We Return to Previously Scheduled Programming In Progress

The musing, analyzing and reappraisal of priorities has been ongoing form the moment I began writing the previous post nearly two weeks ago. But I’ve done more than think and stew. I have targeted several issues as high priority and devised possible solutions and implemented them. They are still in the experimental stage but have generated good results already. The highest priority was sleep as only chaos and confusion is generated by a sleep-deprived mind. Giving in to the greed for sleep the latter part of last week meant the loss of most of my late-night work sessions. But the payoff came when I arrived at Grandma’s last Saturday afternoon feeling rested after sleeping for most of eight hours. Something clicked as I compared the way I was feeling that afternoon to the previous weekends. I realized that attempting to flip my hours back and forth was not working and no amount of will power or self-chiding was going to make it work. I needed to choose one schedule that would work for both the weekend and the rest of the week. I grabbed a piece of scratch paper and, using my coffee mug, drew two fat circles on it. I turned these into AM and PM clocks. I started by shading off the non-negotiable hours--the 6PM to 7PM dinner and dishes hour. Then over the next several hours I experimented with various mutations of 24/7 day schedules and 24/7 night schedules. I eventually settled on the graveyard shift as fulfilling more of the non-negotiable criteria while continuing to give me the largest blocks of time for uninterrupted thinking and writing, the most access to the internet and the best fit for my natural night-owl bent.

This meant that I had to stay on the graveyard shift Saturday night while staying with Grandma. Having the laptop meant that I had access to all that I needed to have a productive work session. All I lacked was access to the internet but that could actually be a blessing as I don’t get much actual writing done while online. I am too busy chasing down web pages. There were several additional adjustments to make but they were easy to figure out once I had settled on a foundation. In order to work the graveyard shift Saturday night, all I was giving up was a few hours of crappy, anxiety ridden sleep anyway. But in order to make it work I had to come prepared by a solid seven hour sleep that ended no earlier than noon. This meant that I had to give up Saturday morning as laundry day. It also meant that I had to lay down no later than six. No more retreating to the bedroom when my mother-in-law got up at five to bide my time with reading or writing until she left at six and then zipping back out to the living room to get back online--sometimes to stay there until just before her expected return at noon.

Continuing to work backward thru the days to find the sticking points, I realized that the same held true for Friday mornings in which I had long had the habit of going without sleep in order to get a couple more hours of time online and then begin the involved process of preparing myself and the books for the weekly trek to the library--this was described in excruciating detail in the previous post. This had usually meant that I lost much if not all of Friday night’s work session and those rare times I had a full session work was compromised by sleep deprivation. So I spent a great deal of time contemplating the elements of library day, looking for ways to carve up the time that gave priority to the sleep that was necessary as a foundation for quality work. I knew that I needed to have the same standard for Friday morning that I had just set for Saturday morning or it would be difficult to maintain it for Saturday morning. It was like a falling dominos game. The practice of going sleepless on Friday morning had been workable before racing season’s Saturday’s with Grandma had been added to the picture because I had the freedom to make up that sleep Saturday afternoon. Then it seemed to be OK because it helped me flip my hours from graveyard to days for the weekend. And this gave me Saturday mornings for laundry, hanging with my husband and packing for the overnight stay. Giving that time back to sleep meant shifting or losing those tasks or benefits.

The same went for Friday mornings. Staying awake had seemed the best option because I do not return to the waking world easily and I needed to be alert for the walk. That was a matter of life and death for me. I must keep my mind on every step I take while walking among moving vehicles and other pedestrians. Most of the tasks associated with library day required an alert and focused mind. Just about the only one that didn’t was the shower and shampoo. And even that took much less time if I wasn’t groggy.

So, I began to look for tasks from Friday and Saturday mornings that could be shifted elsewhere. It occurred to me that I could shift showers to the previous evenings in order to free up a good chunk of time--nearly an hour. Establishing an evening shower made sense in other ways. It could be a symbolic gesture of respect toward my graveyard work session--getting ready for work like someone with a traditional ‘job’ could set a tone of respect for it. I shaded off the 7PM to 8PM hour for this. That was a little more time than I actually needed so it occurred to me that I could combine laundry into that hour and possibly into the post dinner hour--start a load before I start the dishes after dinner. I couldn’t do a weeks worth of laundry in a single day with this time slot but I could spread out the loads among two or three or more days. It was at this point that the chaos began to shape itself into an order that I began to feel good about. The concept of shifting the tasks backward applied elsewhere. Like preparing the returning books. Most of them could be prepared on Thursday evening while I waited for access to the living room. Those books that I knew had used up their two renewals and those I knew had a queue of requests behind me could be stripped of their bookmarks and packed. The movies and books that I or my husband finished with during the week could be packed instead of stacked.

One of the major priorities I had set out to work into this new schedule was the reinstitution of a fifteen to fifty minute free-write time immediately upon waking each day. This habit, recommended by a number of writers, had paid handsome premiums in the past and I wanted to bring it back. It was the habit of returning to the internet after six each morning that made waking up in time for this problematic. This exercise serves to prime the pump so that words and ideas and original thought flow freely throughout the day. But it only works if it is the very first thing you do upon waking--before engagement with words from any other source I.e. TV, conversation, reading, even the analytical thought involved in planning your day or accomplishing involved tasks like preparing a meal getting dressed. I hope to go into more detail about this another time. For now, suffice it to say that of all the elements of the new schedule I developed last Saturday, this is the one I have remained most faithful to.

Other aspects have been harder to adjust to or needed refinements. And in the case of the library trek, yesterday was the first of three Friday’s the Phoenix branch is on hiatus and by having the returning items packed before I lay down Friday morning, my husband was able to return them on the way to work so I didn’t have to make the trek at all. That allowed me to get a solid sleep Friday which in turn allowed me to have a full Friday night work session. Which has set me up to carry the same schedule thru the weekend. If I don’t blow it now. I am breaking one of the cardinal rules of the new schedule to get this posted--returning to the internet after six. But I have a bit of leeway this weekend as the races were canceled due to weather. I am still going to be spending the night with Grandma tonight so my father-in-law can have a break, but I won’t be leaving as early.

Last Saturday night after Grandma went to bed and I was holed up in the other bedroom, I watched two DVDs: Under the Tuscan Sun and Being There. They took priority over reading or writing as they had been due on Friday and had to be in the drop box by Monday morning and Sunday afternoon was already assigned to watching Dreamkeeper, a three hour movie also due Friday, with my husband. And Sunday night was the season finale of Desperate Housewives. I am in the same boat this weekend with two movies due Friday and held over the weekend. This time it is Blackboard Jungle and A Lesson Before Dying. Speaking of season finales--Lost was the last of my prime-time stories to have its season finale this past week. This is going to free up a lot of time and make transitioning into my work session much easier. Sometimes I really miss having a working VCR to record shows that infringe on the sacred hours after 9PM when the living room and thus the internet become available. Before the VCR in our room decided to stop spitting out the tapes, I never let a TV show commandeer one hour of that precious night-shift.

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Dreaming Awake

(The following was written over a week ago with intentions to post but when I began to prepare it for posting and discovered it was over 3000 words, I postponed in order to edit it down. Then when I began to edit I started having second thoughts about having revealed more than I should. This caused me to choke up with self-censoring induced writer‘s block.

I am tired of feeling gagged by all this second guessing of my words based on attempts at guessing what someone else might think or prefer. This is my blog and its very title implies that it is my story. I have the right to tell it my way and sometimes I tell long stories. The impetus of this story was musings about why my writing and web work was stalling. It was an attempt to get onto the screen in a format that could be referred back to all of the ramblings of my mind as I attempt to reassess my priorities and identify the clutter both literal and metaphorical that is preventing me from doing that which I say is my passion: writing.

Since I wrote this, I have begun to implement potential solutions to some of the problems identified and I want to write about those but they would be out of context without much of the material in this rambling backstory. So, for what it’s worth…)

What happened to my famous intractable insomnia? Where is it when I need it? I’ve been having a incredibly hard time adjusting to the new realities of my weekly schedule which commenced in early April. The first weekend of April I spent five days sitting with my husband’s Grandmother while his parents went on vacation. It took me nearly the full of the following week to recover my equilibrium and get back on a graveyard schedule for my online sessions. That following weekend was supposed to be the beginning of dirt track racing and thus I expected to be sitting with grandma again that Saturday so I adjusted my schedule back to days in the twenty-four hours preceding. But the races were rained out. The same thing happened the weekend after that. But every weekend since I’ve been spending Saturday afternoon thru Sunday afternoon at Grandma’s. And there have been other days when I sat with her for an hour or two or several--usually on a Friday and or Monday--while my in-laws shop and run errands for the two households. I used to be able to flip my hours around without unbearable repercussions. Not anymore, apparently. Every time I open my eyes I am so disoriented that I’m not sure who I am let alone where I am or even when I am. I seem to have lost my ability to tell by the ambient light in the room what time of day it is. When the light is dim is it dawn or dusk or just cloudy?

Friday afternoons are also my weekly walk to the library which is a major investment in time and energy. I calculated that it takes upwards of five hours beginning with the hour plus I spend on the library catalog online in the wee hours tending to renewing and requesting books and searching the catalog. Followed by an hour plus preparing books and movies going back by removing bookmarks and notes, noting down page numbers on each book’s bibliography slip and packing them. Followed by an hour to prepare myself to go out in public. Followed by an hour plus to make the walk each way and tend to business at the library--I rarely do this in under ninety minutes but when I leave the house too late and absolutely have to get back by three for Dr. Phil, I can push myself to get there and back in under an hour--just. This isn’t wise in warmer weather tho and that is now upon us.

