With his permission, I’m passing along his e-mail verbatim to y’all.

On Wednesday, October 24, 2007, the court issued a sealed ex parte order, presumably to the government (there are only two of us in this case). Since the order is sealed, no one can see it, and since it’s ex parte (meaning one or more of the parties (me) is excluded (click on the word for a precise definition)), I won’t know what it is. I was told by the docketing clerk, who was very tight lipped (as she is required to be) that “Judge Miller’s chamber has already been in contact with the concerned party. No further action was required on [my] part.” It’s worth noting that no one has been in contact with me.

Ex parte orders and filings are not common in a civil case and tend to be used more in criminal cases. The point of an ex parte filing is to provide the court with something (or ask the court for something) which, if the other party knew about, may cause them to run away or destroy evidence which may be critical to the case. Ex parte filings are used for restraining orders and search warrants (for example). My hunch is that since the government filed documents under seal earlier last month, the court may have wanted something specific related to the filed material. If the Court publicly issued the order, it may compromise the seal under which the filed documents were put. Whether that is really the case, and what that something is, I shall never know – not now anyway.

I’ll keep you updated as I know more. In the mean time, I hope to be back in the US before November (as soon as I find a flight out).

For once, I have no snark to add to this. Things are proceeding according to schedule, I suppose. I retain hope that we will see justice done in this case–eventually–and that Zuhair is able to return very soon to the country of which he hopes to be a citizen.

We are setting up our altar tonight, as most Mexicans here in southern Mexico do, to honor and remember our loved ones. On one side is my dad, with an unopened beer, and a Sandy cookie to take with him to the other side. The other end of the altar is dedicated to my husband’s grandparents. We’re not sure what delicacy we’ll give them this time around.

Meanwhile, my husband’s daughter is at a Halloween party. They say they may even go trick or treating, although no one has ever heard of kids around here doing that. When she comes back, we’ll carve jack-o-lanterns and tell ghost stories.

We’re living an interesting mix of beliefs and traditions. We take what can from each of them to help us better understand big issues like death, loss, fears and darkness within the comfort of a loving family.

That is, after all, the beauty behind festivities and the cultural richness that we experience on a daily basis.
…
BurnzPost will be slipping into hibernation for awhile. If you’d like to keep up with my ramblings from Xalapa, I invite you to visit A Little Chipi Chipi until further notice. You can check it out here.

Cemetery in Michoacan

As BurnzPost will be taking the months of November and December off, I thought I’d skip over the next two chapters* to get to something concrete that you could really use in the meantime. And so we arrive at Chapter Fourteen, where Brande outlines a method of going from practice writing to actual, honest-to-goodness story.

1. Examine your morning writing again, this time with the aim of finding a simple short-story idea.
2. Decide what is needed to turn this idea into a fully fledged story
3. Spend a few days fleshing the story out in your head…

Yes. Really. A few days–at least.

For a day or two you are going to immerse yourself in these details; you are going to think about them consciously, turning if necessary to books of reference to fill in your facts. Then you are going to dream about it. You are going to think of the characters separately, then in combination. You are going to do everything you can for that story by using alternately your conscious intelligence and unconscious reverie on it.

—pp. 140-141

4. Now, just as you did with your writing exercises, make a date with yourself for the actual writing of the story, leaving time to get from beginning to end in one sitting.
5. Once you have set this date, dismiss all thoughts of the story from your mind.

To use Brande’s example, you might say to yourself, “At ten o’clock on Wednesday I will begin to write it.” From the moment you say that until Wed. 10:00 AM, don’t even think about it. If thoughts of your story come to mind, gently let them go.

To my mind, this mental abstinence has two great effects. First, it allows your unconscious to really get to work on the story. Many writers talk about letting their ideas “compost”–that’s what this is, a period during which the conscious mind stops gnawing on the bone and lets the humid dark of the unconscious turn it into fertile soil.

Secondly, it increases the urge to write. The longer an impulse is denied, the stronger it gets. If you, like me, are prey to constant resistance and procrastination when it comes to a writing project, you may find that simply denying yourself permission to write on that project–changing the internal narrative from “I should be doing this” to “I am not allowed to do this”–will magically cause you to want to write more than anything else in the world.

