Month: November 2008

We’re having a sale over at our store. We’re offering free shipping anywhere on the planet for orders over $100. This sale has done pretty well so far. It brought in 40 orders. This naturally means that I’ve spent a good portion of today packing those orders for shipping. I should probably do a write up of what normal shipping looks like to contrast it with our mass mailing style shipping parties. It will have to wait for another day. The shipping tasks were broken up by a trip out to go visiting teaching. This is a program by our church where women are paired up and assigned to visit other women in the congregation once per month. It functions as a way to increase social bonds within the congregation and to make sure that if someone has an emergency, they have people ready to help. I fully support the program. It gives me a chance to step out of my daily concerns and serve others. Today was just a pleasant visit, rather than service, but it was still nice to have a break. After that was an appointment with a blinds salesman. The boy’s room has been suffering from a bent curtain rod and ratty curtains for years now. It is time to have that fixed. This of course leads back to the sale in the store, since that is where the funds are coming from to pay for the new blinds.

My kids each carry a bag to church. The bags hold paper, pencils, scriptures, and occasionally the stowaway toy. These bags are very helpful in keeping the kids focused during the meetings. But after church is over, I find that 3/4 of the kids shove their bags into my hands before they dash for home. Individually the bags do not weigh all that much, but combined they are quite the load. And so I am left literally holding all the bags.

Church bags are not the only things I end up holding for my kids. I am the general repository for unwanted items such as coats, backpacks, books, blankets, even trash. When the kids are done with something, they hand it to me. I know this is the way it needs to be for young children who are not really capable of keeping track of belongings. But my children are not that young anymore. They are perfectly capable of taking a few extra steps to the trash can instead of handing the banana peel to me. And yet they hand me the peel, and I throw it away. Most of the time I throw it away without even thinking about it. I haul the bags home. I pick up the scattered shoes and socks. I clear the table. I do all these things and a hundred more without even noticing that I’ve done them, because that is the pattern we all fell into when the kids were little.

But every so often I have a day when I notice. When I resent being left holding the bag. When I wonder why everyone, including me, assumes that the unpleasant/boring jobs belong to me. When I wonder why I am always the one to share give away her last cracker or to be late to events because I’m scolding dawdlers into getting read. On these days it feels like I am the only one who cares about the state of the house, about the fact that we’re late again, about making sure that healthy food gets on the table.

The problem is that I’m so good at what I do, that no one else has to care. They can leave it to me and know that the work will get done. They trust me to do these things for them. On non-resentful days I treasure that trust and I express my love for them by doing all these little things. But the kids are growing. One day they will be adults. They will go out into the world to have roommates and spouses who will curse me unless I can teach them to clean up after themselves rather than always doing it for them. I do try, but somehow I always end up holding the bag, or the coat, or the trash, and wondering how I got there again.

I think some of the reason for the pattern pure habit. It is easier to follow the flow of a habit than to struggle to change it. Just accepting the trash feels easier than arguing with the child about proper trash receptacles. This is particularly true if you’ve already had that argument with two other children several times during the course of the day. I only have so much energy to make them do stuff. Usually I use it all up making them get up, eat breakfast, go to school, practice piano, do chores, eat dinner, and do homework. The last thing I want to do is turn into the bad guy by hauling kids away from their games to make them pick up their scattered shoes and backpacks. I know I should, but I just get too tired to fight over it. But the clutter is unpleasant, so I pick it up. I’m much better about this than I used to be. I’m making them clean up more often. I also hold out hope because I almost never have to clean up after Kiki anymore. She has grown into a responsible and willing helper.

I know I need to work on this. I need to train them to pick up after themselves so that there are fewer days where I’m left resentfully holding the bag.

It began with the walnuts. Most of them had fallen from the tree and we needed to gather them. Most of the leaves had fallen from the tree as well. The walnuts were hiding in the leaves, so we needed to rake to find all the nuts. We also needed to rake in order to find the grass so that Kiki could mow it one last time. Four kids, four rakes, 90 minutes, then there was jumping. But that was not the end for me. I swept off the deck, scraped piles of debris into the garbage, cut down dead sunflowers, pulled weeds, and chopped back the lawn that was attempting to overgrow the path to our front door. One job led to another until finally I paid attention to the fatigue and aches of my body. My brain was having fun and wanted to keep going, but I needed to stop. It felt good to get out and work. It felt good to know that my garden is a little better prepared for the coming snow of winter. Tomorrow there will be rain. There will be rain for the next several days. But the weather may be good again next Saturday. If it is, I’m headed outdoors again. I haven’t been a gardener often enough lately.

