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For a day which had higher than usual levels of grouchiness in it. I think it ended pretty well. The broken lawnmower was hauled away by a guy who thinks he can fix it in less than a week. The girls were hopefully chastened and made to think a little bit about their repeated conflicts over treatment of the cat. We watched The Great Race. That movie makes me laugh even though I can recite the lines before the actors speak them. (I watched it a lot as a kid.) Then I wrapped up the day with writing project progress. None of the grouchy stuff should have been such a big deal. Hopefully I can be less grouchy tomorrow.

I was in High School and the assignment was to create a quick drawing to represent who you are. The teacher did not mean for it to be an important or profound assignment, it was the prelude to a guessing game activity. I was completely unable to comply with the request. I knew I could draw a picture that would allow other students to guess who I was, but somehow I became emotionally tangled in the idea that such an image would be a false representation of who I was. I felt like a person of infinite possibility and to draw an image would be to show only a sliver of who I was. Anything I drew would be boxing me in, limiting my possibilities, and ultimately be a lie. My teacher was quite frustrated with me. He wanted quick drawings, not an identity crisis.

I have always disliked being pigeon-holed or labeled. As a child I claimed all the colors as my favorites. As a teen I entered high school with the deliberate intention to re-define myself in the eyes of my peers. Later I had to undo all that work and re-connect myself with my true interests. It was only well in to my adult years that I learned that I did not have to constantly challenge other people, daring them to accept all the aspects of who I am. Only in the last five years have I learned that allowing other people to categorize me for their convenience is a courtesy I can extend which has absolutely no bearing on my life or what I accomplish. I have an array of labels to describe me, but none of them define me completely. Having lots of labels means I can display whichever one is appropriate to the social situation.

I spent this past weekend at LTUE, a symposium on Science Fiction and Fantasy. It is always interesting to me to see what panels I am placed on, because it is a reflection of how I am viewed by the local writing community. I had one panel on organization, one on parenting, and two on business/financial things. It is endlessly amusing to me that I, the person who picked a humanities major in college because it required no math, am now teaching basic accounting and business structure. Yet these are things I know very well because I had to learn them. I think it is encouraging for creative people to know that organization and structure can be learned. I love teaching about these things. They are good things. However I am more than just business, organizational, mommy lady. I would love to teach classes on story, blogging, and creative non-fiction. I believe I could do these well, but I don’t yet have the credentials to back up my belief. I don’t have visible evidence of my capability and thus that is not how I am thought of when the time comes to arrange panels or presentations.

The need to categorize is built into human brains. We have to be able to file experiences and dismiss them or else we will be in a constant state of mental overload. One of the primary drives of early childhood is the creation of categories. No one wants to examine each and every fork we encounter to determine it’s qualities and use. We need to be able to label it quickly as a fork and move on to something else. We do this same thing with people. We have to. Every person in the world is a being of infinite possibility, but contemplating that for every cashier at the grocery store and every person you drive past would overwhelm. Thus to me the young lady with a head full of hopes and dreams is just a cashier. To her I am just a customer. This is good and necessary, no matter how much I hated it as a teenager.

I think I worked so hard to dodge categories because I was afraid to be trapped in them. This is a very real problem. Sometimes the imposed categories of others can limit a person’s potential, particularly if the categories are applied by people in power. A child may have a very difficult time breaking free of being “the smart one” if that is how parents and neighbors see her. I have friends who make a full time living at writing and yet are still treated as if they’ve picked up an amusing hobby. This can be infuriating and emotionally crushing. Repeated application of a particular category can make even a being of infinite possibility accept limitation. I am in a very fortunate position. None of the categories that other people apply to me block my pathways to my goals. I am not barred from my dreams by being too female, white, Mormon, maternal, scattered, reliable, messy, or any other category. Fighting against the perceptions of those who have power over your dreams is hard. The first step is to not accept the limitations of the categories assigned by other people.

