Self

Plants Versus Zombies and patience

By / January 18, 2011 / 1 Comment

I don’t play many computer or video games these days, so I can’t really explain the appeal of Plants Vs. Zombies. It wears on me after a while, but every year or so I find myself back playing it again for a month or two. The most recent resurgence of interest was when we upgraded to a newer version and discovered that the game now awarded little trophy badges for all sorts of accomplishments. So during the craziness of last fall, when my brain was tired of all my regular things, I would sit down and earn imaginary trophies on Plants Vs. Zombies.

One of the mini-games in PVZ is called I Zombie. I’ve never played it much. The endless mode was frustrating. I like games where I can accumulate resources rather than trying to extend dwindling resources as far as I can. There was a trophy for getting past level 10 on I Zombie Endless. I wanted that trophy, but never seemed to be able to get past level 5. I sat there, tense, calculating resources in my head, thinking long and hard about each move before I made it. I still could not pass level 5. Then one day I was really tired. I was far too tired to do math in my head. I decided that rather than trying to pass level 10, I would just experiment and have fun. I tried moves that looked crazy. I watched the results curious to see what would happen. It was fun and relaxing. I played the same way the next day, and the next. I played that way for more than a week. Then one day as I was playing, a trumpeting sound alerted me to the fact that I had earned the trophy for getting to Level 10 in I Zombie. Somehow in all that experimenting, I taught myself how to play by instinct. I was far better at the game than I had ever been when I was calculating carefully.

I remember this experience when I am faced with a challenge that seems impossible. I slow myself down, keep at it, and trust that sheer repetition will impart the skills I need. For most things I don’t have to get it right all at once. I just have to get it right eventually.

And with that thought, I need to get back to revising my book.

My Grandfather’s Blessings

By / January 10, 2011

During the month of December I spent time reading My Grandfather’s Blessings by Rachel Naomi Remen. This book is not a single story. It is a hundred stories each with their own message of hope or peace. When I first borrowed this book from a friend the size of it was daunting. Each story was like a shining jewel. I felt like I had to pause and give each my full attention to comprehend it. The result was that I read about five of the stories then I put the book down and didn’t pick it up for over a year. When I picked it up again last month, I realized that it would simply not be possible for me to fully absorb everything Grandfather’s Blessings has to say. I’m not intended to. Instead I read it the way that I read scriptures. I let the stories pass through me, trusting that the things I truly need will stick. It worked.

Some of the stories from My Grandfather’s Blessings were the catalysts which allowed me to see how I needed to shift my life and my thoughts. My focus on seeking bright things instead of dark, holding my plans lightly, and five daily things are all a direct result of thoughts created by stories from this book. I can’t tell you which stories anymore. The details have all washed away, only the pieces I needed have stayed with me so that I can turn them into something new.

One other thought stuck with me after reading this book. This one was definitely attached to the book as a whole rather than any particular story. Just as this book helped me, my book can be exactly the right catalyst for someone else. My book does not have to be perfect or superlative in order to be useful. It merely needs to be the best that I can do. I find great comfort in that thought as I slog through one last necessary revision before sending it out to alpha readers.

Do I recommend My Grandfather’s Blessings? I think that I do, particularly to those who are suffering loss or who are in need of hope. It provided a useful conduit for the inspirations that I needed about my life. I can’t say that it will do the same for everyone. Perhaps it would not have done so for me a year ago when I first picked it up to read it. Perhaps that is why I put it down for so long. I’m ready to give it back. I’ve gleaned from it what I need for now.

First day back to routine

By / January 3, 2011

I stared blearily at the clock. 6:30. It was beeping at me. Oh. That’s right, the kids have school. How do I do school mornings again? I was pretty sure it started by me getting out of bed and stopping the beeps. Thus our new year began with me pulling out memories of how to run school mornings which felt crinkled and ages old.

Thus our new year began. I know that technically the year is already three days old, but I never feel like it is the new year until we’ve re-established our routines. I’m not sure we’ve quite succeeded yet, but the creakiness of the morning has given way to an afternoon that has a familiar shape to it.

The first work week of a new year is always gobbled up by accounting and beginning of the year to-do lists. The deluge of book keeping isn’t depressing me this year because I remembered to expect it. This year I’m also trying to settle new habits of thought into my schedule as well. So far it is working, but I still feel like I’m wearing a cloak of these thoughts rather than residing in them as if they were my skin. I’ll get there.

I hit one of the first challenges to my new frame of mind. Kiki is struggling with her class load this year. Instead of stepping up and getting the work done, she has grown to depend upon me organizing and enforcing work. This pattern was necessary last Fall when she was truly drowning. Lately, she has plenty of time but tends to avoid work until I prod her. Then she gets grouchy at me for reminding her that homework exists in the world even if we don’t want it to. Kiki is aware of the illogic of her behavior. She is honestly sorry even while she flops into a heap of “I can’t do it” and waits for me to make her. I feel frustrated with her, but compelled to keep pushing because I can’t let her short-sightedness damage her long-term future. So we run in little codependent circles which do neither of us any good.

