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Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Your Dreams are not Mine

Posted in Arts, Life, tagged , , , , on October 21, 2010| 7 Comments »

She works for a video game company, writing in a universe she’s loved since childhood.  In return for doing this job she loves, she gets a salary, vacation days, health benefits.  This is a dream.

She discovered the story of a brave boy in New Orleans, who during Hurricane Katrina drove a busload of people to safety.  Lack of publisher interest didn’t make her lose faith in her story and the courage of this boy, and she decided to self publish to make sure his story was told.  This is a dream.

She worked on her novel for several years, joined a critique group, participated in the writers’ community, and kept trying.  Her debut novel is coming out in the spring of 2012 from a major publisher.  This is a dream.

He made his own publishing deal with a small press and has his second novel in a series (third book total) coming out in 2011.  He was nominated for a Hugo, and was invited to be Guest of Honor to a regional convention.  This is a dream.

She started her own business, which would allow her to support herself comfortably only working halftime.  She spent the rest of her time engaged in whatever creative projects struck her fancy.  This is a dream.

Her dad wants her to attend an Ivy League college she couldn’t afford.  She wants to study voice, composition, and writing and live abroad for awhile.  She’s like an echo of myself, but she’s not.  This is a dream, and it’s hers.  Here’s hoping she gets to live it.

Allow people to live their own dreams.  Every dream is as different as the dreamer, and each one is valid and special in its own way.  When we look down on someone else’s dream, it’s because it threatens something inside of us.

We can do better than that.

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Why I Hate Voting, and Why I’m Going to Do It Anyway

Posted in Life, Society, tagged , on October 12, 2010| 11 Comments »

voting guide

It’s that time again: election time.  I recently received my California General Election information guide in the mail, along with my absentee ballot (I’m on the permanent absentee ballot list because I find it encourages me to vote).  And once more I prepare to climb into the morass of trying to figure out who and what to vote for, which involves trying to find information about people I’ve never heard of and wading through dense legalese.

Some quick statistics, based on numbers I found here and here.  California has an estimated 18-and-over population of 27.7 million.  As of April of this year, there were 16.9 million registered voters in the state.  Some easy math tells us that only about 61% of those over 18 are even registered to vote (leaving over 10 million adults in the dust).  And of course, just because someone is registered doesn’t mean they’ll actually cast a vote in any particular election.

Voting is very important to me.  I feel lucky to have the chance to participate in my government and to have duties as a citizen.  But when I’m faced with my 127-page information guide (which does come in languages besides English, I am happy to say, although how easy it is to obtain one in the correct language is outside of my experience), I’m not so shocked that only sixty percent of those eligible elect to participate (or even have the possibility of participation).  In fact, I’m surprised it’s that many.

(By the way, my actual ballot is printed in both English and Spanish.  Good move, whoever is in charge of such things.)

It takes a lot of time for me to vote, and it causes me a fair amount of anxiety.  I read the text of each proposition carefully, trying to understand what it actually says, and I usually pop on the internet and have a look at the opinions of a few established groups.  And then I hope I’m actually understanding something outside of my expertise and cast my vote.  In this year’s election, I will go through this process ten times, once for each proposition.

And then there are the elections for mysterious positions such as State Controller, Insurance Commissioner, Board of Equalization members, and Water District Director.  (Thank goodness my handy guide tells me what these positions are because otherwise I might not know.)  Meanwhile, I’m just feeling relief that there don’t seem to be any local elections this time around, with all kinds of City Council members, Judges, and assorted bureaucrats who aren’t even associated with political parties in case I need to fall back on blind party voting. (EDIT: Oh no, wait, there are City Council members up this year.  Sigh.)

Then there’s the propaganda problem.  Thankfully I don’t watch TV so at least I miss the commercials, but when digging through available information, how do I know who to believe?  And while I’m willing to dig through the voting records of presidential candidates (during primary time, since by the final election I only have two choices anyway), do I really have time to do so for every single candidate on the ballot?  Hmm.

So I muddle through the ballot, doing my best to make responsible, informed decisions and sometimes falling short.  If I weren’t so personally invested in my voting rights, I could see getting lazy and just not bothering with the whole thing, since it often results in my feeling helpless and/or stupid.  Yet another instance in which my stubbornness comes in handy, forcing me to do the right thing.

Because voting is the right thing.  No matter how unpleasant or confusing, no matter how complicated or mysterious, casting my vote is a concrete action in the face of widespread apathy and ignorance.  It says that I care about my country, I care about my fellow citizens, and I care about my hard-earned right to have a say.  It says that I’m not taking the status quo for granted.  It says that I believe each one of us is involved in creating the world we live in.

