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The house is filled with the sounds of pounding. Kiki and Link are deconstructing the shelves in the pantry which is destined to become part of my office. The shelves were made of chip board and 2x4s, so at first we were a bit daunted. Once I gave them permission to destroy the chip board things progressed much more gleefully. I’d love to help. I planned to help, but my wrist has been hurting of late. It is the kind of little hurt which isn’t actually a hurt. Instead it is a pre-hurt, a sensation that if I’m not carefully I’ll acquire a truly painful injury. I don’t want a painfully injured right wrist, so I’m standing back and letting my teenagers wield the hammers. They’re doing a pretty good job too. I’m impressed. Hopefully they’ll be just as enthusiastic about helping me clean up this glorious mess we’ve made. Next Saturday we hope to knock out the drywall and then I’ll have before and after photographs worth sharing. Last night I was telling some friends that I am puzzled by this drive I feel to re-create my office. Somehow I know that it is the most important professional development thing I’m doing during the first half of this year. But it feels anti-logical. If I profess to be a writer, then I should be focusing my energies on writing. My friends assured me that organizing my work space makes perfect sense. Howard agrees with them. Yet it still seems selfish, turned inward, and somehow profoundly healthy. I need the reminder that common logic about how writing careers should be managed can be wrong for an individual. I must trust my inspiration and intuition, both of which tell me that remodeling my office is important. So we proceed. My pause when staring at the empty blog post box is not for lack of thoughts. I have too many of them, but they are all fragments and pieces which are not gelling of their own accord. I like it when ideas click together instead of me having to pull meaning from them. Tonight I’m too tired to pull on much of anything, having spent the last two nights tending to a sick child. He’s all better now. Hopefully no one else will catch it. This was a particularly nasty stomach flu. Taking care of Patch took my shiny new schedule right off the rails for Wednesday. Fortunately we’re back on track today. Or, if not completely on track, we’re at least headed trackward. Why is it that I forget that the first week of January always feels messy and stressy? Somehow I expect to be able to hit the new year ready for action. Instead I’ve been helping three out of four kids who have all been feeling just as conflicted about their oncoming tasks as I have been about mine. I’m working to remember that their problems are not necessarily my problems. I can’t solve them. It isn’t my job. My job is to help them deal with the problems. It is a subtle, yet important, difference. Many people I know online are writing Year in Review posts. In one writer’s forum there is an entire thread which was created simply for people to report on how their writing went in 2011. I keep opening that thread. I don’t actually read every post. I skim over them. The truth is a Year in Review post is more valuable to the person writing it than to anyone who may stop by and read. Or so I thought. But several people commented about how much they love to read the thread. Every time I go in the forum I click on that thread. I think about writing a post for it. My post would be a sort of counterpoint. I accomplished a lot during 2011, but not very much of it was as a writer. I never start typing that post. I’m stopped by the conviction that the things I have to say are only me justifying my decisions to myself. The only reason I would need to do that is if I doubt the choices I made. I don’t doubt. Except when I do. During the times that I manage to find calm contemplation of the year just past, I think it was what it needed to be. Some of it was stressful, there are some hard bits which loom large and obscure my view of the rest. It will be interesting to see how my mental picture of the year changes as I compile my annual book of blog entries. I think I’m also avoiding writing a year in review post because it faces backward. I want to just start where I am and make today be good. I want to reach for goal completion. Last year saw the beginnings of many things, but the second half of the year was lacking in projects completed. Most of the things I began are still pending or in process. The two feel different to me. Pending are the things which I can not control, in process are the things which I can affect. The fact that I’m avoiding it probably means I should do it. I should delve into last year, even the hard bits. I’ll likely discover that my feelings about the year have been colored by various inaccurate perceptions. Because 2011 was a good year. I know that it was. I also know that I made the right choices during it. And then I think that all these thoughts are probably a waste of emotional energy. Either write it up, or don’t. The weather has been lovely. It has been years since we’ve had 50 degree weather in