Last night, when the kids were tucked sweetly in footie pajamas and in bed, I started racing through a list of things I wanted to get done before I hit the hay myself.

The list looked something like this:

• do dishes
• sort through 5 bins of summer clothes
• write blog post
• make contact with other life forms
• make sure all the kids’ school paperwork is in order for the week
• finally made a google spreadsheet of all the kids’ family-friend contact lists
• Prep for writing gig for the next day
• eat ice cream
• have sex with husband
• laundry (natch)
• go for a walk
• make friends
• find myself
• be a better person
• free the world of injustice
• join my husband on the sofa to watch “Fringe.”

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1. A Dry Time
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What does compassion mean?

This week is the veritable “hump day” of my online e-course I am doing. The course has been enlightening, inspiring and exhausting. We’ve addressed “curiosity” and then “honesty,” writing about the ideas in our lives and identifying them in concrete ways. The writing has been coming easily.

All of which makes me very, very angry.

That’s my go-to defense mechanism. Get angry, start ranting, deflect love, prove that people don’t really like me and I’m not worthy of attention, feel bad about all of that, sit in lonely funk, write about it angrily.

Stir, rinse, repeat.

“Our default wiring is to help… If we attend to the other person, we automatically empathize… we feel “with” automatically. The question is, why don’t we? ” — Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence

"mew"

Then, some wise woman will come along and say: “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” What does THAT mean?

Or some friend will say: “Sheesh. Lighten up. Take it easy. It was just a JOKE!” hahaha very funny!

And I get whipped around in the anxious frustration, again, about not being good enough at being able to be nice to myself, or to others, or to even just spotting a stupid joke.

Wow, it’s hard work being all this!

And Now for the Extended Metaphor

It’s the compassion of week 3 that’s got me all stirred up. Being kind. To myself. To others. Thinking about it! ARGH! Because it’s different that just being “kind.” But how? I have no idea. What does Compassion mean?

That’s why Compassion is terrifying!

It’s like a kitten, right?

Kittens are so cute and soft and cuddly. So you take one home, and you say: “I can do this!”

And at first it’s cute, but then you put it in its box so you can go to the bathroom or the bar, then it cries and whines all night, and then it pees all over your duvet, and then it hides in the wall.

Then just when you think it’s gone forever and it’s died in there (and yeah just when you think “that’s gross” and you are a worried about the smell, and you think you will get arrested, but you are maybe a teensy relieved?), it comes out and says:

“Mew.”

Compassion kitty, I don’t have any idea who you are or what to feed you.

 ”Compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others.
–Pema Chodron

 

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You ever get a bit of time where you feel like you are just dry out of ideas? I never seem to be out of ideas, but it seems like lately I keep hitting a wall of no.

The wall of no has quite a few people sitting on top of it, their hairy legs dangling down. They sit up there and look down at me and whenever I feel like hauling myself up and over, they eyeball me and say:

“Nope.”

My life has all kinds of odd characters in it at the moment: social workers, supervisors, assistant professors, attorneys, life coaches, tree trimmers and the like. So you just never quite know who it will be that day, sitting up there, when I look up.

The oddest person I see up there — and the most common, of course — is myself.

Usually dressed up in a big hat.

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1. Dancing with Time
2. Time, Sculpted and Consumed
3. Dry Milk

I’ve never done anything
All the way
To the bone–
And that is why
I know I am
Half-hidden
From you
And myself.

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The #reverb10 prompt for today is about “soul food” which to me has always directly translated into “comfort food.”

And who can speak more about the extensive need for comfort food than Colin and I?

Colin and I are wrapping up YEAR 2 of ” Creme-Filled Uncertainty” with a big sidedish of “Deep Fried Instability.” We like to garnish our days, as I have mentioned before, with a tangy relish of Denial.

At the end of the day, however, when the house is quiet and we’ve laid down our arms on the battlefield once again with sibling rivalries and beating back Princess and Iron Man useless plastic crap, we inevitably comfort our emotional wounds like people have done for centuries.

With food.

In particular, I myself — no longer getting to go OUT for buffalo wings and now being the goddess of fruits and veggies, must be a good example myself — love to partake in a little bowl of Pennsylvania Dutch treat: Snyder’s of Hanover Buffalo Wing flavored pretzel pieces.

I tried them once, and two years later I have not looked back.

Colin has other snack-hour favorites, and when we have guests, he will even do the complicated and special process of making real buttered popcorn for them. Which is treat that we share with the rest of the family once in a while, on movie night.