Are you planning to vote in November? If not, I hope you consider changing your mind and joining me in the baffling yet important process of participating in our government.

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Seven Reasons I Love Autumn

Posted in Life, tagged on October 7, 2010| 8 Comments »

Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt

1.  Pumpkins.  This includes jack o’lanterns, pumpkins as decoration, and various pumpkin-derived foods, such as: pumpkin soup (be still, my stomach), pumpkin bread and muffins, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin pie.

2.  Other flavors of autumn: warm soups and stews, tea, hot cocoa with marshmallows, sweet potato fries, allspice and cloves, cinnamon and ginger.  And candy corn.

3.  Wearing short skirts with tall boots and not freezing to death.

4.  The chilly damp tang to the air, especially in the evening, when you can almost taste the crispness, edged with a tinge of decaying leaves and smoke.

5.  Halloween, with the costumes, consumable goodies, and discernable glee of children.

6.  The leaves changing colors (I have two Japanese maples in my yard) and eventually falling off and collecting in large crispy heaps.

7.  Toasting by the fireplace for the first time in months, and watching Nala the Hound’s glee at being able to sleep by the fire again.

Photo by Stuart Williams

What do you love about the fall?

 

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Keeping Productive through Tough Times, or How to Survive the Fuchsia Hammer of Doom

Posted in Life, Writing, tagged , , , on October 5, 2010| 8 Comments »

The weekend before last, I was having a writerly conversation with a group of writerly friends.  One of them was expressing heartfelt admiration of a mutual friend of ours, who, he said, had totally mastered the problem of emotion getting in the way of writing.

Even if you’re not a writer, you probably know about this little problem.  It’s when you have a to-do list a mile long, or angelic plans to clean out your closet today, or work projects to complete, or writing to accomplish.  And then something happens.  It doesn’t matter exactly what something is (a particularly disappointing rejection letter, bad personal news, someone wrote something nasty about your favorite hat on Facebook, or what have you); the salient feature of the something is that it’s completely upsetting and derails any work you had plans to accomplish that day (or that week, that month….)

Back to my writerly conversation.  I thought to myself, “Well, that’s great, but it’s not so difficult really.  After all, when I’m writing a first draft of a novel, I’m pretty reliable about cranking out my daily word count in spite of everything else going on.”

Be careful what you think to yourselves, my friends, because four days later, life took a swing at my head with an oversized and ridiculously colored hammer (I think it was fuchsia, but it took me so much by surprise I wasn’t at my observational best).  And before I knew it, I was eating my words.  Imagine me staring at the blank page that was supposed to be my blog post the next day.  Not so difficult, huh?  How could I possibly write an entertaining and interesting blog post with a pounding head (the hammer struck pretty hard, apparently) and emotional turmoil swirling in my brain?

Well, obviously I managed, since I published a blog post last Thursday.  And equally obviously, I’m managing again with this post.  But now this pesky problem has earned my interest.  Life is, in my experience, going to knock me down every so often; how do I keep my productivity in the face of these challenges?  Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

1.  Manage expectations. So maybe I won’t get everything done on the to-do list today after all.  But if I can prioritize the tasks that are really critical, or pick a couple tasks that I feel more confident I can manage (this may be errands, or reading the next chapter in my current nonfiction book, or cooking dinner), then I won’t completely lose momentum and will be better set up to deal with tomorrow.

2.  Take a break. Anything I need to accomplish will seem extra overwhelming while I’m in the heat of strong emotions.  If I can take a short break and do something soothing (play the piano, take a walk, read something fun, play mindless computer games), I’ll be in better shape to tackle what I need to do.

3.  Vent. I’ve recently read that venting actually makes a person more angry instead of less, but even if that’s the case, I find it helpful.  Just knowing someone is on my side comforts me to the point where I have a clearer head.

4.  Channel your emotions into your work. Maybe that anger can give you the extra burst you need to put all those packets together.  Or maybe your disappointment will encourage you to send out that story again.  Or maybe you can use what has happened as inspiration for your blog post (hmm, now you see what I’m up to, don’tcha?)

5.  Compartmentalize. If you can get this down, it can be golden (as long as you don’t take it to extremes, of course).  As I’m writing this blog post, I’m still upset.  If I stop to think about it, I can feel the headache, the neck tension, the tightness in my stomach, and I can dwell upon exactly why I’m feeling the way I do.  Or I can not stop to think about it right now and write this blog post instead.  It’s not that I’m not upset, it’s that I can push the upset off to the side while I complete this task, or even several tasks.  At some point, I’ll have to stop and deal, but it doesn’t always have to be right now.  Believe me, if what you’re upset about is important, it’ll be there waiting for you when you finish.

