Things I’ve Been Thinking About Which Are Not Long Enough for a Full Blog Post

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These photos of people being scared. At first they were just funny, but then as I clicked through I became fascinated by the sameness of the facial expressions. It got to the point where I was staring at the photos trying to determine if they are real or people posing in caricatures of fear. I came to the conclusion that they are real.

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I’ve been thinking about Charles Darwin ever since Howard tweeted this quotation from one of Darwin’s letters: “I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everything and everybody.” I find comforting that I’m not the only one who has stupid days. However I’ve been thinking even more about a statement made later in the article about Darwin

“He was not quick, witty, or social. He spent decades working out his ideas, slowly, mostly by himself, writing letters and tending to a weak heart and a constantly upset stomach. He was a Slow Processor, who soaked in the data, thought, stared, tried to make sense of what he was seeing, hoping for a breakthrough. All around were snappier brains, busy being dazzling, but not Darwin’s, which just plodded on until it finally saw something special, hiding in plain view.”

Darwin changed the world, but he didn’t do it with a flash of brilliance or by leaping insight. It makes me think of the tortoise and the hare. Also of my son Link, who is amazing, but not in a flashy, leap-of-insight way. He lives in a family of hares, I’m one of them, and I’ve learned a lot about how to commit to small daily effort just from watching him.

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At the end of a school project–a child’s science fair project display, for a not so random example–there is an urge to just get the thing done. I want to be able to stop thinking about it. I want Get Child to Do Science Fair Project off of my to do list. This is how parents end up doing the work for their kids. It was very hard to restrict myself to cutting and taping while letting Patch do all the thinking and organizing. I could to it so much faster and neater, but then I’ve already learned the things that this project has to teach. Patch needs to struggle with them so that he can too. The result is a display that he is proud of and a project he can describe in detail because he knows how it works. Also: Mythbusters is a great way to expose kids to the scientific method. I know that there is a lot of theater and pseudo science in the show, but Patch instantly understood hypothesis, test with variables and controls, and conclusion. They were made familiar by Mythbusters.

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I find it interesting how I can succeed at things all day long, but a small failure late in the day can alter my perception of the entire day. Out of all the things I could have gotten wrong yesterday, cookies are the least important. I guess it just threw me for a loop because cookies are easy. I have the recipe memorized, I can make them half asleep and they turn out great. But they didn’t last night, and it sent me back to thinking about the Darwin quote, the “I am stupid” part of it.

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In Polish the idiomatic expression which means “Not my problem” translates to “Not my circus, not my monkey.” This makes everyone at Chez Tayler very happy and has now entered our family lexicon. Thanks to Dan Wells for tweeting it.

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Watched an episode of Nanny 911 and spent the whole thing thinking about the power of a film editor. I half want to go through and track what people are wearing to deconstruct how misleading the episode was. All the tantrum footage was in the first part and all of the happy footage in the second, giving the impression that the nanny had made everything better. I’ll grant that she really did teach some important skills that the family needed to learn, but she also spent lots of time looking disapproving for the benefit of the camera. That sort of family therapy is best managed without the audience. I won’t be watching any more, though if I could find a similar show with a different editorial approach or tone, I might sample that. The psychology on display is interesting.

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This is week five of Dancing with the Stars. I love that show and have been keeping my enthusiasm under wraps because I could bore everyone to tears talking about the relationships between the dance teams, the emotional arcs of the people involved, the editorial choices made about the clips, the execution of various dances, who I hope stays to the end, who I’d like to see go home, how this season compares to prior seasons, and the difficulties the show is going to have going back to a regular season after having this all star cast. Besides, blogging all of that isn’t nearly as much fun as finding someone else who loves the show as much as I do and sitting down in person to chatter.

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The Iron Man 3 trailer hits all the right emotional notes for me. I hope the movie I get to see is the one in that trailer. I like emotional depth in my heroes and thus far Iron Man has amused me, but I don’t re-watch because I’ve already seen what there is to see.

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I can not express how much I admire Robison Wells. He writes about his experience of mental illness and thus gives words to a problem that is usually kept out of sight.

