Yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with Daisy's veterinarian, Dr. Dave. A few weeks ago, Daisy injured her knee so that her knee cap repeatedly--and painfully--dislocated. After we did our best to keep her from running and jumping for a week, she was doing much better and hadn't dislocated her knee cap in more than two days. I called Dr. Dave and left a message saying she was doing fine.
The next day, I let her out in the yard, and when I looked out, she was racing at warp speed, a picture of golden enthusiasm and energy. She changed directions suddenly and continued her sprint, ears flapping and fur rippling from the speed in her four furry paws. After staring for a moment in sheer awe of her unrestrained dog joy, I remembered that she should NOT be running. I called her in, and later that evening, she dislocated her knee again.
Shoot.
When I called Dr. Dave yesterday, he told me that dogs...goldens in particular...do not have the cognitive ability to understand that they have to take it easy. As soon as they start feeling better, they go full speed. We humans have to do the thinking for them. He was saying, nicely, that I have to be smarter than my dog, which, clearly, I was not when I let her out unsupervised.
So now Daisy must spend two more weeks on rest and anti-inflammatory medications.
As I was contemplating her stupidity and its consequences, it occurred to me that George, my crazy endurance-athlete husband, understands Daisy's impulse to run perfectly. You see, he has, for many years, repeatedly injured himself, rested for too short a period of time, reinjured himself, and suffered the consequences. In short, he has displayed the same cognitive limitations in this area that Daisy has.
This past weekend, however, he demonstrated a remarkable restraint heretofore unseen in the annals of his triathlon career: he went out for a short run and returned almost immediately because his knee hurt. He had run over 9 miles the day before, and he realized he needed to rest. He limited his activity in response to the thought that pain was trying to tell him something and he ought to listen to it.
He's learning. Daisy, on the other hand, can not.
Since George is, in all other ways, cognitively blessed with a well-developed frontal lobe, I have to assume that his slow learning curve on the matter of injury recovery is a glitch in our evolution. After contemplating George's challenge in this area, I reminded myself of the principle that if you point a finger at someone else there are three fingers pointing back at you. Oh, yes. I'm guilty of this stupidity, too.
I've been living with some pain for a while and have not done anything about it, mainly because I don't want a repeat of six years ago.
You may be asking, "What happened six years ago that would make you stupid, Susan?" Let me tell you.
Six years ago, I had pain and went to the doctor. What followed was a year of medical testing hell, multiple misdiagnoses, and enough test radiation that I had to carry a card explaining that I wasn't making dirty bombs but had been tortured by doctors, in case Homeland Security scanned me with a geiger counter. Good times, man. Good times.
In the end, only two tests proved positive. As a result, I had surgery to remove my gall bladder and started taking prilosec for gastritis. The gastritis was caused by my taking too much ibuprofen for joint pain, which was caused by my insomnia.
Life-long insomniacs, it turns out, have a high incidence of joint pain because the human body repairs daily wear-and-tear in our joints only when we are deeply asleep. We insomniacs don't get enough deep sleep, so our joints don't repair themselves, and we have pain.
I've barely been back to the general practitioner since, though of course I've kept up my annual visits to the stirrups and boob squisher. You know, just for the fun of it. And I've done my level best to get at least six hours of sleep a night, with mixed results.
Lately, I've dismissed some new joint aches and pains as the natural consequence of being a middle-aged insomniac, and when a list of perimenopausal symptoms included joint pain, that seemed like enough reason for my joints to hurt. But the truth is, I don't know. I am not a doctor. And even though doctors practice medicine (wouldn't it be nicer if they did medicine?), they know more about how my body works--and how to fix it--than I do.
I made an appointment yesterday to see my primary care doctor about the pain. Hopefully, she'll simply order me to start doing yoga, which, I've read, is helpful for joint pain and doesn't involve medications that damage your gut or your heart. Because without a doctor ordering me to do yoga, I simply won't do it.
I'm stupid that way.
In what ways are you stupid? How do you ignore what your body tells you it needs? What, if anything, makes you listen?
Showing posts with label advice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advice. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
Getting on Schedule
While I embrace certain aspects of our technological age (computers, the Internet, smart phones), other aspects leave me feeling distinctly annoyed.
Take electronic organizers.
Please. I don't want them in my life anymore.
For years, I happily used a mid-size DayPlanner that worked just great. After I had children, however, it seemed a bit cumbersome and weighed down the diaper bag, so I abandoned it except as an address book.
Mothers of infants and small children do not need DayPlanners. They only serve to remind the mothers of how out-of-control their lives are. Some mornings, it takes three hours just to get yourself and the kids dressed, fed, and out the door, what with the diaper blow-outs, spit-ups, tantrums, and loads of unexpected laundry to be started.
Five or six years ago, George gave me a Palm Pilot. He had noticed how cumbersome my DayPlanner was as an address book, so he thought a Palm would be handy. I welcomed the chance to get organized again since my baby wasn't a baby anymore. Perhaps my life could move back to its previously organized state.
At first, I thought I merely resisted change from a written planner to an electronic one, since I'm pretty much a Luddite at heart. Like Daisy encountering her first truck parked on the side of the road, I approached my Palm Pilot cautiously and woofed my unease at its tiny alien presence in my purse. Unlike Daisy, who now no longer balks at strange cars parked on our walking route, my Palm never felt natural as a scheduler.
It worked--and still works--great as an address book, though.
Then, I tried Windows' Email Scheduler, thinking I would check it every morning when I turned on my computer. Instead, I got annoyed when it popped up stuff that I had to click to dismiss. Clicking to get the calendar out of my way when I hadn't done the stuff on it seemed pointless and unhelpful. My computer doesn't go with me through the day, and being reminded about something in the morning still gave me ample opportunity to forget it.
And forget it I did. Since I started trying to get organized again, I have become convinced that childbirth sucked all the organization skills out of my brain, and with the start of perimenopause, that lack of organization got worse. The same woman who used to juggle dozens of projects at a time and even finished ahead of schedule on many of them suddenly couldn't remember her weekly volunteer schedule at the school library.
I had to do something to get control, and if a Palm and Windows couldn't help, perhaps a cell phone would. George and I bought smart phones in December, and the phone seemed a more sensible location for an organizer since I carry it with me most of the time and can reference it whenever I feel like it. I approached this organizer with optimism and enthusiasm.
Instead, I once again grew annoyed at having to dismiss stuff that I remembered, and despite the fact that the phone is with me most of the time, I simply couldn't remember to check it regularly throughout the day. Surely there is an app that works better than the one already on the phone--for instance, one that plays the theme from Rocky fifteen minutes before each scheduled appointment. But it feels like a gigantic waste of time to go looking for such an app when I already resent the phone as an organizer.
Every year, I buy an old-fashioned weekly planner at Barnes and Noble in early January. This planner sits with a pen by my bed, and each night I write down things that I want to remember about that day...funny stuff the boys say, milestone events, things I am grateful for. At the end of the year, I put the planner with all the memorabilia that I have collected for the year to scrapbook. It's a huge asset for scrapbook journaling because I can look up the exact date that we went to the Columbus Zoo or that Jack tasted a pancake without throwing up.
Problem is, I haven't done much scrapbooking in the past three years. In fact, I've done none, which means that I've slacked on filling those planners for the last year. This year's has very little written in it so far...which made me realize that it would be a perfect organizer.
That is, until my husband shared his organizational method with me, which is even better than my weekly planner and allows me to leave the weekly planner by my bed, thus sustaining the illusion that I'll get back to scrapbooking. Eventually.
Let me pause to share how surprised I was by his enthusiasm for helping me organize myself. You see, this is a man who's main organizational method seems to be "cover every flat surface you can find with your stuff so you can see everything and simultaneously drive your spouse insane." Remember this post?
George saw me putting information in the weekly planner and said, with enthusiasm, "Let me show you what I do!" He pulled out a monthly planner that has nice, big squares for each day of a month, as well as a bunch of blank lined pages following the calendar for notes, lists, and such. It's brilliant. A month at a glance. One place to keep a running to-do list. I embraced the simplicity of his method immediately.
He took me to Office Max yesterday to purchase one. My only complaint is that the only really good monthly planners--the ones without a bunch of superfluous and distracting stuff--are gray and boring. I've already stamped the cover of mine to make it a little less institutional looking. Stamping on plastic is a challenge, but at least George won't mistake his planner for mine.
I'm optimistic that this will work, that I will regain at least a modicum of control and not let so much slip through the cracks of my life. Time will tell if this method of organization will help me feel less scattered-brained and forgetful. I'll keep you posted.
Now it's your turn. What method do you use (if any!) to stay organized and on schedule?
Take electronic organizers.
Please. I don't want them in my life anymore.
For years, I happily used a mid-size DayPlanner that worked just great. After I had children, however, it seemed a bit cumbersome and weighed down the diaper bag, so I abandoned it except as an address book.
Mothers of infants and small children do not need DayPlanners. They only serve to remind the mothers of how out-of-control their lives are. Some mornings, it takes three hours just to get yourself and the kids dressed, fed, and out the door, what with the diaper blow-outs, spit-ups, tantrums, and loads of unexpected laundry to be started.
Five or six years ago, George gave me a Palm Pilot. He had noticed how cumbersome my DayPlanner was as an address book, so he thought a Palm would be handy. I welcomed the chance to get organized again since my baby wasn't a baby anymore. Perhaps my life could move back to its previously organized state.
At first, I thought I merely resisted change from a written planner to an electronic one, since I'm pretty much a Luddite at heart. Like Daisy encountering her first truck parked on the side of the road, I approached my Palm Pilot cautiously and woofed my unease at its tiny alien presence in my purse. Unlike Daisy, who now no longer balks at strange cars parked on our walking route, my Palm never felt natural as a scheduler.
It worked--and still works--great as an address book, though.
Then, I tried Windows' Email Scheduler, thinking I would check it every morning when I turned on my computer. Instead, I got annoyed when it popped up stuff that I had to click to dismiss. Clicking to get the calendar out of my way when I hadn't done the stuff on it seemed pointless and unhelpful. My computer doesn't go with me through the day, and being reminded about something in the morning still gave me ample opportunity to forget it.
And forget it I did. Since I started trying to get organized again, I have become convinced that childbirth sucked all the organization skills out of my brain, and with the start of perimenopause, that lack of organization got worse. The same woman who used to juggle dozens of projects at a time and even finished ahead of schedule on many of them suddenly couldn't remember her weekly volunteer schedule at the school library.
I had to do something to get control, and if a Palm and Windows couldn't help, perhaps a cell phone would. George and I bought smart phones in December, and the phone seemed a more sensible location for an organizer since I carry it with me most of the time and can reference it whenever I feel like it. I approached this organizer with optimism and enthusiasm.
Instead, I once again grew annoyed at having to dismiss stuff that I remembered, and despite the fact that the phone is with me most of the time, I simply couldn't remember to check it regularly throughout the day. Surely there is an app that works better than the one already on the phone--for instance, one that plays the theme from Rocky fifteen minutes before each scheduled appointment. But it feels like a gigantic waste of time to go looking for such an app when I already resent the phone as an organizer.
Every year, I buy an old-fashioned weekly planner at Barnes and Noble in early January. This planner sits with a pen by my bed, and each night I write down things that I want to remember about that day...funny stuff the boys say, milestone events, things I am grateful for. At the end of the year, I put the planner with all the memorabilia that I have collected for the year to scrapbook. It's a huge asset for scrapbook journaling because I can look up the exact date that we went to the Columbus Zoo or that Jack tasted a pancake without throwing up.
Problem is, I haven't done much scrapbooking in the past three years. In fact, I've done none, which means that I've slacked on filling those planners for the last year. This year's has very little written in it so far...which made me realize that it would be a perfect organizer.
That is, until my husband shared his organizational method with me, which is even better than my weekly planner and allows me to leave the weekly planner by my bed, thus sustaining the illusion that I'll get back to scrapbooking. Eventually.
Let me pause to share how surprised I was by his enthusiasm for helping me organize myself. You see, this is a man who's main organizational method seems to be "cover every flat surface you can find with your stuff so you can see everything and simultaneously drive your spouse insane." Remember this post?
George saw me putting information in the weekly planner and said, with enthusiasm, "Let me show you what I do!" He pulled out a monthly planner that has nice, big squares for each day of a month, as well as a bunch of blank lined pages following the calendar for notes, lists, and such. It's brilliant. A month at a glance. One place to keep a running to-do list. I embraced the simplicity of his method immediately.
He took me to Office Max yesterday to purchase one. My only complaint is that the only really good monthly planners--the ones without a bunch of superfluous and distracting stuff--are gray and boring. I've already stamped the cover of mine to make it a little less institutional looking. Stamping on plastic is a challenge, but at least George won't mistake his planner for mine.
I'm optimistic that this will work, that I will regain at least a modicum of control and not let so much slip through the cracks of my life. Time will tell if this method of organization will help me feel less scattered-brained and forgetful. I'll keep you posted.
Now it's your turn. What method do you use (if any!) to stay organized and on schedule?
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Things I Learned in 2010
In no particular order, here are some things I learned (or relearned) in 2010.
One thing people can do after they lose a loved one is open their hearts to love someone new. Ask my mom, whose baby grandson was born six months after her own mother died, and ask our family, who welcomed Daisy into our home three weeks after Hoover died. The pain of loss doesn’t go away, and someone new doesn’t replace someone gone at all, but someone new helps the heart grow new love. And that’s a good thing.
When someone unsubscribes from one of my blogs, it’s nothing personal. At least, that's what I tell myself.
There are definitely more nice people in the world than mean people, though I admit some mean people can definitely screw it up for the rest of us. I’d started to doubt the general goodness of humanity while listening to regular news outlets and their sensational stories of greed, corruption, political bad boys, economic misery, and death and destruction. As an antidote to all the negativity, I made http://www.happynews.com/ my home page on my computer. I started getting a daily dose of, well, happy news. Stories of goodness, mercy, compassion, and love are everywhere in this world…if you look and listen in the right places. Ignoring the bad in the world is rather stupid, but if you fill your mind and heart with only knowledge of the bad, you lose perspective, which is a terribly important thing to have.
Rescuing wildlife makes you feel good. Releasing that rescued wildlife back into the wild after it has recovered makes you feel giddy and causes you to erupt in giggle fits for days after.
The whole Word for the Year thing is not working for me. I’m sad about this because it’s such a wonderful idea. My word for 2010 was Write, and while I did write quite a lot here and on Simplicity, I didn’t work on my book or start freelancing, which were the goals of the word in the first place. Also, my autism blog is suffering sadly from neglect. Oddly, I look back over 2010 with joy and pleasure despite this failure because I did a lot that I’m proud of. I took care of two boys, a man, and two dogs. I blogged over 233 posts on Questioning my Intelligence and over 427 posts on Simplicity. I created hundreds of cards and pushed my creative self harder than ever before. I read dozens of books. I learned and laughed and lived and drank coffee and ate chocolate. I ironed George’s shirts, made his lunches, and was his Iron Sherpa at Ironman Wisconsin. I received countless little kindnesses…even from total strangers from the Land of Internet. I cooked several meals and coordinated meals for dozens of people in our church. I finished another year-long Bible study. I spoke in church and didn’t die from fear. I mourned one very good dog and welcomed another into our home. I helped release a wild animal back into nature where he belonged. I sent a lot of cards this year, including hundreds to the troops for their use, and hopefully, each card brightened its recipient’s day.
I once heard that to be happy, every day you need to do something for someone else, something for your mind, something for your body, something for your soul, something creative, and something you don’t want to do which needs to be done. After this year, I would add that you also need to look at everything that happens to you and everything you do through a prism of love. I used to think the best prayer ever was “This, too, shall pass.” It’s pretty useful, isn’t it? Now, however, I think the best prayer ever is “Lord, make me a blessing to someone today.” Maintaining this loving perspective on life twenty-four/seven is pretty much impossible (at least for me and probably for any other mostly normal human being), but it’s amazing how transformative it can be. At least, it makes ironing shirts much more pleasant, which can only be a good thing.
When you have an impulse to do something nice, don’t over-think it and wimp out. Just do it.