January. The last time I’m sure of was 1999 when most of February was 50 degrees during the day. That was during my radiation therapy while my mother was here. I remember that she was able to take the kids outside every day. We also planted bulbs because the ground was not frozen. I should probably do that this year, but I forgot to put Gardener on the hat schedule. Perhaps I shall revise. The sunshine would be good for me. Amazing how much blogging clears my head. By the time I’d finished yesterday’s post, I already felt better and more focused. I then proceeded to have a day in which I was able to complete tasks without interruption. Instead of having a head filled with little “must go back to” memory tags, I was able to finish thoughts and fold them away neatly. Space began to open up. I’ve decided that my first attack on keeping space open is to containerize. I have lots of jobs: Mother, Accountant, Book Keeper, Inventory Manager, Writer, Chauffeur, Cook, Laundress, Graphic Designer, Shipper, Business Manager, etc. I often refer to these jobs as hats that I wear. Most days I swap hats a dozen times or more. This is fine and will probably continue. However I’ve decided to assign days to all my business hats. On the assigned day that hat gets worn first. For example: On Mondays I am an accountant first. All non-urgent accounting tasks which come up on other days will be assigned to the following Monday. I write down the task and forget about it until I unfold my accounting thoughts on Monday morning. So here is my planned schedule: The schedule is graphic design heavy for the next few months. When I’m prepping for a shipping, then some of those Graphic Design slots will get re-assigned as shipper slots. When conventions are imminent then more slots will go to Business Management. The most important thing is that when I get a new task instead of just putting it on today’s list, I can tell myself “I’ll handle that on Wednesday.” The schedule is going to be messed up, of course. It already has been. A sick child at 4 am this morning means that today I’m wearing the Nurse hat instead of the Business Manager hat. But many of the Business Manager tasks I’d assigned for this week will not be hurt by waiting another week. The few that can’t wait, I’ll sneak around the edges of taking care of my child. I like this plan. Hopefully it will help me keep my head clear. It is the first working day of the new year. The kids are all off at school, which should feel like a relief. My house is quiet and will be for the next five hours. I like quiet. Instead some voice in the back of my brain is crying out “Incoming!” and expecting a blitz of both homework stress and emotional drama to come blowing in the door with the children. They will come home to me with attached chores. Not that my children themselves are chores. They are marvelous people. But any person who is facing a challenge will reach out for support. I must arrange myself to either be there for them or to firmly tell them that they can handle it themselves. Before the children arrive home, there is work. The first week of January is always crazy. I have to tie off all the loose ends from last year while simultaneously launching this year’s focus. Top of the list this morning are the loose ends of: accounting, royalty calculations, emails, costumes for a school play, the never-ending query process, and house cleaning. In the category of launching we have: tax accounting, emails, organizing Howard’s art workload for the next weeks, planning for presentations, knocking out a wall in my office, and merchandise considerations for the coming year. At least five of these things are vying for the “first thing I do” slot. My head is full. It has been full for more than a month. It is going to be full for at least another month more. Because my head is full, and because sleeping has been trickier of late, I’ve been making stupid mistakes. Not many. They’re all small. I catch them before anyone else notices them. Mostly. I fix them and life moves onward. Yet the accumulation of mistakes worries me, because I look ahead at all the things I’ve got to do and I know there are going to be more mistakes. I’m going to mess up something, but I don’t know which thing, so I can’t plan ahead to allow for it. I never considered myself a perfectionist, but this state of brain proves otherwise. The thought of making some stupid mistake, and disappointing someone who counts on me, is enough to make me want to curl up and cry. Logically I know this is ridiculous, particularly since I often set the bar for “other people’s disappointment” in places which are long before those other people would actually notice that I’d failed them. In all the mess of swirling thoughts, a story keeps surfacing. It was told at church some time in the last three weeks, but I’ve lost any other context for it. There was a young woman who had to attend a church leadership meeting. She went begrudgingly, expecting to be told to work harder. Instead the man in charge said “You are all busy. Instead of improving your life by adding something, take something away. What thing