But, for the two of us, the sanctity of our down time has been marked by an opportunity to go blindly into the snack cupboard, and to come out sighing in relief.

We have plans to wean ourselves from this habit over the new year and I am confident we will. For the time being, however, as we walk on our path of questionable circumstance, we aren’t giving ourselves too hard a time over a little comfort food therapy.

This post was part of #reverb10, and the prompt was Soul food. What did you eat this year that you will never forget? What went into your mouth & touched your soul? (Thanks to author Elise Marie Collins)

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1. The Unfinished Basement is Not Worth Examining
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3. Why We Gave Up

#reverb10 Prompt: Beyond avoidance. “What should you have done this year but didn’t because you were too scared, worried, unsure, busy or otherwise deterred from doing?”

I should have revised the novel I wrote instead of chickening out and just taking a teaching job. Because I got positive feedback from agents on it. Because I knew myself what needed to be fixed.

Even so, I went totally BEYOND avoidance, and said “I’ll get back to it someday. Not today.”

Oh, and there was no “deterred” from doing, though many of my excuses may have made it seem like that. It was plain old terror of failure that has left it locked up in the external hard drive on this desk. With its one blue eye staring at me, day after day.

(Bonus: Will you do it?)

Hmmm. I don’t know. On a “Self-Belief as a Writer” scale, I’d give myself a 5.2. I know I CAN do it. I even wonder WHY I haven’t done it and others have.

Yet I seem to always get only halfway there, or so.

Oddly, with so many projects, the minute I flush the fear and get on with things, I seem to instantly reach the finish line.

I mean, not actually instantly. But when the glue of fear has been unstuck, it’s as if action becomes completely effortless.

Like breathing in sleep.

Unfortunately, right now I am very busy tossing and turning.

(Thanks Jake Nickell)

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1. Don’t Make Me Look: Writing, Scorned.
2. It Takes a (Christmas) Village?
3. 1 + 10 = More Real Me in 2011

Day 16, #reverb10, Prompt: Friendship… How has a friendship changed you this year?

I don’t even WANT to talk about PLAYDATES. But this post is reminding me that so many things I thought I knew about friendship got themselves imploded in 2010 when I really had to start to understand the intricacies of PLAYDATES.

Are they for Mommy? Or for the kids?

Can I them drop off? Who is this kid again?

What do I do with my other kids while this one is playing with her friend?

Why do I need them? (you can ask that question a couple different ways.)

What do I do if I like the mom but not the kids?

What do I do if the kids like each other but I can’t stand the parents?

What do I do if the none of these people seem to like me or our kids?

And then there’s the whole “I have a nanny” vs. “Yours go to daycare?” issue, which means some kids aren’t available. Or I’m not. Or they feel weird about dropping them off. With the nanny.

My crash course in finding friends for the kids is happening in the midst of trying to make friends of my own: through work (most of my colleagues are older with kids in college or none at all) or through common interests and the neighborhood. Most of those friends are younger, with no kids of their own. So these friendships have, naturally, been stunted by our posse of small people.

Which leads me back to the original dilemma: Where are all the interesting, fun parents with young kids? And what are they doing with their time?

People With Kids Are Everywhere, But Where You’d Like Them to Be

Well, they seem to be circling in these strange modern extrapolation of fun called “playdates.” These are generally awkward “get-together” of moms, their kids, and goldfish crackers — often arranged merely because the kids are the same age — where everyone makes half-hearted attempts to talk about anything else but teething, A.D.D. meds, and nutrition.

But no one is able to talk about anything interesting at ALL since:

1. You don’t actually know each other and may not have anything in common and

2.  the conversation swirls around preschoolers. So hence it sounds like a stuttering Tourette’s sufferer who interrupts every nearly complete thought with things like “GET DOWN,” “No-no-no”  and “Not-in-the-mouth!”

Playdates, I think, are like a perfect metaphor for modern family life. I need them– to get out and see people who don’t drool and stomp their feet — and yet they come with all sorts of unintended consequences. Like if I have a playdate with friend Billy and his mommy, but it doesn’t go well, now what? Do I have to keep calling? How does one break up with a playdater? It’s as if we moms, having been married awhile, got lonely for the nasty break-up heartache. And decided to torture ourselves again.

Two good things have come out of the Year of Playdates: I realized that the kids (despite their clamoring for Chuck E. Cheese excursions) are far happier playing with the neighbor kids in our yard or theirs. Regardless of age and gender differences. Big surprise.