For the past 11 years, since I became a stay-at-home mother, I’d felt my life made very poor copy in our annual Christmas letter. The day-to-day of caring for two boys just isn’t that interesting; you can only say so much about diapers and potty training and gymnastics lessons and school. For the past two-and-a-half years, I’ve written that mundane life into this blog, making it funny (I hope) and universal, and showing just how meaningful and important it is. This year, my children reached ages that require less daily dependence on me, and so I branched out and started some new things, such as the Mark’s Finest Papers Design Team (for creative development) and Stephen Ministry training (for spiritual and interpersonal development). To varying degrees, both adventures have been life-changing in wonderful ways. Who knows what 2011 will hold, but it’s bound to be interesting!
Next week, I'll post a new Word of the Year. I think. At least I'll give all of you who have more success with your words a chance to share your word and commit to it for 2011. Have a very safe and happy new year's celebration!
One thing people can do after they lose a loved one is open their hearts to love someone new. Ask my mom, whose baby grandson was born six months after her own mother died, and ask our family, who welcomed Daisy into our home three weeks after Hoover died. The pain of loss doesn’t go away, and someone new doesn’t replace someone gone at all, but someone new helps the heart grow new love. And that’s a good thing.
When someone unsubscribes from one of my blogs, it’s nothing personal. At least, that's what I tell myself.
There are definitely more nice people in the world than mean people, though I admit some mean people can definitely screw it up for the rest of us. I’d started to doubt the general goodness of humanity while listening to regular news outlets and their sensational stories of greed, corruption, political bad boys, economic misery, and death and destruction. As an antidote to all the negativity, I made http://www.happynews.com/ my home page on my computer. I started getting a daily dose of, well, happy news. Stories of goodness, mercy, compassion, and love are everywhere in this world…if you look and listen in the right places. Ignoring the bad in the world is rather stupid, but if you fill your mind and heart with only knowledge of the bad, you lose perspective, which is a terribly important thing to have.
Rescuing wildlife makes you feel good. Releasing that rescued wildlife back into the wild after it has recovered makes you feel giddy and causes you to erupt in giggle fits for days after.
The whole Word for the Year thing is not working for me. I’m sad about this because it’s such a wonderful idea. My word for 2010 was Write, and while I did write quite a lot here and on Simplicity, I didn’t work on my book or start freelancing, which were the goals of the word in the first place. Also, my autism blog is suffering sadly from neglect. Oddly, I look back over 2010 with joy and pleasure despite this failure because I did a lot that I’m proud of. I took care of two boys, a man, and two dogs. I blogged over 233 posts on Questioning my Intelligence and over 427 posts on Simplicity. I created hundreds of cards and pushed my creative self harder than ever before. I read dozens of books. I learned and laughed and lived and drank coffee and ate chocolate. I ironed George’s shirts, made his lunches, and was his Iron Sherpa at Ironman Wisconsin. I received countless little kindnesses…even from total strangers from the Land of Internet. I cooked several meals and coordinated meals for dozens of people in our church. I finished another year-long Bible study. I spoke in church and didn’t die from fear. I mourned one very good dog and welcomed another into our home. I helped release a wild animal back into nature where he belonged. I sent a lot of cards this year, including hundreds to the troops for their use, and hopefully, each card brightened its recipient’s day.
I once heard that to be happy, every day you need to do something for someone else, something for your mind, something for your body, something for your soul, something creative, and something you don’t want to do which needs to be done. After this year, I would add that you also need to look at everything that happens to you and everything you do through a prism of love. I used to think the best prayer ever was “This, too, shall pass.” It’s pretty useful, isn’t it? Now, however, I think the best prayer ever is “Lord, make me a blessing to someone today.” Maintaining this loving perspective on life twenty-four/seven is pretty much impossible (at least for me and probably for any other mostly normal human being), but it’s amazing how transformative it can be. At least, it makes ironing shirts much more pleasant, which can only be a good thing.
When you have an impulse to do something nice, don’t over-think it and wimp out. Just do it.
For the past 11 years, since I became a stay-at-home mother, I’d felt my life made very poor copy in our annual Christmas letter. The day-to-day of caring for two boys just isn’t that interesting; you can only say so much about diapers and potty training and gymnastics lessons and school. For the past two-and-a-half years, I’ve written that mundane life into this blog, making it funny (I hope) and universal, and showing just how meaningful and important it is. This year, my children reached ages that require less daily dependence on me, and so I branched out and started some new things, such as the Mark’s Finest Papers Design Team (for creative development) and Stephen Ministry training (for spiritual and interpersonal development). To varying degrees, both adventures have been life-changing in wonderful ways. Who knows what 2011 will hold, but it’s bound to be interesting!
Next week, I'll post a new Word of the Year. I think. At least I'll give all of you who have more success with your words a chance to share your word and commit to it for 2011. Have a very safe and happy new year's celebration!
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Vote
I have a very good friend who is a political junky. She volunteers and makes phone calls and loves the whole process of elections. In fact, she's one of the top volunteers in our area for her party. Because her phone number is unlisted, she doesn’t get the recorded messages and misses them. She loves watching the ads on television and reading the print pieces from all the candidates. The media frenzy fascinates her. She never gets annoyed with it or tired of it.
Needless to say, this is her favorite day of the year.
My response to this media frenzy is different. In the past two weeks, our house has received a number of recorded phone calls from many different candidates. Ohio is a hot state this election, so the activity here has been intense. While intellectually I know that the recorded calls work (no candidate would pay for them if they didn’t!), they don’t work on me because I don’t listen. Yesterday, I was in the bathroom when the phone rang. I rushed to answer (you’ve all done this, haven’t you?) and it was a RECORDED political message. Grrrr.
When Newt Gingrich called my house this weekend, I hung up on him. Putting aside the entire issue of politics, hanging up on Newt was deeply satisfying. I don’t care how famous he is, he doesn’t have the right to bother me in my own home. Click. Score one for the housewife!
We don’t watch network television anymore, so we didn’t see the nasty televised ads. But I’d be tired of them if we had been watching.
I am NOT, however, tired of living in a country that regularly allows me to fill little circles on a ballot and register my opinion. On Election Day, I feel like the luckiest woman alive. I bounce happily into my polling place, full of smiles and kind words to the poll volunteers, take my ballot, go to my little cubicle, and VOTE! I’d squeal with joy if it wouldn’t distract other people.
My political junky friend and I both share this deep and abiding passion for the exercise of democracy. We don’t understand people who don’t make time to vote, who don’t exercise a right that our country’s founders fought to give us, who don’t see the point in doing something that millions of people alive today in less fortunate countries desperately want to do and can't.
Those people, the oppressed and silent masses whose voices are not heard in their own lands…I think of them on Election Day.
For my American readers, if you already voted, I thank you. If you haven’t and aren’t planning to, I urge you to get off your butt and just do it. I don’t care who you vote for, what issues you support or oppose, or what party you identify with.
You can vote.
And that makes you the luckiest human alive.
Needless to say, this is her favorite day of the year.
My response to this media frenzy is different. In the past two weeks, our house has received a number of recorded phone calls from many different candidates. Ohio is a hot state this election, so the activity here has been intense. While intellectually I know that the recorded calls work (no candidate would pay for them if they didn’t!), they don’t work on me because I don’t listen. Yesterday, I was in the bathroom when the phone rang. I rushed to answer (you’ve all done this, haven’t you?) and it was a RECORDED political message. Grrrr.
When Newt Gingrich called my house this weekend, I hung up on him. Putting aside the entire issue of politics, hanging up on Newt was deeply satisfying. I don’t care how famous he is, he doesn’t have the right to bother me in my own home. Click. Score one for the housewife!
We don’t watch network television anymore, so we didn’t see the nasty televised ads. But I’d be tired of them if we had been watching.
I am NOT, however, tired of living in a country that regularly allows me to fill little circles on a ballot and register my opinion. On Election Day, I feel like the luckiest woman alive. I bounce happily into my polling place, full of smiles and kind words to the poll volunteers, take my ballot, go to my little cubicle, and VOTE! I’d squeal with joy if it wouldn’t distract other people.
My political junky friend and I both share this deep and abiding passion for the exercise of democracy. We don’t understand people who don’t make time to vote, who don’t exercise a right that our country’s founders fought to give us, who don’t see the point in doing something that millions of people alive today in less fortunate countries desperately want to do and can't.
Those people, the oppressed and silent masses whose voices are not heard in their own lands…I think of them on Election Day.
For my American readers, if you already voted, I thank you. If you haven’t and aren’t planning to, I urge you to get off your butt and just do it. I don’t care who you vote for, what issues you support or oppose, or what party you identify with.
You can vote.
And that makes you the luckiest human alive.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Clean Windows
“Housework, if it is done right, can kill you.” John Skow
Around the time I decided to stay home and raise my children, I bought a book called Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson. It’s an impressively weighty tome, with 884 pages of tiny, law-school textbook type with shockingly few illustrations. The author, a lawyer (why doesn’t this surprise me?), certainly sets a high standard of cleanliness and order.
In chapter two, Cheryl lists her idea of daily chores:
-Put soiled clothes in hamper and hang up other clothes
-Clean sinks and tubs after use (including drains and traps)
-Check soap, toilet paper, other supplies in bathroom; change towels if necessary
-Prepare meals and clean up afterward
-Put out fresh kitchen towels and cleaning utensils [My note: what exactly are cleaning utensils?]
-Clean floors in high-use areas (kitchen, entryway) by sweeping, damp-mopping, or vacuuming
-Refill vaporizers and humidifiers (and clean if necessary)
-Neaten; put away newspapers, magazines, and similar items
-Do interim marketing when necessary
-Empty trash and garbage containers (evening)
While some of Cheryl's advice seems, to my mildly AR/OC personality, quite good, I have never, even in my wildest flights of obsession, lived up to this list, much less to her list of weekly chores, which includes, among other things, dusting light bulbs, washing out and sanitizing garbage cans, vacuuming lamp shades, and washing “all” combs and brushes.
This reminds me of Heather Armstrong’s blog and all the pictures she posts of her dogs on pristine hardwood floors. According to Heather, “People often write me and ask how I keep my wood floors so clean when I live with a child and a dog, and my answer is that I use a technique called Suffering from a Mental Illness.”
My own OCD isn’t clinically significant (thank Heaven!), and when I bought Home Comforts, I hoped it would help me streamline my housekeeping and make it more efficient so I wouldn’t have to spend so much time cleaning. Instead, just reading the first few chapters made me feel like a filthy, no-good, dirty rotten loser. I was already spending far too many hours in fruitless search for a clean house (baby, pack-rat husband, two dogs, four bathrooms…ohmygosh I was so incredibly doomed to fail!). So I quit reading Home Comforts to preserve my sanity. Honestly, if a person kept house at this level, he or she would spend most waking hours cleaning: who would want to do that?
Well, my grandmother, for one. She kept house at the level recommended by Home Comforts, so I know it’s possible. She had very few hobbies outside the domestic sphere, plus her house was maybe a smidge over one thousand square feet, with one bathroom…small enough to be manageable by one woman on a mission. When she finished all her ordinary household chores, she would invent things to do or carry ordinary tasks to extremes of obsession. For instance, I have vivid memories of her using a pair of tweezers to pick through the contents of her vacuum cleaner bags looking for anything useful that might accidentally have been sucked into it, like rubber bands or loose change.
Does anyone else do this routinely? I mean, I can see tweezering through the disgusting contents of a vacuum cleaner bag if, say, you suspect you sucked up your diamond engagement ring. But to do it in the off chance you’ll find a rubber band?
SERIOUSLY?
I could wax poetic about the Greatest Generation’s saving ways, their frugality, and their June Cleaver pearls-and-high-heels wardrobe for vacuuming. Those things are admirable (well, not the June Cleaver thing…that's just kinky), but these days, I’m happy if my toilets and kitchen are clean and I can still see my reflection in the bathroom mirror despite toothpaste spatter.
Is that too much information? Sorry about that.
Some household tasks inevitably fall to the bottom of the list, simply because they are so very easy to overlook or ignore. It’s hard to ignore dirty toilets (though I am quite capable of it) and positively dangerous to let your kitchen go. But it’s very easy to ignore the state of your windows. I simply don’t think about them very often, which means that, by the time I do notice, they are appallingly dirty.
Having Miss Daisy Doolittle in the house brought windows to my attention. You see, at puppy-nose height, our bay window and door window had become opaque with snot. Seeing that caused me to look higher and realize that all the windows were completely nasty. My grandmother is in heaven shaking her head in disgust at my lack of housekeeping finesse. She loved clean windows and kept hers sparkling.
Oh, relevant and funny tangent time! Jack asked if he could clean this sink the other night. I said sure because there was finely chopped mint and cilantro all over it that needed to be wiped out. After a few minutes, I checked on Jack’s work. “Jack, you need to clean the green stuff out of the sink, dude!” He replied, “Mommy, that’s gross! I’m cleaning the not gross parts. Aren’t I doing a good job?”
Back to windows. My children have washed the downstairs windows in the last few months, but their idea of washing has more to do with wasting as many paper towels and as much Windex as possible on the center of the glass. The fact that windows have sides and corners is completely lost on them. So last week, I cleaned every window in the house. Even the garage-door windows.
I LOVE IT!!!!! Oh how wonderful to see, really see, out the windows. I swear the house is brighter now. I break out in giggles of joy when I open the blinds in the morning. I vow never again to let my windows get so filmy and dirty!!!
But I will. You know I will. In the messy business of life, I will become distracted. I will choose to read novels, poke around on the Internet, blog, craft, help children with homework, scrub toilets and wipe kitchen counters, volunteer to shelve dusty books at the school library, take my mini-laptop to Barnes and Noble for the afternoon and sip mochas and eat scones and blog, and the windows will, once again, most certainly get nasty.
For now, however, I’ll revel in the sparkling clarity of my windows, and comfort myself with the following wisdom from Erma Bombeck: “My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?”
Indeed.
Around the time I decided to stay home and raise my children, I bought a book called Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson. It’s an impressively weighty tome, with 884 pages of tiny, law-school textbook type with shockingly few illustrations. The author, a lawyer (why doesn’t this surprise me?), certainly sets a high standard of cleanliness and order.
In chapter two, Cheryl lists her idea of daily chores:
-Put soiled clothes in hamper and hang up other clothes
-Clean sinks and tubs after use (including drains and traps)
-Check soap, toilet paper, other supplies in bathroom; change towels if necessary
-Prepare meals and clean up afterward
-Put out fresh kitchen towels and cleaning utensils [My note: what exactly are cleaning utensils?]
-Clean floors in high-use areas (kitchen, entryway) by sweeping, damp-mopping, or vacuuming
-Refill vaporizers and humidifiers (and clean if necessary)
-Neaten; put away newspapers, magazines, and similar items
-Do interim marketing when necessary
-Empty trash and garbage containers (evening)
While some of Cheryl's advice seems, to my mildly AR/OC personality, quite good, I have never, even in my wildest flights of obsession, lived up to this list, much less to her list of weekly chores, which includes, among other things, dusting light bulbs, washing out and sanitizing garbage cans, vacuuming lamp shades, and washing “all” combs and brushes.
This reminds me of Heather Armstrong’s blog and all the pictures she posts of her dogs on pristine hardwood floors. According to Heather, “People often write me and ask how I keep my wood floors so clean when I live with a child and a dog, and my answer is that I use a technique called Suffering from a Mental Illness.”
My own OCD isn’t clinically significant (thank Heaven!), and when I bought Home Comforts, I hoped it would help me streamline my housekeeping and make it more efficient so I wouldn’t have to spend so much time cleaning. Instead, just reading the first few chapters made me feel like a filthy, no-good, dirty rotten loser. I was already spending far too many hours in fruitless search for a clean house (baby, pack-rat husband, two dogs, four bathrooms…ohmygosh I was so incredibly doomed to fail!). So I quit reading Home Comforts to preserve my sanity. Honestly, if a person kept house at this level, he or she would spend most waking hours cleaning: who would want to do that?
