Bookworm

Blog Your Heart | A Melancholy Week

Everyone is keeping it real this week. Stephanie has invited us all to blog our hearts and post the link in her comments to this post, so here goes:

My heart is heavy this week.  The tenth anniversary of 9/11 hit me harder than I expected it to do and I was caught in a web of sadness and remembrance all day Sunday.  I don't think it was unhealthy to remember and allow myself to feel what I was feeling, but it kind of cast a pall over the beginning of the week.  Last night we received word that my husband's aunt has cancer which has spread and this morning learned that this means she doesn't have long to live -- perhaps three months.  She is 62.  We lost our brother-in-law earlier this year at the age of 59.  

I feel selfish because all of these things make me think of my own mortality and that of others close to me.  How much I want to live to be around for my beautiful daughter for a really long time.  How I can't imagine a world without my Mom or Dad or husband or sisters in it.  How I fear illness and disability and death.  How I dread those things happening to my loved ones.  How hard it is to cling to the promise of Heaven, to have faith in things not seen.  

[My main blog -- updated more regularly than this one -- is here.]

 

Reverb 10 | Day Two | Writing

Prompt: Writing. What do you do each day that doesn't contribute to your writing -- and can you eliminate it? [Leo Baubata]

I'm wrestling with this one a bit.  Leo is a writer, so it makes sense that this would be the type of thing he would ask himself regularly.  I am not a writer by trade, so should I be asking this about my professional work?  About my favorite hobbies/avocations?  Or should I quit wasting time and answer the question?

Most of my daily activities do not contribute to my writing.  I choose not to upend 90 percent of my existance in the service of my writing, therefore I am not sure anything will change with regard to this in 2011. 

I do enjoy writing.  I tweet, I blog, I write email to friends, I write stories that become part of my scrapbook pages.  Writing a book would be on my bucket list, if I had one.  I would like to work at home as a writer and photographer, but my deep desire for stability and the ability to support my family will likely keep me in my current profession until retirement age. 

If writing a book is important enough to me, at some point it will rise to the surface.  I will become as engaged with writing that book as I currently am with scrapbooking and writing will become my predominent passion outside of work. 

Reverb 10 | Day One | One Word

Reverb 10

December 1 | One Word.
Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

Document (v.)

Earlier this year I chose the word "document" as my word of the year after reading a blog post on Ali Edwards' site.  This was to be the year I finally started scrapbooking pictures and stories about our lives. I've filled three scrapbooks, taken two online classes, and subscribed to another site that offers continuing inspiration and design education. This continues to feel like very important work to me.  These stories have value and will continue to have value, even if just to me.  Since my daughter is an only child, she will not have siblings to fill in the gaps of half-remembered childhood Christmases.  I want these scrapbook pages to do that for her.  This hobby pulls together my love of writing, photography, and creativity -- I am completely enraptured.

Live

The downside to doing a lot of documenting this year is that it is time-consuming and my time outside of work and other responsibilities is limited.  In 2011 I want to make sure I am not turning down opportunities to make memories, live my life, and spend time with loved ones simply so I can retreat to my den and create in solitude.  I am such an introvert and cherish my quiet time.  But my little girl is growing up and these are precious days to spend in her company while my husband and I are still high on her list of preferred playmates.  I want to answer "Yes," more often when she asks, "Will you play with me," or "Can I hang out with you?" 

Schuyler's Monster by Robert Rummel-Hudson

This afternoon I finished reading Schuyler's Monster: A Father's Journey with His Wordless Daughter, a nonfiction memoir by Robert Rummel-Hudson. I could have read it more quickly than I did, but wanted to savor it.

I've been reading Rob's online writing for years and had followed the news of his upcoming book with great interest.  There are a few bloggers/journalers I've followed for so long that I know more details of their lives than I do some close relatives.  The Internet can be a strange phenomenon that way. 

It's the story of the beautiful Miss Schuyler, Rob's and wife Julie's daughter, who has a blazing spirit, a vibrant personality, and a "monster" in her brain.  The monster's name is congenital bilateral perisylvian syndrome (CBPS) which falls under the umbrella of disorders called microgyria.  After some rocky times when their separate, yet equal, pain almost drove them apart, Rob and Julie became a force to be reckoned with and centered their life around finding a true home for their family, specifically a school system where she wouldn't be forgotten or marginalized.

The book basically blew me away. This is no "blogger book" -- this is a book.  So, go read it, already!

Silence

Recently, Schuyler has begun to outwardly express her own awareness of her monster. She has this thing she does now to explain it, a whole story told in gestures and sign language. She gently touches her throat and shakes her head. She then touches her head with her finger (the sign for "think") and then draws a line down to her mouth, signifying how the things she wants to say don't make the trip from her brain to her mouth. I like how she recognizes that her voice is broken, but her mind is working. It's important for her to know that her thoughts are there, and they are magnificent. [Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords: No Blue Fairy.]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The mama was happy because the baby wasn't crying.  And the baby. wasn't. crying.  So I wrote in the chart 'patient may be out of bed in mom's arms,' which was a flimsy, ridiculous order, but the only order I have written in the past two weeks that's actually been worth a damn. [Six Year Med]

These two posts were near each other in Google Reader this morning and they both made my heart ache. 

Letting Go

I've been working on decluttering my den for ages.  I have a hard time letting go of pieces of paper sometimes and find it remarkably easy to acquire them.  Articles from newspapers and magazines, letters and cards, notes and papers from college, concert programs, ephemera from trips.