This is where my new parenting focus and new thought patterns helped me. I was able to see the pattern and pick apart the errors in my own thinking. My false thought was this: “If I don’t help her, she’ll fail. Then she’ll feel even more helpless and depressed. It will spiral downward from there.” The truth is that Kiki is stronger and smarter than that. She might fail a little, but then she’ll dust herself off and figure it out. Instead of being her safety net and task master, I need to be her resource which she can tap for help at times of her own choosing. I need to be more hands off. Which frightens me. Because she could choose avoidance and depression instead of work and confidence. Finding the right balance is going to be tricky. The good news is that I can share every one of these thoughts with Kiki. I can tell her exactly what I am trying to accomplish. Together we can find the best balance for us both.

Balance, that is what I’m striving for in this new year. Along with it I want to find measures of peace and joy to go along with the feeling of purpose that carries me forward. The year started creakily, but I think we’ll all limber up and make it a good one.

New Goals (But not necessarily New Year’s Resolutions)

By / December 31, 2010

In the past 10 days I have had a series of introspective realizations. These thoughts very naturally to the formation of new goals. The little non-conformist voice in my brain says “We can’t make new goals now. It’s New Year’s Eve. Everyone is making new goals.” But I have the goals, and they are exactly what I need at this point in my life. It would be foolish to squelch or delay them out of an impulse to be different. These goals are not things that I will be putting on my To Do list or pushing myself to complete. I can’t complete them, not in the sense that they’ll be done forever. This makes them a very different sort of goal than I am used to making. There will be no progress to track, no self-applied pressure. These goals are merely a little mental sanity check of five things that I will perform each day in an effort to be conscious of the good and enjoyable things in my life.

My five daily things:
1. Read Scriptures/say prayers. I am specifying no particular amount nor am I requiring myself to always ponder deeply. But for at least a few minutes each day I will be present to and address my sources of spiritual direction.

2. Small happy conversations/thoughts. Included in this goal is my plan to have at least one non-business related, happy conversation with Howard each day. It can be very short. Also included is the effort I blogged about recently where I consciously find things currently present in my life which are opposite to my worries.

3. Do something each day to improve my health and physical fitness. I have a format for this which seems to be working. My slide into stress was accompanied by a weight gain. It isn’t much of one, but the reversal of this will do much to help me feel in control of my life.

4. Spend some time each day being a writer. This might be only five minutes where I consciously ponder a plot point. The purpose is to create a space during which I at least glance into my cupboard of writing thoughts.

5. Spend a couple of hours each week working on a project which makes me happy and can not possibly earn us money. Hobbies exist to make life joyful. I haven’t made space for mine in over a year.

If I miss something on the list on an individual day, that’s fine. I have no intention of keeping score. I probably only need the daily mental review of the list long enough to make space for happiness part of my daily life.

Reorganizing my office, my computer, and my brain

By / December 28, 2010

After a 5 day holiday hiatus, I have resumed my office reorganization project. This time I’m tackling digital files. I need to make space on my primary drive so that I can be working on two Schlock books in parallel. (An amusing coincidence: one of the books will be titled Massively Parallel.) My computer is out of date and needs replacing. This is item number one on the list of Things to Do Once We’ve Opened Pre-orders and Have a Buffer of Money Again. Until then, I shuffle files, burn data to disk, and make dual back-ups on external drives.

On it surface this data shuffling does not seem to do anything to forward my office reorganization, but this reorganization is not only about optimizing my physical space. Even more important than making the things I need easy to find is the mental process of looking at exactly how I work. My work processes have grown in response to necessity, usually in the urgency of the moment. After that I was a bit afraid to mess with a system that was working in the middle of a crisis. (Something always felt like a crisis) Now I am questioning if some of the way I work is helping to create a feeling of crisis where none needs to exist. This is similar to the mental adjustment I’m attempting to make in how I worry about/ trust in my children.

It is time to reorganize, re prioritize, and re-evaluate. I know what my goals are, they haven’t changed any, but my mode of travel needs to improve a lot. The physical organization let me see that mental organization was necessary. The mental organization is helping me see how the physical organization can work even better. In the end I don’t know that I will reach any of my goals more quickly. That’s not the point. The point is to be less tired and more happy as I travel.