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I was recently at a laser tag place where I watched one teen hand something to another teen and say “Here you go. I feel like such a mom.” Later that same evening I heard a different teen say “Yeah. Moms are just like that.” I think I’ve figured out why I’m reluctant to self identify as a mom. Obviously I am one. I spend a large portion of my days nurturing my children and just about anyone else who gets near me. Yet when I start writing a list of who I am, mom ends up on the list at the tail end when I’m trying to come up with more things. Yet in the majority of advertising and entertainment, as well as in the minds of all teenagers everywhere, to be mom is to be unfashionable, over-responsible, rules-driven, boring, and ender-of-all-fun. Why would I want to identify with that?

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Catherine Schaffer wrote a great post about why apocalypse stories are so popular. She has many good thoughts, but right at the end she wrote:

In our increasingly globalized world, even the most hawkish among us must admit, on some level, that our worst enemies are still human. So while some may argue that it’s justifiable to kill the enemy, there is no acceptable pleasure in it. Zombies, meanwhile, can be killed with gleeful abandon.

And I thought: of course. The rise of zombie fiction makes sense now. I find it very interesting that we are also seeing sympathetic zombie fiction, such as My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland. Even when we pick the ultimate enemy, some of us are still going to try to empathize. Which is hopeful for the human race I think.

***

My head is full of similar random thoughts all the time. Every thing I see or hear triggers new thoughts. This is why it is so important for me to step away and deliberately select activities that allow me to sort thoughts rather than giving me new ones.

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Today in List Form

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One thing after another happened all day long. None of them were unexpected things, they were just all thinky, important, and urgent. So I did not get many spaces. Instead I:

Managed school departures and arrivals for four kids.

Put together and ordered our annual Schlock thank you postcard.

Began work on the 2013 Schlock calendar, because this year we want to customize the calendar pages rather than just dropping in some pre-made calendar pages.

Did the accounting.

Met with Kiki’s art teacher to talk about Kiki and what she can do to get some scholarships.

Helped Patch assemble a display for his science fair project.

Listened to Gleek’s newly-learned, short, repetitive song about manatees about a bajillion times.

Gave Kiki the tools and materials to matte her art for an art show.

Made dinner, while simultaneously running homework time and cooking a double batch of cookies all on a deadline because we needed to get out the door for cub scout pack meeting.

Attended pack meeting.

Came home to finish cooking the cookies and realized that all the cookies are ruined because in the chaos I did not add baking soda or salt. Threw away all the cookies.

Now I am tired and feel discouraged because I made that lovely list only two days ago about how I was going to make good use of my time, but right now all I want to do is shut off my brain and stop thinking about today.

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Enter the Stray Rooster

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Chickens were not on the schedule for today. Not anywhere, but roosters have their own ideas about how things should go. I saw him from the corner of my eye as I headed into the house with Gleek and Link.
“That’s a chicken.” I exclaimed without thinking.
I immediately had the full attention of both kids, particularly Gleek.

Sometime in the past year or so it has become fashionable for people in our neighborhood to keep chickens. There are half a dozen neighbors who have little coops and gather their own eggs. Gleek knows them all and sometimes visits the chickens. She has even earned the name Chicken Whisperer because she can catch the uncatchable hen and convince it to sit still while she pets it. So our first thought was to catch this interloper. He had different ideas.

He dodged and dove while Gleek tried to corner him. I went into the house and began calling all the known chicken owners. Their answers were the same: No it was not one of theirs, but was this the same chicken my next door neighbor had been calling about yesterday? Yes it is. I’d determined that if we managed to catch the bird, we would have no one to give it to. Obviously the best course of action was to not catch it and hope that it would go back home on its own. I was trying to explain this to Gleek when she succeeded in catching it.

Once caught, he was a well behaved bird. He held still in her arms, and when she sat down with him in her lap, he even dozed off to sleep. She decided his name was Harry. I again tried to explain to Gleek that we should just let him go. We had no cage for him, no food, no way to keep him safe. Gleek argued the case for pet chicken, but then asked if she could at least show it to her friend. So she carried the bird into our back yard. This was when Gleek remembered our walnut tree. It turns out that roosters like to eat walnuts quite a lot. Gleek had the rooster eating out of her hand. This was when our cat wandered up to see what was going on.

These animals are not likely to be friends.

I brought the cat into the house, not entirely sure who I was keeping safe from whom. Gleek finally released her hold on the rooster, but apparently being caught, petted, and fed convinced his little brain that Gleek was the source of all things good in the world. He followed her all over the yard. We all thought this was funny, and it was, particularly when Gleek when running across the yard and he ran-flapped to keep up. But then Gleek came inside and the rooster was convinced he should get to come in too.

