What I learned today about creative wrighting

Thursday, and dark with stars this morning.  Hard to tell much about the weather under those conditions, but visible stars mean clear skies, so that bodes well for those of us eager to stretch the sun days out as long into fall as possible.  The forecast, always a distant second-best means of ascertaining the likely weather for the day in this mild but changeable part of the country, predicts a high of 64º with 0% chance of falling wetness. 

Wednesday came and went in a blur of back to back meetings.  That cliche phrase rarely has a litteral application to my workdays because I have learned to make sure each day has at last some space carved out specifically to get something done.  Good meetings help move things along, bad meetings simply suck up time and energy, but no meeting is "doing" time.  To the contrary, meetings usually result in more things added to the to-do list, making those intentionally calendared I'm-doing-stuff-during-this-time periods even more important.  Best practices to the contrary, somehow my Wednesday calendar got booked with meetings running end to end from 9:00 to 4:00 yesterday, and today is nearly as bad.

Today's soundtrack was varied and compelling.  The Brandan James song offered the chorus lines:

They say we're made to live as one

Let this need to fear each other

Not be passed on to my son

Let your beat go on forever,

Let your fears down rivers run

Let the silence be the music,

When their words are said and done

In these angry, noisy, and divisive times, there is a very relavent hope there.

• Lee Ritenour & Dave Grusin: Lagrima
• Brandan James: Let Your Beat Go On
• Bruce Cockburn: Salt, Sun And Time
• Valley: Boom Theory
• Sigur Rós: Viõrar Vel Til Loftárasa

Typing out that play list presented me with a small challenge this morning.  Can you, perhaps, spot it?  Apart from Sigur Rós song titles, I don't have much call for writing out Icelandic words.  I know where the most-common accent marks are hidden under my banal keyboard caps, but I don't think I've ever had a previous call to type a tilde over an o (and I assume it isn't called a tilde in this circumstance, either).  Had to pull up the "Special Character" pallet, which sounds like something a playwright grabs when they need to find a character type to spice up the work at hand.

So, that last sentence raises another question for me: why is playwright spelled that way, instead of playwrite?  Apparently this is not a word I type out very often, because I hadn't thought about that spelling before.  I would assume that one who writes plays would be a play-write, short for play writer.  But the second half of the actual word stems from the older word wright, meaning one who builds or crafts.  So one who writes plays is a builder of plays, a playwright.  Like shipwright.

I learned something new today and I didn't even have to stray very far from the task at hand. Which, in an over-crowded workday schedule, is a good way to get a little bit smarter.