Did You Miss Me?

I desperately need to blog, so I am going to fix that right now… Even though I don’t have anything particularly poignant to say.

Although… and I know you’re bound to be just as excited as I am about this… I am done with the grant proposal at work! Woohoo!

What? Did I forget to mention that thing? Oh. I’ve spent the past few weeks writing a grant proposal at work, asking for money. Which is really the only reason why one would write a grant proposal, but…

Do you know how difficult (and time consuming) it can be to write a big, thesis-long, technical thing asking for money? And explaining how you will wisely and responsibly spend that money? I don’t like asking the neighbors to check the mail while we’re on vacation! Can you imagine how odd I feel asking for fistfuls of cash—even when it’s not my own?

I did find time to put the tree up, though...

 If I had participated in NaNoWriMo this year, I’d have been about half-way done, which is a vast improvement over how far I got last year. So maybe grant-proposal writing is my thing.

Nevertheless, the proposal is done, edited, and gathering signatures as we speak. And this means that the few weeks of being able to think of nothing other than the proposal are over!

Unless we win, and then I’ll be spending a lot more time thinking about the whole thing. Which is kind of the point, but hopefully, it won’t suck out all of the creative writing juices from my brain, like the writing of the proposal did.

Also? I think I’ve gained about ten pounds during this grant proposal writing process. Writing a grant requires that you eat chocolate, and have wine with dinner. And not exercise. That’s the important piece, there. I’d probably appreciate it if the weight gain thing would stop now too.

How could anyone resist this wine??? They couldn't.

Although—here’s an idea—I could go back to my Fitspo motivational posters, and my blog posts about how losing weight sucks and why exercise is the devil’s work!

You see? The juices are already starting to flow after just starting a blog post.

Except this is really a blog post to nowhere. While the big names, like The Bloggess, are incorporating half a dozen different animals (dead, alive, mythical, and saintly) in one post, and SDL, who came out of the closet as not-straight this week… here I am with no coherent thesis statement and no idea of an ending to this train wreck.

Maybe the proposal burned up that area of my cerebral cortex…

Or... maybe it's creepy owls who are now the newest thing in house accessories...

 Although, I was able to write some fun posts for Sprocket Ink over the past few weeks, and I’ve not yet had the chance to share them with you here! So, let’s have a recap of some of the good ones:

I was amazed that our culture needs Legos to explain the Bible…

I made fun of Lance Armstrong’s Twitter skillz.

I got to applaud Cory Booker, and…

I wondered what all of you would be doing with your Powerball money, had you won.

You know what? That was almost like a weekend wrap-up! Which I haven’t done forever! Perhaps I’ll bring that back as well! And maybe a giveaway? I haven’t had the chance to do one of those in a while… And didn’t I promise everyone a post of the vacuum that Twitter gave me?

And… I’m back!

Grieving, Holidays, and Revelations

I didn’t finish my NaNoWriMo novel. At first I felt awful about this, but I’ve learned to let it go. It just wasn’t in the cards this time around. I had no control over the events of the past month.

My last post—the one about the crazy schedules and the like—was right before my husband’s grandmother took a dramatic turn for the worst and then died, and his grandfather went into the hospital himself with something as of yet undiagnosed.

That throws a lot of kinks in things. Like novels. Or blogs. Or holidays. Everything was supplanted in order to travel, to comfort, to grieve.

An aside: Thank you to all of you who sent us well wishes and deepest sympathies and even real life cards. CARDS! In the mail! That is a cultural phenomenon I think all of us should revive.

Thanksgiving (which had never been my favorite holiday anyways) was much less than a holiday this year. The following week was marred by cold temperatures and stress and a funeral. Everywhere Christmas exploded around me but I did not feel it. I could hear the songs and smell the smells and see the shoppers but I could not get excited.