Besides, that parameter is going to change after this coming weekend as the library is moving shop a block away into temporary quarters while they construct a new building about four blocks further than that. The new building is slated to open in a year and if we are still living here at that time, I will have to allow for two hours just for the walk to and from sandwiching the visit itself. But on the other hand, when that time comes I may choose to make that walk every weekday to hang out at the new facilities which will have air-conditioning and WIFI!!! I could say goodbye to the graveyard shift altogether.

Anyway, the fifth hour plus spent on the Friday library run is spent on putting bookmarks in all the non-fiction books, referring to the bib slip of the repeaters for the page number where I left off, making new bib slips for first timers, making room for the books on the makeshift shelves--mostly cardboard boxes of various sizes from shoe boxes on up to large produce boxes--and finally taking stock of which books and movies are coming due the following Friday whether they have used up their two renewals or are high demand and unlikely to renew. Some of this latter I do while renewing online and while pulling items from the shelves for return.

After all of that, I get to read very little if at all before Monday! This is very frustrating. Often I have not slept Friday morning and thus am unlikely to have a Friday night session online. Which means I lose three nights in a row as my attempts at napping Sunday afternoon, after returning from Grandma’s, to prepare for a late night work session have not worked out. Either I am too wound up, have too much caffeine in my system or the nap does nothing but make me crave more sleep.

So it is Monday night before I get swung back around. And then what do I do? I spend most of the next four nights, chasing down my favorite blogs and websites to catch up on them! And there are so many of them that I don’t have time to actually read them while online, I use the magic of synchronizing and saving to disk for some but mostly just rush from one to another opening them as fast as I can using three different browsers with multiple tabs and windows. Some will only remain available while offline if the window it is in remains open to it. Others will open again to the last refresh when I am ‘working offline’. The major downside to this practice is that any time I spend reading stuff saved on my laptop is time I don’t have for reading library books or watching DVDs. So more and more books and movies are going back untouched. I get further and further behind on current events. Worst of all from a writer’s perspective, I am squeezing out the time available for my own original writing. This has got to change!

So I am setting myself the task of adjusting my priorities over the next three or four weeks. After this Friday (May 19), the Phoenix branch of the library is on a three week hiatus so I won’t be making the library run, books and movies will be going back as they come due but none will be coming home. I will have to spend the time on the online catalog to manage the renewals and requests but the other four hours plus will be available for other tasks. I intend to make one of those tasks Writing! And not just on Friday.

My fingers are fairly itching for the keyboard every minute I am awake. I am writing in my head constantly. I don’t know why it is that it is at those times when circumstances curtail the availability of writing time that I get the most interesting ideas. Whether I am washing dishes, at a family gathering, attempting to sleep, waking from a dream, doing laundry, in the shower, riding in a car, reading a book, watching a TV show or movie, watching pages download, the ideas and the words are flowing through my mind but I keep on putting them on hold. Whatever I am doing always seems more pressing. Often it is. As when I am woken from that dream by the sound of Grandma’s labored breathing over the baby monitor, or I am at the dinner table or performing a task others are depending on me to complete, or I’m washing my hair.

When I was dreaming of having my own laptop last spring and summer, I dreamed of being able to take it outside with me to write from a lawn chair next to the rose bushes with my cats on their leashes just far enough away they can’t quite reach me. But to my dismay, when I tried this the first time the weather permitted, I discovered that I can’t read my screen outside in daylight. It is also difficult when there is too much daylight in a room. This completely bamboozled me. I have seen laptops featured in photos, commercials and in TV shows being used in daylight outside and beside windows indoors. I don’t know whether it is something to do with a setting on my computer or just one more thing I can thank my RP for.

Another, related frustration, is that when I am working in the dark which is when the screen is easiest to read, I can’t read my keyboard. I had anticipated this when shopping for my laptop and had hoped to get a light colored case but when the time came it would have added several hundred dollars to the price tag to insist on a white or gray case. Just today I spent over an hour going thru my fun sticker collection looking for cute stickers in light reflective colors and small enough to stick to some of the more crucial keys in an attempt to solve this time wasting frustration. Now I have a tiny furry white cloud on the delete key, a left-leaping neon blue dolphin on the backspace key, a right-swimming dolphin on the tab key, a multicolored heart on the left control key, a rainbow arising out of clouds on the space bar, metallic-red ladybug between the right control key and the up arrow and a metallic aqua and silver Tao on the return key. After I got them all stuck on, I put a jacket over my head and screen to make it dark enough to test it and it seems to work to make those key visible by the light of the screen even when it isn’t mostly white. A secondary benefit had shown itself as I type this. It is helping me find those keys and more by touch without looking down at the keyboard. The one I’m finding most helpful is the fuzzy cloud on the delete key as I have never before been able to use it without looking and when the light is dim or non-existent I have to get about two inches from the keyboard to read the less familiar keys. Of course I’ve been typing since I was ten or eleven so I have no trouble with the alphabet and number keys once I have my fingers positioned on the F and J. But nearly every other key on this keyboard is in a different location from the last three keyboards I have used. I hope this is going to save me a lot of time and frustration. I had the idea for it several months ago but I never took the time to do it. Now I wish I had. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve lost a thought because I was looking for a key in the dark. I had been using my little book light to light up my keyboard but its batteries are dying.

All of this barely scratches the surface of those things competing for my time and attention. One of the most egregious, making all of the above simple irritants in comparison, are a culmination of events in my personal life that I don’t feel free to share in public because of those elements of the story that intersect with other’s stories. I don’t mind confessing to my own mistakes, errors in judgment or any other thing tending to embarrass or shame me but I don’t think I have the right to include those aspects of my story that might tend to embarrass or shame someone else. The story of the last thirty years of my life has all the material for a compelling roman a clef--a novelization of real life events with thinly disguised characters and true and fictional events and characters stirred together. Those of you who have been reading regularly since the debut of Joystory will have encountered a number of those elements of great stories, any one of which would make for a great story on their own--but imagine them all combined into one story! And then imagine that is barely scratching the surface of my life: coming out of fundamentalism and learning to think for myself; living with severe visual impairment; living with Panic/Anxiety Disorder; surviving several episodes of severe depression; living with infertility; living for years in extreme poverty and then finding ourselves on the edge of becoming another high-tech millionaire family after my husband got hired onto a pre IPO in the Silicon Valley only to find ourselves homeless on the streets of Santa Clara County, California after the tech bubble burst and subsequently losing all the belongings we left in storage when we left the state on a bus--among them twenty years worth of my manuscripts and notes and what remained of my personal library after selling several hundred books in an attempt to hang onto the roof over our head; taking in a special needs nephew for three years and three years after seeing him out on his own sitting vigil beside his hospital bed after his surgery for colon cancer, then two years later two rooms down, sitting beside my Dad’s hospital bed following his surgery for the same thing and sixteen months after that sitting beside my father’s bed in my parent’s bedroom moments after he stopped breathing and two months after attending his funeral, attending my Mom’s twin sister’s funeral and that same weekend learning that the building in which I attended church and Sunday school and eventually was married in had been donated to the fire department for practice and had been burned to the ground while my Mom and sister were out of town for the funeral. I swear, life itself has a sense of story at least as good as the best storyteller ever known. Or is that just the experienced storyteller in me framing the episodes of my life as story?

Most all of those things I listed have been covered to some extent here in Joystory. There are many other things I haven’t brought up. Among them my struggle with weight since it seems so cliché, other health issues because they are just a jumble of symptoms without attached diagnosis and it makes me sound like a whiner to inject them in every time they crop up. Some I have touched on occasionally: joint pain, dangerously high blood pressure, allergies to just about everything under the sun and sometimes it seems the sun itself for every exposure to the sun beyond twenty minutes is invariably followed by a fever later that day, evidence of OCD and ADD, a mouthful of bad teeth, migraine headaches….. Like I said, whining! I need one of those photos of a wailing baby to insert here.

You know what? I am going to drop a hint about the situation obsessing me lately since it is as much my story as anyone else’s and I am sick and tired of tip-toeing around all of the peripheral issues: I believe my husband and I are candidates for Dr. Phil’s Mooch Squad as I no longer believe, and haven’t for at least three years, that our continuing imposition on my husband’s family is justified by lack of sufficient income. Mismanagement of that income is the decisive factor now and it fills me with shame and a sense of helplessness. I want to be clear that I do not absolve myself of blame but I have control over only my own behaviors and am struggling to figure out what my response to certain events should be and how to coordinate all of my personal difficulties so as to figure out how to become part of the solution instead of part of the problem. With that caveat I must confess that every time I watch my husband light up a cigarette I feel my whole being fuming along with the tobacco. A cartoon image reflecting my mood at that moment would show a grim-lipped, clench-jawed face with smoke flowing out the nose and ears. As the cigarette burns down I see the dollar bills I had saved toward my business plan that had to be redirected, the pages of the books I had to sell, my lost manuscripts, family photos lost in two different forced moves, the bus ticket back to Longview to attend at least the free walk around Lake Sacagawea that is part of our thirtieth high-school reunion this July, and hope itself. I fear I am succumbing to the sin of bitterness.

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Sunsetting Democracy

Following is a collection of articles that I’ve come across in the last month which were disturbing individually but taken collectively tempt me to despair for American democracy especially considering the undermining of the vote in the last three elections. Often as I read, my mind juxtaposes the oddest things from previous reading, television and movie viewing and personal experience across the spectrum from novels to news and I’m never sure whether I’m having a profound insight or need to be committed to a psyche ward and hooked up to a Thorazine drip.