Some things I'm organizing.  All my correspondence is in hanging file folders with the correspondent's name on it.  I also scanned a gigantic binder of letters for electronic storage.  Items that I want to scrapbook I will also organize in folders. 

Some things I'm dumping, such as saved articles.  If I truly think I'll want them again, I'm either scanning the hard copy or finding it online. 

You wouldn't think it would take a great deal of introspection to get rid of some of this, but sometimes it does.  There are multiple reasons for this, but one major one is that if I get rid of articles on a topic I once researched in school, it's like saying I'm not that person anymore, I won't ever pursue anything scholarly again.  But how insane is it to keep pieces of paper just as a badge that says I might write a scholarly paper sometime?

In the closet I have a small collection of Sports Illustrated magazines with Yankees-related covers.  I collected them during the time in the late 90's when the team had such success.  Now, I really feel ambivalent towards them.  I still follow the team -- I guess I don't feel the need to keep as much memorabilia related to them.

We have storage cupboards in the living room.  One of them is half-filled with records, as in LPs and 45s.  We have a turntable, but it's not part of our current stereo setup.  I can't remember the last time it was used.  Over the weekend, husband was musing about whether we even needed our tape deck anymore.  We should probably get rid of the turntable and the records, for sure.  There's great "content" there, but we're never, ever going to take the time to digitize it.  We're too lazy to even have the turntable set up.  And our little kidlet could certainly use more storage space for her many toys and puzzles. 

I guess watching Clean Sweep on TLC has infiltrated a bit, especially the concept that you should keep what's special to you, what's unique and irreplaceable, and get rid of things that don't have meaning and are keeping you from enjoying your living space. 

The magic ingredient for a fulfilling life is . . . - lifehack.org

Link: The magic ingredient for a fulfilling life is . . . - lifehack.org.

Why rush through life? Do you want it to be over so soon? Doesn’t it take time to appreciate its joys and experiences?

    * Time to learn. Time is necessary to learn, to think, to reflect, and to internalize fresh ideas. The more you rush, the more you are forced to stick with what you already know.
    * Time to think. Time to plan, to prioritize, and to choose how best to expend your attention and energy. Doing anything in haste increases the risks of missing key elements, making needless mistakes, and wasting effort.
    * Time to enjoy. Rushing through an experience robs it of most of its value. Gobbling down a fine meal, leafing through a work of literature with more than half your mind elsewhere, allocating 10 seconds to see the sunset. You might as well not bother.
    * Time for others. It’s not only unpleasant and callous to deny the people close to you your time and attention, it’s downright rude. Why do so many relationships break down nowadays? My bet is that those involved simply don’t allocate enough time to spend together, learning how to enjoy one another’s company.
    * Time to be creative. You need time to reflect and see the links between items or areas of knowledge. The human brain doesn’t work well with disconnected ideas or pieces of information. In all those “gaps” where they appear to be doing nothing at all, the world’s outstanding creative minds are hard at work reflecting, ruminating, “noodling” with odd ideas—tinkering with patterns and unexpected connections. What you see as the result is a mental iceberg: nearly all the activity that brought it about is hidden below the surface.
    * Time just to be. This is the only life you have. How much of it have you missed already because your attention and energy were elsewhere? How much will you still miss, because your days are so filled with activities that there’s no space left to just to live?

What would you say in your last lecture?

Carnegie Mellon has a lecture series called Last Lecture.  In this clip, you see a professor giving the talk who knows it is literally his last lecture.

Values and Motivations

Why do we do what we do?  Why do we spend Sunday morning in church or Saturday morning with our child or those few precious minutes of free time writing or painting or reading?  We all have to determine our own values and build our lives around them.  If someone looked at how you had spent your time this weekend, would it accurately reflect your most important values and priorities? 

I've been thinking of this tonight because I tend to watch a lot of television in the evenings.  And it's not so much that I value television itself so highly (although there are certainly valuable and uplifting things to be seen), as that I usually feel I just need time to not think.  Honestly, if I wasn't watching television, I would probably not be working on various anticipated or inactive writing or photography or scrapbooking projects.  I want to do those things, but after a busy day at work followed by a couple of hours with my beloved and sometimes demanding three year old, I usually can't calm my frazzled brain enough.  So, I treat the frazzle with the Cinderella stories of What Not To Wear and the Cormac McCarthy interview on Oprah and watching people do amazing things with their bodies on So You Think You Can Dance.

I feel a little guilty about this.  But isn't that kind of ridiculous?  If I'm being a responsible worker and wife and mother, who or what exactly am I letting down? 

Resolved: to spend my leisure time as I want to with less guilt.

Life Goals

I recently spoke with a friend who talked about traveling, seeing various places he wanted to see before he dies. (He's young and in good health -- these are just life goals.)

I see people online posting lists of the 100 things they want to do -- everything from learn to play the guitar to skydive.  Maybe I'll make a list like that and add it to this post soon. 

But my life goals, the really important ones, are:

• To be a loving mother to my daughter
• To be a loving partner to my husband
• To be a loving sister, granddaughter, niece, daughter, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, friend...
• To walk the walk of my religious beliefs
• To fill my life to the brim with the things that make me happy and fulfill me: creative pursuits like writing and photography, intellectual pursuits like reading and studying, and active pursuits that will keep me healthy and fit like walking and biking.