can you eliminate from your life?” That last thought is what keeps coming back to me. What things in my life can I let go? I love clearing out and discarding physical objects, the process of clearing mental space ought to be similarly satisfying. I had an argument with Kiki about organization yesterday. She feels like all of her things and space are jumbled. She would dearly love to have more space in which to spread out her things. I contended that learning to live inside the space you have is an important life skill. Then I tried to show her that perhaps she was holding on to too much. If she would just sort through, store, and discard then she would have the spaces she needed. Kiki argued back that she needs all her things. She needs six bottles of hand lotion because they all have different smells. She needs the clock and the ipod player, the nail files and the lip glosses, the seven pads of art paper and the thick files of reference art. Everything. She can’t let any of them go. The only resolution we reached was to realize that we were arguing needlessly. Kiki knows how to sort and make use of space. She’s done it before, she’ll do it again when she is ready. Mostly we just needed to walk away from each other and deal with our own things. Today I can’t help feeling like my mental/emotional space looks like Kiki’s bedside shelf, stocked with six bottles of hand lotion and multiples of almost everything. Then I become the one who is saying “But I need all these things!” Do I really? What can I take out of my life to create the space I need to handle everything else? I don’t have the right answer yet, but I’m fairly certain I’ve found the right question. Answering this question will require me to re-think the things I am holding on to. I’ll have to look at the items in my brain and realize that some of them are only still here because I haven’t bothered to look at them in months. That will be like Kiki’s bag of candy, none of which she wanted to eat, but which she’d kept because they were gifts from people she liked. Candy doesn’t make a good keepsake. Some of the things in my brain have long outlived their purposes. Perhaps I could start letting other people decide when they are disappointed instead of me deciding that they are before they’ve had a chance to notice anything. I know that I want to get rid of all the useless anxiety, but it is so tangled up with everything else that I can’t start there. It is also possible that I need to containerize. Twenty small things loose on a shelf are a mess. Those same twenty things placed in three containers are neat and handy. Just as Kiki is the only one who can make sense out of her spaces, I am the only one who can make space in my brain. I’m trying to keep too much. Thus “Brain organization” becomes item one on the To Do list. It is the sort of item that makes a difference for everything else. Perhaps I can apply a rubric similar to the one I use when sorting through books. As I look at each item on my list I can think “Do I really need this? Does someone else really need this? Does this have to be done by me rather than someone else?” If the answer to all three is No, then it doesn’t belong on my list. What can I take out of my life to create the space I need? It is a question well worth answering. The sky gave me a lovely present today. I thought I’d share. I am not the typical facebook user. From the day of my registration I considered facebook to be a public space. This means that I accept friend requests from anyone who does not trigger my spammer detector. That policy has gathered me some real friends whom I would not otherwise have met. Unfortunately the continual changes Facebook keeps making result in the site being less and less useful to me. I enjoy reading the things that people are intentionally posting about their lives and their thoughts. Instead my stream is full of things my friends read, updates any time someone friends another person, updates on games played, and comments that one of my friends made to someone I have never met. These sorts of updates would actually help me feel connected if I were only trying to keep in touch with 20-50 people I’ve met in real life. That’s not how I want to use facebook. Unfortunately every time I figure out how to filter my facebook stream, facebook changes again. I still use facebook. I skim through my news stream once per day or so, but I miss a lot. Often I miss things that I would really like to know about while being bombarded with things about which I don’t care. Many times I see happy news, or sad news, and I would like to respond briefly with congratulations or sympathies. I do want to use facebook for me to connect with people. Unfortunately facebook wants to use my response to connect my friends with advertisments. Some of the people with whom I am facebook friends are very private people. They are extremely selective about who they let see information online. If I respond to a private person’s birth announcement, then that response is broadcast to all the writers, fans, and business contacts that I’ve also friended. Broadcasting a private announcement