Un-elected Panel Could Guide Federal Budget Ax--Congress could be voting on the creation of a panel whose members are appointed by the president who are charged with analyzing the effectiveness of federal agencies and programs and recommending whether they should continue to exist or continue to be funded. Such recommendations would then be submitted to the legislators in a single package for an up or down vote without debate. Thus dozens of agencies and programs created by Congress--in many cases after years of public pressure--could be de-funded, truncated, or sunsetted without any opportunity for debate among legislators or those they represent. How would this not be the very sunsetting of representative government? By voting for such a panel Congress would be voting for their own irrelevance.

How Bush Sidesteps Intent of Congress--with presidential signing statements submitted at the time of signing bills into law, the president presents his interpretation of the law he is signing, including in many cases his contention that he as executive is bound by the law only to the extent that it does not infringe on his constitutional prerogatives as executive and commander-in-chief according to his interpretation of said prerogatives. So…according to this theory the Executive is rewriting the laws and interpreting them as well as executing them. Add to this the untold number of executive orders. Many of them classified! How is this not the subsuming of all three branches under the executive branch and thus the demise of our three branch system of government and our constitution? If the Judiciary and Legislative branches continue to sit still for this they might as well submit to wearing ceremonial dog collars.

Homeland Security contracts for vast new detention camps--This is especially chilling in light of the reports that Federal aid for Louisiana following Katrina was being withheld because Governor Blanco would not declare martial law and hand the state National Guard command over to the President. But this article pulls together several more obscure actions at the executive level going back to the seventies, tracking the steady accretion of power into the executive and their hankering after martial law and the suspension of the Constitution. Many of those advocating over the last thirty years for such a response to every disruption of order from civil unrest to natural disasters work in some capacity for this administration. One of their contentions is that 9/11 has made America itself--from sea to shining sea--a war zone and thus we should implement the same command structure here as any other theater of war.

Is it time to hold a coast to coast candlelight vigil in memorial of democracy?

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Washing Those Harpies Right Out of My Hair

(This was my guest post at Write Stuff last Saturday)

My personal nemesis is perfectionism. My Moby Dick if you will--tho it is more like a swarm of harpies than a great white whale and they didn’t abscond with any of my limbs nor wreak any other havoc upon my physical being, nor do they hide themselves in the deep abyss of either ocean or sky, playing a diabolical hide-and-seek game. I wish! If they would but remove themselves to the underbelly of the clouds, I could possibly let the grating of their incessant berating be subsumed by the susurrus of wind and rain or the white noise of an off-air TV station. But no! They must hover and fly about my face so that I feel their hot, foul breath on my eyelids as their screeches fill the interstices of my eardrums with scorn-fed laughter and they fill all the bandwidth of my brain with invective.

I’ve been plagued by these hell-spawned haranguers since as far back as my memories go, since well before kindergarten, well before I could either read or write. They disrupt many areas of my life but none so much as writing. My Mom tells the story of my earliest adventures with crayon and paper around a year old. She says that I was the only baby or toddler she ever witnessed who never scribbled. I drew little circles about the size of dimes. They weren’t perfect circles--some weren’t closed and those that were often sported a tail or two where the line met itself, like small stemmed fruit, but they resembled grapes more than they did cherries. I’ve seen these early efforts--and effort is the precise word for them as they exude a miasma of intensity and focus and unmet expectations. Mom remembers how I would point at these marks one by one uttering a syllable or two of baby-babble. So resembling the way she read to me by pointing at the words in my storybooks as she spoke them, she is sure I was trying to tell a story. If that is true, then I’ve been a storyteller since before I could walk, let alone talk. But I suspect that I was scolding the fruits of my labor, giving voice to the harpies already nesting in my curls and shaking their sharp-nailed fingers at my nose.

My memories of the physical task of writing begin at around age three. I was still drawing those circles but I was also carefully copying alphabet letters and even short words off of whatever nearby source presented itself. But this was still more like drawing than writing. I was about four when I started writing letters to my grandparents by copying the words my mother had carefully written down as I composed the sentences aloud. It would take me a few minutes to compose those several sentences, my mother a few minutes longer to produce a clean copy, correctly formatted and punctuated but it would take me hours to produce the finished letter. I still remember those efforts--the painstaking drawing of each letter, the oh-so-disobedient pencil, the erasures that left smears, the starting over, and over and over. My first memory of writer’s cramp is from this time. My first conscious memory of having stories to tell comes from about this same time too. But I could never seem to coordinate the act of imagining the story with the mechanics of making marks on the paper. By the time I got a handful of words on the page, the fragile images and sound-track of the story would have been shredded by the dread harpies claws and gnashing teeth.

Once I taught myself to type at age eleven, I was able to hold those howling harridans at bay long enough to get whole paragraphs on the page and I would build my stories or essays one sentence or paragraph at a time like laying bricks. But it was impossible to proceed to the next sentence or paragraph or page as long as I perceived any imperfections. If I needed to insert words or phrases or make corrections, I would have to start the page over even knowing that the threads of the story might vanish by the time I got back to where I left off. This made it so tempting to just sit and stare at the pristine white page in the typewriter’s carriage, letting the story play out on it like a movie screen. This is what ‘writer’s block’ was for me. It was never about having nothing to say, no story to tell or no ideas. No, those hovered about my head like flocks of butterflies. But their delicate wings could not survive in the searing gusts generated by those leather-winged fiends.

It was about the time that I was introduced to word-processors that I came to understand that there were two distinct tasks involved that I had been conflating: creation and communication. Creation is chaos unfolding into complex beauty and it is messy. Communication must adhere to rules of order agreed upon by a community so that individual minds can be understood by one another. Carelessness and flouting of the rules increases the chance of misunderstanding. There may have been a story behind my carefully inscribed circles, but if so, I was the only one who knew the language, the grammar, the punctuation and that knowledge probably did not survive my next nap. So there was no communication, no sharing, no meeting of the minds and hearts that the best stories can conduce.

This was meant as a preamble for sharing the methods I learned over the last twenty years to tame those harassing harpies, to wash them right out of my hair and transmogrify them into feather-winged angels playing harps and wearing circlets of butterflies in their hair. But I’ve run out of space and time so I am going to leave you with the little poem I wrote in the late eighties--about the time that I made the breakthrough described above:

Crucify the Critic

To write and not worry if all is spelled right,

To write and not think of the good and the bad of it,
To write and not judge, neither budge
A finger to backspace or erase,
Thinking only of white space,
Fingers flying like birds, to fill it with words-
With thoughts sublime or absurd,
With plots simple or complex,
With dreams shallow or deep,
With observations, inspirations, aspirations,
To make someone-if only me-laugh or weep,
To make their brows perplex,
To slake their verbal thirst
For soothing nouns and zesty verbs.
Wandering solitary in thicketed woods,
Wooing amid airy leaf-lace that enchanting face,
That muse, unnamed, neglected, un-embraced, until
That harassing harpy who begrudges-even sabotages-
The art of it, is banished from the heart of it.
So crucify the critic writer, and write!

(c) 1988 by Joy Renee

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Write Stuff

I guest-blogged at Write Stuff today--Saturday. It is another riff about those harrassing harpies of perfectionism but its a little more put together than the average one I spill out here. I will probably cross-post it here later--in a day or two--but I want to encourage you to go check out Karen's new community blog for writers. It features some good writing, helpful tips for writers and inspring insight about the writng process.

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Free Press on Chopping Block?

Kevin Drum sees an ominous import to the governments espionage charges against the two AIPAC lobbyists accused of receiving classified information from Pentagon analyst, Lawrence Franklin, and then passing that info on “to persons not entitled to receive it.” It is the broadness of the charge that concerns Drum and should concern any journalist and any champion of transparency in government. For a common sense definition of espionage amounts to passing information with potential to harm the U.S. interests to a foreign entity, as the defendants did when the shared ‘scuttlebutt’ with their clients at the Israeli embassy. But by using the generic phrase, ‘persons not entitled’ this administration seems to be attempting to set a president that can be applied more broadly. Think Sy Hersh. Think Daniel Ellsberg. Think bloggers!

Well, we seem to have one thing going for us. The judge hearing the case, conservative, Reagan era T. S. Ellis III, has expressed deep discomfort with the governments premise here and says that he regards the 1st amendment issue as “central to this case and important.”

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Elder Caregivers Deserve More Respect

After most of four days and all of three nights on high alert even while sleeping, I was too weary to see straight after returning home Tuesday afternoon from sitting with my husband’s grandmother over the weekend. My sleep was accompanied by the static and hum from a baby monitor that erupted several times per night with the sounds of wheezing and coughing as Grandma struggled for breath. But other than the fact that it deprived me of the rest I needed to be prepared for the next day, the nights were easy. Because at least I knew where she was and was fairly sure she was going to stay there until at least dawn.

I could even stay fairly relaxed until after Grandma had her coffee in the morning. But for the rest of the day, I had to stay very alert to her every move as she was impulsive and sneaky and careless. Just like a toddler. But toddlers have yet to be autonomous adults. Grandma may no longer have the wherewithal to be autonomous but she has the experience of having been and she continues to act as if…

And I haven’t the heart to abuse her sense of dignity any more than absolutely necessary to preserve her health and life. So I had to be sneaky and alert and proactive. I had to watch her from around corners. I had to couch my offers of help as questions that appeared to give her options she didn’t really have. I had to try to anticipate her needs so she wouldn’t try to do for herself things that endangered her.