I never did draw a picture for that class game. I sat out while the other students played. Several months later I realized what my visual representation should be. It was a dandelion puff scattering seeds on the wind. All of the seeds had the ability to sprout into a new plant and they had the potential to travel far. It still was not a perfect representation, but I liked it because it represented possibility rather than limitation. The fact that real-world dandelions are often treated as weeds was perhaps a meta-commentary upon the fate of people who defy categorization. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I just loved to remember blowing the dandelion puffs, watching seeds sail off into the blue, and wondering where they would land. I gave my teacher a hand drawn picture of a dandelion puff months after the assignment was forgotten by everyone else. He gave me an odd look, not quite sure where I fit. I felt quite good about that.

Between on placement test last Saturday, another coming up this Saturday, Link’s class selection meeting next week, and talking with three neighbors about their kids’ educations, my brain is much full of kid stuff.

It is also fighting off the illness which has run rampant through our family in the last week. The day has been good, but my writing brain abdicated for the day. I hope it will be back tomorrow.

I am a second or third adopter. I have my Kindle because someone else gave it to me. This makes me demographically different from someone who really wants a Kindle in advance of receiving it. I’m glad to have it. I figured I would get one some day, but the truth is that I probably would never have gotten around to buying it for myself before someone gave me one. Facing the actually device and contemplating using it, my feelings toward it are oddly ambivalent. It is as if a part of my brain is afraid that once I become accustomed to reading on a Kindle I will love it and abandon paper books. I may have to change how I define my love of books. I’m not sure I want to do that, but I’ve heard really good things about reading on a Kindle.

Of the current electronic reading platforms, I was most attracted by the Kindle. I’m not sure why.

As with any new gadget there was a learning curve as I figured out how to adjust settings and to use it. There were some moments of frustration during this process. There are probably still some yet to come. The most persistent one is that my subconscious believes that the buttons on the right should page forward while the buttons on the left page back. Both sides have page forward and page back buttons, but it creates momentary confusion when I accidentally page forward when I meant to page backward. This is already fading as I retrain my brain.

The Kindle feels small in my hands. I kind of want a cover for it to give it more heft. I’m a little afraid that I’ll break it somehow. One of my habitual reading times is while I am eating. I’m concerned about splatters and spills.

The page refresh is mildly distracting right now, but I suspect that I will learn to tune it out in the same way that I tune out the turning of a page.

The biggest ongoing resistance that I have to the device is that it is electronic. Somewhere deep in my brain, I expect to be able to check twitter or email. I keep staring at it, and being distracted from absorbed reading. I suspect this will fade as my brain learns what to expect from this device.

I have yet to buy a book for it. I’m testing the waters with free books. I find I have an aversion to spending money for an electronic book. In theory I know why e-book pricing is where it is. In theory I support those prices. But I’m resisting plunking down money for something I can’t really touch. It is an interesting mental block this attachment to a physical object. I’ll take the leap at some point. It is probable that the mental block has more to do with the spending of money than the purchasing of e-books.

I can visualize how this Kindle will be useful. There are books I want to read, but I don’t want to have cluttering the house. I’m looking forward to taking it on trips loaded with books. I don’t have any trips before August, so we’ll see how my habits shake out between now and then.

It will be interesting to look back on this entry in a month to see how much my attitudes have changed.

It was 10:30 pm and 26 degrees outside when our cat began lingering suggestively by the door. She wanted to go out. Which was odd, because sub-freezing temperatures usually send her fleeing the other direction. I let her out, but then I was stuck. If I went to bed, she would be outside in the cold all night. She’d survive. We have a heated pet bed for her. She’s been outdoors in worse weather before she was officially ours. But now that she’s ours, I didn’t want to leave her out in the cold. So I waited, like a mother on prom night, for her to show up at the door.

As I waited, I happened to check twitter. John Scalzi had noted that both of his cats had just asked to go out despite the epic ice storm they’re having in Ohio. I snickered to myself and replied with a joke about a secret global cat meeting. Our cat returned and I went to bed. In the morning several other friends tweeted that their cats had all wanted out too. So now I am wondering what was so important outside last night. Our cat isn’t telling.