in this way would be extremely discourteous of me, even if I do it by accident. I know there is a setting to prevent this. I’ve toggled that setting. However facebook will change again and they may untoggle or change the way that settings are interpreted. The only way I can protect the privacy of my friends is not to answer them on facebook. This makes me sad. Because I’d dearly love to have these little conversational interactions which are the online equivalent of bumping into someone at the grocery store. For the big things, with close friends, I use other means (like email) to respond to their announcements. For the little things, I just have to smile or sympathize silently. I do make good use of the facebook Thumbs Up button. It is a tiny way for me to cheer without also broadcasting that I’ve done so. Facebook still is useful to me, but I am always aware that to facebook I am a commodity, not a customer. Naturally, the minute I admit to myself that I’m not quite ready to face next year’s schedule, part of my brain does exactly that. So here is a listing of my currently scheduled public events. There are some additional events which may pop up, but they’re tentative, so I’ll not list them yet. LTUE Life the Universe and Everything Symposium at UVU (Orem, UT) February 9-11 LDStorymakers Conference (Provo, UT) May 4-5 Deep South Con (Huntsville, AL) June 15-17 Additional events to which I will NOT be going: And in the tentative category I have: I’ve already got my wall calendar for next year. It is sitting rolled up in a corner of the living room. I had to order it off of the internet. Year-at-a-glance wall calendars have become a specialty item rather than being readily available at my local office supply store. I admit, this fact made me pause. Perhaps my decade-old system is out of date. I stopped using a paper planner last year and now rely instead on electronic tools. But I am not yet ready to abandon all my familiar methodologies merely for a sense of progress. It is useful sometimes to stand in front of the calendar and picture the sweep of events across weeks and months, all of it written out in colored ink. So I have my calendar. Some time in the next five days I will pull it out and transfer information from the year past onto the year to come. Birthdays, anniversaries, schedules, and events must all be inked onto the new year.
See that pillar candle to the left, the one with the pretty drips? I made it. Once I made it, I spent an hour watching the wax drip through the holes and down the outside. I like candles as projects because they are like sand castles. No one expects them to last forever. Instead the materials are organized, destroyed, and reorganized as many times as one feels inspired to create. Left over wax from one candle can be the seed of the next candle. It is all about playing. How did I make the candle? Click on through for instructions and pictures Continue reading Making a Cascading Pillar Candle 1am on Christmas Day is too late to fix any of the Christmas planning errors I may have made during the preceding weeks. All those might-have-been trimmings and trappings circle in my brain instead of the visions of sugar plums which Clement Clark Moore assures me are what should be dancing about in there. Of course I have trouble visualizing sugar plums anyway, having never seen one. (Except that, of course, now I have, since I googled it the moment I finished typing that sentence. So now I know. I still don’t expect to be dreaming of them any time soon.) The truth is that the best possible preparation I can make to ensure a happy Christmas day is to love and teach my children all year long. This means that whatever joys or disappointments arrive with the festivities, we’ve already got the tools and the sturdy relationships to manage. If the lack of a particular item on Christmas morning is truly traumatizing, then something far more fundamental is wrong. I know this. I believe this. I know my kids are fantastic people and that they are as much focused on the things they are giving as on the things they hope to receive. Everything is set up to be a lovely day. This does not stop me from slipping out of bed and sneaking a little bit of cash into each stocking. It is a small gesture which will bring joy tomorrow. It is worth doing even if the impulse behind it is my guilty conscience. As I said to Howard “How can it possibly be enough if I didn’t spend a month fretting over it?” But it can. And it is. This is the secret of Christmas. It exists no matter how much time I spend creating it or trying to ignore it. This year our usual round of Christmas festivities was paused for an hour-long excursion to church. I love it when Christmas falls on Sunday for this very reason. However it does present a challenge for the youngest of my family. He did his mighty best to sit still and listen to songs about Jesus while his mind and heart were back home poking packages under the Christmas tree. In the end my fretting was unnecessary. Each of us received pretty much exactly what the poem states: |
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