But there were some things I could not pre-empt. Grandma has one over-riding obsession and that is her dog Spot. She wants to know where Spot is every minute. She is constantly calling to her and if she doesn’t get a quick enough response will go looking for her. Even to the point of going outside! She got all the way outside once while I was sitting just three feet from the door she exited.

I thought she was just going to call to Spot again as she had ten minutes earlier when she found Spot on the front porch and coaxed her inside. But Spot had made a circuit around the room as Grandma made her way back to her chair and then as soon as Grandma had sat back down that dog headed straight for her doggie door on the back porch. Grandma had called and called until her asthma had kicked up and she’d had to stop to use her breathing machine. As soon as her breathing was under control she headed straight for that front door again. I heard that door open but I assumed it was just a repeat of before. But when I heard silence instead of the calling of Spot’s name, I turned to look and there was Grandma’s walker standing alone in front of the closed door.

She also obsesses about Spot having food in her bowl. No matter how many times I assure her there is, she keeps going to look and if the amount doesn’t suit her she adds another full scoop--a day’s serving. She did that three times that I witnessed on a single day. This is one of the tasks that is dangerous for her as bending down to the floor risks a fall or wrenching her back again.

The thing I dreaded most happened on the first night as we were heading for bed. Grandma fell. But it was slow motion and amounted to an abrupt sitting down onto the floor and not a tumble. She was attempting to stand up from her recliner while pulling her walker towards her all the while giving me instructions about shutting down the living room for the night--be sure the lights are all out, and the TV is off, and turn down the heater and lock the doors. And she seemed to want me to start doing these things immediately. I used poor judgment on my part in eagerly complying. Especially in turning off the lights. I am nearly helpless myself without lights!

I was across the room when I saw her shadow swaying. Spot and the walker were between me and her so there was no way to get to her in time. By the time I did reach her she was already scrambling over onto her knees and pulling herself up by the seat of the rocking recliner. She ignored my pleas to stay put until we were sure she was OK. I’m alright. I’m alright. She kept repeating until she had kicked her asthma into high gear again. It was another forty-five minutes before she was settled in bed and breathing comfortably. It took me another two hours after that before I was calm enough to doze off. Then, not an hour after the last time I saw the time on the clock, I was awakened by the sounds of another asthma spell coming over the baby monitor. And that was just the first night.

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May be away for a few days

Was trying to get a substantial essay ready to post this morning but I’m not going to make it. And now I am probably not going to be able to post again until next Tuesday night. I am committed to spending the next several days sitting with my husbands frail, 91 year old grandma while my in-laws take their annual trek to the coast. I don’t know what, if any, opportunity to get online I will have. I hope to use some of the time there to write and continue with the major revamp of my sidebar so that I will have plenty to post here in the days after I get back.. But my attention has to be primarily on Grandma as she is impulsive and forgets there are things she can’t do unaided anymore. I have to keep a close eye on her and try to anticipate what she needs so she doesn’t try to do it herself if it endangers her. She has had several bad falls in the past six months and I dread her having one on my watch.

I’ve also had to switch my hours back to days for this so it should be interesting switching back again Tuesday night. Grandma is an early riser and early to bed and I have to shut myself in the other bedroom after she goes to bed or else her dog, Spot, will stay with me and Grandma will keep getting out of bed to come wheedle Spot to come back with her. I am taking my laptop with me which gives me plenty to do in both work and entertainment once I am shut up in the bedroom. Last spring and summer when I spent every Saturday with her so the family could go to the races all I had was books and sewing. Which was plenty but I ached for the keyboard because the previous racing season I got to be on the family PC from 3pm on Saturday until people started getting up Sunday morning about seven or eight--if I could last that marathon which I often did. Got a lot done that year. This weekend I’m taking DVDs with me to play on the laptop. And books of course. And my sewing because Grandma is always interested in what I am working on and asks about it even when I don’t bring it with me. But I will have to be strict with myself about the temptation to stay up all night because I have to be awake with the sun to get Grandma’s breakfast and coffee or else she will try to do it herself.

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EPA Under Fire for Inaction on Katrina Cleanup

New Standard has the story of the letter sent to the EPA by a number of humanitarian groups, demanding a clean-up of the toxic contamination of New Orleans and the greater Gulf Coast region incurred during the storms last year. Finally some groups with clout, or at least the power to command attention, are forcing authorities and the media to start addressing the issue of the toxic residue coating all of New Orleans and much of the coastal regions inundated by Katrina and Rita last year. I blogged about this several times last September (see here and here) and intended to make it an ongoing project before life forced my attention elsewhere for awhile. I was shocked then and continue to be amazed that there is so little attention being paid to this issue in the MSM and that what there is of it tends to promulgate official obfuscation and misdirection.

This is a scandal in the making that could rival Chernobyl for the toll of death and disease it could take over the next several decades if it continues to be ignored. But if science can, for once, trump politics and the prophets of profit, the tragedy could be hugely ameliorated as most of the contaminants in the storm-ravaged region are much more amenable to clean-up than radioactive contamination. But it would be costly. So many politicians and corporations are probably banking on the fact that most of the death and disease these toxins will be responsible for will be slow in developing and difficult to attribute to them.

Thus, the attention focused on this by groups like Oxfam America, the National Black Environmental Justice Network, ACORN and the NAACP when they sent a letter to the EPA earlier this month urging a ‘‘careful and prompt clean-up” is crucial to the cause of raising awareness of the situation, even if it has little hope of moving the government to prompt action. These groups all have reputations for doggedness once they have identified an issue to be deserving of their attention. They will not be easily dissuaded from pursuing the story and pressing for action. They all have large memberships noted for their humanitarian concerns. This is encouraging. It is at least a start.

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Expecting Respect? Then Demonstrate Respect.

How many times must I re-learn this simple lesson? If I don’t demonstrate respect for myself, my work, my dreams and goals, then how in the world can I expect anyone else too? And how can I expect to realize my dreams and goals, accomplish any meaningful work or even hold my head up while meeting my own eyes in the mirror if I am accommodating disrespectful attitudes toward my work from self or others, when I allow irritants, ill-manners or random temptations to derail my focus? In the post Breaking the Ice last week, I listed a number of irritants that kept me distracted including a ‘blue funk’ but I did not mention the one thing that was doing the most damage and that was the frequent interruption of my work by IM from someone very dear to me who was going through a rough time. Her story is not mine to tell so I am spare with the details. Besides, her story is not the point of this post. My story is. And more specifically it is the perennially relearned lesson that dreams cannot be realized without specific goals, goals cannot be reached without work, work cannot be accomplished without a significant investment of time and energy. But that time and energy must be set aside and treated as sacred, as not available for other use. When I allowed this person to monopolize my work-session time and energy night after night, I was disrespecting my own work and teaching her that it wasn’t worthy of respect.

Would I have allowed such intrusion if I were working for wages? Would she have even considered intruding then? Likely not. Would I have called my husband at work to fill his ears for hours with my angst? Hardly. That would be considered quite rude, not to mention a fire-worthy offence by any employer. So why did I let it continue for weeks, to the point that I dreaded and then avoided going online? Because I was buying into the theory that because my work was not yet making any money, it wasn’t worthy of the same respect as my husband’s job. Because I cared so deeply and empathized so profoundly with her and thought that it was my duty to ‘help’ her. And the impulse to retreat felt selfish. Until I realized that the more attention I gave her, the more she demanded and I suddenly understood that, far from being part of the solution, I was actually part of the problem. She had become addicted to my attention as to a drug and I had become addicted to offering her compassion and advice. But even after I realized this it took me awhile to put a stop to it because I was afraid to hurt her feelings, to make her feel abandoned, to doubt my love.

I should have given her more credit. As she is the only one among my family and off-line friends who shows any real interest in my work, who ask questions as to how it is going, who even holds me accountable for tending to it. She is the only one who reads my blog, the only one who pesters me for another of my stories or poems, willing even to see them in rough drafts. I should have known she would understand. But it took me a long time to confront her. When I finally did, over the weekend, she took it well and apologized sincerely and promised to respect the boundaries that I set. One of which was to treat my work-hours between 10pm and 5am as inviolable. I enforce this by turning on an away message on the IM that auto-responds to her IM that I am working and need peace and privacy for reading, writing and thinking. In exchange I tell her that I welcome as many emails as she wants to send and promise to reply if only briefly to at least one of them before I sign off at 5.

It seems that this act of respect for my work has invited it to bloom again. The words are flowing better already as are the ideas and the energy. I expect that I am going to be a bit rusty at technique and organization for awhile but I trust those to smooth out as I practice my craft and regain confidence. Meanwhile I am looking at other areas to see where else I am disrespecting my work or accepting the disrespect of others. Should I, for example, break my resentful silence at the dinner table where my husband and his mother regale each other with their exploits at work and grumble and gripe incessantly about their co-worker’s incompetence and their boss’s demands? Should I stop waiting for them to ask me about my work and volunteer a comment once in awhile? Is it possibly time, after twenty-seven years of marriage to her eldest son and four years of living in her home, to ask my mother-in-law, who is an avid reader herself, if she is interested in reading something I’ve written? Would she find that a gift or an imposition? How can either of us know before the offer is made and accepted at least once? Surely, after all this time and exposure to my eccentricities, she is at least curious. Nor do I need to fear offending any political or religious sensitivities as I do with my own family. Why does contemplating this make me so anxious? Is that evidence of disrespect for my work? Or simple fear of rejection? Is there a difference?