I was wallowing, and what took me too long to realize is that sometimes it’s okay to wallow. When I first started this blog—shell-shocked from our dramatic turn of economic events and moving and sore from the sale of our first home and fearful that everything could slip away once again (and would at any moment)—I thought that I needed to stop wallowing. Now, with months between me and the immediacy of those fears, I am beginning to realize that sometimes wallowing is healthy. Wallowing. Grieving. Mulling. All of these emotions are actually okay.

Once I finally realized this, it was as if the proverbial giant weight was lifted. I was no longer Atlas—at least for the moment. The room to breathe has allowed me a chance to get excited about Christmas—at least a little bit. I can still be sad—I can still have those moments. I can also have moments of humor and of happiness. They do not have to be mutually exclusive.

I’ve got a shopping date tomorrow. It’s going to be whirlwind day, and if we are actually able to follow my schedule, it’ll be one for the record books. I have a lot of catching up to do. My decorations are now up (with the exception of the lights for the outside that I bought, but my husband has been working too hard to find the time to put up). And I have big plans for some holiday giveaways here! I’m trying to work out the details now.

So, stay tuned. I never disappear for long. Plus, I have a wonderful story about Ant and his discovery of “Santa” on deck.

And the next thing I knew a week had passed…

Yep. That pretty much sums it up.

There was a conference, and a meeting and a lecture and another meeting and a stomach bug running rampant and notifications of chickenpox at the school and an email server crash and the next thing I knew I had lost a week of blogging, a week of writing, a week of house cleaning, etc.

There were also visits to grandparents and an awesome concert and shopping for books at the book fair. There were parent-teacher conferences and books coming off hold at the library and averting a near crisis with a cold sore. There were lunches with friends and my husband making four quarts of homemade pasta sauce. In other words, I’m not complaining.

I am desperately behind in writing for NaNoWriMo (What? You didn’t see that coming?) But I do have another guest post for Imperfect Parenting, and another one I’m thinking of writing about (but will not tell you about quite yet). Thank you to everyone who helped out and thank you to those who came and read each one!

Maybe I’ll be able to catch my breath around Thanksgiving. Or maybe I’m deluding myself. Eh, does it really matter?

The Challenge

I’m frustrated and have been in a horrible mood for the past forty-eight hours, all due to some silly writing challenge. NaNoWriMo. I keep trying to tell myself that it doesn’t really mean much of anything to me, but that’s not the truth. It does mean something, and it’s not silly. I scoff and degrade it in my mind because it IS important.  It means breaking down a barrier that I’ve contended with during the entirety of my writing “life”; I start something, I am excited about it, but that excitement quickly wanes. I abandon the project in the search for the next new thought.

I fix things other people cannot and finish things and tidy up loose ends in all other aspects of my life, but when it comes to the thing that I’ve always enjoyed doing—the thing I’ve always wanted to take more seriously—the place in my life where I WANT to grow… I cannot seem to break that barrier.

It’s not that I can’t keep up with the word count—I know that the word count can be a big issue to many others, but the word count part of this is fine for me. If I have an idea and a direction, I can write until the cows come home. I don’t anguish like some others do; I don’t have to struggle for hours over a paragraph or a sentence. The problem is that I’m doing nothing but writing crap. I look at it, and it’s just crap, and even though I try to push through it and tell myself that it’s supposed to be crap, that it’s supposed to be a shell of story, that I’m supposed to go back and edit and revise and that this is all part of the PROCESS…I get frustrated and angry and I stew over it. I’m to the point that I lay on the couch of the evenings with a deep scowl on my face and my arms crossed over my chest, and the boys look at me with the question “If it makes you this angry, why are you even doing this?” hanging in their eyes.

It makes me feel like some tragic, brooding artist cliché, and this pisses me off even more because I don’t like that cliché. I think you can be happy and content and craft something wonderful at the same time. I think you have to be a good storyteller, a good listener, a good observer; not mentally unstable or tortured or lost.