He pecked at the door, jumped at the nearby windows, and kept trying his hardest to find a way inside. Fortunately it was dusk and we convinced him to roost by covering all the windows. Even without him pecking at the door, he was still a major distraction at homework time. The kids kept wanting to go peek at the chicken.

I will admit that a small part of me imagined Gleek with a devoted rooster friend in our backyard. The realities are more complicated than that pretty picture. The weather is getting colder. One chicken alone would not fare well against hard freezes. We have no pen nor safe place for him to roost. Also, the more he got used to our yard, the more he seemed to feel that he could peck at Gleek if she did something he didn’t like. Then there is the probability of crowing. Roosters are not really suburban neighborhood friendly. The argument which really convinced the kids that the rooster had to go was when we pointed out that he and our cat are likely to fight, and he is plenty big enough to seriously injure our cat. I don’t care how pretty the rooster is, we love our cat more.

Fortunately a friend with a large flock (far from our neighborhood) has offered to take this rooster and give him a new home. (Hurray for social media as a problem solving tool.) We’ve decided this is a happier option. Hopefully he will enjoy being the rooster for a flock of hens. The friend took him away in a box. This is happy. One evening full of rooster adventures is quite enough for me.

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Making Better Choices About Time

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It is the interstitial moments that are my downfall. They are the spaces between one task and the next, when I’ve completed one email for business and before I’ve gathered my parenting thoughts to write the next one to a teacher. In that fraction of a moment some part of my brain tells me I should go check twitter. So I do. In fact I click through my saved tabs taking a look at all of my regular websites to see if there is anything new. If there is, I read it. If nothing is new, I feel like I want something new, so I am tempted to click something else, to go find something new. Ten or twenty minutes later I resurface and turn my mind to the next task. Sometimes that brief click through actually does refresh my mind, making me ready for the next thing. More often it fractures my focus, filling my mind with distraction. I have decided that I need to pay attention to this tendency, to acknowledge that sometimes I need a break, but that I should focus my break time on activities which actually refresh and refocus instead of those which distract and fracture. To that end, I have made the following list. These are the things I should do instead of clicking through internet tabs for the umpteenth time.

  • Spend time in spiritual study and scripture reading. Granted this is a larger break, but a very worthwhile one.
  • Go to the gym. Again a longer brake, again very worth the time.
  • Do a five minute house chore like switching out laundry loads or vacuuming a room.
  • Step outside my house and breath outdoor air for five minutes.
  • Spend a few minutes on a gardening task or watering the indoor plants.
  • Glance through fiction notes to see if new ideas jump out. (This one may lead into writing hijacking an hour.)
  • Spend ten or fifteen minutes working on the family photo book projects.
  • Declare writing time and go write fiction for awhile.
  • Read one of those books I’ve been intending to study for style and prose.
  • Read or watch one of the articles or TED talks that I put away to look at later when I had time to focus on it.
  • Just sit and stare at nothing to see what thoughts parade themselves into consciousness.

Some of these things will take more time thank a quick click through websites, but they actually feed and rest my brain in ways that clicking doesn’t. Having the list is a good start. The next part is learning to be mindful.

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A Conversation with My Writer Brain

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So writer brain, we went on a retreat and shook loose ideas. We wrote notes and began forming stories. We made a plan to try to write 1000 words per day, and just to make it easier we decided that both blogging and fiction in that word count. Yet we’re only averaging around 600 words per day, what is up with that?

I’m not really sure. Instead of having a head full of clear thoughts, all I’m getting is static. Maybe you need more sleep.

Okay, I’ll grant you that sleep has been more scarce than it ought to be. But there were things to stay up and accomplish and things to get up and accomplish. We took that three hour nap on Thursday, but you wrote almost nothing that day.

True. On Thursday I was still busy processing all the emotional baggage from Wednesday night. The back brain cycles were reallocated to parenting thoughts. Can’t you arrange for the kids to not have crises?

Not really. I don’t get to pick when they have troubles with friends, what their homework loads will look like, how they’ll handle those homework loads, or if they get sick. Stomach flu is no respecter of persons, nor of writing brain space. Still, I tried to feed you good information even though we were tired. When sleep wasn’t possible, we watched some good shows and listened to Writing Excuses.

Yes. I’m still digesting all of that too. Sometimes I need more space, not more input.