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Attitude, Not Cost, Barrier to Disabled Workers

This article (linked in this post's title) by Catherine Komp at the New Standard confirms for me the sense I was getting, that the ADA has not created the hoped for environment of acceptance in the workplace for the disabled. Her additional comments relegated to the New Standard’s collective blog--because the material was a tad off topic--was even more meaningful for me as they spoke to the catch-22 that disabled people on SSI or SSDI encounter when they do attempt to add to their subsistence income with a workforce paycheck: they risk loosing the medical care that in some case their very lives depend on.

I have lived this. I have 90% vision loss and 50% hearing loss accompanied by a panic-anxiety mood disorder which can be managed with meds when I can be under a doctor's care. I have not been employed since 1987. Being married, I cannot be on SSI as long as my husband is employed and this once factored into his employment options--whether to take a job or not if it didn't provide health benefits for a spouse, for example. Currently he is employed but the hours fluctuate seasonally. A significant percentage of his earnings are sunk into the benefits package, including health care but during the slow months-which is three quarters of the year--we can't afford the co-pay. Thus I cannot get the minimal medical support I need. I would need to divorce him or be legally separated in order to get back on medical coupons. So much for family values. Ha. Ha.

There is another issue which she did not touch on and which I cannot find any information on and I think it is a glaring omission in the field of employment opportunities for the disabled: I was so excited by my introduction to word-processing when in college in the late eighties. My productivity increased by several hundred percent. When the internet was added to the mix in the mid nineties, I was thrilled as I saw it as the means to work at home where I could control my environmental needs. I do not understand why this has not caught on.

My skill set in the area of information accumulation and manipulation is extensive. Including but not exclusive to: word processing and database management, writing, reading and summarizing, researching--accumulating and organizing information and extrapolating insight from it. And I am a self-motivator. But because I have no degree and no work history this is all discounted. My expectation that having a computer and internet access would make me employable has been disillusioned and after reading this article I guess I understand why, tho I can't say I agree with the reasons: if most employers are leery of depending on disabled employees who are under their watchful eyes, why would they be eager to trust them under self-management at home?

I am convinced this evinces a lack of imagination, creativity and flexibility of mind. All of which, I would think, any employer who is worth his own salt in the corporate world should have in abundance. But what do I know about the corporate world. My only exposure to it, other than my husband's after work grumbling, is through books and articles like this one. I am currently reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch, which is completely disillusioning me of that assumption. Apparently, imagination creativity and flexibility of mind are the last things the corporate world wants of their workers. Most disturbing of all is Ehrenriech's discovery that ANY gap in one's employment history makes one unemployable. Where does that leave people like me?

(Most of this after the first paragraph was first composed and published to the comments section of Catherine Komp’s blog entry)

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Vicarious Joy

The event most responsible for snapping me out of the state of paralysis I’ve been in was the local breaking-news story on Tuesday that transmogrified a local tragedy-in-process into a joyous miracle that has since made national headlines and created a media frenzy. I had been following the story of the missing Ashland family with great heaviness of heart. The Higginbothims and Stivers--six members of three generations of one family had left in an RV for an overnight camping trip to the coast the first weekend of March, the weekend that major winter storm hit all the passes surrounding our Rogue River Valley, dumping snow and ice and blasting the higher altitudes with hurricane strength winds. Two children, their parents and their grandparents disappeared. Last weekend, after two weeks of intensive searching had garnered no sign of them, the search was called off and my heavy heart sank even further. I did not know this family and yet I was haunted by the images of those two children’s faces and the face of their anxious and grieving grandmother waiting in her Ashland home for news. My mother-in-law, who works at a motel in Ashland, told me of her co-worker’s concern for her own young daughter, distraught over her close friend’s disappearance. This reminded me that there were numerous such connections from peripheral to intimate that weave individuals into a community--from blood-relatives to best friends, from teachers to preachers, from store clerks to librarians, from doctors to garage mechanics, from classmates to co-workers--my heart was breaking for all of them. Six members of an extended family cannot be surgically removed from a community without leaving behind a festering wound.

After two weeks of them, I had gotten used to the frequent news-breaks and news-teasers for the five o’clock and eleven o’clock news programs that mentioned the missing family’s name and flashed pictures of them on the screen--the same handful of still shots and a few frames of a video of the children’s grandmother waiting anxiously at home. I had stopped expecting any actual news--as in new information--so I only half listened and seldom glanced at the screen for these interruptions in my regularly scheduled programs. So I almost missed the significance of the breaking news story that was delaying the start of Oprah on Tuesday. I was only looking at the screen because I was checking out the quality of the picture to see if Oprah was even going to be worth watching that day. Before I heard the announcers words and registered them, I noticed that the video shot of the grandmother was different--different angle, different configuration of faces surrounding her--and then the roomful of people erupted from their chairs and collided in a group hug. Only then did I register the announcers voice explaining that KDRV’s cameras and news crew had been present, conducting an interview, when the news reached the family that morning that their loved ones had been found and all six were safe and sound. My heart burst into galloping beats and my eyes welled with tears. It felt much like a panic attack but I realized that what I was experiencing was a profound emotional rapture as my heart was lifted out of despair into hope, out of sorrow into joy.

Briefly I wondered why it seemed so much easier for me to experience the emotions of others vicariously than to experience my own. But then I realized that vicarious emotion was just empathy by another name and I knew that empathy was rooted in ones ability to translate one’s own emotional reaction to events onto another, to recognize that ‘my’ pain and ‘your’ pain are the same. Thus, no one ever experiences a vicarious emotion that they have not experienced for themselves at least once. As the evening wore on and the emotional glow I felt did not wear off, I realized that the joy I was feeling had come full circle. It was no longer simply vicarious joy, it was pure and simply my own joy and it trailed veils of hope and infused me with an energy I have not felt since last summer--since before Katrina and the three personal grief-whammies I was hit with between late September and early December. I feel like I am waking up and for the first time in six months I feel like awake is where I want to be.

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Breaking the Ice

The longer I go without posting, the harder it gets. It's not that I have nothing to say, it's rather that I have too much to say on too many different things. But I'm having trouble staying focused on anything long enough to compose my thoughts let alone coherent sentences. Forget paragraphs. The excuses for not posting have been myriad--a series of migraine headaches, serious eyestrain, pressing library due dates, a cold snap with night temps in the twenties which made typing masochistic and an exercise in futility, toothaches that rival migraines for pain intensity, sinus headaches ditto, a drastic cutback in my husband's work hours which not only creates anxiety about money but reduces my access to privacy for thinking, writing and the day-sleeping that makes my online night session possible. Yes, myriad. But the one factor that gave all these irritants the power to freeze me up when similar events have not even slowed me down at other times is the seriously blue funk I've been in for well over a month now. I'm hoping it is just the winter blues and I will snap out of it as the days lengthen. Meanwhile, I hope this brief babble will serve as an icebreaker that will make it easier to babble again. Sooner rather than later.

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Unwilling--That's Me

...to sit down and shut up that is.

I've been teetering on the brink of the high-dive for a month now preparing to take the plunge back into political commentary here on Joystory. My miniscule pool of regular readers will have noticed that I have been shying away from it since the loss of my father last September--followed quickly by two more grief wammies--which made it difficult for me on multiple levels to continue to focus intensely on the issues that I'd been obsessing on for the previous five years. Grief and guilt were a black hole that threatened to swallow what hope I had managed to cultivate. I had to take a complete hiatus from reading or watching any politics from early December thru mid to late January.

Grief needs no explaination but you might wonder, Why guilt? Well, I have explained that at length at some point last fall. I'm in too much of a rush to hunt for the link(s) right now but may try to add them later. Anyway the short version: My family are fundamentalists and, at least last I heard, starry-eyed Bush supporters. Now, even tho I broke with the religion of my childhood nearly thirteen years ago, I did not break with my family. It was, and is, a loving and close knit family. I cannot even use the word 'wingnut' in any context because whenever I see it being used, I know that those using it would include my loving family under the umbrella of that pejorative and I refuse to be a part of that. I know for a fact that these people are sane, rational, concerned, compassionate citizens. The just have a different world-view thru which they filter incoming data. They have a right to that and they have a right to be respected!

So my dilemma has been about how to deal with feelings of disloyalty as I continue to participate in the national progressive dialog. But it is about more than feelings. It is also about how to maintain my own sense of integrity. I find it hard to maintain a close relationship with those whom I cannot share nintety percent of what is occupying my heart and mind and time. And yet, I find it impossible to live with myself while denying those things that exercise my heart and mind.

The title of this post links to a post on RenaRF's On the Left Tip in which she has reminded me of what I already knew: I have no right to opt out. Because every voice counts. Because it is going to get worse before it gets better. Because it is going to take a lot of voices to tip the ballance back to a progressive agenda. Because things have been this bad--or worse--before and the only thing that precipitated change was the '...unwillingness of a group of educated and motivated people to sit down and shut up.'

Count me in as one of the unwilling. Thanks to RenaRF I am taking the plunge.

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Lost in Translation

I am becoming so spoiled by the liberal use of replay while watching DVDs that, not only am I getting frustrated with not having it available while watching TV, I am catching myself quite frequently of late actually making the same motion with my right hand--index finger extended towards a non-existent keyboard--in response to a real life, real-time event as I do when I get confused by a scene in a movie playing on my laptop. I catch myself hankering for English subtitles too.

This began to come into focus for me as I watched the movie Lost in Translation this past weekend. I don’t know if I am getting the whole point intended by the director/writer Sofia Coppola--there are probably subtleties that I am missing--but the major metaphor of being culturally transplanted and finding oneself overwhelmed by the complexities of a foreign culture seems pretty straightforward. What I am wondering tho, is whether Coppola intended for me to see this as a metaphor for my own life right here, inside my own culture.