6.  Find the silver lining. Yeah, I know I just wrote about this, but it too belongs on the list.  Finding a good point, any good point, can be crucial for managing your mood, especially once you’re over the initial shock of whatever is going on.  And if you can manage your mood, then writing (or project planning, or programming, or making phone calls) won’t seem quite so hard after all.

Anyone else have any ideas on how to keep on task in the face of emotional difficulty?  Anything you find particularly effective?  I eagerly await hearing about your experiences.

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What Makes a Home

Posted in Life, tagged , on September 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Between the time I moved out of my childhood home to go to college when I was eighteen and when my husband and I bought and moved into my current house, I lived in eleven different places, with a few short stops at two of my dad’s houses along the way (summers and the transitional period post-living abroad).  Eleven different homes in twelve years.

I began thinking about what makes a home for me when I read Theodora Goss’s interesting essay entitled The Idea of Home.  I’ve had the opposite experience from her, in that in spite of all that moving (and don’t get me started on how much I abhor moving), I rarely felt homeless or like I was searching for a home.  I was searching for something, that’s for sure, but home wasn’t it.  I settled fairly easily into each new apartment, creating my own special retreat from the world.

I remember worrying about not having a home, though.  It must have been soon after I left for college, and I realized I had left my childhood home behind more or less for good (I spent my entire childhood in the same house).  Due to my artistic and traveling tendencies, I thought it was quite possible I’d be spending a lot of time either moving or on the road.  So I asked my mom to make me something that would symbolize home for me, something portable that I could carry with me wherever I went.

Here is the collage she created for me:

Home

Home, by Carol Sundberg

So what does home represent?  Warmth, love, safety, comfort.  A place to let your mind spread out and dream.  A place where you can be completely yourself.

I don’t know when I realized that if I could achieve those ideas, any space became home.  Perhaps it was because I had no choice about looking back.  My old home gradually disintegrated: my mom, who embodied home more for me than anything or anyone else, died; the childhood house was sold; most of my old things were sold or donated or thrown away, a few of which I still regret ten years later; my dog died.  When I would say, “I want to go home,” I would still mean it, but I had no idea what I was even talking about.

And yet the idea of home has always been important to me, so I did what I could to create new homes wherever I went.  Home was a room where I could close the door and be alone.  Home was a place with my favorite books and either a piano keyboard or full-fledged piano.  Home was tea and toast and ice cream always in the freezer.  Home was where I could acknowledge to myself exactly who I was and how I felt.  Home was where my memories lived.

In every place I lived, I found something to love.  Often it was the trees outside my window, pine or redwood, or a distant corner of the sea visible if I stood on tip-toe.  It was the cats who lived there, or the ramshackle hodgepodge of books and papers, or the mismatched furniture.  It was the large expanses of empty carpeting, the guitar leaning on the wall, my warm green woolen blanket.  It was the roses growing out front, or the acoustics in the family room, or the colors of the walls.

Home was the lingering remains of my mom’s hugs, the ones that told me better than anything else that things were going to be okay.

Home is still all those things, and now it is also my husband and my little dog.  Home, for me, isn’t so much a physical place as a place inside of me, a feeling to which I try to give physical manifestation.  It’s comforting to know that I carry the seed of home wherever I go.

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Yom Kippur: the Day of Atonement, or What Atonement Means to Me

Posted in Life, Society, tagged , , on September 16, 2010| 5 Comments »

Yom Kippur begins at sundown tomorrow.  I don’t have an intimate viewpoint on this holiday, not being Jewish myself and having never attended synagogue on this High Holiday.  I’m pretty far from being an expert, so what I’m offering is an outsider’s perspective on what this holiday has come to mean to me.

For years, all I knew about Yom Kippur was that it was a name on the calendar.  When I first learned a little more about it, I didn’t get it at all.  Fasting all day, droning in a foreign language, lots of tears and catharsis.  It was so different from any other holiday I knew about, I even found it a touch creepy.  As the years have gone by, however, my feelings have undergone a profound shift.  While I don’t celebrate it myself, I love this holiday and what it stands for.  It is also known as the Day of Atonement, and I have deep respect for a religion that has set aside an entire day for this type of introspection.