But I gave you space and you didn’t do anything with it.

Yes I did. Just not things that you could see. Percolation is invisible. I need time to be bored.

I know that. We wrote a blog post about that. I’ve been trying. I keep shielding us from additional tasks, not taking on new jobs, but some of the ongoing jobs keep popping up with new requirements. I had to dust off my art director hat this week because Howard is going to a convention with an art show. Then there are all the assistant things I need to do because Howard is stressed and up against three different deadlines. Also the dryer broke.

Just listen to yourself. All of that going on in your head and you wonder why I’m drown out with static. Once. That is the number of times that you have set aside a couple of hours to open up the files of fiction and forced yourself to write the next 1000 words. That was a 1400 word day.

So now you’re blaming me for not making space? I’m trying, but it is hard. The phone always rings or there are a dozen urgent emails.

If you don’t sit down, I can’t organize the words.

But sometimes you do. Sometimes I’ll be doing something else and you just throw words into the front of my brain so that I’m excited to go and write them down. Why can’t you do that all the time?

I’ll do it more if you build writing time into the day.

Yes. I know this. Writing is important. I keep feeling like it is important even when I don’t know what to write. Even when all the thoughts in my head flow together into an indistinguishable mass. I’m working on giving writing more space, prioritizing it higher on the list of things to do. I keep telling myself no excuses, just get it done. And somehow it all ends up feeling messy, sloppy, uninteresting. There are so many important projects in my life and writing is only one of them. Also, I feel pretty dumb sitting down to blog about writing. Surely I can come up with something more poetic and meaningful than whining about writing. Isn’t the point of writing something to add good to the world rather than to waste words in a meta examination of my own writing and the lack thereof?

We wrote some worthwhile stuff this week. Haven’t you looked back at it? We finished the Strength of Wild Horses draft.

Was that this week? Are you sure.

Go check.

Huh. It was, seems much longer ago. But surely we could have done more than that. Better.

We will. Bit by bit. 800 words a day, or 200 words a day, or 3 words a day if that is all we can do. Small daily efforts add up. Don’t get discouraged by numbers.

But I was trying to use the numbers to motivate me to do more.

Yes. And it is working. But give yourself time to settle into the new habits of thought, new daily structures. Trust me, I haven’t lost track of the things we learned during the retreat.

So…a busy week is not a sign that I’ll never be able to write.

It is not.

But all my weeks are busy. What if…

Stop playing what if. Just choose to write instead of choosing to watch a TV show. Choose to garden instead of choosing to read, because gardening lets the thoughts settle and percolate instead of feeding in new data. Sit and think instead of clicking through internet sites that you’ve already visited five times today. You can do this.

Okay. But are we really going to post this as a blog entry? Me talking to myself about writing? It makes me look a little bit crazy.

One of the purposes of the blog is to sort thoughts by writing them. You’re changing how you approach writing, so naturally that change needs to be processed. I had to write this first to clear space to write other things. Now that this is written, I can go write something else. Shall we do that now?

Yes.

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Facing My Calendar

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The calendar square for today is empty–no appointments, activities, or places to be. So it would seem that I could have a quiet day of writing and working. That was what I’d planned for today when contemplating the day from a week’s distance. I knew last night that my plans for today were going to require revision. The day was filled to overflowing with the sorts of emotional events which do not get written on the calendar. Many of them slopped over into today as a result of yesterday’s deluge. None of it is tragic or long-term, just the various emotional dramas that attend the process of growing up. But now I’m looking at all the other blank days on my calendar and thinking how grateful I am that they are blank, because I’m certain they won’t actually be empty.

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A Promise to My Son

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Last night I looked Link in the eyes and, with every ounce of intensity I could muster, I promised him “I know it is hard now, but it will get better.” He believed me. Even in the middle of feeling like his life was impossible and his challenges were insurmountable, even though he is fifteen and has begun to make value choices independent from mine, even though I’ve sometimes failed him–in that moment he believed me. It helped that I spoke truth.