Because that is exactly the reaction I had as the impact of the visual and audible chaos of the Tokyo scenery scurried across the screen. I bet the experience of seeing this on the big screen would have enhanced this effect. Possibly to the point of inducing a panic attack on me. Because excessive light, motion, and noise are the things that would often set one off. But besides those assaults on the senses there was also the more subtle effect of confusion generated by encountering foreign non-verbal communications, which are even less translatable than verbal ones. As these elements of the film became conscious to me, I also became aware that this is how I’ve always felt inside my own life. This could be at the very root of my anxiety issues.

Even before my visual and hearing impairments became an issue in my life in my late twenties, most of the moments of my life were lost in translation. I know that I developed the habit early on--grade school if not before--of replaying in my mind over and over certain events that left me feeling confused or anxious, trying to make them make sense but never being quite sure that I ever ‘got it’ as the saying goes. I remember times when I realized days or even weeks later that a certain cast of eye, a certain set of lips when certain words were spoken was intended to convey to me an attitude towards me on the part of the speaker. It took me even longer to figure out that these facial contortions were as codified as vocabulary words. Thus it was that my cheeks would burn with shame a week after I had been humiliated by a classmate or my heart would warm with pleasure as I dropped off to sleep while remembering the complement a teacher gave my essay that afternoon. It seems I have seldom experienced my life in real-time. Now, having gleaned this insight about myself from watching Coppola’s film, I am left to wonder if she meant for me to see this because her metaphor was intended to expose this common plight of humanity. Or am I reading more than was intended into this metaphor because there is something uncommon about the way I relate to my world--either because of the insular and eccentric cult-like religion I was raised in or because my brain was miss-wired.
Brain miss-wiring has been on my radar screen for a couple years ever since my sister and her son were diagnosed with ADD and she started pressing the literature on me because she sees elements of it in both me and our mother. I did further research on ADD when I needed a physical disorder with behavioral manifestations for a child character in my novel Brooding Instinct. But after exploring a number of such disorders, including Tourette’s Syndrome, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, Bi-Polar disorder, and autism, I settled on Asperger’s Syndrome which is considered a high-functioning autism. The concept of a continuum from severe to mild with these disorders really intrigued me for that implies that there are many, many people making their way through life with brain-wiring that is just this side of optimal, who have never been diagnosed with any disorder but who interact with their environment in ways that disconcert their parents, peers, employers--their social milieu in other words--who attempt to exact a conformity of behavior from them that is as attainable as flight for pigs.

There seem to be a number of ways besides cultural transplantation that can cause the communication between any two persons or any individual and their environment to become lost in translation. To contemplate this is to wonder, ’How in the world does any successful communication occur ever?’ Am I reading too much into this film? Does it matter?

ADDENDUM: I was working on this post most of Tuesday afternoon and had it ready to go by eight o’clock. When Tuesday night’s episode of Boston Legal dealt with aspects of this theme, I tried to find a way to insert reference to it seamlessly into this essay but could not. At least not if I want to get this posted before five. So I am just sticking it on the end. I am referring to the case confronting the James Spader character in which he represents a precocious nine-year-old girl who is unable to smile because the nerves that control the facial muscles don’t work. I was unclear as to whether this was due to a birth defect or an accident. His objective was to encourage the board of a fusty private school to reverse its refusal to admit her. How he eventually succeeded was quintessential Alan Shore but I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t seen it yet since that isn’t essential to my point. That being further reflection on the fragility of communication, the hubris of assumptions that put more value on conformity than integrity, and the futility of aspiring to fit in when that entails self-assassination. I was entirely charmed by how the relationship between the two developed, by his immense compassion for the child and the way he conveyed to her his total acceptance and admiration of her. The writer’s seemed to be making obvious comparisons between her involuntary ‘poker face’ and his well practiced ‘dead pan’. He seemed to be seeing himself in her and since the mother was an old sexual liaison of his, I can’t help but wonder if the writers are preparing the ground for revealing she is his daughter. If not, they should be. I can’t think of a better plot twist for his character right now. It would make the perfect complement to the impending nuptials of his buddy Denny Crane, played by William Shatner. Besides, I have an affinity with this child and want to see more of her and especially more of their interactions. What better way to give her a recurring role. How I wish I could have recorded this episode so I could replay it. I have to assume that I missed more than I got what with my own visual, hearing, social and emotional impairments.

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Drifting Shifts, Tussling Tools and Wrangling Words

I’ve let another full week go by without posting. Every day it gets harder to face. This time it’s because my writer's tools seemed to have declared war on me. I had a frustrating experience getting my post up last weekend. This was partly due to having gotten rusty at using the Blogger editor but mostly due to Blogger having some issues of their own. First, I did not get my post ready before I had to clear out of the living room at five Saturday morning. I had reached the editing stage but once it was edited in the word processor it still had to be transferred to the Blogger editor where it looses most of the formatting--italics, paragraph breaks, font style.

After sleeping about three hours Saturday morning I got back to work and when I was ready to transfer to the Blogger editor, I started preparing to return to the living room to go online. I was planning to leave the power cord behind because my husband and his parent’s dog, Sweetie, were out there and I didn’t want to have the cord strung across the main path through the room. To save battery power, I wanted to have AOL and an IE browser window open before I unplugged. In the latter, I also opened the nested favorite folders to the one containing the shortcut to the Blogger editor. It showed that page as available offline. It opened and all the bells and whistles worked! This gave me the bright idea of getting my essay transferred and re-edited before I moved to the living room. This took nearly another hour, as anyone who has dared to read the previous post will know it was rather long. :)

When it was ready I moved to the other room and hooked the phone line into my laptop. By sitting in my mother-in-law’s chair, I was next to the phone cord’s wall outlet so I didn’t have any cords strung across the floor. I had only an hour or so before my mother-in-law was due home. My plan was to quickly post and then get off line and return my laptop to the bedroom and then use to PC to go back online to follow up with a few promotional tasks--like surfing for credit and pinging my blog on Blog Explosion. But nothing went as planned.

As soon as I got online, I clicked the publish button. And the editor was replaced by a sign-in screen. I should have know that would happen and used another window to sign in before I clicked publish. Once signed in, the editor window returned but it was blank. If I could have seen the future, I would have just pasted the essay into it again and redid the formatting. Instead I clicked the back button to see if the publish-ready post would still be there. It was. So I clicked the publish button again. And this time it took. Only when I went to my blog to look at the result, I discovered two major problems. I had misspelled a word in the title and the timestamp was for January 18! Apparently the time it was coded with the last time I had attempted to prepare a post.

The Blogger editor used to have a form for entering the date and time yourself but recently that disappeared and the posts are given the timestamp of the moment you call up the editor. Which is very frustrating for someone who often spends hours preparing a post. Editing this post would have been very simple if the ability to manipulate the timestamp was still available. My only other option was to open a fresh editor window and paste the essay in, redo the formatting, republish and then remove the bad post. I worked quickly, expecting my mother-in-law’s return at any moment. It took me less than fifteen minutes to have the essay ready to post again. But when I clicked the publish button this time, I got back the message that I should attempt to publish again in ten minutes, that the draft had been saved and was safe, that my blog was still accessible to the public but that Blogger was currently doing maintenance.

I banged my head on the cushioned back of the chair. What else could go wrong! Well the answer to that came in ten minutes when I tried again only to get the same message. My battery power was under fifty percent now and my husband suggested I do as I had planned--take the laptop back to the room and plug it in and go back online with the PC where I could keep trying to republish. Which is what I did. Not long after I got back online, my mother-in-law got home. I asked if she needed the phone and she said no and she kindly allowed me to keep working for another ninety minutes or so. My eyes were burning with fatigue by then so I had to quit.

I did not get another chance to try until after ten that night. This time it published without a snag on the first try. As soon as I verified with my own eyes that it was there, I deleted the bad version. And then headed on over to Blog Explosion. I expected to surf for credits until I’d accumulated between ten and twenty and then move on to other things. It had been several days since I had caught up on my favorite blogs and my news and views resources. I had been surfing BE for less than ten minutes when the window froze. It turned out that several of the other IE windows I had open were also froze. And the windows of other applications tho not frozen were responding as slow as pitch oozing from the bark of a tree. My husband, who was playing games on the PC, suggested, with a bit of the ‘I told you so’ tone, that I needed to restart my computer. How long had it been? A week? He asked. I sheepishly replied that it had been at least two and probably a few days longer than that. He just shook his head. When will you learn? I have this aversion to closing the application windows on projects as I tend to get sidetracked and not go back to them. When I am working online I have a dozen or more windows open on my task bar. Half of them browser windows, a few word processor windows, a project manager, a game…

I disconnected and started closing the windows that would respond to prepare for the restart. My husband headed for bed. It was after 1am now. If I had known what was about to happen, I would have begged him to wait until the restart was done to be sure that all was as it should be. But I was confident that I could manage a restart. I have been doing them for nearly ten years now-- usually without incident. I expected things to pick up speed as each window closed but instead things got worse. The AOL window froze when I tried to close it and I had to use control/alternate/delete to call up the system task manager to try to close the applications from there. But even then, the windows refused to close. Then I discovered that I could not return to the desktop. Only the task manager was still responding. Except that it wasn’t able to actually end the tasks as requested. Then on the processes page of the task manager, I learned that 89-98 percent of the CPU was consumed by SYSTEM IDLE. I was tempted to try ending that task but I had never ended a task on the process page-only on the applications page. I was especially wary of ending a system related task. I couldn’t do it without consulting my husband that is for sure, and he was asleep. At this point, I knew exactly what I would have done with any desktop computer. I would have pulled the plug or cut the power on the power strip. But with the laptop, pulling the plug would just transfer me to battery. Was I supposed to wait two hours for the battery to die? For the first time I regretted that my power button only put my laptop into hibernation. What good would that do, if it would only wake up to the same state it was in now? Then I learned the computer wasn’t accepting input from the keyboard either--not even the power button.

