Left Brain Power Up
I have been so thinky lately, it’s awesome! Creative Problem Solving is my favorite thing do in the whole wide world, and this week I have just been on fire. I taught myself the Forms function in Google Docs so that I can keep a daily inventory of my State of Me and chart it over time to find out what really works for me (not what I THINK works, but to have actual data to support it). And who knows when doing survey forms and charts for the data will be a handy skill?
I have also been thinking business thoughts. Adjusting a filmmaker friend’s business model to one that could be quite successful in Music City, even as it starts small with the resources already at hand, utilizes the new world of (viral) internet distribution, and includes quick enough reiteration to perfect the art and gain a reputation quickly.
Also designed a getting started business model for a catering business (I can see the logo in my head!) for a family member, capitalizing on some past experience and personal contacts to get it done. Not that said family member is into it, just that I’ve been problem solving a not-yet-problem.
And wouldn’t it be interesting to work out how to apply Grameen Bank principles to addressing poverty issues in our own local urban communities?
Not to mention Sudoku overload. Those damn 1/day puzzle calendars!
Yay surfeit of creative problem solving energy. Now to just get to a point where it makes sense to be creatively problem solving my own problems instead of just waiting for some circumstances outside my creative control to resolve and solving other people’s problems in the meantime. Sigh.
Maddow does it again.
Some Nuts are not worth it
Recently tried reading this book that looked quite interesting, and I KNOW there are nuggets of wisdom in there, but the damn thing feels like some really interesting nut that I want to eat, but now that I have cracked it open, I am having to sort through so much not-tasty in order to dig out anything worth eating that I am never going to finish the damn thing.
It is one of those “white person (often female) learns spiritual secrets from brown indigenous people and then writes THE BOOK to explain them to white people” books. In it, her teachers are members of a tribe in the Amazon but conveniently live in California near her.
It feels appropriating, racist, and exoticizing in ways I can’t necessarily point to, but I feel creeped out by it. Also, the narrator white chick has no confidence, is always belittling herself, and is playing a “stupid white American” so over the top that I don’t believe it. And then it condemns everything Western/American with a paranoia that I find breathtaking.
Not to say that I think we do things best in the big ole USA. But puppetmaster sociology has always seemed like a classic fallacy to me.
I will not be reading more of the book, even though there are tiny nuggets of useful shamanism in it. But I just have to subject myself to too much stoopid for it to be worth it.
Maudlin-itude
I am standing here scarfing down chocolates I would have given away if I had been a better person, but I have a knot of maudlin-itude in my tummy that I am trying to kill with sugar toxicity.
Today Boogs quit eating off a spoon. Won’t do it. Stubborn chin to clamp his mouth shut. And so all those many strategies for getting the little guy fattened up that involved non-finger foods are now scrapped. I tried frying the baked sweet potato in coconut oil to see if it would stick to itself well enough to be finger food, but it didn’t work out well. I called two of my Mama resources to get talked down off the frustrated ledge…
Meanwhile, we had a touch of drama in my Dark Moon Circle and one member may be leaving. I don’t think there will be many hurt feelings, since it just no longer meets all of her Needs. The timing, however, is horrendous and I admit to just being angry and resentful that I had to address someone else’s Needs RIGHT NOW when I can barely function for myself and my family.
Contributing to all of this is the fact that my Grandad was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and has 4-6 months left. I had a feeling his 90th Bday last fall would probably be the last time I saw him, and so stored my happy last memories and made my peace with it then. It has hit other members of my family much harder, though, and I feel the ripples of their grief and yet I have so few Spoons of my own that I don’t feel like I have much to offer them.
And of course, looming over everything are all these rounds of 1 year old doctor visits, culminating in Boog’s second surgery. At least my hip pain seems to be working itself out. Now if only I can manage some personal laundry, I seem to be out of shirts that don’t smell.
Side note: I have stopped reading the insipid little comments inside these myriad chocolate wrappers. If I really had the Spoons to Skip and Go Naked in the next summer thunderstorm, do you really think I would need my chocolate to tell me to do it? Geez.