With the end of the insane 2008 convention season and the shipping of Teraport Wars, Howard and I have found ourselves with more time and brain space than we have had in over a year. We’ve been spending some of that on home maintenance. Mostly we’re taking care of little things, but it is surprising how much difference a small maintenance task can make. Howard has been focusing primarily on the lighting in our house. He replaced two fixtures that we’ve hated for years. Then he went through the rest of the house replacing light bulbs and talking about replacing other fixtures as well. The thoroughness of his attention to lighting was a little puzzling to me since lighting had not seemed like a big issue to me. Then something he said clicked into place in my head. The days are getting shorter and Howard remembers clearly how hard last winter was on me. We suspect I have a mild case of Seasonal Affective Disorder. I feel more sad/depressed in the winter. Howard is paying so much attention to the light in our house, because he hopes it will help make my winter better. Oh look, it already has.

Howard and I went to see the Body Worlds exhibition in Salt Lake City. It was fascinating, and disturbing. I could look at sections of bodies, hip joints, heart muscles, lung arteries, without feeling anything but interest. But when I looked at the whole bodies, I was forced to confront the fact that this had once been a living person who was now plastinated and put up for artistic display. All the bodies there had been specifically donated to the exhibition, but it was still very strange. I would examine the muscles and the nervous system or the circulatory system. I admired the artistry with which the bodies had been arranged. They not only displayed the interior of the human body for inspection, but some of the arrangements also made commentary on what it means to be human. I had to look respectfully and think carefully about what I thought was being said and what meanings I would take away with me. And then I would look into the face of the art and remember that this had once beena living human with family and dreams and a job. The emotional impact was impressive. (It would have been even more so if the place had not been packed with high school students on a field trip.)

And then I came to the human development room. The tiny fetuses in little jars had little effect on me, except the last one which had recognizable eyes and fingers. I felt awe that something so tiny could be the beginning of a human being. Next was a case with a fetus approximately 30 weeks along. It was so little and perfectly formed. It looked plastic, but again I looked into the face and knew that this exhibit had once been alive. My niece was 30 weeks along when she was born prematurely. I was looking at a baby who, for whatever reason, had never had the chance to live. I know the value of studying bodies after death, even the bodies of babies. But I could not look anymore. There were other cases in that room, but I could not even look at them. It was too sad for me. The adult exhibits had lived lives. Some were dead by their choices. All were in the exhibition by their choices. But the fetal babies were different. Howard and I moved on before I started to cry.

This exhibition, and the three sister exhibitions, are controversial. Many people have had many things to say about whether it should exist. When the first exhibition opened in Germany, I never believed it would come to the states. I thought people here would be too squeamish. But only a decade later it is not only in the States, but in one of the very conservative states and I saw no controversy over it at all. One of the things I am pondering about the experience I had, is what the very existence of the exhibition says about the society in which I live and what my reactions say about me. There is an element of freak show. There is an element of scientific study. There were definitely elements of beauty. The art was beautiful. All of those elements spoke to me on different levels. I am interested to note that there were no children on display. There were fetuses to newborn and then there were adults, nothing in between. It seems that either parents do not donate the bodies of their children, or the institutes refuse to use them for display. This says something about how humans feel about children, our protective instincts. I am glad there were no children. Seeing them would have been as hard or harder for me than the human development room.

We came home with an exhibition catalog. It has photographs of many of the exhibits we saw. It also has photographs from other exhibitions. The emotional impact of the photographs is much less than standing next to the actual bodies. I can look at the infant pictures without crying. Even so, it is not light reading. I have to respect the gift of those who donated their bodies to this project. I am glad that I went. I now have a whole raft of thoughts and impressions filed away in my head from which I can draw thoughts and connections. This is how creativity is fed. But for now I’m ready to file all of that into the back of my brain. I want to be able to watch my children without picturing the muscles, tendons, bones, and organs underneath their skin.

To “Headdesk” is the action of banging your forehead against your desk in realization of something stupid you have done.

I’ve been running out of space on my computer. Local Drive C is a 50 gig hard drive, which sounds like a lot until you start editing books and layouts and photographs. About a year ago Howard and I bought an external drive to serve as a back-up for my files. So I happily put pictures and other non-essential stuff onto Backup Drive D, which had space for 18 gigs.

All was well and good until I filled up the space that I’d made on drive C.