Where have I gone wrong this past year?  Who have I knowingly or perhaps unknowingly injured?  What could I have handled more skillfully?  To me, this process of reviewing the mistakes and hurts of the past year (whether intentional or not, avoidable or not) celebrates what it is to be human.  We all make mistakes, we all handle things badly, we all say things we shouldn’t have said, or leave things unsaid that we shouldn’t have.  We forget or unable to keep important promises; we tell lies, perhaps to avoid even greater conflict; we don’t have the time or energy or capability to be there the way we wish we could.  We make other people cry; we lose friends through change, neglect, or direct confrontation; we make the wrong decision.  And here’s this holiday that acknowledges this reality we live with, that says: Yes, it’s true, none of us is perfect, and yet we can always strive to improve ourselves, to move on and do better next time.

The way I see it, the process of atonement has three steps.

Step 1: Be aware of your effect on the world. Think about the actions you have taken, the mistakes you have made, how you’ve treated other people.  Reflect on questions of morality.  Remember those times you let your emotions get the better of you.

Step 2: Feel the emotions associated with your actions, and then forgive yourself and let go. This is a hard step, and a critical one.  Atonement isn’t about self-hatred; that will only make your behavior worse over time, not to mention erode at your happiness and well-being.  Atonement is taking responsibility for yourself and your choices, while remembering that you are human and imperfect.  By the end of Yom Kippur, a practicing Jew is considered to be absolved by God.  However, if you don’t believe in a God to be absolved by, you need to find the strength to forgive yourself instead.

Step 3: Learn from your previous behavior and mistakes. Having taken the time to introspect so deeply about your behavior, you can move through life with a cleaner slate.  Not a blank one, of course, but at least a less messy one.  Take the time to think of possible solutions for some of your mistakes.  Sometimes there won’t be a solution, and that’s okay too, but at least you’ll know one way or the other.  Think of how you can become more like the ideal person you wish you were.  Will you ever really become that person?  Perhaps not, but I like to think that throughout life, we draw ever closer to realizing our full potential, as long as we have the willingness to learn from our experience.

I love Yom Kippur because it’s a formalized ritual that helps people go through these steps with the full support of a community behind them.  It means they don’t have to face their faults and shortcomings alone, but can remember that everyone else is in the same boat.

So whether you’re Jewish or not, whether you’re religious or not, I hope that’s what you take away from this post.  We all make mistakes, and it’s important to be aware of them and learn from them.  But we’re also all in this soup of humanity together, capable of learning from what has passed before.

As Anne in L.M. Montgomerie’s Anne of Green Gables says, “Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”

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E-books and the Apocalypse

Posted in Life, Society, Writing, tagged , on September 14, 2010| 8 Comments »

I am the semi-satisfied owner of a Kindle (semi-satisfied because the DRM still creeps me out) and in general, I’m a fan of electronic books.  I’m also a fan of hardbacks, mass paperbacks, trade paperbacks, super deluxe special editions… basically I’m an all-around kind of book fan.

But I do have one worry about electronic books that no one ever seems to talk about: what possible disastrous effect will electronic books have on the store of human knowledge, art, and entertainment in the event of an apocalypse?

I know this is illogical.  I know that books printed on paper are vulnerable to all kinds of destruction: fire, flood, crumbling to pieces due to old age, complete inaccessibility due to building collapse, toxic waste, control of written material by a tyrannical minority, etc.  So electronic books don’t have the monopoly on tragic loss.  But still, think of the possibilities.

First, on a personal level.  If you were living through a Lost scenario (plane crash onto isolated island, no rescue in sight), your e-reader would die within … a couple weeks, maybe?  If you were lucky and it didn’t suffer unfixable damage.  Wouldn’t you rather have a few paperbacks that would last your entire exile?  Not only could you read those books again and again (and out loud to your fellow strandees as well), if you had a pen, you could write *new* stories in the margins and end pages, thereby giving you more reading material.

Or what if the power was off in your house for a week or more?  (This actually happens in real life even without an apocalypse.)  And let’s say you’ve been lazy about keeping your e-reader up to full power (this also actually happens in real life).  So once it gets dark, you decide to read with your flashlight, since you can’t watch movies or TV, you can’t play piano because it’s too hard to read the sheet music in the dark, you can’t call anyone because your cell phone is running out of charge and you’re preserving it for an emergency.  But then you can’t read either because your Kindle is dead!  Meaning you’ll have to find a coffee shop that allows you to mooch off power (or hope the power isn’t off at your office as well, if you are fortunate enough to have one of those).  Or you’ll be stuck whispering ghost stories in the dark.