The Heaviness of Poverty
I could feel that desperation behind my eyes, that tightness behind the polite mask necessary for the grocery store. It was the last day to get my WIC food for the month but the baby, and then my partner, and then I all got sick that week and I felt awful but we can’t afford to skip some of the WIC for the month just because hauling myself out of bed and leaving my partner to care for the baby seems too hard on us all (sharing the childcare when we are sick and less functional makes it a lot easier).
Oh good, I got the older lady cashier, the one who knows what she is doing. As I pull the cart up and begin unloading, I say, “I have WIC,” because she has to know that for how she rings it up. My exhaustion and apology for my slowness and difficulty must have showed, because she answered, “It’s okay.”
And this time, they didn’t ask why I was so late cashing in my vouchers. There were no pointed questions to ascertain whether it was something we “need,” and no problems with me getting something not allowed for no good reason (you can get the round box of grits but not the square box, regardless that they are the same size, same brand). And it was a relief, because I had answers and excuses and dodges all planned out in my head in case I needed to smooth over that awkward moment when the bagger gives me the stink-eye, but I was so worn down that I wouldn’t have carried off that just right tone and my mask would have slipped and it could have been ugly.
When I got home, I had to sit in the car for a few minutes. I just wasn’t ready to deal with the next step. But then I hauled it inside and my partner put it away for us, and I wondered once again at how very heavy poverty can feel around the shoulders, and in the soles of the feet, and in those tiny little muscles behind the eyes that make it hard to look up from the most basic one-foot-in-front-of-the-other.
Pain Day
I can feel it, the pain, hovering around the edges, just waiting for me to do something. Could be stepping on a stool to reach a high shelf, could be switching the laundry, could be picking up the little guy out of the playpen. Something simple and innocuous, a basic everyday human activity. I’ve given up trying to seal the windows to keep out the winter wind, I’ve finished giving away food to friends who need it (for this month), and lud knows I won’t be dancing the belly fat giggle in the hallway again anytime soon. Those all make me hurt. They make that muscle knot up, they make that nerve scream down my leg, they make it so I can’t take a single step without hedging my weight and my bets against blinding pain and a collapsing hip.
Yesterday was the worst it has been. Tomorrow I go back to the kinesiologist for an adjustment, in two days I get a high quality massage. It will get better. But today was a batten-down-the-hatches day where I tried to move as little as possible and hoped really really hard that the pain would stay at the edges and not get loose.
Adventures
I have been rather intrepid in my life, traveling to foreign countries, around the US, galavanting off to programs and events where I don’t already know anyone there, and generally engaging in behavior that pushed at my comfort zone because I loved the adventure of it. Kind of as soon as I was old enough to take off, I did, starting in middle school with a non-family trip to the British Isles and continuing through my Walkabout across country in 2004.
Once I got back from those physical travels, I settled into one town and began calling on support networks of friends and family to move through another series of adventures, this time in sustainability, political and social organizing, activism, social justice, pagan community building, and magical experience. Most of those adventurous experiments were failures and fiascoes, but learning curves are good and some useful seeds got sown.
Now that I am doing this starting a family gig, I feel frustrated that I don’t have the time and energy for my adventures, and it is hard to remember to zoom out enough to realize that this is one of my highest-stakes adventures yet. Just this learning curve of new parenthood, special health-needs infant care, health-care enforced poverty, and dependency on the (tattered? deliberately degrading?) social safety net has been epic and challenging enough to require ALL of my spoons, with hardly anything left over for Occupy, for Beloved Community, for Transition, or any of the rest of it that I (merely) follow on the internet in these few quiet hours edging out midnight.
One thing about adventures that brings me back over and over is that they change a person, pushing for transformation, pushing for space to incorporate new experiences and information, and pushing me into perspectives than I ever imagined until suddenly a new focus snaps into place.
I think I just need to remind myself that I love this shit. Because sometimes, when slogging through swamps with leeches clinging to your knees, it is hard to remember what a great story it will make later in the warm dry coffee shop when you tell it to your friends.
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