcCon, I spotted Wil Wheaton in the dealer's hall. After he finished up at the Indie Press Revolution booth, I stopped him for just a moment and thanked him for sharing his pain with the world. He'd helped me immensely, and I was profoundly grateful. I'd been hoping to run into him for the last several years to tell him that, but it seems appropriate that it didn't happen until now. It's only in the last few months that I've really come to terms with what happened and allowed myself to move on.

So, thank you, Wil and Seth, for helping me through your writings. I'm a happier, healthier person because of it.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Who Needs Copy Editors?

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:32:55 GMT

Apparently not Dr. Dobb's Journal.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Becoming Available To The Moment

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:40:09 GMT

I've mentioned The Artist's Way before. Here's what jumped out at me in this week's chapter.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well-observed or specifically imagined.

As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment.It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered.

Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows.

Recently I've experienced the power of making myself available to the moment. It's the sort of thing we talk about a lot in improv, but it's so much more applicable than that. Overcoming the fear, doing the work, putting yourself out there to actually experience what's going on: it's powerful, transformative stuff. I don't do it enough.

This is as far as I've gotten in the book before. Presuming I make it, next week will be new ground.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Photos Of Me Making A Fool Of Myself

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:08:34 GMT

Pictures of the Ventura Improv Company's show on New Year's Eve are up. It was a great show, and I was honored to be a part of it.

Also, I have no idea what Travis is doing to me in this picture.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Korea: Where Am I Now?

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:15:28 GMT

When I woke up in Seoul, I was a little confused about where I was. In addition to the unfamiliarity hotel room, South Korea has a seventeen-hour time difference from Santa Barbara, and it's on the other side of the International Dateline. This means that despite leaving home on Saturday morning, when I woke up it was Monday. And of course, because my body was confused about what time it, I woke up around 5 AM. Once it got light, though, I was able to see this out of my hotel room window:

Where was I staying? That requires a brief explanation of South Korean addresses. There's a good overview here, but the short version is that Seoul is divided into twenty-five gu, or districts. These districts are further divided into dong, or neighborhoods. My hotel was in Jamsil-dong, Songpa-gu. So far pretty straightforward, right? The tricky part about this is that while some streets have names (like Olympic-ro, the one in front of my hotel), most addresses are simply given as a number within a dong. (This number apparently comes from the land lot records, but my sources are little confusing on the matter.) So my hotel's full address was 40-1 Jamsil-dong, Songpa-gu, Seoul, Korea. Kind of makes it hard to find, no?

Fortunately I was staying at a local landmark: the Lotte World Hotel. The Lotte Group is one of the largest of South Korea's chaebol. Chaebol are large, family-run, government-assisted business conglomarates, similar to the old Japanese zaibatsu. To the outsider, they're companies that do everything. So Lotte, in addition to running a theme park, makes fast food (I saw a fair number of Lotterias on my trip), issues credit cards, owns two baseball teams, and operates a chain of department stores. And when you looked a little further out my window, it was easy to see where I was.

With that mystery solved, I headed off to meet one of my coworkers for breakfast.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Korea: Getting There

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:18:54 GMT

On December 6th, Gwen and I moved into our new house. On the 8th, my boss's boss came into my office and asked me if I had any personal commitments in the next few weeks. It turned out that one of our customers in South Korea was having a problem with our software, and they were asking for someone to come and fix it. I wasn't his first choice to deal with it, but for a variety of reasons I was the best available choice. The timing was less than ideal for me, but I knew it was a great opportunity.

The only problem was that my passport was due to expire in a week. Gwen and I had originally gotten our passports to go to London as a part of a college class, and that turned out to be exactly ten years prior to the start of my trip. (Amusingly enough, every time I looked at my passport photo my first thought was not of how ridiculous my hair was but to memory that Gwen and I had had a huge fight right before we went to the Kinko's in the Rice Village to get our pictures taken. The mind is strange.) Fortunately, it is possible to get a same-day passport renewal if you go to one of the nine or so passport agencies around the country. There's one in Los Angeles, which is why I found myself driving over the Sepulveda Pass at 6:45 AM the next morning. Gwen and I had gone to down to Newbury Park to have dinner with our friends who live there, so I just stayed overnight there, cutting about an hour off of my early morning drive. Once I got to the agency, everything went smoothly, and I walked away from the Will-Call window a few hours later with my new passport in hand.

Over the next few days, the details got ironed out, and I left Santa Barbara on Saturday heading for Seoul, with a connection through LAX on Asiana Airlines. Sadly, my in-flight entertainment console was broken, so I didn't get to watch the various Korean films that were available. On the plus side, I did get this:

The menu (yes, they gave me a real menu on this flight) had two choices for lunch: Western style or Korean style. I got the Korean style lunch, consisting of bibimbap, fish soup, steamed sweet pumpkin, fruit, and, of course, kimchi. I'm a big believer in eating as locally as possible when I travel, and this was a great start. I was pleased to discover that the gochujang, the red chili paste that is very common in Korean food and is normally mixed with bibimbap, came in a tube, allowing me to add as much or as little as I wanted. I'd not had a lot Korean food before, so I wasn't sure how spicy it could get. As it turned out, I was able to add to the whole tube without dying, thanks in part to the various Korean beers on the plane (including the three major brands: Cass, OB, and Hite).

What did nearly kill me, however, was the flying time. From LAX to Seoul Incheon took fourteen hours. The longest flight I'd been on before was ten. At the ten hour mark, I was actually feeling pretty good, but the last three were pretty rough. I didn't want to sleep because it was going to about 6 PM when I landed, so I was determined to stay awake. Thanks to my supply of books, audiocourses, and podcasts, I was able to make it.

One more note about the flight: because of the prevailing winds, we flew much farther north than even the Great Circle route would have taken us. We basically followed the US coastline all the way to Alaska, cross the Bering Sea, and down the Kamchatka Peninsula. That was unexpected and certainly contributed to the length of the journey.

Once we landed in Seoul, I got through Customs and Immigration with no difficulty, and I headed immediately for an ATM. I'm always nervous about trying to use my credit cards in foreign countries, as it sometimes seems to require black magic to make them work, so I always like to have cash on hand. The first ATM I walked up to had a whole bunch of instructions written in hangul (the Korean alphabet) and one big button labeled "English." A minute later, I walked away with 100,000 won, which sounds like a lot but is only about seventy dollars. (Making this problem worse is the lack of any note over 10,000 won. No wonder they do so many electronic transactions.) I headed to the bus terminal, where my destination was thankfully marked in both hangul and Romanized script, bought my ticket, and climbed aboard. About thirty minutes later, the bus dropped me off at my hotel, where I checked into my room and subsequently passed out.

Originally published at paultevis.com.

Slow Progress Is Still Progress

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:02:24 GMT

I'm once again working through The Artist's Way.

I say "once again" because this is either my third or fourth attempt. It's not that it doesn't work for me, it's that every time I try it, I get a little farther, I learn something new, and then I fall out of the routine. (I'm pretty much guaranteed to have some schedule-rattling interruption in any given twelve-week period.) Fortunately, I do keep coming back to it, and I keep learning and growing.

As I've done every time, I've started from the beginning, re-reading the chapters and working through the exercises. And today I encountered this in chapter 2:

As your recovery progresses, you will come to experience a more comfortable faith in your creator and your creator within. You will learn that it is actually easier to write than not write, paint than not paint, and so forth. You will learn to enjoy being the process of being a creative channel and to surrender your need to control the result. You will discover the joy of practicing your creativity. The process, not the product, will become your focus.

I've read that passage two or three times before, but this is first time it's seemed profoundly true.

Originally published at paultevis.com.