I don’t know how long it took me to conceive of the idea of pulling the battery. But I wasn’t sure where it was or how to remove it. My brother had inserted it the night I bought the computer. He was walking me thru the steps of unpacking it and getting it operational. But just as he started to take the battery out of its plastic wrap, I was called from the room for something and by the time I got back he had installed it. He showed me what he had done. I am pretty sure he actually removed it and reinserted it so I could see how. But anyone who was following my story last September knows that on that night, I had been without sleep for three days, had spent six hours on the bus that morning, another six computer shopping with my brother that afternoon, had participated in the bedside baptism of my Dad, and had a one-on-one encounter with my Dad which left me unsure that he knew it was me. So maybe it is understandable that I no longer had a clear memory of how to remove the battery. I could have gone to our room and retrieved the literature that came with the laptop but that would have entailed turning on the light and making a racket. I wanted to see if I could figure it out first. I closed the lid to the laptop and pulled the power cord out of its back so I could handle the machine like a closed book, inspecting every inch of each side and the bottom. It didn’t take me long to figure out where the battery had to be as I knew with certainty which gizmos occupied the other locations. It took me a bit longer to figure out how to remove it. The latch was in the middle of the bottom panel and I needed to be pulling on the edge of the battery as I released it. Ten minutes later I was back on my desktop and all was well. But it was closing in on 4am and I was exhausted. I headed to bed.

I fully intended to prepare a new post by Sunday night, but there was no way I could concentrate with my husband, a rabid Seahawks fan, watching the Super Bowl all afternoon and evening, starting with the pre-game yakity-yak and on thru the post game yakity-yak. I don’t mind the games. I hate the commentators chatter. It is 90% baloney. I found it easier to sleep thru it than to either read or write. I was awake for the second half and attempting to read while keeping half an eye on the game. I was anticipating the episode of Grey’s Anatomy due to follow the post-game and it started about seven-thirty. By the time it was over, I knew that hopes for another post that night were dying. My sleep that day having been so compromised, I was left with a greed for it. Nor could I infuse myself with caffeine again to keep me going as I was committed to sitting with my husband’s grandma the next morning from eight until early afternoon. I could not risk being drowsy while on watch with her. She had recently had another fall and needed to be helped quite a bit getting in and out of chairs and escorted about the house.

By the time I got online Monday night, I had been awake since four that morning but I had started pumping the caffeine in after dinner and was prepared to work for several hours. But Blogger was not prepared for me. The site was completely down. Not only could I not access the sign-in page, I could not open Blogger’s homepage nor my blog nor any of my favorite blogs that happened to be hosted by Blogger. I moved on to other internet activities. I kept checking back with Blogger but it continued to be no go all night. Meanwhile I was reminded of one of the drawbacks of the graveyard shift in winter. As the temp outside dropped to thirty the temp inside dropped to fifty and I had to put up the hood of my fleece jacket and wrap a fleece blanket around my legs. But there was nothing I could do about my fingers or my nose which got so cold they ached. My fingers stiffened and began to fumble the keys. My mother-in-law has given me permission to keep the heat at sixty when I am working at night but knowing that the cost of the gas heat has gone up by over a third this winter, I just can’t justify heating the whole un-weatherized mobile home just for me. That was one of the factors making it hard to work nights this winter and I had forgotten about it while analyzing the situation in the previous post. And it would have fit right in with the theme of that post as it is where the economics of time management meets home economics and the economy at large. An example of the impact of the rising gas prices on the working habits of a writer--a minor inconvenience as compared to some but with a major impact on my life.

Tuesday I did not post because I spent the day and night reading books and watching DVDs that had to go back before the library opened on Wednesday. I seemed to be coming down with a cold. And on Wednesday afternoon, with the light from a window in my eyes, I mistook the left arm of the office chair in the living room for the right arm and, thinking that I was sitting between the arms, I sat down beside the chair instead, hitting the floor hard, jarring both arms, a hip and my lower back. My wrists took the brunt of it and were not in any shape for sustained typing for several days.

Now I’ve again spent the entire night on one potential post. It’s nearly time for me to move back to my room. I just discovered this post is even longer than last week’s post. So long that I’m embarrassed to post it. I do go on and on. And it is going to be a bear to edit. I’m tempted right now to let it lie--to just forget it exists--as I’ve done with several since last fall but that is exactly how the unintended hiatus in January began. When I disrespect my work by letting it lie in the dark, deeming it unfit for any but my own eyes, the flow of words tends to dry up on me. I will try to edit it down but it takes twice as long to make a long story short as it does to just tell it and I can’t afford to spend more than another hour or so on this--let alone another eight. My plan at this moment is to go work on the editing in my room until I hear my mother-in-law leave for work--which should be about six--and then come back in here to go online. My niece will be sleeping on the couch tonight so my next chance to post this will be Sunday night and I already have it reserved for writing reviews for books that have to be back at the library before it opens on Monday.

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It's All About the Economics

How did I let so many weeks go by without posting? Well it isn’t really that big of a mystery. Not when one has a daily journal to reference to buttress memory of the slipping by of minutes and hours. The bigger mystery and exacerbation of my frustration for me is why does it seem that having my laptop has not made me more productive and seems even to have made me less so? I have been fretting myself over that question for weeks. Leaving aside, for now, all the rmaifications of fresh grief times three, there are a number of factors that interrelate. There is the hassle of moving workstations from the bedroom to the living room and back again by 5AM. A procedure that takes ten to twenty minutes, disturbs my husbands rest both leaving and returning and often seems quite daunting at 10PM when my day has already been eight to eighteen hours long and eventful. Before the laptop, I used to continue hanging out on the computer--sometimes even online--during my husband’s and mother-in-law’s morning routines, fiddling with things that took less concentration and then getting right back to work as soon as they had left for work about 6AM. But their morning routines cannot accommodate me with my laptop and its power cord and phone cable flung across pathways. And since Christmas, my husband doesn’t leave until after 8AM and by then it is too late for me to either begin or continue a work session for if I’ve been working all night I need to be going to bed so there can be hopes of another productive session beginning in fourteen hours and if I have just gotten up along with my husband I am left with only four hours before anticipation of my mother-in-law’s return requires vacating the living room.

Besides all of that, there is the extra time spent reading physical books--novels mostly. And there are the DVDs that I bring home from the library and watch on the laptop-sometimes three times over. Getting lost in story. There is the sleep. Where did all this sleep come from. What happened to my insomnia? I have had intractable insomnia for so long I almost do not recognize myself as this one who sleeps hard for over seven hours per day. The stories from the novels and movies go into that sleep with me and mix with the stories I am composing myself. Their vividness and sense of reality impinge on my waking hours so that, like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Skies, I am never sure where story, dream, memory and reality begin or end.

There was the fact that the workspace in the bedroom was not conducive to serious work. But I resolved that issue two weeks ago when I thoroughly spring cleaned and rearranged our room, spending thirteen hours doing seven loads of laundry while pulling every item smaller than the bed and the entertainment center out so I could dust, vacuum and put it all back together with an eye for a writing workstation that now included a laptop. In the process I nearly killed my laptop when a board loaded with books and notebooks fell on it. A good fifty pounds of weight smashed down on the closed laptop shortly after I set it in its new place of honor and my heart just about smashed my ribcage in the ten minutes it took for me and my husband to move everything off of it so I could open it and wake it up from hibernation. My relief and gratitude when the desktop appeared on the screen was so intense I swore silently to redouble my dedication to the work that I got it for--the work that justified the expense in spite of our current financial situation, that motivated four years of sacrifice to save the money for it penny by penny. I realized at that moment that in less than four months I had already begun to take it for granted. And for several days I did prioritize my writing again. And then once more it began to slip-slide away from me.

I think I have just figured out--and I mean just now in attempting to organize my thoughts to write about it--where the sticking point is, the issue that has caused an imperceptible tug on the steering wheel of my motivation so that I keep drifting off course by increments so small that it takes more than a week to recognize the evidence that the rubber is off the road. And the irony is that it is the very possession of the laptop itself that exerts that tug. It is because all of my files are on my laptop and thus available to me 24/7 that I am actually spending less time with them than when they were on my in-laws’ PC and thus available only when their living room was not otherwise in use, which tended to mean between the hours of ten at night and six in the morning, tho there were occasional exceptions. Because having possession of my files and the tool to work with them has caused me to assume that I can work anytime, I have loosened the fierce grip I kept on the graveyard shift.

For nearly two years, I treated those late-night hours as almost sacred. Nothing else was allowed to preempt my time on the computer. I gave the same respect to those hours as if they were a conventional job tho I had no accountability to anyone but myself and no compensation other than the satisfaction of accomplishment. But lately I have been so laissez-faire about them, I have allowed myself to apportion them out to whatever feels good at the time--sleep, TV, a novel, a DVD, a computer game--because, after all, I can write anytime now right? But I have been failing to take into account that there is no other significant block of time in any 24 hour period that allows for the peace and privacy required to think long and deep, to focus on intricate detail without fear of interruption or observation--which short-circuits creativity with an anxiety producing self-consciousness.