Finally…

6. When the appointed time arrives, write.

Write confidently. Write until you have set down an entire draft of the story from beginning to end. Do not let misgivings or aesthetic concerns give you pause. This will be a rough draft. It’s allowed to be terrible. What it isn’t allowed to be is incomplete.

Later in the chapter, Brande continues by telling the reader to lay the story aside for a few days, then give it a critical reading preparatory to revising it. I’m not going to go into it here. I will only point out that, if you’re new to this, when you reread the story later you may be surprised at how well you’ve written.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that tomorrow, November 1, is the beginning of National Novel Writing Month. As the clock turns midnight in each time zone, writers across the globe will be putting down Word One of their hoped-for total of 50,000. It’s not unlike this exercise of Brande’s, but writ large: instead of a short story in a sitting, it’s a short novel in a month. This exercise, in fact, is not a bad way to approach “NaNoWriMo.” Even if now, on the last day of October, you haven’t the faintest clue what you might write about, give it a shot anyway. Here’s how you might do that:

Look through your morning-and-appointment writing for a theme or character that, in its frequent appearances, poses a likely topic to stay with for 50,000 words. Spend an hour or two thinking about that topic and coming up with a first scene. Not an outline for a book; just one scene. Flesh out the main character in your mind. Decide where the scene will take place. See the room, the city, the highways and forests in your head. Finally, make that date with yourself: “Tomorrow at 4 PM I will write the first scene of this novel.” Then let it go until tomorrow afternoon arrives.

When you’re done writing, repeat the process. Take some time to decide what the next scene will be. Make a date. Let it go.

You can eat up a whole month that way.

Good luck, and see you in January!

Brande begins this chapter with some words about habit and repetition, the “dullness of apprehension to which we all submit spinelessly” and how it feeds “the temptation to rework material … through thoughtlessness.” I would file this entire preamble under the heading laziness–laziness of eye and laziness of speech.

It’s a pretty harsh word, “laziness,” and I don’t wish to invoke its connotations of moral judgement on someone’s work ethic. Instead, I’m referring to what’s increasingly a survival tactic in today’s fast-paced, over-stimulated world. We learn mental shortcuts so as to process the vast amount of information coming at us from every direction–hundreds of cars alongside ours on the highway, the myriad emails and meetings and conference calls at work, all the news of the day and all the people we encounter in a week. We habitualize a sort of shallow triage on all this input, a kind of mental flowchart of categorized, stereotyped experience triggering a preset handful of reactions, just to stay functional. Our internal narrative becomes a series of IF/THEN blocks, telling ourselves about the world in only as much detail as is required to choose a course of action.

Nevertheless, a writer must relearn the trick of seeing everything on its own terms and speaking about it precisely.

For half an hour each day transport yourself back to the state of wide-eyed interest that was yours at the age of five. Even though you feel a little self-conscious about doing something so deliberately that was once as unnoticed as breathing, you will still find that you are able to gather stores of new material in a short time. Don’t plan to use the material at once, for you may get only the brittle, factual little items of the journalist if you do not wait for the unconscious mind to work its miracles of assimilation and accretion on them. But turn yourself into a stranger in your own streets.

—pp. 114-115

Take the time, she suggests, to really observe what you’re seeing. Not tree, but blue spruce or choke-cherry. Not man walking dog, but a skateboarding teenager being pulled along by an exuberant chocolate lab with a tennis ball in its mouth. A bus goes by: what route is it, and what advertisement is running on its side, and who is looking out the window?

Compared to the world Brande inhabited, ours has even more hurry-up-and-wait purgatories: lines at the bank, stop-and-go traffic, doctors’ waiting rooms, DMV lobbies. When you have nothing to do with your time but observe is the best time to practice observation. Accurate observation. Imaginative observation. Look at the family in the grocery line adjacent yours. Don’t just describe them to yourself factually in terms of their appearance and conversation and the items in their shopping cart. Create stories about them. Even as the check-out clerk is running up the half-dozen half-gallons of juice and the five bags of potato chips and saying, “Going to a picnic, huh?” you’ll be asking yourself, Who will be at that picnic? Where will it be held? Which child will spill her cup of grape juice all over a nearby hamburger, and how will that hamburger taste? And do you remember the last picnic you went to?