Well, my grandmother, for one. She kept house at the level recommended by Home Comforts, so I know it’s possible. She had very few hobbies outside the domestic sphere, plus her house was maybe a smidge over one thousand square feet, with one bathroom…small enough to be manageable by one woman on a mission. When she finished all her ordinary household chores, she would invent things to do or carry ordinary tasks to extremes of obsession. For instance, I have vivid memories of her using a pair of tweezers to pick through the contents of her vacuum cleaner bags looking for anything useful that might accidentally have been sucked into it, like rubber bands or loose change.
Does anyone else do this routinely? I mean, I can see tweezering through the disgusting contents of a vacuum cleaner bag if, say, you suspect you sucked up your diamond engagement ring. But to do it in the off chance you’ll find a rubber band?
SERIOUSLY?
I could wax poetic about the Greatest Generation’s saving ways, their frugality, and their June Cleaver pearls-and-high-heels wardrobe for vacuuming. Those things are admirable (well, not the June Cleaver thing…that's just kinky), but these days, I’m happy if my toilets and kitchen are clean and I can still see my reflection in the bathroom mirror despite toothpaste spatter.
Is that too much information? Sorry about that.
Some household tasks inevitably fall to the bottom of the list, simply because they are so very easy to overlook or ignore. It’s hard to ignore dirty toilets (though I am quite capable of it) and positively dangerous to let your kitchen go. But it’s very easy to ignore the state of your windows. I simply don’t think about them very often, which means that, by the time I do notice, they are appallingly dirty.
Having Miss Daisy Doolittle in the house brought windows to my attention. You see, at puppy-nose height, our bay window and door window had become opaque with snot. Seeing that caused me to look higher and realize that all the windows were completely nasty. My grandmother is in heaven shaking her head in disgust at my lack of housekeeping finesse. She loved clean windows and kept hers sparkling.
Oh, relevant and funny tangent time! Jack asked if he could clean this sink the other night. I said sure because there was finely chopped mint and cilantro all over it that needed to be wiped out. After a few minutes, I checked on Jack’s work. “Jack, you need to clean the green stuff out of the sink, dude!” He replied, “Mommy, that’s gross! I’m cleaning the not gross parts. Aren’t I doing a good job?”
Back to windows. My children have washed the downstairs windows in the last few months, but their idea of washing has more to do with wasting as many paper towels and as much Windex as possible on the center of the glass. The fact that windows have sides and corners is completely lost on them. So last week, I cleaned every window in the house. Even the garage-door windows.
I LOVE IT!!!!! Oh how wonderful to see, really see, out the windows. I swear the house is brighter now. I break out in giggles of joy when I open the blinds in the morning. I vow never again to let my windows get so filmy and dirty!!!
But I will. You know I will. In the messy business of life, I will become distracted. I will choose to read novels, poke around on the Internet, blog, craft, help children with homework, scrub toilets and wipe kitchen counters, volunteer to shelve dusty books at the school library, take my mini-laptop to Barnes and Noble for the afternoon and sip mochas and eat scones and blog, and the windows will, once again, most certainly get nasty.
For now, however, I’ll revel in the sparkling clarity of my windows, and comfort myself with the following wisdom from Erma Bombeck: “My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?”
Indeed.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Out of the Closet
In spring and fall every year, I enact a ritual older than Twiggy: the Seasonal Wardrobe Shift. In spring, I put all my warm, fleecy clothes into storage bins emptied of all my short, cottony cool clothes, which take their place in my drawers and closet.
Ah, the thrill of clothes! The joy of thinking about what pieces you need to refresh your wardrobe for a new season! The adventure of shopping!
Bah, humbug.
I used to love clothes and spent many hours thinking about them, perusing fashion magazines to see all the clothes that I couldn’t afford, and shopping for knock-off designer items that both fit and looked great on me.
Then I had kids. Kids killed the fashion buzz for me. First, breastfeeding left me wanting to wear oversized comfortable clothes, a preference that has stuck with me for the last six-and-a-half years since I cut Jack off from the boob. Second, stay-at-home life doesn’t motivate great clothing choices because whole weeks go by when the only adults you see are your spouse and the checkout folks at the grocery, who are generally wearing highly unattractive aprons themselves and hardly inspire you to break out a dress, heels, and panty hose. Third, clothes shopping—shopping of any kind, actually—with infants and toddlers and preschoolers and elementary-age kids is painful to the nth degree and must be avoided at all costs.
Lately, however, I’ve been reading Susan Wagner's Friday Playdate blog. Susan writes about fashion for several online magazines. She’s a real mom who likes to look great and likes to help other real moms look great, too. She doesn’t promote $500 skirts; she writes whole articles about finding great stuff at Old Navy.
She’s my kind of person.
Susan has written about how purging your closet of everything except what you can and will wear actually leads to greater wardrobe choices and more fun mixing and matching. Having less, according to Susan, gives you more choices. I decided to trust her advice and last week carried out the Great Closet Purge.
First, I took everything—absolutely every piece of clothing, belt, shoe, slip, sock, and nightgown—out of my closet and drawers and piled them on my bed. Then I politely asked them a few questions.
And yes, I do talk to my clothes. Don't you?
Question #1 Have I worn you in the last two years? If not, but you are wearable, you go into the donation bag. If a hobo would be ashamed to be seen wearing you, you’re going into the trash.
About 70 percent of my wardrobe disappeared with this question. So many of these pieces were clothes I wore before Nick was conceived almost 12 years ago. I will never again have a 21-inch waist. Heavens, I even had belts from that time in my life…eight of them. Why, oh why, have I clung to these clothes for so long?
Question #2 Do you fit me right now? If you don’t fit now but a 10-15 pound weight loss would let me wear you, then you go into a storage bin.
My goal this winter is to shed the weight I have gained in the last year. I’m exercising again, which is a step in the right direction, and fall is usually a very busy time that keeps me from munching between meals. Because this is a realistic goal, I have no problems holding onto these items…just not in my closet or drawers where they clutter things up and distract me from what I can wear right now.
Question #3 If you fit me right now, can I be seen in public wearing you? If yes, let me hang you in my closet or put you in my drawer. If no, you’re going in the trash.
I expected to have three articles of clothing left to wear but was surprised at how much I have for fall and winter that is wearable and in decent shape. Mainly, I could use a few new pairs of shoes and a couple of tops, but I don't even need those urgently.
In the spring, however, if I haven’t lost weight, I’m going to have to go shopping or go nekkid. That’s because the few—very few—summer clothes that survived the purge are just barely this side of acceptable, and then, only if you are a hobo. By the time cooler weather gets here, they will have to be tossed.
I do, however, have quite a few crop pants and shorts in the lose-weight-and-wear-these storage bin. No shirts, though. Not one. So shopping is definitely in my future.
Susan also reminded me that I can have clothes altered, and as I carried out the Great Wardrobe Purge, I found a nice cream blazer from the ‘80s that fits really well (it was too big back then), but the huge shoulder pads make it look dated. It’s fully lined, so it’ll take a professional to snip those suckers out. A fleece skirt needs to be hemmed, too. They are good pieces, and a tailor can take care of both for less money than it would cost to replace them.
For now, however, the Great Closet Purge of 2010 has served me well. I’ve actually worn dresses twice in the past week because there is now so little in my closet that it is easy to see that I do, indeed, have several dresses for hot weather.
It’s sort of embarrassing that it took me 43 years to figure this closet thing out. But I feel so liberated from worry about clothes. No anxiety, no stress. This must be the honeymoon period. I expect the golden glow of self-satisfaction will evaporate the first time I go to the shoe store in search of all-purpose, comfortable black winter shoes.
In the meantime, I’ll take whatever satisfaction I can from this and thank Susan Wagner for it. Thanks, Susan, for inspiring me to get out of the closet.
What lessons have you learned about clothes? How do you keep from being stressed over wardrobe choices? Is your closet overflowing with stuff you can’t wear? Care to share the content of your closet?
Ah, the thrill of clothes! The joy of thinking about what pieces you need to refresh your wardrobe for a new season! The adventure of shopping!
Bah, humbug.
I used to love clothes and spent many hours thinking about them, perusing fashion magazines to see all the clothes that I couldn’t afford, and shopping for knock-off designer items that both fit and looked great on me.
Then I had kids. Kids killed the fashion buzz for me. First, breastfeeding left me wanting to wear oversized comfortable clothes, a preference that has stuck with me for the last six-and-a-half years since I cut Jack off from the boob. Second, stay-at-home life doesn’t motivate great clothing choices because whole weeks go by when the only adults you see are your spouse and the checkout folks at the grocery, who are generally wearing highly unattractive aprons themselves and hardly inspire you to break out a dress, heels, and panty hose. Third, clothes shopping—shopping of any kind, actually—with infants and toddlers and preschoolers and elementary-age kids is painful to the nth degree and must be avoided at all costs.
Lately, however, I’ve been reading Susan Wagner's Friday Playdate blog. Susan writes about fashion for several online magazines. She’s a real mom who likes to look great and likes to help other real moms look great, too. She doesn’t promote $500 skirts; she writes whole articles about finding great stuff at Old Navy.
She’s my kind of person.
Susan has written about how purging your closet of everything except what you can and will wear actually leads to greater wardrobe choices and more fun mixing and matching. Having less, according to Susan, gives you more choices. I decided to trust her advice and last week carried out the Great Closet Purge.
First, I took everything—absolutely every piece of clothing, belt, shoe, slip, sock, and nightgown—out of my closet and drawers and piled them on my bed. Then I politely asked them a few questions.
And yes, I do talk to my clothes. Don't you?
Question #1 Have I worn you in the last two years? If not, but you are wearable, you go into the donation bag. If a hobo would be ashamed to be seen wearing you, you’re going into the trash.
About 70 percent of my wardrobe disappeared with this question. So many of these pieces were clothes I wore before Nick was conceived almost 12 years ago. I will never again have a 21-inch waist. Heavens, I even had belts from that time in my life…eight of them. Why, oh why, have I clung to these clothes for so long?
Question #2 Do you fit me right now? If you don’t fit now but a 10-15 pound weight loss would let me wear you, then you go into a storage bin.
My goal this winter is to shed the weight I have gained in the last year. I’m exercising again, which is a step in the right direction, and fall is usually a very busy time that keeps me from munching between meals. Because this is a realistic goal, I have no problems holding onto these items…just not in my closet or drawers where they clutter things up and distract me from what I can wear right now.
Question #3 If you fit me right now, can I be seen in public wearing you? If yes, let me hang you in my closet or put you in my drawer. If no, you’re going in the trash.
I expected to have three articles of clothing left to wear but was surprised at how much I have for fall and winter that is wearable and in decent shape. Mainly, I could use a few new pairs of shoes and a couple of tops, but I don't even need those urgently.
In the spring, however, if I haven’t lost weight, I’m going to have to go shopping or go nekkid. That’s because the few—very few—summer clothes that survived the purge are just barely this side of acceptable, and then, only if you are a hobo. By the time cooler weather gets here, they will have to be tossed.
I do, however, have quite a few crop pants and shorts in the lose-weight-and-wear-these storage bin. No shirts, though. Not one. So shopping is definitely in my future.
Susan also reminded me that I can have clothes altered, and as I carried out the Great Wardrobe Purge, I found a nice cream blazer from the ‘80s that fits really well (it was too big back then), but the huge shoulder pads make it look dated. It’s fully lined, so it’ll take a professional to snip those suckers out. A fleece skirt needs to be hemmed, too. They are good pieces, and a tailor can take care of both for less money than it would cost to replace them.
For now, however, the Great Closet Purge of 2010 has served me well. I’ve actually worn dresses twice in the past week because there is now so little in my closet that it is easy to see that I do, indeed, have several dresses for hot weather.
It’s sort of embarrassing that it took me 43 years to figure this closet thing out. But I feel so liberated from worry about clothes. No anxiety, no stress. This must be the honeymoon period. I expect the golden glow of self-satisfaction will evaporate the first time I go to the shoe store in search of all-purpose, comfortable black winter shoes.
In the meantime, I’ll take whatever satisfaction I can from this and thank Susan Wagner for it. Thanks, Susan, for inspiring me to get out of the closet.
What lessons have you learned about clothes? How do you keep from being stressed over wardrobe choices? Is your closet overflowing with stuff you can’t wear? Care to share the content of your closet?
Friday, March 19, 2010
Words, Words, Words about Work
The following is from Tea Time for the Traditionally Built by Alexander McCall Smith, volume 10 in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series.
"She had recently read that scientists could not work out exactly when everything would come to an end and the earth would be swallowed up by the sun...and there would be nothing left of any of us. That had made her think, and she had raised the issue with her friend, Bishop Trevor Mwamba, over tea outside the Anglican Cathedral, one Sunday morning after the seven thirty service in English and just before the the nine thirty service in Setswana. 'Is it true,' she asked, 'that the sun will swallow up the earth and that will be that?'
"Trevor had smiled. 'I do not think that is going to happen in the near future, Mma Ramotswe,' he replied. 'Certainly not by next Tuesday, when the Botswana Mothers' Union meets. And frankly, I don't think that we should worry too much about that. Our concern should be what is happening right now. There is plenty of work for love to do, you know.'
"There is plenty of work for love to do. That was a wonderful way of putting it, and she had told him that this could be the best possible motto for anybody to have."
What work for love do you have today?
"She had recently read that scientists could not work out exactly when everything would come to an end and the earth would be swallowed up by the sun...and there would be nothing left of any of us. That had made her think, and she had raised the issue with her friend, Bishop Trevor Mwamba, over tea outside the Anglican Cathedral, one Sunday morning after the seven thirty service in English and just before the the nine thirty service in Setswana. 'Is it true,' she asked, 'that the sun will swallow up the earth and that will be that?'
"Trevor had smiled. 'I do not think that is going to happen in the near future, Mma Ramotswe,' he replied. 'Certainly not by next Tuesday, when the Botswana Mothers' Union meets. And frankly, I don't think that we should worry too much about that. Our concern should be what is happening right now. There is plenty of work for love to do, you know.'
"There is plenty of work for love to do. That was a wonderful way of putting it, and she had told him that this could be the best possible motto for anybody to have."
What work for love do you have today?
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
What Really Matters
Janus, the two-faced god of gateways in Roman mythology, gives us the word January, as well as the word janitor, which originally meant gatekeeper or keeper of the keys. Anyone else thinking about Zuul the Gatekeeper and Vinz Clortho the Key Master from Ghostbusters right now? Tell me I’m not alone here.
Janus looks forward and backward at once, anticipating the future while still considering the past. As do all the ancient gods, Janus represents a very real and deep impulse in humans, and what better time of year to reflect on the past and anticipate the future than the depths of winter, when, really, what else are we going to do?
In the media, lists reign this time of year. Top Ten News Stories. Top Ten Movies. Top Ten Scandals. Top Ten Best-Selling Books. Top Ten Athletes. Celebrity Deaths. Celebrity Babies. Celebrity Divorces.
While these lists may be mildly entertaining to read, I’m more interested in a different perspective on the year past. Nance in Reno sent me a link to an NPR commentary by David Stipeck, who asks his listeners to consider the following question: “How did I do in the areas that really matter?”
What really matters? Financial success? Popularity? Celebrity? How many times Tiger cheated on his wife? Those lists in the newspapers and magazines and websites have it all wrong. What really matters is more personal and individual, at least for those of us fortunate enough to live in places of peace and freedom. What really matters is how we treat others, how we help those who need it, how we make the world in our small spheres of influence a better place.
Back in the Dark Ages when I was a teenager, I came across a list of things a person should do every single day to be happy:
1) do something good for your body,
2) do something good for your mind,
3) do something good for your soul,
4) do something good for someone else,
5) do something good for the world.
At first glance, the list seems pretty self-centered, but without a healthy body, mind, and soul, how can you do something for someone else or for the world? This list pretty much covers what really matters: our physical, mental, and spiritual health; our kindness and compassion to others; and our duty to make the world a better place.
Let’s get back to Stipeck’s question: “How did I do in the areas that really matter?” I’m going to share my answers to this question but invite you to think of your own answers and, if you are comfortable doing so, to share them in the comments.