I’d been listening to him for thirty minutes as he described the difficulties and emotions he faced. I tried not to speak too much, because it is a failing of mine to try to give him words to describe his experiences. I love words. I love wrapping them around concepts and experiences. For most of his life my son has not loved words and he was happy to let me provide them when he did not have them. But now he needs his own words, not mine. He needs to wrestle and struggle to give his own shapes to his thoughts. He needs to cry out in frustration until he manages to discover the words which fit his feelings. I must bite my tongue and not try to fix that struggle, because the struggle is what he needs. In so many ways my son is like the hatchling who must push and work his way out of the shell, because the effort to escape will give that chick the strength to survive everything else that comes later. I can already see the end of this struggle. I can see how far Link has come and how close he is to being free from the shell. He spent thirty minutes talking to me about his feelings, this would have been an impossible feat for him just six months ago. So when I told him it would get better, I knew that it was true. And he believed me.

Within an hour, better had already arrived. I didn’t know it would arrive so quickly, but I’m glad it did. I also know that more struggle is ahead, because he is not done with this process. Watching a chick struggle to hatch–without helping–is hard. So I do the equivalent of making sure that the egg and chick are in a safe place, a warm place. I speak encouragement. I prepare the food and other necessities that the chick will need which the egg did not. I do everything I can to make this easier, except pull off the shell. Then I wait, and occasionally I look into Link’s eyes and promise him that his struggles are temporary. It gets better.

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Attack of the Cranky

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It is not news to me that crankiness is contagious, people can give it to each other. Given the quantity of cranky that has filled this house in the past few days, one would think that we’d somehow acquired a particularly infectious strain. Except, when I look closely at all the different flavors of cranky they all seem to have spontaneous origination within the host. Link had a headache and homework he didn’t want to do. Also he was hungry, because hunger is nigh constant when one is fifteen. Kiki was cranky because she was tired and it was nearly bedtime when she learned that the following day was an A schedule day. She had prepared for a B schedule day. Gleek was cranky because we didn’t have a book she wanted, the cat would not consent to being a snuggle toy, and life in general is angry making without any other reason when one is a pre-teen. Patch was cranky because he didn’t pass his math test and he got his third black eye for the year by crashing into a friend on a trampoline. Howard was cranky from deadline stress and just because some days are that way. My case of cranky was definitely made worse by all of the above, but probably originated in a creeping feeling that there was something important I was failing to do properly.

We did not all explode into crankiness simultaneously. Instead it has been as if our house were built where the river of grouchy meets the sea of irritability. The tides ebbed and flowed creating eddies, rip tides, periods of calmness, and the occasional spectacular rogue wave. The good news is that we are all at least somewhat self-aware human beings and thus able to recognize that we are not being entirely reasonable. the most recent and amusing example of this was Patch stomping his feet and crying because Gleek, who had already finished her homework, got to watch Mythbusters, while he had to complete his work first.
“But I’ll miss some of it!” Patch wailed.
I looked at him and raised an eyebrow. (I recommend that all prospective parents learn the eyebrow trick, it is so very useful. Also you get to feel like Spock.)
“And the show will completely evaporate off of Netflix while Gleek watches so that it is gone forever?” I asked.
Patch half scowled and half smiled at me. Then he pulled the corners of his mouth down into a faux sad face.
“Yes.” he sighed. “It will be gone forever.”
Then he stopped complaining and completed his work in record time.

The cranky comes and goes, but it feels like the storm surge is settling out. Hopefully we’ll have calmer waters soon. Until then we try our best to not spread the cranky around.

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Pieces in Today

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There are at least seven different places I could start to tell a story of today. A story, not the story. This day doesn’t have a single narrative, no big event which over rides all else and becomes the focus for all the events around it. Instead I’m left with pieces of stories: The science project in process sitting in mason jars on my counter. The lost homework paper which was the cause of much drama and stomping. The forgotten appointment that I hurried to arrive late for. The pounding of my feet on a treadmill while I listened to Disney’s ultimate swashbuckling album and pondered how pirate songs were not usual gym fare. The script I read for Howard before he headed out to draw on it. The plethora of emails both business and personal along with notifications from various colleges who are trying to make me believe that they’re enthralled with the wondrous capabilities of my daughter when they’re really hoping to get some of my money. The nap I didn’t take. The dinner which is sitting in a casserole dish on the stove “cooling” while I find the emotional energy to call everyone to the table. Then there are the fragments of stories yet ahead of me: homework time, dinner, bedtime.

I would dearly love to draw all of it together, make a coherent whole. I like it when stories have themes and deeper meanings than is implied by the basic scenes. Instead I must accept that today taken by itself does not carry a full story. All of these things are threads of much larger stories which will play out over the next months and years. Some days have stories, others just have pieces of stories. So it goes.

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