My husband says things that he considers to be supportive, like “Just keep going with it honey, and see where it takes you,” and “It’s okay if you don’t finish, no one EXPECTS you to finish,” and this leaves me even more frustrated. It’s not his fault that he doesn’t have the right words to support me in this endeavor—this is not his goal, this is not his forte. He doesn’t understand what would make me feel better, and I don’t think that there’s much that could be said to make me feel better. I think to myself that I would feel better if I could dedicate more time in the day to the endeavor, but in the same minute I know that this is not the truth—I would just spend more of my day feeling like this.

I lay in bed with the thoughts spinning around my head so fast that I cannot even grab one to pick it out of the mix and examine it up close. I feel the frustration in this writing challenge spinning out into other areas of my life, and the question “What am I doing?” no longer applies to the writing challenge, but to my life overall, as the negative thoughts grow out of proportion and sneak their way into other parts of my brain.

Then, out of all of this, my great-grandmother’s voice comes into my head, clear and strong. You don’t know this, but I am writing about her, in a roundabout way. The way I envision her would be a better description, I suppose. This somehow conjures her, and she is speaking in my mind—in the middle of the night—telling me things that soothe me, then telling me that it wouldn’t be worth it if it wasn’t hard. That nothing in the world that is easy is really worth anything at all. It comforts me to hear her again—I can almost smell her—and I know that what I hear is the actual truth, the main point, and finally, I can turn over and fall asleep.

Momentary Break from NaNoWriMo: The Stereotypes Stop Here

The news (if you consider Kim Kardashian news, which I don’t, so assume I’m using the term loosely) of the past week has not been lost on me, despite my efforts to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. The events of the past week, both in the news and personally, have left a swirl of emotions in my mind that I just cannot clear out unless I write it here. So, I will write it here, and hope that there is some spark of serendipity that makes this coalesce.

When I was a child about Ant’s age, I asked my Nanny what being an Indian Giver meant. I had heard the term several times in school—with girls swapping trinkets and toys. I knew that whatever an Indian Giver may be, it wasn’t good. Nanny, possessing a quick wit and a quicker tongue, didn’t tell me the truth. She told me that the term represented what the United States had done to American Indians—given land, signed treaties, made proclamations of sovereignty and then taken it back whenever the mood possessed them.

I learned as an adult, the term is a derogatory slam against American Indians, disparaging the cultural systems of reciprocity and shared ownership. Native populations (and let’s get this clear; there were over 550 different tribes, or sovereign nations, on this continent before Columbus, and they did not share the same cultures, practices, languages, or even styles of houses or dress, despite what your 4^th grade teacher may have mis-taught you) took pride in giving gifts, of maintaining protocol, of ‘making nice’, for lack of better term. This was an important practice, and greatly misunderstood by European settlers during the time of first contact.

Which is why I take offense with the stereotypical response Kris Jenner gave on national TV concerning her daughter’s two million dollar ring. She “hates an Indian Giver.”She should apologize, immediately. It is not native people’s fault that the European settlers had a different concept of ownership. Perpetuating this line of thought is egregious; I don’t care how much of a celebrity you are or are not, or how you got there.

Honestly, I don’t even know how they got to be celebrities. Was there a sex tape or something? Isn’t that how Paris Hilton got famous? I just cannot keep up with the celebrity-reality-TV crap. But, I digress.

Stereotypes seem to be the theme of this week in our household. I suppose it got kicked off when I was re-reading some of Redneck Mommy’s posts around Halloween. One of those posts was from last year’s Halloween. For those of you unfamiliar with Tanis Miller, her third child, who was disabled, died suddenly a few years ago, at around the age of five, I believe. Ultimately, her child’s death and her advocacy of the disabled community led her and her husband to adopt another child, also disabled. In that post from last year, she chronicles how her son is invisible: no one wants to give Halloween candy to a child in a wheelchair; no one wants to see what severe disability looks like, up close.

It struck more than a chord with me. When I was in college, I spent a year working in special education in the public school district. I worked with non-communicative autistic children. I worked with the profoundly impaired. I worked with students who had learning and behavioral disorders. I worked with children as small as three and children as old as nineteen. I fed and changed and held and rocked and soothed and cared for these children. I remember the first word one autistic child spoke, and cried along with that child’s teacher. They had worked with this child for years, literally, and then one day that child pointed to the maple in the schoolyard, ablaze in red with the autumn, and said, “tree”. It was one of the most significant moments of my life.