This is a significant insight that I did not have when I began to write this. The fact that the common denominator of all my multitudinous justifications for not writing at any given moment boiled down to a very misplaced assumption that having the laptop meant I could write anytime. Thus every now became a disposable moment. I failed to take into account that time is like money and aspects of economic theory apply to it. The law of supply and demand applies to any finite resource, of which time is the epitome. Spending time, like spending money, implies trade-offs. And because of societal conventions neither every dollar nor every moment are interchangeable. Some dollars earned have more time, sweat, sacrifice or angst invested in them than others. And, as with monetary income, some time is pre-committed making some trade-offs more ’expensive’ than others. Mealtimes, work-schedules, family commitments and television schedules are among the constraining factors. By assuming that I could think and write as easily at noon as at midnight, I was forgetting about ringing phones, the dog needing let out or in, the neighbors screaming obscenities outside the window, the garbage truck making its slow, ponderous way up one side of the narrow lane and down the other every Wednesday, the planned trek to the library every Friday, the washer and dryer buzzers and the vacuum cleaner’s moan, the sound of radio or TV that other’s are engaged with. I was forgetting the factor of my anxiety which makes even the fear of interruption freeze my mental gears.

So tonight, Friday, I fixed a cup of coffee at ten-thirty so that I could apply the next several hours to finishing and then polishing this essay which I began to write around noon Thursday. I hope, no I intend, to get it ready to post and then go online and just do it. And by ready I mean good enough not perfect; for that pesky perfectionism that I constantly fence with has had a great deal to do with this unintended hiatus. I have begun several posts in that time--at least once or even twice a week--but did not get them ready to post before their content became too past tense. There was one that attempted to turn the experience of spring-cleaning my room into a comedy routine with references to bushels of used tissues under the bed, cats weaving figure eights around my ankles with their leashes and jumping on my back when I bent down to pick something up and the half-dozen electrical cords plugged into the power-strip that had woven themselves into a macabre macramé along with a cat toy string and the wires of the boom box’s detachable speakers. There was one about the experience of reading Harper Lee’s, To Kill a Mockingbird, and then immediately watching the DVD of the movie made of it in the sixties, in which I confess that I began that project believing that I had never encountered either of them, only to discover that I must have read the book in grade school because there were several familiar scenes in it which were not in the movie, but that nothing about the movie was at all familiar. I am assuming grade-school because I had to have read it before I had any concept of either rape or racial discrimination which my sheltered childhood had kept me innocent of until at least sixth grade.

Among the aborted posts was one reflecting on my first encounter with the movie, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? which I watched three times in less than twelve hours, seeing something new in each encounter. But I had left watching the DVD until the morning it was due and was forced to return it to the library and then found it impossible to write coherently about it without having it handy for reference. The same thing happened with Vanilla Skies. And again with the novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which is probably one of the best novels I’ve read in the last five years. I could probably get either of the movies back again within a handful of weeks but the Zafon novel’s queue at the library is in the double digits with just two copies and each turn allowed up to three weeks. I had waited in that queue twice in the last year. The first time I got my turn last July I did not get to read it because of the eventful nature of late July--see the archives here if you’re curious, especially the posts referencing the beginning of serious promotion of Joystory, kicking the duck, the family retreat and sitting with my husband’s grandma. I got back in queue immediately and my second turn with it came the week before Christmas and there was just no time to set aside for it until after the New Year and I ended up starting it just a couple days before it was due so I rushed through it without taking notes and had to send it back to the library just hours after finishing it.

In fact--and again I just noticed--there is another common thread woven into the web restraining my productivity: added to the perfectionism and procrastination already mentioned is the time-pressure of library due dates. A pressure that is exaggerated by my insistence on checking out waaaay more than I could conceivably read and watch in the allotted time (even if my eyes were not impaired), let alone compose thoughtful responses to them and also write original material, keep up my chores and family commitments, read my online news sources, watch my primetime TV stories, maintain and promote three web sites… Just about every choice of what to read, watch or write is constrained artificially by these due dates. Yet I keep choosing to over-extend my time and space and energy by bringing home more, and more, and more. I just saw a Dr. Phil show about hoarding this week and saw myself in the stories presented. And lest that seem completely off point, let me clarify: it is all economics. Space, time and energy are finite resources and every allocation here implies a sacrifice there. There is always a tradeoff and the trick is becoming conscious of them and making well-considered choices that reflect your truest self. For me that means that I still need to commit a significant number of wee hours to writing and web page maintenance. Maybe not the full eight and maybe not every night, as before, but enough to ensure a dependable, if moderate, productivity. It may take awhile for me to find the best balance but it begins by remembering that anything of value must be invested in--beginning with respect for the raw material, the process and the envisioned end-product. Without that, investment is willy-nilly and the product is chaos.

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I Never Thought I’d Come To This. What’s It All About?

I’ve been changed. Yes, really changed. In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself, I seem like someone else. I don’t know how to take this. I never thought I’d come to this .What’s it all about?

Probably anybody over forty with a ‘normal’ American background will recognize those lines as coming from the Rock Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar--from the song which Mary Magdalene sings to the sleeping Jesus. Just about anybody but me that is and those like me with backgrounds in isolationist fundamentalism in which movies in general and especially movies like this one, with interpretations of our sacred stories presented in a far from solemn manner and taking liberties with the sacrosanct text and traditions, were taboo. Me, I remember some of the hullabaloo about Jesus Christ Superstar back when I was in Junior High. I remember most the day an English teacher played the album in class and I nearly went into a panic attack before the first track finished. I had to ask to be excused. A form of conscientious objection I suppose. But my aversion had been mixed with a strange attraction and my conscience was convicted by the fact that I didn’t leave sooner than I did. I felt contaminated for days and the melody and lyrics of that one track (the title track) stayed with me for years. Even to this day. Well, the melody anyway. I think I remembered the lyrics wrong. And in such a fashion as to exacerbate the dismay. For I remembered them thus: Jesus Christ, Superstar! Who in the world do you think your are? Whereas, the movie that I have just seen for the first time does not have that line at all. It is: Who are you? What have you sacrificed? Do you think you are who they say you are?

I was shocked to discover that the movie does not dis Jesus, debunk the Gospel or deny Christ as I had been led to believe back in the seventies. It stays fairly faithful to the Gospel accounts while telling the story through the eyes of Judas. And in this way forces the viewer to encounter Jesus with fresh eyes and heart and makes the questions Who are you? What’s it all about? new and personal and imperative. And it emphasizes that all who encounter this Jesus, no matter how they answer those questions, are profoundly changed by it. Such is the power of the story of Jesus still.

Ironically, Jesus Christ Superstar, may have just given Jesus back to me--the Jesus of the Gospels stripped of all the doctrinal encrustation and all the toxicity of the breakup of the church I was raised in. Especially Mary Magdalene’s song: I Don‘t Know How to Love Him. After watching the movie straight through, I watched several of the scenes over with the English subtitles AKA closed captions. A fifty percent hearing loss causes a frustrating loss of crucial syllables but my visual impairment makes it difficult for me to watch the captions and the film at the same time. So I like to save the captions for a re-watch. I also like to watch significant scenes of movies (or taped TV shows) repeatedly, focusing on something different each time. And that is what I have spent the last eight hours doing with Jesus Christ Superstar. I gave up my intended online session for this. I watched several of the scenes repeatedly but none as often as Mary Magdalene’s lullaby to Jesus.

At some point I discovered the repeat function on my laptop’s DVD player and about the same time discovered that I could have it playing in the background while I typed in my word processor. (Why did it take me three months to discover this?) So I’ve been composing this while listening and occasionally glancing at the video in a screen resized to cover the upper right quadrant of the monitor while my word processor window is in the lower left quadrant. I’m sitting up in bed which is the only place to sit in this room and thus serves as office, library, sewing-room, theater. My laptop sits on a board atop a pillow on my lap. One cat curls against my right shin while the other one presses up against the sole of my right foot. My tailbone is asleep. The overhead light is off and my keyboard is dimly lit by the monitor and by the indirect light from a reading lamp aimed at the wall behind me so as not to reflect off the monitor or disturb my husband, snoring to my right, his elbow knocking mine with semi regularity. I have to keep pressing the earphones back into my ears as the clenching of my jaws and occasional yawns work them loose. I’ve lost count of how many times the track has played. Twenty? At least two hours.

The first time I watched and listened to it, I began to tear up. I wanted to replay it immediately but did not want to interrupt the flow of the story. I don’t know why this song moved me so. I’m still trying to figure it out. I think it will have to remain a mystery. But I was seriously moved by it. The first two times I replayed it, I did more than tear up. I wept. Strenuously. Yes, the melody has a plaintive tone and Yvonne Elliman’s performance is evocative of anguish, confusion and fear as well as hope and passion and amazement. But none of that fully explains the impact it has had on me. Somehow the words and the mood of the song and the emotive dramatization of Elliman have combined to express my own heart to myself. I’m sure it has much to do with the fact that recent events in my life have made me ultra sensitive to the themes evoked by this song; this movie; this story. But for now this feeble attempt to unpack the meaning of my reaction is going to have to be continued as my eyes are gluing themselves shut, the yawns are nearly continuous and I have to secure my laptop before I succumb or one of the cats would be sitting on the keyboard before the first hypno-gogic image illuminates the back of my eyelids.

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Happy New Year!

Hope to be posting more substantially again soon. Exegencies of the holidays, health, mood and weather have seriously limited my productivity as well as internet access. Meanwhile have a wonderful New Year and join me in making a resolution to get a grip on our dreams and never let go even when it lifts our feet off the ground.

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