My body got short shrift this year. Going for my annual ride in the stirrups a few weeks ago made me realize how little I’ve exercised and how much junk I’ve eaten. Looking back in this case shows up my failure to attend to something that really matters. Looking forward, I must do better.
My mind flourished, largely because it has always been hyperactive and demanded large chunks of my attention. Sometimes, I wish it would just shut up. Maybe then I would exercise more.
My soul, however, got quite the refreshing workout this year. I took a Disciple II class at church and learned more about my faith than ever before. It made me hungry for more, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next year-long class that will start in January.
Looking outside ourselves to others’ needs is reflexive for parents, but now that my children are older and don’t require the intensive daily care required to keep infants and toddlers and preschoolers from killing themselves, I have tried to look a bit farther out. My focus is, of course, still close to family and home, but my church and community provide plenty of opportunity to help others and the world in ways that matter.
Mother Teresa said, “We cannot all do great things, but we can all do small things with great love.” Smart lady, don’t you think? There are ALWAYS small things to do with great love…so many, in fact, that this can seem an impossible task. What possible difference could a couple of hours volunteering each week at the school library make in the grand scheme of life, the universe, and everything?
Well, if we were alone in the universe, this point of view might be valid. But we’re not alone. There are billions of us.
The Cake Wrecks blog demonstrated the power of many people doing little things in its charity push this Christmas by asking its readers to donate $1 a day for twelve days to twelve different charities. At last count a few days ago, the effort has raised over $75,000 for charities large and small.
That’s a lot of cake.
The message here is powerful. If we each do our little bit of work to help others and the world, we’ll make a big difference in the way the world works.
A bunch of simple, small things add up: recycling, turning off lights, driving less; voting and staying informed on issues affecting national, state, and local government; sending money to worthy charities doing work abroad and at home; buying a meal for the man with a sign outside McDonalds or giving diapers to the man whose grandchild needs them; serving meals in a soup kitchen; paying the toll for the driver behind you; smiling at a stranger; acknowledging others’ efforts. The list is easy and endless, so dive right in wherever it feels right to you.
Stipeck says that our good deeds have “probably made a greater impact than we ever realize.” Sometimes, our good deeds are acknowledged and we feel a glow of satisfaction. Sometimes, people discourage us from good deeds, citing charity rip-offs and lazy malingerers and thieves who take advantage of our charitable impulses. Sometimes, our good deeds are not acknowledged, and we may feel angry about that and stop doing them out of spite.
As we look back at the past year, let’s do what Stipeck says. Let’s celebrate our successes and acknowledge our failures as learning experiences prodding us in the right direction. Let’s have faith that our good deeds--large or small, rewarded or unacknowledged--did make a difference.
On January 1st, let’s channel our inner Janus. Look back on what really mattered in 2009 and forward to what really matters in 2010.
As for the rest, let it be.
Janus looks forward and backward at once, anticipating the future while still considering the past. As do all the ancient gods, Janus represents a very real and deep impulse in humans, and what better time of year to reflect on the past and anticipate the future than the depths of winter, when, really, what else are we going to do?
In the media, lists reign this time of year. Top Ten News Stories. Top Ten Movies. Top Ten Scandals. Top Ten Best-Selling Books. Top Ten Athletes. Celebrity Deaths. Celebrity Babies. Celebrity Divorces.
While these lists may be mildly entertaining to read, I’m more interested in a different perspective on the year past. Nance in Reno sent me a link to an NPR commentary by David Stipeck, who asks his listeners to consider the following question: “How did I do in the areas that really matter?”
What really matters? Financial success? Popularity? Celebrity? How many times Tiger cheated on his wife? Those lists in the newspapers and magazines and websites have it all wrong. What really matters is more personal and individual, at least for those of us fortunate enough to live in places of peace and freedom. What really matters is how we treat others, how we help those who need it, how we make the world in our small spheres of influence a better place.
Back in the Dark Ages when I was a teenager, I came across a list of things a person should do every single day to be happy:
1) do something good for your body,
2) do something good for your mind,
3) do something good for your soul,
4) do something good for someone else,
5) do something good for the world.
At first glance, the list seems pretty self-centered, but without a healthy body, mind, and soul, how can you do something for someone else or for the world? This list pretty much covers what really matters: our physical, mental, and spiritual health; our kindness and compassion to others; and our duty to make the world a better place.
Let’s get back to Stipeck’s question: “How did I do in the areas that really matter?” I’m going to share my answers to this question but invite you to think of your own answers and, if you are comfortable doing so, to share them in the comments.
My body got short shrift this year. Going for my annual ride in the stirrups a few weeks ago made me realize how little I’ve exercised and how much junk I’ve eaten. Looking back in this case shows up my failure to attend to something that really matters. Looking forward, I must do better.
My mind flourished, largely because it has always been hyperactive and demanded large chunks of my attention. Sometimes, I wish it would just shut up. Maybe then I would exercise more.
My soul, however, got quite the refreshing workout this year. I took a Disciple II class at church and learned more about my faith than ever before. It made me hungry for more, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next year-long class that will start in January.
Looking outside ourselves to others’ needs is reflexive for parents, but now that my children are older and don’t require the intensive daily care required to keep infants and toddlers and preschoolers from killing themselves, I have tried to look a bit farther out. My focus is, of course, still close to family and home, but my church and community provide plenty of opportunity to help others and the world in ways that matter.
Mother Teresa said, “We cannot all do great things, but we can all do small things with great love.” Smart lady, don’t you think? There are ALWAYS small things to do with great love…so many, in fact, that this can seem an impossible task. What possible difference could a couple of hours volunteering each week at the school library make in the grand scheme of life, the universe, and everything?
Well, if we were alone in the universe, this point of view might be valid. But we’re not alone. There are billions of us.
The Cake Wrecks blog demonstrated the power of many people doing little things in its charity push this Christmas by asking its readers to donate $1 a day for twelve days to twelve different charities. At last count a few days ago, the effort has raised over $75,000 for charities large and small.
That’s a lot of cake.
The message here is powerful. If we each do our little bit of work to help others and the world, we’ll make a big difference in the way the world works.
A bunch of simple, small things add up: recycling, turning off lights, driving less; voting and staying informed on issues affecting national, state, and local government; sending money to worthy charities doing work abroad and at home; buying a meal for the man with a sign outside McDonalds or giving diapers to the man whose grandchild needs them; serving meals in a soup kitchen; paying the toll for the driver behind you; smiling at a stranger; acknowledging others’ efforts. The list is easy and endless, so dive right in wherever it feels right to you.
Stipeck says that our good deeds have “probably made a greater impact than we ever realize.” Sometimes, our good deeds are acknowledged and we feel a glow of satisfaction. Sometimes, people discourage us from good deeds, citing charity rip-offs and lazy malingerers and thieves who take advantage of our charitable impulses. Sometimes, our good deeds are not acknowledged, and we may feel angry about that and stop doing them out of spite.
As we look back at the past year, let’s do what Stipeck says. Let’s celebrate our successes and acknowledge our failures as learning experiences prodding us in the right direction. Let’s have faith that our good deeds--large or small, rewarded or unacknowledged--did make a difference.
On January 1st, let’s channel our inner Janus. Look back on what really mattered in 2009 and forward to what really matters in 2010.
As for the rest, let it be.
Friday, November 13, 2009
This Is the Life!
Jack participates in an aquatic program through school. Roughly two Fridays a month, the students with special needs are bussed to the YMCA, where they pair up with high school student mentors for swim therapy.
Have I mentioned how much I love our school district? Well, I do.
Jack loves to swim, so I knew the swim therapy would be a big hit. At Jack’s parent-teacher conference this week, his aide Julie told me a great story about his first day in the program. When the students returned to class after swimming, they ate lunch in the classroom. That’s when the following conversation occurred:
Jack [to Julie]: Do you love peanut butter?
Julie: Well, yes, Jack. I do.
Jack: I love peanut butter. I love swimming. [leans back in his chair, puts hands on belly] This is the LIFE!
Yes, Jack, it is.
A common symptom of autism is repeating movie lines or scripts. I’m sure Jack heard “this is the life” in a movie or television show, but its meaning struck a chord in him that resonates every day. Other lines he repeats frequently are “Today is a new day” and “It’s a beautiful day” and “Mommy, I love you sooooo much!” (That last one isn’t a movie line, but it sure makes me happy.)
Most of the lines Jack repeats regularly are happy. He’s definitely the glass is MORE than half full person. He still thanks me for taking him to ride Thomas the Tank Engine in September, and every little joy of his day is greeted with enthusiastic delight. When he walked into the school’s book fair and saw me, he yelled, “Mommy, you’re HERE!!!!” Everyone in the library laughed as he threw his arms around me.
Jack’s attitude of gratitude infuses our lives, and he sets an example that can be hard to follow in today’s jaded world. He doesn’t know about the tragic shootings at Ft. Hood or the nasty anti-Muslim reaction it has provoked. He doesn’t know about crooked politicians and greedy mortgage companies and high unemployment. He doesn’t understand why George has to go to work instead of staying home with him when he’s sick.
This is the innocence of childhood, and I want to protect it and guard it against corruption and sadness and the ugliness of the world. I will fail in this, and really, I should fail. Ignoring all the tragedy and badness of the world doesn’t make for a good adult. If you ignore bad things, they continue and often get worse. Think of how many people ignored the smoke from the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Think of how many people living in democracies don’t bother to vote when people living in dictatorships would die for the chance. Think of the homeless person who takes refuge in a church and is shunned for his shabby, smelly clothes.
Yet every one of these examples has another side. The camps were liberated. Women in Iraq now cast their votes. At least one cold, smelly, homeless person was taken to lunch after church by Jim and Tam Thompson.
So many adults spend too much time focusing only on the bad, especially now when the media takes such delight in saturating us with news of economic disaster, war, corruption, horror, and celebrity train wrecks. It's so easy to get sucked into believing that the bad is all there is in the world. Then, we start repeating the bad movie lines until we see that our glass is not only half-empty but drained dry of all water.
I prefer Jack's view of things. Borrowing a page from his book, I actively seek out things that make me happy, whether it’s delighting in a ladybug that lands on my sleeve, or taking a bite of glorious wilted salad made by my husband, or casting a vote for health services in our county, or making a meal for a family who needs it, or reading a delightful book, or receiving a story via email about the lost being found.
November is a brown, drab month (at least in the northern hemisphere). It’s the month of my birthday, and it has always annoyed me that November usually has the ugliest picture in calendars. This November, I challenge you to find an attitude of gratitude in all the drab and depressing. Find your own ladybugs, help lift up someone who needs it, participate in changing something ugly in the world.
If you have children, one way to begin teaching them a positive approach to the wide world of good and bad is to get them involved in a Christmas charity project. You can fill a shoebox for Operation Christmas Child, drop toys in the Toys for Tots boxes, or serve Thanksgiving dinner at a local shelter. Whatever you do, do it with your children, let them pick the gifts out, explain why it's not a good idea to send toys with batteries to children living in remote villages far from Target. Help them learn not to take their blessings for granted and to share them with others who are less fortunate.
This IS the life...the only one we get. Let us grown-ups embrace it, like Jack does, and spread our own attitude of gratitude.
Have I mentioned how much I love our school district? Well, I do.
Jack loves to swim, so I knew the swim therapy would be a big hit. At Jack’s parent-teacher conference this week, his aide Julie told me a great story about his first day in the program. When the students returned to class after swimming, they ate lunch in the classroom. That’s when the following conversation occurred:
Jack [to Julie]: Do you love peanut butter?
Julie: Well, yes, Jack. I do.
Jack: I love peanut butter. I love swimming. [leans back in his chair, puts hands on belly] This is the LIFE!
Yes, Jack, it is.
A common symptom of autism is repeating movie lines or scripts. I’m sure Jack heard “this is the life” in a movie or television show, but its meaning struck a chord in him that resonates every day. Other lines he repeats frequently are “Today is a new day” and “It’s a beautiful day” and “Mommy, I love you sooooo much!” (That last one isn’t a movie line, but it sure makes me happy.)
Most of the lines Jack repeats regularly are happy. He’s definitely the glass is MORE than half full person. He still thanks me for taking him to ride Thomas the Tank Engine in September, and every little joy of his day is greeted with enthusiastic delight. When he walked into the school’s book fair and saw me, he yelled, “Mommy, you’re HERE!!!!” Everyone in the library laughed as he threw his arms around me.
Jack’s attitude of gratitude infuses our lives, and he sets an example that can be hard to follow in today’s jaded world. He doesn’t know about the tragic shootings at Ft. Hood or the nasty anti-Muslim reaction it has provoked. He doesn’t know about crooked politicians and greedy mortgage companies and high unemployment. He doesn’t understand why George has to go to work instead of staying home with him when he’s sick.
This is the innocence of childhood, and I want to protect it and guard it against corruption and sadness and the ugliness of the world. I will fail in this, and really, I should fail. Ignoring all the tragedy and badness of the world doesn’t make for a good adult. If you ignore bad things, they continue and often get worse. Think of how many people ignored the smoke from the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Think of how many people living in democracies don’t bother to vote when people living in dictatorships would die for the chance. Think of the homeless person who takes refuge in a church and is shunned for his shabby, smelly clothes.
Yet every one of these examples has another side. The camps were liberated. Women in Iraq now cast their votes. At least one cold, smelly, homeless person was taken to lunch after church by Jim and Tam Thompson.
So many adults spend too much time focusing only on the bad, especially now when the media takes such delight in saturating us with news of economic disaster, war, corruption, horror, and celebrity train wrecks. It's so easy to get sucked into believing that the bad is all there is in the world. Then, we start repeating the bad movie lines until we see that our glass is not only half-empty but drained dry of all water.
I prefer Jack's view of things. Borrowing a page from his book, I actively seek out things that make me happy, whether it’s delighting in a ladybug that lands on my sleeve, or taking a bite of glorious wilted salad made by my husband, or casting a vote for health services in our county, or making a meal for a family who needs it, or reading a delightful book, or receiving a story via email about the lost being found.
November is a brown, drab month (at least in the northern hemisphere). It’s the month of my birthday, and it has always annoyed me that November usually has the ugliest picture in calendars. This November, I challenge you to find an attitude of gratitude in all the drab and depressing. Find your own ladybugs, help lift up someone who needs it, participate in changing something ugly in the world.
If you have children, one way to begin teaching them a positive approach to the wide world of good and bad is to get them involved in a Christmas charity project. You can fill a shoebox for Operation Christmas Child, drop toys in the Toys for Tots boxes, or serve Thanksgiving dinner at a local shelter. Whatever you do, do it with your children, let them pick the gifts out, explain why it's not a good idea to send toys with batteries to children living in remote villages far from Target. Help them learn not to take their blessings for granted and to share them with others who are less fortunate.
This IS the life...the only one we get. Let us grown-ups embrace it, like Jack does, and spread our own attitude of gratitude.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Trial by Blank Book
I collect blank books. When I discovered that Jimmy Buffett has a trunk full of blank books he’s collected over the years which are still, well, blank, I realized my dirty little secret wasn’t quite as shameful as I thought.
Isn’t it funny how comforting it is to find just one person out of the billions on our planet who exhibits your own particular brand of obsession? Knowing I was not alone gave me permission to buy even more blank books. Really, you just never know when you might need one.
When we go to heaven (note my optimism), I’m certain we will be able to find the answers to all those burning questions that puzzle us in life. What is the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything? Is it really 42 and do you need a towel to calculate it? What killed the dinosaurs? What causes autism? What is the unified field theory and can an angel explain it to me so that I really understand it? Was Chaucer gay? Did Shakespeare write his plays (I think so) or was their author really the Earl of Oxford? What is my dog thinking at any given moment?
I’ll be sure to ask a few questions about blank books, too. How many blank books stay blank for their entire earthly existence? What percentage of the total is that? Is there a special library in heaven for blank books? Do the angels write in them so they don’t feel so useless?
Take this lovely book, for instance. It's made with handmade paper by bookbinders from Thailand. I bought it at a craft fair in Greensboro, North Carolina, more than a decade ago. I've never written in it. It's too pretty. I might mess it up.