It is not only that you are bringing new material to [your morning’s pages] every day, but you are stirring the latent memories in your mind. Each fresh fact starts a train of associations reaching down into the depths of your nature….

This is one reason for the inexhaustible resources of the true genius. Everything that ever happened to him is his to use… By the simple means of refusing to let yourself fall into indifference and boredom, you can reach and revive for your writing every aspect of your life.

Once again, Tom Brady put on one of the best performances of the week. In a 52-7 beating of the Washington Redskins, Brady passed for 306 yards and three touchdowns. To go along with this, he also ran the ball into the end zone for a couple of scores.

Drew Brees is finally on track in New Orleans. This past weekend he passed for 336 yards and four touchdowns. Despite a slow start, if Brees continues to play this well, the Saints may very well find themselves sneaking into the playoffs.

At running back, Willie Parker of the Steelers had a big game against the Bengals. He finished with 126 yards on the ground, while also adding one touchdown. If the Steelers are going to capsize the Patriots and Colts in the AFC, Parker is going to have to keep up his strong running during the second half of the season.

All of these players had great games this past weekend. It is safe to say that they are looking to continue this trend heading into the final eight games of the season. Those who do will be putting their team in the best position for playoff success.

Source: katespot.com

Now, this is where I must part ways with kind commentary to these great products and point out some obvious obscenities to the commercial market. Who in their right mind would buy a deluxe model bull’s freeze dried sexual organ for one hundred dollars a piece. It would sure seem much more cost effective to visit the nearest ranch site to gather a few golf club shafts yourself. Furthermore, what is this process of preserving such a miracle of nature anyway? I mean, all men like to brag a little, but I just have to admit I cannot imagine using this as a third leg, or slamming a golf ball 300 yards down a fairway.

I shouldn’t even have to mention the fact that a few scratches of bark off an ancient tree in the jungles of Sabu, Africa, mixed with the semen of a one eyed baboon with thirty fingers and toes and three testicles is not worth eighty dollars a monthly supply. Common sense tells each of you reading this that none of this stuff is going to work as it claims it will, yet with the expense and popularity of such ads, someone is buying this stuff. If it is not you or I, then please make it your dedication for the day to save a lost friend from making a poor decision tomorrow.

I have to admit, these ads have proven to be extremely effective tools in grabbing the attention of today’s desensitized market audience, but miserably fail to give their actual worth and it is up to you to read past the bull (no pun intended) and not be taken by their clever advertising. These marketers have mastered the art of attention, now all we need are some worthy products, and I think we will be on to something. Perhaps if these companies had spent more on the research of the product itself and a little less for the marketing, these would have been as useful as the once popular pet rock, but then again…

maybe they are…

Photo Credit: Andy MacDonald at Flickr.com

First, we have an ad for golf putters and walking sticks placed in die hard hunter magazines across the country, usually strategically located next to the exotic genuine moose dung earrings, but we won’t even get into that.

Photo & Product found at Tellmewhereonearth.com

Now I know what you are probably saying, big deal, right? These are not the usual putters and canes however. These putters and canes are made from the “entire reproductive organs of a grown bull.” Now this is an ad that will grab a person’s attention, and perhaps even motivate them to cut out to show a friend, hang on their school locker, or pin on their office managers back.

Photo & Product found at Head2Tail.com

Picture this, a poor little bull huddled in the far corner with his knees clenched in pure panic, crying, “Made from what?” I couldn’t help but feel my own voice box creep up my throat, as the very thought began to cross my mind. Yesterday’s credit card bills seemed like a wet willy in the ear compared to this painful humiliation. I just had to know who would do such a thing, why, for how much, and most importantly… what herbal male enhancement has that Bull been taking?

This brings us to another popular trend in the market today, male enhancement pills, seen everywhere from television to popular magazines. Bigger will always be better, right? Or so it seems. These ads picture a down and out loser of a husband, picked on by his boss, teased by his friends, shunned by his own family, you know the story. Then this poor sap of a man gets a hold of a few male enhancement herbs, and bam… kapow! Superman is unleashed upon the world; filled with confidence, self assuredness, and most notably… a very happy wife.