And at least one of the regular playdates has started to sound more like a tuned in radio station and less like loud static. The kids play together without the use of cattle prods or bribery most of the time, and the other Moms and I don’t have to say things like “What’s your husband’s name again?”

Or god forbid, “What’s YOUR name?”

Which I’d say is progress.

You might also like:

1. The Word for the Year: Denial
2. Three Questions for the New Year: Part One
3. The Unfinished Basement is Not Worth Examining

A Guest Post in Which New Haven Graphic Designer Jessica Ferguson Reveals Her “Blog Problem”

“Most people are just afraid of putting pencil to paper.” That’s how one of my favorite art teachers started his “Introduction to Drawing” course.

“When you’re a kid, you don’t care – you’ll draw anything on any surface you can get away with. You just draw. But now, I can tell you’re afraid – you’re terrified to make that first mark. You need to just do it, just draw!”

And I was afraid. Terrified actually. It sounds silly, but that first mark was so important: it was where you started. There was no going back. You could make or break a drawing with that first mark. It was a commitment, once you did it, that mark would be out there for the world to see… and what if it turned out I had no drawing skills? Putting pencil to paper felt a lot like jumping off a cliff.

Blogging into the Abyss

Blogging feels the same way to me. I love the idea of it – expressing myself out there on the web. I’m a born attention whore you see. My Facebook wall teems with updates, links, comments on my life and photos from my iPhone. I never think twice about throwing something up there – it feels so casual, so relaxed. I know people judge me from time to time (the term “morally questionable” was thrown about at one point in reference to a post), and I welcome the critiques. If you don’t like it – unfriend me. Or I’ll unfriend you. Let’s race to see who can click “unfriend” first! Facebook is easy!

But blogging is different.

Blogs aren’t just for your friends, nosy little buggers that they are. Blogs are for strangers who don’t care what your husband cooked you for dinner. They don’t care what cute thing the cat did last night or if you’ll be at the bar, “just in case anyone wants to show up.”

And blogs filled with links to cool shit better be filled to the brim with the coolest of shit, because otherwise they’re a dime a dozen.

I should know, I have several. Oh yes, I’ve done my share of blogging. Let’s see…

Stringing Them Along

There was my first blog.

Quite a few years ago when blogspot started making it easy for any Tom, Dick or Harry to toss their thoughts out onto the web. I started as many do, with a massive manifesto post – filled with tidbits about WHO I AM and IMPORTANT BELIEFS and WHAT I WILL BLOG ABOUT. It was self-important and grandiose. It was everything I wanted my blog to be. I WAS A BLOGGER!

And then the fear set in. I had the shocking realization that I don’t really have much to blog about. It was less of a venue for my important and well-thought-out views on life and more of a random journal. Sort of embarrassing really – especially since this was before the days of FB and sharing everything from how you slept last night to what you had for dinner seemed normal. Back then it just seemed silly to make those things public. My blog died a slow death over several months until I eventually shut it down for good, kicked some dirt over in and moved on as though it had never happened.

My second blog, was different. It had a point!

It was to be A CRAFT BLOG: chiefly about my own craft projects (mainly quilting) but also about a few choice crafts other people had done – and tutorials/patterns for those.

I skipped the manifesto this time and went straight to work; I’d learned my lesson about setting unachievable goals. THIS is what I was working on yesterday. And THIS is my project tonight. HERE are some amazing photos of a new fabric and HERE they are in my quilt! It was beautiful – a work of art in its own right. But then I ran out of projects – I only have so much time to craft after all. So I started sharing more and more projects from the web. I’m a craft-blog addict – so there was never any shortage of amazing things I could share from them. I used the blog as a sort of “to-do” list, blogging about all the craft projects I planned to try myself. But somehow, I never got around to them. They faded into the back of my mind and the bottom of my blog as I posted more and more. My comments became more sparse with each post as I grew tired of using the same words, “Gorgeous!” “Isn’t this beautiful?!” “I love this!”… I just didn’t have anything else to say.

And eventually the pointlessness of the project became apparent. The people reading my blog were likely the same people reading the blogs I was reading. I wasn’t creating anymore: I was simply regurgitating images with pathetic and interchangeable comments attached to them.

Third Time’s a What?

This time I didn’t kill the blog. I started a new one. I transitioned from one to another by putting up a post on the old one saying that I was starting new, starting clean. I had a new purpose & a new focus. It was no longer going to be a craft blog – but now A DESIGN BLOG.