Blank books represent potential: words, sentences, paragraphs that can express meaningful thoughts in a relatively permanent form for someone to read. Reality can't always live up to potential, however, and fear of failure--that our words won't say what we want them to say in the way we want them to say it--keeps these books blank.
Or maybe it's just me. Fear of failure has kept me from doing a lot of things. Writing a novel, for instance.
I've had an idea for a novel since 1987. It came to me during my senior year at Duke, when I took a graduate seminar in Medieval History. I've done a lot of research over the years and have actually written scenes and whole chapters. The dirty, stained book on the left below contains some very bad scenes for the novel:
The pristine book on the right is still completely blank because I switched to composing on the computer after Nick was born. A few years and about 50 single-spaced pages in Microsoft Word later, I lost it all in a corrupted floppy disk incident.
Please don’t ask. It’s just too painful.
I have a number of blank books like the ones above that hold paper craft ideas. I have filled them with hundreds of card and scrapbook ideas over the years. Unfortunately, I almost never look in them when I need inspiration. I just stare at my stamps and ink and hope the Muse will speak to me.
Please remind me why I took the time to fill these notebooks in the first place.
Here is a lovely leather-bound blank book, similar to several others purchased at Barnes and Noble or Borders over the last 15 years. Each has some writing in it, but nothing finished. This one contains a journal I wrote to Nick when he was in my womb. See his first portraits? Who knew a lima bean could be so cute? I did the same thing for Jack, but predictably, Nick’s is much fuller than Jack’s.
Second children get gypped, every time.
In the interest of full disclosure, I went looking for the first blank book I remember buying, which was in college. I thought it would be in a Sterilite storage bin in the basement skulking, hidden from view, but apparently in a temporary fit of sanity, I threw it away. It contained all that remained (maybe ten pages) of the poetry I wrote in college.
Isn’t it funny how comforting it is to find just one person out of the billions on our planet who exhibits your own particular brand of obsession? Knowing I was not alone gave me permission to buy even more blank books. Really, you just never know when you might need one.
When we go to heaven (note my optimism), I’m certain we will be able to find the answers to all those burning questions that puzzle us in life. What is the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything? Is it really 42 and do you need a towel to calculate it? What killed the dinosaurs? What causes autism? What is the unified field theory and can an angel explain it to me so that I really understand it? Was Chaucer gay? Did Shakespeare write his plays (I think so) or was their author really the Earl of Oxford? What is my dog thinking at any given moment?
I’ll be sure to ask a few questions about blank books, too. How many blank books stay blank for their entire earthly existence? What percentage of the total is that? Is there a special library in heaven for blank books? Do the angels write in them so they don’t feel so useless?
Take this lovely book, for instance. It's made with handmade paper by bookbinders from Thailand. I bought it at a craft fair in Greensboro, North Carolina, more than a decade ago. I've never written in it. It's too pretty. I might mess it up.
Blank books represent potential: words, sentences, paragraphs that can express meaningful thoughts in a relatively permanent form for someone to read. Reality can't always live up to potential, however, and fear of failure--that our words won't say what we want them to say in the way we want them to say it--keeps these books blank.
Or maybe it's just me. Fear of failure has kept me from doing a lot of things. Writing a novel, for instance.
I've had an idea for a novel since 1987. It came to me during my senior year at Duke, when I took a graduate seminar in Medieval History. I've done a lot of research over the years and have actually written scenes and whole chapters. The dirty, stained book on the left below contains some very bad scenes for the novel:
The pristine book on the right is still completely blank because I switched to composing on the computer after Nick was born. A few years and about 50 single-spaced pages in Microsoft Word later, I lost it all in a corrupted floppy disk incident.
Please don’t ask. It’s just too painful.
I have a number of blank books like the ones above that hold paper craft ideas. I have filled them with hundreds of card and scrapbook ideas over the years. Unfortunately, I almost never look in them when I need inspiration. I just stare at my stamps and ink and hope the Muse will speak to me.
Please remind me why I took the time to fill these notebooks in the first place.
Here is a lovely leather-bound blank book, similar to several others purchased at Barnes and Noble or Borders over the last 15 years. Each has some writing in it, but nothing finished. This one contains a journal I wrote to Nick when he was in my womb. See his first portraits? Who knew a lima bean could be so cute? I did the same thing for Jack, but predictably, Nick’s is much fuller than Jack’s.
Second children get gypped, every time.
In the interest of full disclosure, I went looking for the first blank book I remember buying, which was in college. I thought it would be in a Sterilite storage bin in the basement skulking, hidden from view, but apparently in a temporary fit of sanity, I threw it away. It contained all that remained (maybe ten pages) of the poetry I wrote in college.
When I got bored in class, I wrote poems. This is ironic, as two of the classes that bored me silly were poetry classes covering poems far more stunning and intelligent and skillful than my angst-ridden whining could ever be. I loathed twentieth-century English and British poetry until I went to graduate school, when I was finally mature enough to appreciate them. In college, though, the beauty of William Carlos Williams and the WWI poets was lost on me.
In my defense, I did love T.S. Eliot’s work even in high school, so I wasn’t a total idiot. Just be grateful I threw my own poems away, or I might have actually shared some of them with you. What has been read cannot be unread.
You're welcome.
This is among my best-loved blank books, one that will die happy knowing it was really useful and loved and frequently handled. It contains my Christmas craft project and gift notes for the last five years: pages of shopping lists, project check-lists, who got what and when it was shipped, and tips for the next Christmas. Without this notebook, bus drivers and church secretaries would have bleak Christmases indeed because there's no way I would ever be organized enough to remember how important they are until sometime in February, when it would be embarrassingly late to give them a Christmas gift.
I pulled the Christmas book out a few days ago to start getting ready for Christmas 2009 and found this staccato tidbit of information: "Make less bulky Christmas cards--and larger ones. A2 size is so small. Ribbon knots are so bulky. Make flat cards."
Sadly, it's a little late for this advice. I've already made 80 or so A2-size cards, many of which have ribbon knots on them. Oh, well. At least I try.
And that's what blank books are ultimately all about: trying. Trying to overcome fear and anger and depression (which worked, for the most part). Trying to express ephemeral thoughts in a more permanent form. Trying to remember too much stuff. Trying to document wonderful moments and feelings so they can be remembered at a later date and shared with loved ones. Trying to be organized in thought, word, and deed. Trying to find myself through words and sketches and random ink marks on pages of books.
Nick has acquired my love of blank books, but his rarely remain blank. Instead, he fills them full to bursting with drawings, ideas, words, lists, whatever. He's not afraid to write in the pretty books. I hope it stays that way.
Over the years, I've become far less concerned that my blank books remain either unfinished or completely blank. I don't take life nearly as seriously as I did when I wrote bad poetry in college. I may never write that novel, but by heaven above, I've already written a lot of essays in my life. The word essay originally meant a trial or an attempt, and came to be used to describe short pieces of writing that try to explain, explore, argue, or reflect upon a rather focused topic.
Yoda said, "Do. Or do not. There is no try." He was wrong. We should keep trying. Sometimes we'll get it right. Sometimes, we won't.
And that's okay. As long as we keep trying.
What are you trying right now?
Sunday, September 20, 2009
A Sunday Sermon on the American Media
Jon Katz, author and blogger, posted this insightful commentary on America's media. Please check it out and let me know what you think.
I've found myself tuning out even NPR news lately. So much of what the media spouts seems so unrelentingly negative and depressing. I don't feel like the news is educating me on the issues like health care and the economy. Political pundits and fear mongers do not educate; they thrive by prolonging conflict and making problems worse.
If the linguistic theorists, the Bible, and Walt Whitman are right, we create our world with language. Our perspective is shaped by the words we hear--in our own minds as well as from outside. We know how powerful self-fulfilling prophesy is in the development of children, but how often do we question how our adult worlds are shaped by the words we hear and speak?
Not often enough, I think.
Wouldn't you watch a whole network devoted to reporting humanity's good side to balance the bad? I would watch, not because I want to hide from the bad news but because I know there is more out in the world than just the negative. Sadly, positive news is hard to find. The mass media sell us a world view of panic, fear, and knee-jerk reactions. We are better than that. We deserve better than that.
I see so much to be hopeful for, so much to celebrate, so much to praise on both a national scale and in my private life. Questioning my Intelligence promotes the positive. For those of you who only read it via email, I encourage you to start clicking to the actual site. The sidebar contains inspirational quotations, and I'm going to start linking to other sites that promote positive perspectives, too. I'd love it if you shared your favorite positive sites with me.
On his book tour, Jon Katz has seen an America full of hope, creative problem solving, and positive perspectives on life even in the face of difficulty. That's the America I know and love; and I suspect the rest of the world isn't too different, either.
Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." That change starts with our words. Our actions are the follow-through.
Right now, my favorite words are compassion, hope, and gratitude. What are your favorite words right now?
Let's start making some noise...positive noise.
Are you with me?
I've found myself tuning out even NPR news lately. So much of what the media spouts seems so unrelentingly negative and depressing. I don't feel like the news is educating me on the issues like health care and the economy. Political pundits and fear mongers do not educate; they thrive by prolonging conflict and making problems worse.
If the linguistic theorists, the Bible, and Walt Whitman are right, we create our world with language. Our perspective is shaped by the words we hear--in our own minds as well as from outside. We know how powerful self-fulfilling prophesy is in the development of children, but how often do we question how our adult worlds are shaped by the words we hear and speak?
Not often enough, I think.
Wouldn't you watch a whole network devoted to reporting humanity's good side to balance the bad? I would watch, not because I want to hide from the bad news but because I know there is more out in the world than just the negative. Sadly, positive news is hard to find. The mass media sell us a world view of panic, fear, and knee-jerk reactions. We are better than that. We deserve better than that.
I see so much to be hopeful for, so much to celebrate, so much to praise on both a national scale and in my private life. Questioning my Intelligence promotes the positive. For those of you who only read it via email, I encourage you to start clicking to the actual site. The sidebar contains inspirational quotations, and I'm going to start linking to other sites that promote positive perspectives, too. I'd love it if you shared your favorite positive sites with me.
On his book tour, Jon Katz has seen an America full of hope, creative problem solving, and positive perspectives on life even in the face of difficulty. That's the America I know and love; and I suspect the rest of the world isn't too different, either.
Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." That change starts with our words. Our actions are the follow-through.
Right now, my favorite words are compassion, hope, and gratitude. What are your favorite words right now?
Let's start making some noise...positive noise.
Are you with me?
Friday, September 4, 2009
Words, Words, Words from a Golden Retriever...Again
After Wednesday's essay on Hoover, AKA Furry Golden Sunshine, I feel I must once again quote Trixie Koontz, who was a golden retriever owned by author Dean Koontz. Her book Life is Good should be mandatory reading. We all need a little Dog Wisdom in our lives.
"Life is good when you believe you are beautiful. Everyone is beautiful somehow, some way, Some need bows. Some are beautiful without 'em. Some have beautiful voices, some beautiful minds. Some are beautiful like sunsets, some beautiful like cheese. Some have fur and tails, and are adored. Be sunset, be cheese, be furry, be whatever beautiful you are, and beautiful things will come to you along the path of life. The only ugly puss is a sourpuss. Dog wisdom."
Trixie Koontz, golden retriever
"Life is good when you believe you are beautiful. Everyone is beautiful somehow, some way, Some need bows. Some are beautiful without 'em. Some have beautiful voices, some beautiful minds. Some are beautiful like sunsets, some beautiful like cheese. Some have fur and tails, and are adored. Be sunset, be cheese, be furry, be whatever beautiful you are, and beautiful things will come to you along the path of life. The only ugly puss is a sourpuss. Dog wisdom."
Trixie Koontz, golden retriever
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Apocalyptic Horses and Grammar Nazis
As I drove home from my sister’s place in Maryland, I thought a lot about grammar. Ten hours is a long time to reflect on something as geeky as grammar, I know. Long car rides send my reflective brain to strange places.
GrammarLand was not, however, the strangest place my brain went on the drive. I spent an interesting half-hour contemplating the fiberglass animals I saw on the back of a low flatbed trailer. The first animal I noticed in this unlikely menagerie on I-68 was a rather smallish bison. Having seen many real and scary-looking bison in Yellowstone, I know how big an adult can grow, which is about as big as the super cab pickup hauling these weird animal statues.
Accompanying the miniature brown bison were two painted, life-size horses…one in the same brown as the bison and the other sort of reddish. Then I noticed two totally white, unpainted horses, which of course made me think of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Were the colors right? I thought they were all white, but perhaps I was mistaken, especially because the Book of Revelation gives me the heebie-jeebies and thus rarely enters my mind unless four fiberglass horses appear out of nowhere on I-68.
Perhaps these four really were the biblical harbingers of doom, sans riders, of course. Their fiberglass legs looked spindly. What would happen if they snapped and fiberglass horse parts went flying all over I-68? I felt an irrational urge to pass the trailer just to be on the safe side.
As I accelerated past the trailer, I noticed a small unpainted fiberglass pig tucked beside the bison. Pig butts are funny enough to push all thought of the Apocalypse from my mind. When I finished chuckling, I started thinking about nonrestrictive modifiers and passive voice again.
You might think nonrestrictive modifiers and passive voice are far less interesting than fiberglass pig butts, but you’d be wrong. A recent thread in the General Stamping Forum at SplitcoastStampers reminded me that grammar is a highly controversial subject which flares tempers and turns some people into elitist, arrogant grammar Nazis preserving the purity of the rules they learned in seventh-grade English.
Problem is, some of those lessons are WRONG. Sorry about the all-caps yelling, but nothing provokes my ire like people who slavishly follow rules, even when some of those rules don’t exist.
I used to be one of these arrogant Nazis from GrammarLand. At the experienced age of seventeen, I informed a hapless park ranger of a misspelling on a park sign: “picnicing” should have been “picnicking.” He looked at me as if I were an alien from another planet, which was my first clue that my obsession with grammar and spelling probably exceeded the bounds of normalcy.
Eventually, I went to graduate school and taught the dreaded Freshman Composition. During my first few nerve-racking weeks teaching, a student asked me why I added commas to a sentence in her paper. I couldn’t remember the exact rule, which made me panic for a few seconds. I knew the commas belonged around that particular clause, but saying “because I said so” would have been pedagogical suicide. Instead, I said, “Let me show you how to look this up in your grammar handbook.” I did, and that was how my student learned (and I relearned) the rule on commas around nonrestrictive modifiers.
Whew.
That night, I read the entire grammar handbook to refresh my memory. The experience taught me the power of internalizing rules so completely that you forget them. Each rule I reviewed seemed like an old friend. “Hello, Nonrestrictive Clause That Takes Commas. Good to see you again! How have you been?” But really, these rules had been with me all along, hanging out in my unconscious mind working their magic and earning me good grades.
Grammar rules serve a noble purpose: they allow people to communicate as clearly as possible in a highly imperfect world. Communication under the best circumstances is fraught with peril. It’s so easy to be misunderstood…and so painful.
Some so-called rules, however, are not rules at all. They start as recommendations arising from common stylistic errors. For instance, many of my students believed with near-religious fanaticism that they should never, ever, under any circumstances start a sentence with and or but. When I corrected this misunderstanding, many students simply refused to believe me.
I felt deep kinship with the high school biology teacher whose ultra-conservative Christian student refused to believe that men and women have the same number of ribs.
Strunk and White’s superbly succinct book, The Elements of Style, includes a section titled “Avoid a succession of loose sentences,” which discusses the overuse of and, but, and other words that weaken the rhetorical effectiveness of writing. Beginning writers often resort to wordy, sloppy writing simply because the teacher assigns a word-count to their papers. The more useless words a student sprinkles around the paper, the more quickly he or she reaches that magic number of words to complete the assignment.
Reading wordy, pointless essays forces tortured seventh-grade English teachers to make broad, sweeping, self-defensive declarations like “Never start a sentence with and or but.” Students prefer clear and absolute rules like this to Strunk and White’s “avoid a succession of loose sentences.” What is a “loose sentence” anyway? It sounds vaguely dirty, doesn’t it?
Interestingly, Strunk and White generally object to the use of however at the beginning of a sentence. They state, “Avoid starting a sentence with however when the meaning is ‘nevertheless.’ The word usually serves better when not in the first position.” Notice that they qualify their injunction with the word usually.