Or what if, twenty years from now, Amazon goes out of business?  And what if there are problems, possibly due to the stupid DRM, with porting your library, now possibly numbering in the thousands of titles (definitely at least hundreds), over to whatever alternate e-reader is dominant at the time?  (If there is an alternate and Amazon doesn’t go under in a general economic collapse.)  You may scoff and say how unlikely this is, but having just read Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects (which I highly recommend even if I think it should have been a novel instead of a novella), you never know.  (Note: this is especially true if you are the kind of person who daydreams about apocalypses.)  After all, what good do all those old 5.25 floppy disk backups do me today?  I can’t look at any of my old papers or stories for reference anymore unless I happen to locate a hard copy.

Now, expand out to a societal level.  My favorite apocalypses to ponder these days are generally related to global warming and/or running out of oil and/or some political excitement.

 

A retreating glacier

(Sorry, I don’t do zombies.)  Now, if I’m feeling optimistic about these scenarios, I can hope that by the time trouble strikes, solar power has become more widespread (or wind, or water) or some other practical energy source has been developed.  But will the infrastructure be in place so there isn’t even a blip when switching over the electricity grid?  Will there be enough electricity all the time so people can spare the amount it takes to charge an e-reader instead of, say, run lab or farming equipment or a water heater or power a hospital?  Now if you owned physical books, on the other hand, your only problem would be lack of time in daylight to read them, and if you could figure out how to make candles, well then, problem solved.  (Now an e-book with built in solar energy panels could be cool, but what if the panels break?  Would spare parts be available?  Would I have or be able to purchase the expertise to use said spare parts?)

Whenever I plan my ideal supplies for surviving post-apocalypse, I always include as many reference books as possible (unless, of course, I have to be mobile in said apocalypse world, which severely limits the books you can carry).  There are so many basic things that modern life has left me unprepared to face: making candles is a great example.  Making soap, medical and first aid techniques, mechanical crash courses for as many devices as possible, farming and gardening, how to gut a fish or deal with a live chicken if I want to eat it.  The knowledge I don’t have that would be necessary for survival goes on and on.  Maybe I’ll be lucky and live in a community with experts on various of these topics, but what if I don’t?  I’ll have to rely on the reference books.

And I’m not even getting into the dream of preserving human knowledge and art (Shakespeare, anyone?) for future generations.

What this all boils down to is that I’m unlikely to give up my physical library any time soon.  Call me old-fashioned in ten years or twenty, and I’ll probably cheerfully agree with you.  But if the apocalypse comes, I’ll have the last laugh.

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My Trip to Maui, told in photos

Posted in Life on September 13, 2010| 3 Comments »

Yes, folks, I’m safely back and well rested, if still a touch prone to hobbling around due to a tender ankle.  Maui was lovely, as it always seems to be, and we managed to have a few adventures in spite of my relative lack of mobility:

Beginning of trip

So happy to have made it through the labyrinth of airports all in one piece.

Resort

The resort: the view from our lanai.

Maui waterfall

Tropical waterfall

Maui ocean

Apparently this rock is in the beginning of one of the Jurassic Park films.  Who knew?

Dolphins

Dolphin watching trip!

Baby dolphin

See the little dolphin calf on the right?  Adorable.

Maui sunset

Sunset

Happy and relaxed at the end of the trip.

So there you have it, plus lots of great food and swimming (although not at the same time).

Tomorrow I’ll have a new post up about apocalypses that you already know you want to read, so I’ll see you then!

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Brief Update

Posted in Life on August 26, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Just to let you all know, I’m actually NOT in England or Wales right now.  Nope, I’m lounging on my very own couch, as I have been doing for the past week or so.  Apparently my ankles had ideas of their own regarding my upcoming trip, and after waking up the day before my flight with a swollen bruised ankle that couldn’t take any weight, I rethought the entire trip and canceled it.

Don’t feel too sorry for me though.  I’ve been having a staycation while the ankle heals, and we’re leaving for Maui on Saturday.  So I’ll be swimming and going down water slides and eating too much and reading while listening to the ocean’s surf and getting fancy spa treatments and watching romantic sunsets with my husband.  Not too shabby, all things considered. 🙂

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Journey to England and Wales

Posted in Life, tagged , , on August 20, 2010| 9 Comments »

Vacation time!  This weekend I am getting on a plane and taking off for faraway places.  If I were an especially kind person, I would have arranged for guest bloggers in my absence, but alas, I am not as kind as all that.  It’s possible I might pop on with the occasional photo, but it is equally possible I will disappear off the internet sphere for a few weeks while I go off, rejuvenate, see some amazing sights, and have a great time.

In the meantime, here are some of the places I hope to be seeing:

Bath

Idyllic Cotswolds

Thornbury Castle

Mount Snowdon

My favorite city

Have fun while I’m away, and I’ll see you on the other side of Labor Day, if not before.

Cheers!

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