Which is why I was so heated with Ant yesterday evening, I suppose. I’ve since apologized to him for my diatribe last night, but it caught me off guard, and I cannot, will not, tolerate stereotypes or mockery in our house. We were watching the news as I cooked supper, and there was a piece on Gabrielle Giffords, and the book she and her husband has written about her recovery from a nearly fatal gunshot wound last January. Part of the coverage described how Gabby has had to re-learn speech; not able to say any more than the word “chicken” in response to the Bush’s when they visited her months ago in the hospital. I’m not a doctor, but I know that this woman has suffered a traumatic brain injury. I know how important the left front cortex is for speech. I know how hard individuals have to work to re-learn speech without the benefit of the brain plasticity we each have as small children (when we learn language for the first time). When Ant laughed at this; likely something he’s learned from his third grade peers (seems to be the common age for playground politics, doesn’t it), I literally saw red. Why in the world it was reported in the first place, I will never be able to explain.

We had not had to discuss this with Ant before. I think it’s safe to assume he now knows that it is unacceptable to take any individual who differs from you less seriously than you would take your best friends or your family.

It also reminds me of the young woman who posted the YouTube video of her father using a belt on her seven years ago. Now, the vast majority of that story is a post for another day (and boy, do I have a lot of thoughts running through my mind about that man) but the thing that got me is that once it was mentioned that this woman had cerebral palsy, the media latched onto it like this was the story. It was not the story! Does it make what he did any less despicable if she did not have cerebral palsy? No! The only thing that has come out of that father’s mouth that makes any semblance of sense in the aftermath of that video is the statement where he said, “As multiple media appearances clearly demonstrate, Hillary Adams is articulate, possesses a superior IQ, and is capable of functioning as a productive adult in today’s complex society.” If this horrible man sees past her disability then why the hell can’t the rest of us?  

I couldn’t sleep early this morning, and decided to give up tossing and turning in bed and go downstairs. As I drank my coffee I flipped through channels, hoping to find some extra-cheesy movie that would make my early morning travails worth the time. I found the Crucible—which details the events of the Salem Witch Trials (with some artistic license, to be sure). The story of the Salem Witch Trials has always astounded me; it was the perfect storm. There was the possibility of ergo, and a hard existence with coming winter. There was pettiness and jealousy and irrational fear. Then there were accusations, and ultimately death. Old women- widows. A child. A few men. Why did all of that happen? The only reason that makes any sense to me is that those who were different, separate, strange, outside the norm, whatever you want to call it—those individuals were removed from society (by death) because an unchecked and irrational sense of  what is normal and what is not normal overtook everyday citizens. A mob mentality that I highly suspect was started with something akin to stereotypes.

We could descend into something akin to the Salem Witch Trials again. I see the possibility with the Occupy Wall Street detractors. “They don’t want jobs.” “Oh, they are rioting and vandalizing, and raping.” “They give the real unemployed people a bad name.” I sometimes wonder if the people who make these comments actually know someone who is protesting, or even more than the nightly sound bite they hear on the news. Perhaps they should keep their opinions and speculation to themselves, if they don’t know the whole story. Or, if not the protests, then perhaps political speculation? Or fear of different ethnicities? Or the harassment of immigrants, illegal and legal?

Because it is all based in fear, in not knowing, in not understanding, in not being able to make sense of a situation. That’s all it is. You do not know the answer, you feel uncomfortable, and then you fall back upon some useless and incorrect stereotype. You do not want to feel weak. You do not want to be wrong. You do not want to be mocked. So you put someone else in that place. Stereotypes are nothing more than the confessions of ‘witches’; naming others as ‘accomplices’ to take the focus or danger off of themselves. It’s time we stopped relying upon and condoning stereotypes in our society.