Almost any rule can be broken if breaking it makes rhetorical sense. Would you correct the grammar, usage, and spelling Mark Twain deploys in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Perish the thought! Twain skillfully uses vernacular to develop characters and lend realism to the setting and atmosphere of his novel.
Sort of like this blog.
See what I mean? I used a sentence fragment to emphasize the transition in topic. If this were a scholarly essay, I might have written, “Twain’s use of language to reinforce verisimilitude and offset pretentious delivery of the novel’s main message sets a precedent for twenty-first century web log authors whose rhetorical situation requires them to minimize the division between writer and audience, to bring writer and audience together metaphorically as friends chatting over cups of tea, much as Huck converses informally with his audience.”
I bet you prefer the fragment.
Language Nazis (like my young and silly self) have either lost or not yet learned perspective, and they inflate grammar and spelling errors to assume apocalyptic importance. They accost park rangers, send indignant emails to bloggers who dare misspell a word, and post unintentionally ironic comments on internet forums promoting rules that don’t exist.
Errors appear in even the most accomplished and meticulous writer’s work. Bloggers are rarely meticulous. If I spent as much time proof-reading and style-checking each blog post as I spent on my academic writing, I’d only be able to post once a month. Instead, I sit at my laptop and type like I talk, only funnier because I can go back and change things and reword and exaggerate for comic effect. This means I bend, break, and ignore many rules that I followed fanatically when I wrote my geeky master’s thesis. If I wrote my blog like I wrote my geeky master’s thesis, it’s unlikely you would read it. I wouldn’t.
The geek in me, however, couldn’t let go of the four possibly apocalyptic fiberglass horses on the flatbed. After a bit of research, I’m relieved to report that they were not a sign of the end of times. The Book of Revelation states that only one of the apocalyptic horses is white. The others are black, red, and pale (whatever that means). Not a bison-brown one in the lot.
What a relief.
GrammarLand was not, however, the strangest place my brain went on the drive. I spent an interesting half-hour contemplating the fiberglass animals I saw on the back of a low flatbed trailer. The first animal I noticed in this unlikely menagerie on I-68 was a rather smallish bison. Having seen many real and scary-looking bison in Yellowstone, I know how big an adult can grow, which is about as big as the super cab pickup hauling these weird animal statues.
Accompanying the miniature brown bison were two painted, life-size horses…one in the same brown as the bison and the other sort of reddish. Then I noticed two totally white, unpainted horses, which of course made me think of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Were the colors right? I thought they were all white, but perhaps I was mistaken, especially because the Book of Revelation gives me the heebie-jeebies and thus rarely enters my mind unless four fiberglass horses appear out of nowhere on I-68.
Perhaps these four really were the biblical harbingers of doom, sans riders, of course. Their fiberglass legs looked spindly. What would happen if they snapped and fiberglass horse parts went flying all over I-68? I felt an irrational urge to pass the trailer just to be on the safe side.
As I accelerated past the trailer, I noticed a small unpainted fiberglass pig tucked beside the bison. Pig butts are funny enough to push all thought of the Apocalypse from my mind. When I finished chuckling, I started thinking about nonrestrictive modifiers and passive voice again.
You might think nonrestrictive modifiers and passive voice are far less interesting than fiberglass pig butts, but you’d be wrong. A recent thread in the General Stamping Forum at SplitcoastStampers reminded me that grammar is a highly controversial subject which flares tempers and turns some people into elitist, arrogant grammar Nazis preserving the purity of the rules they learned in seventh-grade English.
Problem is, some of those lessons are WRONG. Sorry about the all-caps yelling, but nothing provokes my ire like people who slavishly follow rules, even when some of those rules don’t exist.
I used to be one of these arrogant Nazis from GrammarLand. At the experienced age of seventeen, I informed a hapless park ranger of a misspelling on a park sign: “picnicing” should have been “picnicking.” He looked at me as if I were an alien from another planet, which was my first clue that my obsession with grammar and spelling probably exceeded the bounds of normalcy.
Eventually, I went to graduate school and taught the dreaded Freshman Composition. During my first few nerve-racking weeks teaching, a student asked me why I added commas to a sentence in her paper. I couldn’t remember the exact rule, which made me panic for a few seconds. I knew the commas belonged around that particular clause, but saying “because I said so” would have been pedagogical suicide. Instead, I said, “Let me show you how to look this up in your grammar handbook.” I did, and that was how my student learned (and I relearned) the rule on commas around nonrestrictive modifiers.
Whew.
That night, I read the entire grammar handbook to refresh my memory. The experience taught me the power of internalizing rules so completely that you forget them. Each rule I reviewed seemed like an old friend. “Hello, Nonrestrictive Clause That Takes Commas. Good to see you again! How have you been?” But really, these rules had been with me all along, hanging out in my unconscious mind working their magic and earning me good grades.
Grammar rules serve a noble purpose: they allow people to communicate as clearly as possible in a highly imperfect world. Communication under the best circumstances is fraught with peril. It’s so easy to be misunderstood…and so painful.
Some so-called rules, however, are not rules at all. They start as recommendations arising from common stylistic errors. For instance, many of my students believed with near-religious fanaticism that they should never, ever, under any circumstances start a sentence with and or but. When I corrected this misunderstanding, many students simply refused to believe me.
I felt deep kinship with the high school biology teacher whose ultra-conservative Christian student refused to believe that men and women have the same number of ribs.
Strunk and White’s superbly succinct book, The Elements of Style, includes a section titled “Avoid a succession of loose sentences,” which discusses the overuse of and, but, and other words that weaken the rhetorical effectiveness of writing. Beginning writers often resort to wordy, sloppy writing simply because the teacher assigns a word-count to their papers. The more useless words a student sprinkles around the paper, the more quickly he or she reaches that magic number of words to complete the assignment.
Reading wordy, pointless essays forces tortured seventh-grade English teachers to make broad, sweeping, self-defensive declarations like “Never start a sentence with and or but.” Students prefer clear and absolute rules like this to Strunk and White’s “avoid a succession of loose sentences.” What is a “loose sentence” anyway? It sounds vaguely dirty, doesn’t it?
Interestingly, Strunk and White generally object to the use of however at the beginning of a sentence. They state, “Avoid starting a sentence with however when the meaning is ‘nevertheless.’ The word usually serves better when not in the first position.” Notice that they qualify their injunction with the word usually.
Almost any rule can be broken if breaking it makes rhetorical sense. Would you correct the grammar, usage, and spelling Mark Twain deploys in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Perish the thought! Twain skillfully uses vernacular to develop characters and lend realism to the setting and atmosphere of his novel.
Sort of like this blog.
See what I mean? I used a sentence fragment to emphasize the transition in topic. If this were a scholarly essay, I might have written, “Twain’s use of language to reinforce verisimilitude and offset pretentious delivery of the novel’s main message sets a precedent for twenty-first century web log authors whose rhetorical situation requires them to minimize the division between writer and audience, to bring writer and audience together metaphorically as friends chatting over cups of tea, much as Huck converses informally with his audience.”
I bet you prefer the fragment.
Language Nazis (like my young and silly self) have either lost or not yet learned perspective, and they inflate grammar and spelling errors to assume apocalyptic importance. They accost park rangers, send indignant emails to bloggers who dare misspell a word, and post unintentionally ironic comments on internet forums promoting rules that don’t exist.
Errors appear in even the most accomplished and meticulous writer’s work. Bloggers are rarely meticulous. If I spent as much time proof-reading and style-checking each blog post as I spent on my academic writing, I’d only be able to post once a month. Instead, I sit at my laptop and type like I talk, only funnier because I can go back and change things and reword and exaggerate for comic effect. This means I bend, break, and ignore many rules that I followed fanatically when I wrote my geeky master’s thesis. If I wrote my blog like I wrote my geeky master’s thesis, it’s unlikely you would read it. I wouldn’t.
The geek in me, however, couldn’t let go of the four possibly apocalyptic fiberglass horses on the flatbed. After a bit of research, I’m relieved to report that they were not a sign of the end of times. The Book of Revelation states that only one of the apocalyptic horses is white. The others are black, red, and pale (whatever that means). Not a bison-brown one in the lot.
What a relief.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Words, Words, Words from a Golden Retriever
"To lead a good life, must have curiosity...even if sometimes the mystery in the bushes turns out to be skunk."
--Trixie Koontz, golden retriever and author of Life is Good: Lessons in Joyful Living
Friday, July 24, 2009
Words, Words, Words: Pioneer Woman
"Always look on the bright side of life. Sometimes it's the only thing between you and the loony bin."
Pioneer Woman
I couldn't agree more.
Pioneer Woman
I couldn't agree more.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Snuggle-Bunnies and Little Blessings
One rainy day when I was seven, my father took me for a ride in his pick-up truck through the Georgia countryside. He pulled off the road and, in very serious tones, informed me that he and Mom were getting a divorce. As I watched the heavy rain pushed aside by the windshield wiper blades, he explained that Mom, my sister, and I would move to Charlotte to live with my grandparents.
As I digested this news, it occurred to me that Dad expected me to be sad, and I squeezed out a few tears. Behind those tears, however, was an incandescently happy little girl.
It’s hard to be sad when you’re told that you are going to live with two of the nicest people you’ve ever known in your entire life, two people whom you have wrapped around your little finger, two people who cherish you so absolutely that you feel like you can say or do anything—even push your sister down the stairs—and they will still love you.
Yep, that’s just a tragic situation for a seven-year-old, don’t you think?
When we were settled in Grandma and Papa’s small three-bedroom ranch with a big back yard, I basked in the daily glow of the love of three fabulous adults. Life was good.
What makes life good for a child? It’s not money and prestige and fancy cars and their parents’ high-powered careers. It’s not luxury vacations, first-class seating, or fine dining. Life is good for children when they are loved and have someone to love in return. Life is good when they can take pleasure in little things, like a grandmother who makes play-dough for them and a grandfather who hands them a ball-point pen and lets them doodle all over his grease-stained work shirt because, after all, the shirt is going to the cleaners anyway.
Every night, after Lisa and I were tucked into bed by Mom and Grandma, Papa would walk into the dark room, cigarette glowing in his hand. He sat at the foot of one of our twin beds. He talked with us. I don’t remember a single word of our conversations, the subject matter, or whether he shared words of wisdom with us. Maybe he told jokes or asked questions about our day or told us stories. What he said was not really important. He was there. Every night.
I remember feeling safe, feeling that there was a strong, smart, sweet man who was there for me, dependable and true. I remember falling asleep with a whiff of cigarette smoke and Canadian Mist and Old Spice. I remember feeling loved.
When I had children of my own, I wanted to continue this bedtime tradition, which we christened Snuggle-Bunnies. Both our boys sleep in one queen-size bed, and George and I take turns every night lying on each side of the bed, talking, rubbing backs, tickling knees, and having conversations with stuffed animals. At the end of my time with each boy, I place my hand on his head and say, “The Lord bless you and keep you. Amen.”
Recently, I stumbled on a quotation that struck home with me. Keith J. Thomas said, "Unless we can do little things well we can never do big things. We must ennoble our little duties, and we shall find they grow into big achievements. Little acts of thoughtfulness, little kindnesses, little tendernesses, little charities make up the sum total of a large, generous and lovable mind."
My grandfather had a large, generous, and lovable mind, and he showed me the secret to love. It’s not the grand gesture, the huge vacation, the biggest present under the tree. Love is the little daily gift of time and attention, the dependability and thoughtfulness shown in little gestures, the reflection of God in the small things we do for those who need us.
Snuggle-Bunnies and little blessings make a big difference in children’s lives. After all, what is bigger than to teach someone how to love?
As I digested this news, it occurred to me that Dad expected me to be sad, and I squeezed out a few tears. Behind those tears, however, was an incandescently happy little girl.
It’s hard to be sad when you’re told that you are going to live with two of the nicest people you’ve ever known in your entire life, two people whom you have wrapped around your little finger, two people who cherish you so absolutely that you feel like you can say or do anything—even push your sister down the stairs—and they will still love you.
Yep, that’s just a tragic situation for a seven-year-old, don’t you think?
When we were settled in Grandma and Papa’s small three-bedroom ranch with a big back yard, I basked in the daily glow of the love of three fabulous adults. Life was good.
What makes life good for a child? It’s not money and prestige and fancy cars and their parents’ high-powered careers. It’s not luxury vacations, first-class seating, or fine dining. Life is good for children when they are loved and have someone to love in return. Life is good when they can take pleasure in little things, like a grandmother who makes play-dough for them and a grandfather who hands them a ball-point pen and lets them doodle all over his grease-stained work shirt because, after all, the shirt is going to the cleaners anyway.
Every night, after Lisa and I were tucked into bed by Mom and Grandma, Papa would walk into the dark room, cigarette glowing in his hand. He sat at the foot of one of our twin beds. He talked with us. I don’t remember a single word of our conversations, the subject matter, or whether he shared words of wisdom with us. Maybe he told jokes or asked questions about our day or told us stories. What he said was not really important. He was there. Every night.
I remember feeling safe, feeling that there was a strong, smart, sweet man who was there for me, dependable and true. I remember falling asleep with a whiff of cigarette smoke and Canadian Mist and Old Spice. I remember feeling loved.
When I had children of my own, I wanted to continue this bedtime tradition, which we christened Snuggle-Bunnies. Both our boys sleep in one queen-size bed, and George and I take turns every night lying on each side of the bed, talking, rubbing backs, tickling knees, and having conversations with stuffed animals. At the end of my time with each boy, I place my hand on his head and say, “The Lord bless you and keep you. Amen.”
Recently, I stumbled on a quotation that struck home with me. Keith J. Thomas said, "Unless we can do little things well we can never do big things. We must ennoble our little duties, and we shall find they grow into big achievements. Little acts of thoughtfulness, little kindnesses, little tendernesses, little charities make up the sum total of a large, generous and lovable mind."
My grandfather had a large, generous, and lovable mind, and he showed me the secret to love. It’s not the grand gesture, the huge vacation, the biggest present under the tree. Love is the little daily gift of time and attention, the dependability and thoughtfulness shown in little gestures, the reflection of God in the small things we do for those who need us.
Snuggle-Bunnies and little blessings make a big difference in children’s lives. After all, what is bigger than to teach someone how to love?
I invite you to share in the comments your version of Snuggle-Bunnies: whatever little thing that lets you know you are loved by someone or that lets others know you love them.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Good Advice
The world is full of advice. Self-help books, Dr. "How's that working for you?" Phil, religious leaders, teachers, doctors, celebrities, mothers, fathers, and friends all tell us what to do, when to do it, how to do it. Of course sometimes their advice is bad, such as when my father-in-law’s told us not to buy Apple stock in the late ‘90s. We didn’t listen to him, and can you say “iPod” and "iPhone"? YES! But too often, people’s advice makes sense, and if we followed it, our lives would be better, happier, and healthier.
Why, then, don’t we take advice, even when we know it is good for us? I’m baffled by this oh-so-human failing. Perhaps it’s the result of some evolutionary quirk because every person I know seems afflicted by it.
Two years ago, I took the RealAge test. If you’ve never taken it, I encourage you to give it a whirl. The results show your “real” age, adjusted for lifestyle choices, diet, exercise, and general health. Just be sure to click NO on the questions asking if you want information on diet and exercise or your in-box will be flooded with spam. I’ve warned you in bold italics, so you can’t blame me if you don't take my advice.
In 2007, RealAge gave me a four-year credit for all the great choices I made, so at the age of 40, my RealAge was 36. Woohoo! At the time, I exercised a few times each week (it was summer and I walked the dog), and I also drove the speed limit, didn’t talk on the cell phone while driving, drank a half a glass of wine a day, had good cholesterol levels and blood pressure, kept my weight reasonable, yadda, yadda.
Three areas of my life warranted improvement, according to the experts at RealAge. They recommended I exercise more and at higher intensity, eat more fruit and veggies, and take a calcium supplement. No surprises in any of those suggestions, and I had no reason not to follow this excellent advice…except that I’m lazy, and prefer chocolate to fruit and veggies, and can’t seem to remember to take the supplements sitting on my bathroom counter.