A happy wife indeed and what better to go along with her newly endowed husband than a pair of her very own endowed breasts. Fortunately for her, she has even more options here than her male counterpart does. Modern science has brought women their very own mixed herbal blend of vitamins guaranteed to produce larger breasts, or if the woman just wants a taste of what enhancement out of life bigger breasts could offer. Victoria secret is always there to lend a helping hand with their exclusive wonder bra line. Women have learned that it does not matter if the breasts are all them or half water filled balloons; as long as they depict themselves to the world with the proper social expectations long since learned even before undressing their favorite Barbie for bedtime.

(to be continued…)

Again it may be that you feel that your writing is monotonous, that verb follows noun, and adverb follows verb, with a deadly sameness throughout your pages. You are struck by the variety, the pleasant diversity of sentence structure and rhythms in the author you are reading. Here is the real method of playing the sedulous ape: The first sentence has twelve words; you will write a twelve-word sentence….

Brande’s instructions continue, and the reader’s heart sinks: He or she is to mimic the model passage in word count, in each word’s syllable count, in every aspect of grammatical structure, imperative by subjunctive by indicative. The only difference is to be the actual words chosen. Thus, if the model passage begins, “The quick red fox jumped over the lazy dog,” you might begin your response with “The kind old bird flew across the darkened plain.”

It’s not an exercise to be dashed off in five minutes; nor is it one, Brande acknowledges, that you’d want to perform with any kind of frequency. Like the most exacting of poetic forms, it requires great concentration, deliberate word choice, and awareness of meter. By imitating the model passage’s rhythm so closely, you gain an intimate familiarity with the feel of that rhythm. From that familiarity comes the ability improvise in its key signature, so to speak:

Once having taken the trouble to analyze a sentence into its component parts and construct a similar one of your own, you will find that some part of your mind is thereafter awakened to subtleties which you may have passed obliviously before.

NASA has been ordered to do a comprehensive search of the files and give them openly to both the court and the public at large. The trick here is going to be if all key papers and members of the cover-up walk out of this alive. It is amazing how really important people and documents disappear right around the time the public is about to find out something important…

Photo Courtesy of Alien-UFO-Pictures.com

The story goes, one afternoon, December 9th, 1965 a strange burning object (shaped somewhat like a bell or Russian nose cone from a space craft), shot through the sky and crashed in a wooded area in Pennsylvania. Some people in the area claimed to have seen the object briefly before being scared off by the military, who was soon after guarding the area and turning civilians away.

The suspicion kicked off when the military reported that it did not find anything. But with mass reports of people seeing a large canvass covered object being taken out of the woods on a large flatbed trailer/tractor truck, the reports soon changed to being merely a meteor.

Today, with most all of the important witnesses of this incident having long since passed, our best chance for an answer is going to be these documents retrieved from NASA.

What really happened that night?

The question, are we alone in the universe, may be getting a +1 of the answer “NO”…

The article and accompanying slide show are fascinating and couldn’t have come at a better time. Migration, modernization and increased exchanges with the outside world have all led to the near extermination of the language. Now, not even half of the town’s 3,000 habitants speak Palenquero, although most can understand it and put together phrases.

Linguists say that Palenquero has its roots in the Kikongo language of Congo and Angola and in Portuguese, the language used by the slave traders who brought African slaves to Cartagena in the 17th century.

The article includes a sampling of Palenquero in wiritng: “Palenge a senda tielan ngombe ri nduse i betuaya,” says the local schoolteacher. This translates to “Palenque is the land of cattle, sweets and basic staples.” The article later explains that the word ngombe (cattle) comes directly from Kikongo.

Rutsely Simarra Obeso, a linguist who was born in this same village, is now compiling a lexicon and other are compiling a dictionary to be used in the local school system. Many members of the community are prepared to fight for the survival of their language, just as they’ve fought for centuries. “Our ancestors survived capture in Africa, the passage by ship to Cartagena and were strong enough to escape and live on their own for centuries,” said Mr. Salgado, the schoolteacher. “We are the strongest of the strongest. No matter what happens, our language will live on within us.”

You can learn more here.

Photo: Scott Dalton, NY Times