In recent months I’d been blurring the lines anyway – posting typography links that got me excited, links to well-designed webpages & fliers. It was time to refocus.

The first post? Back to the much-loved manifesto. This one focused on the need for designers & artists to keep a journal – and this would be mine! Eleven posts later – the blog went silent. My own expectations were too high. Everything I thought to post seemed wrong, not enough, not focused enough, not enough to say about it. And there it sits gathering dust. I even still have a standard link to in my email signature – though most of the time I manually delete it before hitting send, out of embarrassment of making my failure public.

No surprise: I love blogs. My Google blog reader has me subscribed to 196 blogs, and I read through them almost daily. Mostly I look for cool links, images or projects. I share a ton of these on my Facebook page, where I have no fear. I look up to bloggers – mostly women– who find the time to put their thoughts down on the page. They make me laugh, they make me cry. They feel like friends. I want to be one of them. I want to join their club. I want people like them to be moved & inspired by MY words the page.

What Now You Ask?

So now I’m starting my own business. And I really should be blogging. Its almost a necessity, but the business aspect makes the whole thing even more stressful. Potential clients will be judging me. I need to seem professional and educated in my field. I need to find something interesting to say. I need to blog with some frequency. I need to find the courage jump again.

I think my problem is that I expect too much of my blogs. I expect them to change me. To change my life, my goals. To make me focus, when nothing in my life is focused.

In short, I want my blogs to make me the kind of person who should be blogging. But I’m not really sure what kind of person that is, and I’m even more unsure that the person is me.

As for the pencil to paper dilemma? I did it. I jumped. I think the first time I may have even done it with my eyes closed, my breath held – but I did it. I drew a bike.

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“Forever is composed of nows.”  ~Emily Dickinson

Denial has saved me this 2010. Denial is my word for 2010.

Let’s be clear. I use denial for good. I use it to protect myself and some important people from thinking too much: thinking about pain, thinking about loss, thinking about the possibility of an empty or broken future.

2010 has been a year of treading water in my personal life. You can ask me questions, but I will usually only be able to answer you with a “fill-in-the-blank.”

Denial has allowed me to be at peace in uncertainty. To ride the waves of day-to-day without being swallowed by the stress of imagined scenarios.

Jack Cheng makes an excellent case for good denial. The point he makes — that “good denial doesn’t know well enough to realize what the obstacles are…” — is the reason Colin and I made many of the big life choices that we have made.

Maybe you could also call it optimistic naivete? But I wouldn’t say  I was naive about these choices. We did our research and listened to the experts.

I think it was more that in order to be visionary, you have to have a certain kind of tunnel vision. You have to see the extraordinary opportunities attached to risks, without focusing on the possibilities of dire consequences.

Maybe that is faith? Or a bit of madness?

For me, though, it plays out in daily life as a kind of simple sweet denial. I refute the negative connotations of the word and simple lay back against the relief it has given me.

For 2011, I choose the word awakening. The year to shake off of our dreams and show them the world is waiting for them.

This post is part of a daily writing project called #reverb10. Find out more & join in this creative exercise here.

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1. Peace is the Word
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3. Three Questions for the New Year: Part Last!

… And Processed Cheese

I have this group of women friends that I, well, sort of worship. I knew them from college. We all worked together on the daily newspaper.

It only recently occured to me that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t actually friends with them.

Maybe it was that friend-ish-ness, where you later see yourself in a photo with them and realize: Weird, I am standing next to them, but not with them.

(Of course, we’ve all re-connected on Facebook and I am reliving that feeling again.)

This is true insecurity. That sudden feeling that one might not be what one believed all along.

When I was in London, working at the Warrington, I had a case of lucky ignorance. I had no idea that I was foisting myself upon a pack of wonderful and unsuspecting people that I now call friends. I was so sure that anyone would want to be friends with me that it didn’t occur to me for a minute that they wouldn’t. Or that the social norms of British tradition had been well trampled upon in my quest to join their table. Even in my awful yellow shirt.

The outcome, however, was wonderful. My British (some French, some South African, some Australian, but all Londoners) friends took me for who I was, because I was guileless. Ignorant is the other word for that, you know.

But when I feel AWARE, that’s when I suddenly find myself stumbling… and overthinking everything.

Like with this wonderful posse of writer-friends from my past who have reconvened. I am anxious to make someone happy to see me, yet, I keep missing the bus altogether.

Which is to Say…

Life is awkward and messy. Especially when overly processed.

Cheese is the same way.

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