Why is it so hard to follow good advice?
In the last two years, I pretty much quit exercising altogether. The dog now has arthritis and moves much more slowly, which means walking him hardly counts as a workout anymore. I intended to start rowing again and had George haul the rowing machine up from the basement. It’s now very dusty in the corner of our bedroom. Mr. Ironman keeps asking when I’m going to use it, and I answer, “Eventually.” I also intended to eat more fruits and veggies and to take the supplements.
You don’t need to say it. I already know the road to hell is paved with good intentions. When I took the RealAge test this April, the news was indeed hellish. I lost all but six months of the four-year credit I had.
Yikes. I really am 42.
Unfortunately, the RealAge test doesn’t ask how much soda a person drinks. By last July, I drank five cans of Coca-Cola Classic a day and had gained almost ten pounds in about six months. When I told George of my intention to quit, he laughed at me. He’d heard that particular intention many times before.
He’s not laughing now. I quit Coke in August and have lost 18 pounds. Kicking a life-long addiction to fizzy high-fructose corn syrup should be a good thing, right? No more bone-leeching carbonation, empty calories, and tooth-rotting acid, right? Wrong. Ironically, losing 18 pounds works against my RealAge score since it reflects a significant yo-yo in weight that isn’t healthy.
Sometimes a girl just can’t win.
When I took the RealAge test a few weeks ago, the experts had lots more good advice for me, truly reflecting my deterioration in the last two years.
Get more calcium, folic acid, potassium, vitamin C, vitamin D, and vitamin E. I guess I have to open those bottles on my counter and pop some pills.
Cut down on red meat. I’m sorry, but if God didn’t want us to eat cows, He wouldn’t have given them tasty parts, like ribeyes. Thank you, God, for ribeyes.
Vary your veggies. It’s not enough that I eat more, I have to vary them. Sheesh!
Work out more often and more intensely. Duh. I felt great when I worked out seriously, and my back was incredibly strong. I do want to feel that healthy again.
Tighten and tone with weights, which is useful for keeping my bones from disintegrating as well as for boring me to death. I hate weight lifting.
Stretch. I’ve intended to start yoga for years….
Protect your joints. The arthritis pains in my knees and hands need to be addressed rather than ignored, apparently. But seeing as I can’t take ibuprofen without giving myself ulcers, and the alternative meds can cause heart problems, I think I’m between a rock and hard place on that one. Hopefully, my doctor will have a useful suggestion.
RealAge’s advice is all good. But is a life without ribeye worth living? I might be able to eat less red meat but cannot promise any more than that. Some changes, however, seem much more important than others. The exercise, fruit, veggies, and vitamins deserve immediate attention. I really don’t want to develop the osteoporosis that dissolved my grandmother’s bones. She spent the last 18 months of her life in a nursing home bed. I don't want to go there.
If I don’t do something now, though, that’s where I’ll end up. Guess I better get my butt in gear and take RealAge’s advice seriously. When I tell George this, hopefully he’ll laugh at me. Then I know I’ll succeed, just to show him who’s boss.
Why, then, don’t we take advice, even when we know it is good for us? I’m baffled by this oh-so-human failing. Perhaps it’s the result of some evolutionary quirk because every person I know seems afflicted by it.
Two years ago, I took the RealAge test. If you’ve never taken it, I encourage you to give it a whirl. The results show your “real” age, adjusted for lifestyle choices, diet, exercise, and general health. Just be sure to click NO on the questions asking if you want information on diet and exercise or your in-box will be flooded with spam. I’ve warned you in bold italics, so you can’t blame me if you don't take my advice.
In 2007, RealAge gave me a four-year credit for all the great choices I made, so at the age of 40, my RealAge was 36. Woohoo! At the time, I exercised a few times each week (it was summer and I walked the dog), and I also drove the speed limit, didn’t talk on the cell phone while driving, drank a half a glass of wine a day, had good cholesterol levels and blood pressure, kept my weight reasonable, yadda, yadda.
Three areas of my life warranted improvement, according to the experts at RealAge. They recommended I exercise more and at higher intensity, eat more fruit and veggies, and take a calcium supplement. No surprises in any of those suggestions, and I had no reason not to follow this excellent advice…except that I’m lazy, and prefer chocolate to fruit and veggies, and can’t seem to remember to take the supplements sitting on my bathroom counter.
Why is it so hard to follow good advice?
In the last two years, I pretty much quit exercising altogether. The dog now has arthritis and moves much more slowly, which means walking him hardly counts as a workout anymore. I intended to start rowing again and had George haul the rowing machine up from the basement. It’s now very dusty in the corner of our bedroom. Mr. Ironman keeps asking when I’m going to use it, and I answer, “Eventually.” I also intended to eat more fruits and veggies and to take the supplements.
You don’t need to say it. I already know the road to hell is paved with good intentions. When I took the RealAge test this April, the news was indeed hellish. I lost all but six months of the four-year credit I had.
Yikes. I really am 42.
Unfortunately, the RealAge test doesn’t ask how much soda a person drinks. By last July, I drank five cans of Coca-Cola Classic a day and had gained almost ten pounds in about six months. When I told George of my intention to quit, he laughed at me. He’d heard that particular intention many times before.
He’s not laughing now. I quit Coke in August and have lost 18 pounds. Kicking a life-long addiction to fizzy high-fructose corn syrup should be a good thing, right? No more bone-leeching carbonation, empty calories, and tooth-rotting acid, right? Wrong. Ironically, losing 18 pounds works against my RealAge score since it reflects a significant yo-yo in weight that isn’t healthy.
Sometimes a girl just can’t win.
When I took the RealAge test a few weeks ago, the experts had lots more good advice for me, truly reflecting my deterioration in the last two years.
Get more calcium, folic acid, potassium, vitamin C, vitamin D, and vitamin E. I guess I have to open those bottles on my counter and pop some pills.
Cut down on red meat. I’m sorry, but if God didn’t want us to eat cows, He wouldn’t have given them tasty parts, like ribeyes. Thank you, God, for ribeyes.
Vary your veggies. It’s not enough that I eat more, I have to vary them. Sheesh!
Work out more often and more intensely. Duh. I felt great when I worked out seriously, and my back was incredibly strong. I do want to feel that healthy again.
Tighten and tone with weights, which is useful for keeping my bones from disintegrating as well as for boring me to death. I hate weight lifting.
Stretch. I’ve intended to start yoga for years….
Protect your joints. The arthritis pains in my knees and hands need to be addressed rather than ignored, apparently. But seeing as I can’t take ibuprofen without giving myself ulcers, and the alternative meds can cause heart problems, I think I’m between a rock and hard place on that one. Hopefully, my doctor will have a useful suggestion.
RealAge’s advice is all good. But is a life without ribeye worth living? I might be able to eat less red meat but cannot promise any more than that. Some changes, however, seem much more important than others. The exercise, fruit, veggies, and vitamins deserve immediate attention. I really don’t want to develop the osteoporosis that dissolved my grandmother’s bones. She spent the last 18 months of her life in a nursing home bed. I don't want to go there.
If I don’t do something now, though, that’s where I’ll end up. Guess I better get my butt in gear and take RealAge’s advice seriously. When I tell George this, hopefully he’ll laugh at me. Then I know I’ll succeed, just to show him who’s boss.
PS As for the funny grandparent stories, I decided to send cards to everyone who submitted them...so Gina, chelemom, Susan, and Carrie, please send me your snail-mail address. And yes, Angela, you'll get one, too, even though you sent an email instead of posting a comment!
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Strange Metaphors
Greetings from my brand-new shiny Toshiba laptop. When I took Jack to gymnastics Saturday morning, George and Nick rushed out to buy it for me. An hour later, Jack and I walked into the house to find this little beauty up and running.
Have I mentioned lately how much I love my husband? Well, I do. Muchly. And not just because he buys me stuff. He’s cute, too.
I’m also feeling better, so thus ends Viruses: A Dramatic Miniseries. Don’t you love a happy ending?
Anyway, this week’s topic for questioning is negativity. Oh, my, aren’t we hearing a lot of negativity in the media lately? If you listen to the media, you might think nothing good ever happens, yet logic and reason tell us this simply isn’t so. Jon Katz wrote a lovely critique of the media’s contribution to our negative vibe here. As he says, we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand and ignore what’s going on, but too much negativity isn’t good for us at all.
As someone who once suffered from serious depression, I know that negativity feeds itself, grows large and invasive like cancer if left unchecked, and can kill you if you don’t fight back. The best way to kill negativity before it kills you is to put life into perspective. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you already know I’m a huge fan of healthy perspective. If you’re new to Questioning, strap on your seatbelt and prepare for long sentences with lots of commas because perspective brings out the punctuation in me.
Sorry about that.
Before we can fully appreciate perspective, however, we need to lay some groundwork and set my inner geek free to discuss the Law of Entropy, or, as I prefer to call it, the Law of the Mocha. Way back in tenth-grade chemistry, Mr. Harmon taught me that entropy is the tendency of the universe to move from a state of high order and energetic movement to low order and stasis. This is why my house won’t stay clean unless I put a lot of energy into keeping it that way. It’s also why our bodies disintegrate into dust after we die.
But I’d much rather talk about mochas. Wouldn’t you?
If you make a mocha with Ghirardelli hot chocolate mix (which is quite yummy and I highly recommend it), you must stir vigorously to mix the powder in the hot milk. The powder, however, doesn’t dissolve completely, and as the momentum of stirring dissipates, gravity drags the chocolate to the bottom of your mug, where, if left for too long, it will solidify and defy your dishwasher’s best efforts to remove it. Without the chocolate particles suspended in the milk-and-coffee solution, you get way too much bitter coffee flavor. To keep the mocha tasty, you must add energy to the system by periodically stirring it. This is the Law of the Mocha.
And it’s an excellent metaphor for what life is all about: you have to add energy to make life better. God didn’t put us here to sit around on our butts and not stir things up. Having a proper perspective is all about the well-mixed mocha. Life’s made up of good and bad…sweet sugary chocolate and bitter coffee. Balancing the two is key; don’t let one get the better of you. Too much sugar makes you hyper and fat and gives you diabetes, and too much bitter gives you wrinkles from constantly pursed lips and makes people flee at the sight of you coming down the street because you’re too dang negative…like the media.
The bitter is everywhere right now because as a nation we’ve let the sweet chocolate sink to the bottom of our cup. It’s time to stir things up and restore our perspective. Counter all the negativity with some positive movement to make your life…and maybe the lives of others…a bit sweeter. Here are a few random ideas:
Take up a hobby and throw yourself into it. People who actively engage in hobbies live longer, have fewer doctor visits, and consider themselves happier than people who don’t. I love paper crafting and usually make about 800 cards a year. This isn’t as freakishly obsessive as you might think, seeing as I send over 400 cards a year to the troops overseas so they have cards to send back to their families. Baghdad suffers a notable lack of Hallmark stores. Well, maybe 800 cards a year is freakishly obsessive, but hey, I’m having fun. Which is honestly the whole point behind a hobby. If your hobby can make other people happy (like the soldiers overseas), it’s doubly sweet.
Reconnect with long-lost friends. Consider Facebook or another networking website. I’ve had four voices from the past reach out and touch me through the internet in the last few months. How cool is that? Making an effort to stay in touch with others takes some energy, but it’s worth it.
Pray. The power of prayer is extraordinary. I’m not going to get all preachy here, but having a rich spiritual life helps give you purpose above and beyond making money and certainly helps keep things in perspective. If you feel so inclined, spend time regularly talking to God, listening to God, just being with God. If you don’t feel so inclined, try connecting with nature. Walking in the woods is as good a way to pray as any.
Listen to music. Music that makes you happy. Music that gets your toes tapping. Music that energizes you. I feel the need to listen to Jimmy Buffett right now. Excuse me for a minute…. Ahh, that’s better. Changes in attitudes, changes in latitudes. It’s all good.
Set aside differences and come together as a nation (at least for those of us here in America). You may or may not have voted for President Obama (for the record, I didn’t), but he’s our president now, and by golly, I’m excited about it. Who would have thought that America could have internalized Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech in less than 46 years to elect a African American with the middle name of Hussein as president? Honestly, it took us 92 years just to get from the Emancipation Proclamation to Brown v. the Board of Education. This is totally awesome, and we should feel really good about it.
Help other people. This can be as simple as sharing a smile with the server at McDonald’s or as big as regular volunteer work or as all-consuming as becoming a foster parent. You can even get really nutty and spend your vacation in a third-world nation helping build a dam. Most of us, however, can’t do the really big things, but we can all give someone a smile, or do a few hours of volunteer work a month, or donate a few dollars to a good cause. If you’re looking for an easy way to do a little bit to make the world better, subscribe to Do One Nice Thing, a crusade to make Mondays more fun. My point is, helping others in little ways or big ways stirs up the sweet chocolate in the world’s mocha mug.
Did you know there’s a super-volcano under Yellowstone that could blow at any time and render all our problems—and they are undeniably serious problems—completely obsolete? This doesn’t keep me from flossing every day, if you know what I mean. The sky could fall at any time, but it’s not falling right now, this very minute. I choose to see that as a good sign.
Jimmy’s singing to me right now about searching for strange metaphors and quietly making noise to piss off the old kill-joys. I am so totally on board for this.
In keeping with my strange metaphor, what ideas do you have for stirring the chocolate? Please share them in the comments and let me know you're on board, too.
Edited for mathematical error...can't believe no one caught it before I did! George, you clearly aren't reading very carefully.
Have I mentioned lately how much I love my husband? Well, I do. Muchly. And not just because he buys me stuff. He’s cute, too.
I’m also feeling better, so thus ends Viruses: A Dramatic Miniseries. Don’t you love a happy ending?
Anyway, this week’s topic for questioning is negativity. Oh, my, aren’t we hearing a lot of negativity in the media lately? If you listen to the media, you might think nothing good ever happens, yet logic and reason tell us this simply isn’t so. Jon Katz wrote a lovely critique of the media’s contribution to our negative vibe here. As he says, we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand and ignore what’s going on, but too much negativity isn’t good for us at all.
As someone who once suffered from serious depression, I know that negativity feeds itself, grows large and invasive like cancer if left unchecked, and can kill you if you don’t fight back. The best way to kill negativity before it kills you is to put life into perspective. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you already know I’m a huge fan of healthy perspective. If you’re new to Questioning, strap on your seatbelt and prepare for long sentences with lots of commas because perspective brings out the punctuation in me.
Sorry about that.
Before we can fully appreciate perspective, however, we need to lay some groundwork and set my inner geek free to discuss the Law of Entropy, or, as I prefer to call it, the Law of the Mocha. Way back in tenth-grade chemistry, Mr. Harmon taught me that entropy is the tendency of the universe to move from a state of high order and energetic movement to low order and stasis. This is why my house won’t stay clean unless I put a lot of energy into keeping it that way. It’s also why our bodies disintegrate into dust after we die.
But I’d much rather talk about mochas. Wouldn’t you?
If you make a mocha with Ghirardelli hot chocolate mix (which is quite yummy and I highly recommend it), you must stir vigorously to mix the powder in the hot milk. The powder, however, doesn’t dissolve completely, and as the momentum of stirring dissipates, gravity drags the chocolate to the bottom of your mug, where, if left for too long, it will solidify and defy your dishwasher’s best efforts to remove it. Without the chocolate particles suspended in the milk-and-coffee solution, you get way too much bitter coffee flavor. To keep the mocha tasty, you must add energy to the system by periodically stirring it. This is the Law of the Mocha.
And it’s an excellent metaphor for what life is all about: you have to add energy to make life better. God didn’t put us here to sit around on our butts and not stir things up. Having a proper perspective is all about the well-mixed mocha. Life’s made up of good and bad…sweet sugary chocolate and bitter coffee. Balancing the two is key; don’t let one get the better of you. Too much sugar makes you hyper and fat and gives you diabetes, and too much bitter gives you wrinkles from constantly pursed lips and makes people flee at the sight of you coming down the street because you’re too dang negative…like the media.