Last night Howard suggested that I might make some more space if I flushed my browser cache because Kiki has been watching video on my computer. I blinked at him cluelessly. He sighed and went to my computer to do it himself. He flushed the cache and it made no difference. So he poked around some more.
“What is this?” Howard asked pointing at something labeled Local Drive F.
“I don’t know.” I blinked cluelessly again. “Do I have two internal drives?”
Howard clicked it and discovered that Drive F has over 133 gigs of available space on it. Further examination determined that despite having “local” in the name, Drive F is in fact the external drive that we’d purchased for backing things up. Drive D is a second internal hard drive.

This is akin to opening a door in your house and discovering that you have another whole wing that is three times the size of the space you’ve been living in.

Hurray for space! But *headdesk* how did I miss seeing it was there?

My brain does not like to be idle. It always wants to be engaged on multiple levels. I habitually read while I eat. I’ll listen to music or watch a show while doing manual tasks like folding laundry. There is this almost incessant need for new information. Sometimes it is fiction, other times it is factually based. But every so often I find a day where some instinct tells me “enough.” Then I find myself avoiding input sources. I’ll turn off the music, leave the books laying, walk away from the internet. On these days I have a strong need just to stare at nothing in particular and let my brain wander. Today was such a day. I found myself seeking out manual labor tasks that I usually find boring. No profound thoughts emerged from all the thinking. I had no epiphanies. But my house is cleaner now than it was and I feel calmer. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

There are not many shows that we can watch as an entire family. Howard and I tend to like shows that are too intense for the kids. The three younger kids like shows that are too simple and repetitive for Howard or I. Kiki loves anime with a passion that is sometimes shared by the other kids, but not by Howard or I. Gleek loves Barbie movies which the other kids all swear they don’t like, but still end up sitting down to watch. Our differing tastes aren’t really a problem. We just schedule the use of the TV accordingly so that everyone gets a fair turn. But sometimes we want to sit down for a family viewing. It is frequently frustrating because the youngest two kids often bounce during the exposition parts of the film that the rest of us are trying to hear. Recently we’ve found two shows that engage us all, the Speed Racer movie and the Myth Busters TV series.

I did not expect to like Speed Racer. Nothing about the trailers interested me. I did not care about race car crashes in over saturated colors. I still don’t. The bright colors, blinking lights, and general flashiness are hard on my eyes. But I find the storytelling methods fascinating. Back story and story line are packed together so tightly. You switch from past to present so often that sometimes it is hard to tell which one is supposed to be present, and yet the story advances so that I am not lost. The movie itself seems like a race. Everything happens so fast. This film has one of the best uses of visual medium that I’ve ever seen. In most films the back story is told using dialog. A character tells about something that happened in the past. Sometimes you get a flashback scene to tell what happened. Speed Racer depends heavily on montage. There are places where a whole story of decision and regret is told wordlessly in less than a minute. Every time the kids turn on the show, I end up watching fascinated. I want to see how the storytelling is done, although most of it will not ultimately help me as a storyteller since my mediums are not visual. And yet it is still definitely a kid’s show. There are characters, such as the monkey, who only exist to be silly. But these silly kid scenes never lasted long enough to bore me. Similarly the few exposition scenes never lasted long enough to bore Gleek or Patch. And most of the exposition was accompanied by fascinating visuals or montages. I suspect that Speed Racer is a movie that people will either love or hate. The good news is that the first 15 minutes of the film is a self-contained storyline that introduces all the characters, all the back story, and comes to a satisfactory conclusion at the end of a race. If you don’t like the first 15 minutes, don’t bother with the rest.

Myth Busters has a very different appeal to our family. It also keeps the interest high by keeping the scenes short. But we are fascinated by the cool things they get to build and frequently blow up. And it ends up being educational because invariably there is some aspect of the show that the kids don’t understand and we then have to pause and explain. Just yesterday I got to explain to Gleek what breast implants were and why someone would want them. Less awkward for me, but equally fascinating to the kids are the discussions we’ve had about electricity, microwaves, the reason we don’t perform these experiments at home, and why we can’t have an electric eel for a pet. I love that the show gives us stuff to talk about. I love hearing Kiki and Link expound about things that they know which Gleek and Patch do not. Then Howard or I weigh in and correct erroneous information.

We own Speed Racer, but there are only so many times we can watch the same film, even one with fascinating storytelling. We have several seasons of Myth Busters to go through. After that, we’ll again be seeking a show.