The Nativity, Beginnings, Middles, and Faith

By / December 24, 2010

Shepherds, wise men, angels, Mary, and Joseph, they all rejoiced at the birth of Jesus. They all came from cultures which prophesied and awaited the coming of the Messiah who would save them all. I wonder how dismayed they were to wake up the next morning and discover that there were diapers to be changed, sheep to be fed, and normal life to be lived. The birth of Christ was a long-awaited moment, but it was only the beginning. Years of work and preparation were necessary before the true work of the Messiah could be done.

I am in the middle of raising my children. This Fall has been a tumultuous one, not in events, but in emotions. In no measurable way am I at the culmination of anything, nor at the beginning of something else. It would be nice to have a clear marker on the road, what I have instead is Christmas. I stare at the porcelain nativity scene and look at the baby. I look at the Mary in blue, so serene. They are frozen in the moment of joy, which turned out to be a brilliant moment at the very beginning of a long hard path. But once the path was done, not a one of them would regret it.

I’ll take Christmas as my marker. The fact that I’m here means that 2010 has passed and somehow we all survived. More than just survived, we have grown. I will photograph many things tomorrow and years from now I will look back and be able to see the whats and whys of where we are. I think I will look back and see that this Fall and this Christmas were a beginning. More importantly I’ll be able to see what was begun and why it matters.

I don’t think the real Mary was quite so serene as my porcelain one. She had just been through labor, not the medically-assisted, epidural-ific version of labor that I have experienced. She did natural childbirth. In a stable. With no doctor or nurse, or anyone but Joseph nearby. She must have been frazzled, sore, and high on endorphins. She knew she was at the beginning of something, all new mothers do, but what measure of terror she must have felt when contemplating the path before her. Perhaps she did not experience the Nativity as a moment of pure clarity and beauty, but rather as a muddle which only made sense later.

I think I can have faith in that. I can trust that it will make more sense later when I am not in the middle of so many things.

My holiday from urgent tasks

By / December 23, 2010

Yesterday morning my life was awful and impossible. This evening life is good and happy. Since nothing much has changed in the last 36 hours I am reluctantly forced to acknowledge once again that my emotional state is prone to fluctuation and therefore not a good short-term measure for my quality of life. What is valuable is taking an after-the-fact look at the specific complaints I listed as to why my life was impossible. The analysis is not surprising. I am not spending enough time on activities which replenish my emotional well-being. I’m not just talking about “taking time out for me” because some of the things I find most fulfilling are when I spend time deliberately helping someone outside my immediate family. Other soul-filling activities are actually a lot of work, (gardening, writing, family photo books) but the work I spend on them makes me feel like my life has value in a way that I can see and measure. I can see the weeds pulled, the words written, the pages finished. It is kind of hard to quantify “parenting” particularly when it is like the air I breathe, omnipresent and invisible.

The holiday has created a little space where many of my other responsibilities are held at bay. It is rather like one of those lulls in the crashing waves where the ocean pulls back leaving me standing ankle deep in wet sand. There are no packages to ship, emails to answer, tasks to complete, because most everyone else is also on vacation. The schools have backed off as well. There will be homework to manage next week, but this week is clear. The waves that have pushed against me and occasionally swamped me have retreated for a moment. In this space I organized and sorted and discarded. Mostly this is a physical sorting as I discarded years of old papers and garbage. As I sorted through piles, my brain also sorted. I dredged up old memories and then filed them away in new places. As I organized, I began to picture how my physical spaces need to be arranged so that I can accomplish the tasks that are in front of me. But I tried not to think too much about the tasks themselves. Tasks have dictated the order of my days for more than half a year. The biggest value in this holiday space is the freedom from urgency. I have time to consider what is important to me rather than what must be done right away to prevent an imminent crisis.

My space will only last until Monday. I can see the urgency swelling like a large wave gathering momentum to crash across the shore. A part of me wants to start preparing now, hurry and complete a dozen small chores so that they’ll be out of the way. Instead I am doing the mental equivalent of wiggling my toes in the sand, looking at the sky, and taking a deep breath. It is good to take time off from battling the waves to remember that I like the beach.

Before Monday arrives I intend to have a plan. It needs to be simple and low maintenance, but I need some structure which demands that part of each day is given over to things which are important even though they may not be urgent.

Pictures from my dorm room walls

By / December 17, 2010

Among the things I located in yesterday’s paper sorting was a file folder full of pictures that I once used to decorate the wall of my college dorm room. The walls of the dorm were painted cinder block and we were forbidden to do anything which would damage the paint. In order to make the room feel more welcoming than a jail cell, most of us plastered the walls with posters, clippings, and other cheerful things. I did the same during my first year. My second year of college was transformative for me. I was going through a conscious process of claiming adulthood and defining myself. I did not put just anything amusing on my walls. Instead I carefully sought out images which I felt were truly reflective of who I was. I collected pictures as the months progressed. Some came from magazines or cards. Others were carefully photocopied from books. I hung the pictures carefully, neatly. Then half way through the year I re-hung everything on diagonals creating dynamic angles. Howard had entered my life and completely rearranged the way I pictured my future. My dorm walls echoed my internal insecurity. At the end of the year I took them all down and carefully stowed them in a file folder. I married Howard and became absorbed in creating a communal life with him. He did the same. Our walls were hung with things that reflected us both.