This was a morning full of thinky business emails, preceded by a weekend full of thinky parenting. None of it is completely resolved. Many emails and tasks are waiting until I no longer feel like my brain is mush. I remember when the receipt of email filled me with a child-like delight. I still enjoy getting email, particularly happy email filled with possibilities. My brain just gets tired and I have a hard time keeping up some days. Still, I’m doing pretty well for a Monday. The accounting is done and I’ve got the packages out the door. The children will be home in 45 minutes, which will bring chaos, joy, and conflict to my quiet house.

I’ve been sort of afraid to say it out loud, for fear of jinxing it, but January has been … pleasant. I was not aware that this was a possible condition to enjoy during the darkest/coldest month of the year. The goals and mental shifts I made back in December seem to be bearing good fruit. I shall examine it no more and instead just try to keep it up. Some things stop working if you think about them too much.

It took all day, but I set up my new computer. I even did it mostly by myself, which gives me a sense of ownership and accomplishment. More important, this machine is actually tuned and capable for all the graphic design work that I do. I’m itching to try some book layout on this. I’m excited that I won’t have to run use Howard’s machine to use photoshop because my old machine couldn’t handle it. The screen is big enough to hold full page spreads without side-scrolling. I had other things on my list of stuff to do today, but I feel pretty good about getting this done.

Today felt like I want the majority of the next few months to feel. It was not a day free from strife or conflict, but I feel good about the responses I chose for those conflicts. I spent time on a project that is just for me. I even made the house orderly so that I enjoy being here more. This last is important since we are embarking on our third week of sub-freezing temperatures which prevents the kids from playing outdoors for very long.

Snippets from the day:

Kiki has been reading Little Women for her history class and loving it. I’ve been watching with interest as Kiki reacts to all the various developments in the lives of the March family.

I had a conversation with a friend several weeks ago in which we discussed the necessity of cutting back on social interactions to avoid over load. This is particularly true in venues where one needs to appear professional and competent rather than being able to relax. The conversation made me look around at the places where I spend time both in person and online. I realized that while I don’t need to eliminate any, I definitely needed to re-frame how I was thinking about them. The result is more enjoyment and less pressure.

The cold temperatures have driven our outdoor cat almost entirely indoors. I am not dying of allergies which is completely astonishing to me. I believed that the choice to own a cat was to choose being permanently ill. At least in this case, for this cat, I was wrong. I still feel cautious about the whole thing, but also glad.

As of yesterday morning, my shipping process is back into working shape. Stamps.com took all the information I provided them in the 75 minute service call and within 24 hours they’d released a patch that fixed the problem. This is all in place just in time for the January shipping lull.

The project I worked on today is my annual print version of my blog. This year I decided not to simply use LJbook.com to pull the entries for me. That works, but because it is automated it creates odd formatting around photographs and the dates take some deciphering. This year I decided to use my layout tools and make the pages of my book pretty. Then I’ll do something for the cover as well. This process is definitely taking longer, but I’m enjoying it.

And now it is time for me to make bedtime happen.

The week between Christmas and New Years is always a sort of limbo. All the big events of the holiday season are complete, but we can’t yet return to normal because the kids are still out of school. Add to that the fact that the holiday provided me with space to unpack and reorganize all my thoughts. I now have plans I want to implement, but they need to be built into “normal” and so must wait for normal to arrive before I can fully see if they will work.

Despite being in limbo, today was a good day. It was not as focused as I’d hoped it would be, but I still got all of the necessary tasks done. The kids played more video games than I probably should have allowed. Perhaps tomorrow I will require more cleaning.

I gave up on trying to work when I snapped awake to discover that I’d laid my head down on my desk and fallen asleep while waiting for my computer to process. Since the process in question took less than a minute, I’m guessing sleep hit as soon as my head was down. I’ve been on a roll all week long, moving steadily and shorting myself on sleep. I guess my body decided to call in the sleep debt. Which is fine. I’m not exactly on vacation, but we’re definitely in a vacation rhythm around here. So this weekend will have extra sleeping in it. Then next week can have extra organizing and cleaning. Then there will be Christmas.