The bitter is everywhere right now because as a nation we’ve let the sweet chocolate sink to the bottom of our cup. It’s time to stir things up and restore our perspective. Counter all the negativity with some positive movement to make your life…and maybe the lives of others…a bit sweeter. Here are a few random ideas:
Take up a hobby and throw yourself into it. People who actively engage in hobbies live longer, have fewer doctor visits, and consider themselves happier than people who don’t. I love paper crafting and usually make about 800 cards a year. This isn’t as freakishly obsessive as you might think, seeing as I send over 400 cards a year to the troops overseas so they have cards to send back to their families. Baghdad suffers a notable lack of Hallmark stores. Well, maybe 800 cards a year is freakishly obsessive, but hey, I’m having fun. Which is honestly the whole point behind a hobby. If your hobby can make other people happy (like the soldiers overseas), it’s doubly sweet.
Reconnect with long-lost friends. Consider Facebook or another networking website. I’ve had four voices from the past reach out and touch me through the internet in the last few months. How cool is that? Making an effort to stay in touch with others takes some energy, but it’s worth it.
Pray. The power of prayer is extraordinary. I’m not going to get all preachy here, but having a rich spiritual life helps give you purpose above and beyond making money and certainly helps keep things in perspective. If you feel so inclined, spend time regularly talking to God, listening to God, just being with God. If you don’t feel so inclined, try connecting with nature. Walking in the woods is as good a way to pray as any.
Listen to music. Music that makes you happy. Music that gets your toes tapping. Music that energizes you. I feel the need to listen to Jimmy Buffett right now. Excuse me for a minute…. Ahh, that’s better. Changes in attitudes, changes in latitudes. It’s all good.
Set aside differences and come together as a nation (at least for those of us here in America). You may or may not have voted for President Obama (for the record, I didn’t), but he’s our president now, and by golly, I’m excited about it. Who would have thought that America could have internalized Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech in less than 46 years to elect a African American with the middle name of Hussein as president? Honestly, it took us 92 years just to get from the Emancipation Proclamation to Brown v. the Board of Education. This is totally awesome, and we should feel really good about it.
Help other people. This can be as simple as sharing a smile with the server at McDonald’s or as big as regular volunteer work or as all-consuming as becoming a foster parent. You can even get really nutty and spend your vacation in a third-world nation helping build a dam. Most of us, however, can’t do the really big things, but we can all give someone a smile, or do a few hours of volunteer work a month, or donate a few dollars to a good cause. If you’re looking for an easy way to do a little bit to make the world better, subscribe to Do One Nice Thing, a crusade to make Mondays more fun. My point is, helping others in little ways or big ways stirs up the sweet chocolate in the world’s mocha mug.
Did you know there’s a super-volcano under Yellowstone that could blow at any time and render all our problems—and they are undeniably serious problems—completely obsolete? This doesn’t keep me from flossing every day, if you know what I mean. The sky could fall at any time, but it’s not falling right now, this very minute. I choose to see that as a good sign.
Jimmy’s singing to me right now about searching for strange metaphors and quietly making noise to piss off the old kill-joys. I am so totally on board for this.
In keeping with my strange metaphor, what ideas do you have for stirring the chocolate? Please share them in the comments and let me know you're on board, too.
Edited for mathematical error...can't believe no one caught it before I did! George, you clearly aren't reading very carefully.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Godiva Chocolate
In early December, 2006, I found myself at Barnes and Noble Booksellers. This should surprise no one who knows me. I adore books and create any excuse to surround myself with them, browse through them, smell them, buy them. I even read them. Happily. Enthusiastically. Voluntarily. Voraciously.
On that particular day in December at Barnes and Noble, I bought something or several somethings—honestly, I don’t remember. I do remember that the check-out clerk asked if I would like to donate a Godiva chocolate to disabled children in our area.
Who can say no to such a request? I pictured in my mind a small child with a serious disability—say, Down syndrome or paraplegia—enjoying a piece of chocolate. That chocolate wouldn’t change his life or make it easier, but absolutely no one can be unhappy or worried while eating chocolate. If Elvis had eaten more chocolate and done fewer drugs, he’d still be alive, don’t you think? Buying a chocolate for a disabled child was the least I could do. So I did it and checked my to-do list for the next holiday errand. I didn’t give that chocolate another thought.
A week later, I went through Jack’s backpack to clean out the day’s work: artwork of Christmas angels made with his handprints, beaded pipe cleaners hooked into Christmas ornaments, the usual assortment of notices from the teacher regarding the Christmas party, pajama day, the book exchange. At the bottom of the mess was a foil-wrapped Godiva chocolate with a note attached.
I’ll give you one guess what that note said.
My child. Disabled?
Of course Jack is disabled. He had been receiving services through IDEA—the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—for three months. He had had a diagnosis of Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified for five months. He attended speech and occupational therapies at Children’s Hospital and went to two different schools to meet his needs. My schedule was topsy-turvy just trying to get him where he needed to be each day.
None of this added up to “disabled child” for me that day at Barnes and Noble. Then, my definition of “disabled” included only huge, obvious, “bad” things that keep people from functioning normally. Disabilities are made up of amputations, or assistive apparatuses, or senses that don’t work, or brains that can’t learn, or bodies that can’t speak or walk or move easily. Disabilities are really hard things, things that create barriers in life that most people don’t face, barriers that other people face.
The Godiva chocolate in my hand laughed mockingly at me and said, “Your son whom you love more than life itself is ‘disabled.’ What do you think about ‘disability’ now?”
I just hate it when the universe dope-slaps me.
I’ve learned that we really do have a choice how to react to situations like this. It’s easy—and pointless—to take these ironic dope-slaps personally. The universe isn’t picky about choosing its victims, and absolutely every person on this planet gets dope-slapped at least a few times in the course of life. When we take it personally, we are the ones who suffer, mainly from that dreadful waste of time called self-pity.
This reminds me of an apt quotation from the sci-fi series Babylon 5. (You see, I’m a geek as well as a dope.) Marcus, my favorite character, said: “I used to think that it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”
On that December afternoon two years ago, in the face of the general hostility and unfairness of the universe, I chose to laugh at the mocking bit of fine chocolate. Yes, Jack is disabled. His disability isn’t so obvious as Down syndrome or paraplegia, but it is real and it is hard. It does put up barriers for him that most people don’t face. As Jack’s mother, however, I had instinctively chosen to focus on his abilities rather than thinking him “disabled.” Even though his brain works and learns differently from other kids’ brains, I focused on the fact that it does work and it does learn. His hands don’t do fine motor tasks as well as other kids’ hands, but they are learning and can already do a lot. He still has difficulty telling me a story or answering questions, but his speech improves daily.
This is how love sees disability.
Far be it from me to promote political correctness (I prefer good manners), but the PC term “differently abled” has merit. It’s all in the perspective, how you look at it. Yes, we all face really hard things in life, whether we qualify as disabled or not, and these challenges can overwhelm us at times with worry and stress and fear. Been there, done that. Haven’t we all?
But by shifting our focus we’re able to see those challenges differently. To a certain extent, it really is “all in our heads.” How many mothers of children whose disabilities are more severe, more obvious, more challenging than Jack’s see their children through the same filter of love, that same focus on ability rather than disability? My big mistake was in assuming those families were different from mine.
One day last summer, while I waited for Jack to finish speech therapy, a mother and son sat down near me. The son was hard to miss: a large teenager, nonverbal, squinting, tongue sticking out of his mouth, playing with his hands, barking. Well, it sounded like barking. His mother patiently settled him, asked if he wanted a drink, handed him a sports bottle with a straw, told him gently to keep his tongue in his mouth, made small talk without expecting a verbal response but was attentive to nonverbal cues. I was struck by how patient and calm she was. Every time he barked, she smiled. She never shushed him.
There aren’t many moms who could go out in public with a barking teenage boy and make it look like the most natural thing in the world. By the grace of God, she pulled it off and made it poignant and beautiful. I saw God in action in the waiting room.
As it’s impolite to stare, I turned back to my book but was distracted when I heard her speak to another waiting mother: “Oh, that’s his happy sound. He makes it all the time. He is always so happy and brings such joy to our lives. I don’t know what we would do without him.” Love literally glowed from this mother. You could tell she wanted to share it with the world, wanted the world to see her son the way she did. I looked at the young man with fresh eyes. I could see what she meant. He did show joy; I had missed that before because I was looking only at his disabilities.
No doubt the universe heaped its general hostility on this mother and son. No doubt she has felt frustrated, scared, and angry, and has wondered why. No doubt her son is severely disabled. But she made a choice at some point to accept her son for who he is, to see joy and love in him, and to give joy and love to him.
Don’t we all long for acceptance? Don’t we all long for love and compassion and understanding that is unconditional? But how often do we give that sort of love? It’s easy to accept someone who’s just like you, who acts like you, looks like you, and shares your beliefs, interests, language, and politics. It’s harder to accept difference in any form. Much harder. History is largely the record of our collective failure to accept difference.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be judged or dismissed or ignored or feared, and I certainly don’t want either of my children treated that way. We’re all different, but we are also all children of God, human beings created in His image with great capacity for compassion, love, and joy.
An American soldier stuck in the sandstorm during the invasion of Iraq said, “Embrace the suck.” He couldn’t change the weather or the fact he was in it, but he could change his attitude. He embraced the sandstorm just as that mother smiled each time her child barked in joy. The outside world may see our challenges, whatever they are, as uncomfortable, painful, unfortunate, disabling, or tragic, but we don’t have to see them that way at all. When the universe is hostile, we need to embrace the suck, and sometimes we can even transform it into something beautiful through love. Doing this is hard. It requires courage to stand up to the universe’s hostility and let go of a lot of indulgent wallowing in self-pity, but it’s worth the effort. At least I believe it is.
As for the Godiva chocolate…I ate it myself because Jack won’t touch any chocolate that isn’t an M&M or cake frosting.
Don’t you just love irony?
On that particular day in December at Barnes and Noble, I bought something or several somethings—honestly, I don’t remember. I do remember that the check-out clerk asked if I would like to donate a Godiva chocolate to disabled children in our area.
Who can say no to such a request? I pictured in my mind a small child with a serious disability—say, Down syndrome or paraplegia—enjoying a piece of chocolate. That chocolate wouldn’t change his life or make it easier, but absolutely no one can be unhappy or worried while eating chocolate. If Elvis had eaten more chocolate and done fewer drugs, he’d still be alive, don’t you think? Buying a chocolate for a disabled child was the least I could do. So I did it and checked my to-do list for the next holiday errand. I didn’t give that chocolate another thought.
A week later, I went through Jack’s backpack to clean out the day’s work: artwork of Christmas angels made with his handprints, beaded pipe cleaners hooked into Christmas ornaments, the usual assortment of notices from the teacher regarding the Christmas party, pajama day, the book exchange. At the bottom of the mess was a foil-wrapped Godiva chocolate with a note attached.
I’ll give you one guess what that note said.
My child. Disabled?
Of course Jack is disabled. He had been receiving services through IDEA—the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—for three months. He had had a diagnosis of Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified for five months. He attended speech and occupational therapies at Children’s Hospital and went to two different schools to meet his needs. My schedule was topsy-turvy just trying to get him where he needed to be each day.
None of this added up to “disabled child” for me that day at Barnes and Noble. Then, my definition of “disabled” included only huge, obvious, “bad” things that keep people from functioning normally. Disabilities are made up of amputations, or assistive apparatuses, or senses that don’t work, or brains that can’t learn, or bodies that can’t speak or walk or move easily. Disabilities are really hard things, things that create barriers in life that most people don’t face, barriers that other people face.
The Godiva chocolate in my hand laughed mockingly at me and said, “Your son whom you love more than life itself is ‘disabled.’ What do you think about ‘disability’ now?”
I just hate it when the universe dope-slaps me.
I’ve learned that we really do have a choice how to react to situations like this. It’s easy—and pointless—to take these ironic dope-slaps personally. The universe isn’t picky about choosing its victims, and absolutely every person on this planet gets dope-slapped at least a few times in the course of life. When we take it personally, we are the ones who suffer, mainly from that dreadful waste of time called self-pity.
This reminds me of an apt quotation from the sci-fi series Babylon 5. (You see, I’m a geek as well as a dope.) Marcus, my favorite character, said: “I used to think that it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”
On that December afternoon two years ago, in the face of the general hostility and unfairness of the universe, I chose to laugh at the mocking bit of fine chocolate. Yes, Jack is disabled. His disability isn’t so obvious as Down syndrome or paraplegia, but it is real and it is hard. It does put up barriers for him that most people don’t face. As Jack’s mother, however, I had instinctively chosen to focus on his abilities rather than thinking him “disabled.” Even though his brain works and learns differently from other kids’ brains, I focused on the fact that it does work and it does learn. His hands don’t do fine motor tasks as well as other kids’ hands, but they are learning and can already do a lot. He still has difficulty telling me a story or answering questions, but his speech improves daily.
This is how love sees disability.
Far be it from me to promote political correctness (I prefer good manners), but the PC term “differently abled” has merit. It’s all in the perspective, how you look at it. Yes, we all face really hard things in life, whether we qualify as disabled or not, and these challenges can overwhelm us at times with worry and stress and fear. Been there, done that. Haven’t we all?
But by shifting our focus we’re able to see those challenges differently. To a certain extent, it really is “all in our heads.” How many mothers of children whose disabilities are more severe, more obvious, more challenging than Jack’s see their children through the same filter of love, that same focus on ability rather than disability? My big mistake was in assuming those families were different from mine.
One day last summer, while I waited for Jack to finish speech therapy, a mother and son sat down near me. The son was hard to miss: a large teenager, nonverbal, squinting, tongue sticking out of his mouth, playing with his hands, barking. Well, it sounded like barking. His mother patiently settled him, asked if he wanted a drink, handed him a sports bottle with a straw, told him gently to keep his tongue in his mouth, made small talk without expecting a verbal response but was attentive to nonverbal cues. I was struck by how patient and calm she was. Every time he barked, she smiled. She never shushed him.
There aren’t many moms who could go out in public with a barking teenage boy and make it look like the most natural thing in the world. By the grace of God, she pulled it off and made it poignant and beautiful. I saw God in action in the waiting room.
As it’s impolite to stare, I turned back to my book but was distracted when I heard her speak to another waiting mother: “Oh, that’s his happy sound. He makes it all the time. He is always so happy and brings such joy to our lives. I don’t know what we would do without him.” Love literally glowed from this mother. You could tell she wanted to share it with the world, wanted the world to see her son the way she did. I looked at the young man with fresh eyes. I could see what she meant. He did show joy; I had missed that before because I was looking only at his disabilities.
No doubt the universe heaped its general hostility on this mother and son. No doubt she has felt frustrated, scared, and angry, and has wondered why. No doubt her son is severely disabled. But she made a choice at some point to accept her son for who he is, to see joy and love in him, and to give joy and love to him.
Don’t we all long for acceptance? Don’t we all long for love and compassion and understanding that is unconditional? But how often do we give that sort of love? It’s easy to accept someone who’s just like you, who acts like you, looks like you, and shares your beliefs, interests, language, and politics. It’s harder to accept difference in any form. Much harder. History is largely the record of our collective failure to accept difference.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be judged or dismissed or ignored or feared, and I certainly don’t want either of my children treated that way. We’re all different, but we are also all children of God, human beings created in His image with great capacity for compassion, love, and joy.
An American soldier stuck in the sandstorm during the invasion of Iraq said, “Embrace the suck.” He couldn’t change the weather or the fact he was in it, but he could change his attitude. He embraced the sandstorm just as that mother smiled each time her child barked in joy. The outside world may see our challenges, whatever they are, as uncomfortable, painful, unfortunate, disabling, or tragic, but we don’t have to see them that way at all. When the universe is hostile, we need to embrace the suck, and sometimes we can even transform it into something beautiful through love. Doing this is hard. It requires courage to stand up to the universe’s hostility and let go of a lot of indulgent wallowing in self-pity, but it’s worth the effort. At least I believe it is.
As for the Godiva chocolate…I ate it myself because Jack won’t touch any chocolate that isn’t an M&M or cake frosting.
Don’t you just love irony?
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