Yesterday I opened the file and carefully flipped through the pictures. A wash of feeling wafted to me from the pages. The images stored echoes of that definitive stage of my life. The room I used to live in came back to me. I remembered the wooden crate I used as an end table, the way my roommate and I rearranged the furniture in a non-standard format that felt more home-like to us. I remember that for the first time I was sharing space with a roommate that I’d deliberately chosen rather than one to whom I had been assigned. We had a lot of fun and some over-stressed arguments, but it was a really good time. The pictures carried all that, and they spoke to me. “Remember. This is who you are. You were this person before you were a mother, a wife, a business manager. You still are this person.”

I have no desire to go back to dorm room days. I like who I am. I like everything I have learned along the way. Besides, a lot of the ground between there and here was really unpleasant to travel. I’d rather not cross it again. But in my heart and mind that dorm room exists and the things that happened there are a part of me. The self-definition I did there is the foundation of who I am now. Looking at the pictures helps me see that I’m at another point of self-definition. With this office reorganization I am going to have a space that is truly mine. I can arrange it and decorate it however I will. And I think I will pull out some of these college pictures and hang them again. The decision carries with it a little bit of fear. It was so joyous to find this pocket of memory. I want to hoard it away so that its power will not dissipate. But on the whole, I think that having a visual reminder on my wall will be good. “This is who you were, and still are.”

Office Cleaning Continues

By / December 16, 2010

I sorted through 15 years worth of filed papers today. I ended up with five boxes of paper that could just be pitched and a huge stack of paper which needed to be shredded before it could be pitched. It turns out that 10 years worth of bank statements fills four garbage bags when shredded. Part of my brain rebelled at the wanton destruction of data that the shredding represented. An analysis of all those papers would tell worlds about our life and habits during that era. The rebellious thoughts were squelched by remembering that during all of those years I have been entering all that data into Quicken. I have it all in digital form where it can rapidly be turned into reports. There is no reason to keep storing the paper.

Disposing of garbage paper was only part of the benefit of this project. I unearthed many hidden treasures and have now organized them so that I can find them again as needed. Memorabilia is all filed together as are health documents and contracts. I also have a big stack of file folders which are available for reuse. A piece of my brain is happy knowing that I’ve collected fragments of writing and family stories together. Someday I’ll put together a book out of it all. Not this year though. I need to finish cleaning my office and then use the space to continue working on all the other lingering projects in my life.

Starting in the corners

By / December 15, 2010

My front room is a mess. It has been a mess since some time before Thanksgiving. I don’t like it when my living spaces are a mess, and I’ve been sorely tempted to clean it up by shoving stuff elsewhere. I don’t because that is what I’ve been doing ever since school started and at this point “elsewhere” is full. Last week I finally had space in my brain to try to figure out how to clean up the front room. In order to do it, I had to start in my office. This makes sense when you realized that “elsewhere” is usually in the middle of my office. This continues until my office is impassible. Which it was.

So I began to clean my office. Unfortunately many of the things in the middle of my office had been stuffed there because they simply did not have other places to belong. All the stowing spaces in my office and storage room are full. Half of what they are filled with is the wrong stuff. Things I use regularly reside in piles and under other things while things I no longer need sit neatly on easily accessible shelves. Reorganization is in order. So yesterday I began. I am going through my office shelf by shelf and evaluating everything. I’m putting things where they will be readily useful. This is not going to be a quick process. I expect it to take weeks.

Yesterday I finally accepted that my office needs to be an office instead of also doubling as a guest room. I set up a permanent shrink wrapping and paper cutting desk. Now there is not room for me to put an inflatable bed in here for guests. I am sad, because I like being a good hostess and giving guests their own space, but this makes much more sense on a daily basis.

Today I began going through the four drawer file cabinet. All the drawers are stuffed full and I intend to look at almost every paper in there. I already have two garbage bags full of shredded out-dated documents. The world will not suffer for me shredding old utility bills. I keep the tax related stuff back 7 years, but I’ve saved so much garbage paper. It wasn’t garbage when I stowed it carefully away, but it is now. Soon I’ll be able to re-think the organization in those cabinet drawers. I’m hoping to be able to stow writing notes in the newly created spaces.

Onward I will head to the cubby holes and shelves. Then into the storage room. I will haul garbage bags out. I will have a stack of things to give away or donate. In the end I will have space and the supplies I need ready to be used. It is going to be good to have an office that I am able to vacuum.