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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Happy Holy Days

HAPPY HOLY DAYS

MAY YOU AND YOU YOURS

HAVE A SEASON FILLED WITH:

FAMILY

FRIENDS

LAUGHTER

DELIGHT

HUGS

SMILES

WARMTH

CONTENTMENT

GRATITUDE

LOVE

JOY

PEACE

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Erratic Meanderings and Moody Operandi

Have been sleeping quite erratically lately and thus loosing my opportunities to get online. In fact have been doing almost everything erratically. My attention span is a lot like my cats’, alternating between snoozing, staring at the TV (on or off) or the wall or being hypnotized by the screensaver soon followed by the blinking blue standby light on the front of my laptop, eating, grooming… of course there are things I do that my cats can’t like read, write, watch DVDs, play computer games, laundry, walk to the library…

And it isn’t that I haven’t been writing. It’s just that most of what I have been writing isn’t fit for anyone’s eyes but mine--if even that. I would no more post it than I would try to pass off my own vomit as soup to unsuspecting guests. Why would I want to inflict the dyspepsia of the nauseous contents of my mind on anyone else? It’s bad enough to watch it splash onto the screen each day as I regurgitate the minutia of my thoughts and doings into my daily journal.

Some of my recent writing is not so noxious but it is still not yet fit for public consumption. Like my continued work on Brooding Instinct, the novel I worked on for NaNoWriMo. Though it is now on simmer, instead of full boil as during the month of November, it is still cooking. And on some days it is the most appetizing thing going in my life.

Then there is the work on a couple dozen book reviews that are in various stages of production. When life-altering events overtook me last July, a lot of my projects got set aside and I am trying to reconnect with them. But it is nigh to impossible to write book reviews for books one read months previously without having access to the book! I guess I need to send for them again but that means giving time, energy, space and attention to books I finished months ago when there are sooo many more waiting their turn to be finished or started.

And I have continued to finish books at the rate of three to five per week since I got back from Longview and start them even faster than that. Last week, I finally finished Faulkner’s Light in August. It was the fourth copy of the book I had in my possession. The first copy came bundled in the same tome as his novel, As I Lay Dying, which I ordered from the library in June and read in July after finishing, The Sound and the Fury. But no sooner had I started it, the book came due and with it being one of the summer Oprah Book Club selections, it was on hold so I had to get back on the waiting list for one of the other half dozen or so copies in the system. I was amazed when one came thru for me in late August but I was far from done when it was coming due the third week of September. I was all set to set aside everything else that week to finish it when word came that my Dad’s liver was failing and I had to leave for Longview, Washington. Then after my Dad’s funeral, my sister checked a copy out for me from the Longview library but the novelty of my new laptop and the availability of the internet for ten to twelve hours per day commandeered my reading time (not to mention my sleeping time) so I had just passed the halfway point in mid November when I learned that my ride back to Phoenix would be leaving in six days. There was little time for reading that last week. I picked up the fourth copy of the novel on the shelf of the Phoenix branch of our Southern Oregon Library System on November 20th. But I did not make good progress with it until about a week after returning from Gerber, California where I attended my Aunt’s funeral on December 3rd. Since finishing it, I started reading a collection of critical essays about it and have discovered that I have forgotten more than I remembered about the plot and missed much of the significance of many of the elements of the story. A novel was never meant to be read in bits and snatches over half a year’s time! Novels are meant to be dove into and immersed in until the last word. I believe I need to start it over if I am to do Faulkner’s intent justice. As I relate this, I have flashes of having written versions of part or all of this before. Don’t know if it was for a blog post or my journal and if the former whether it was posted. I have begun many a post for Joystory that I never finish or for some reason choose not to post. If you have heard this all before I apologize for inflicting it on you again. But I guess it is as good as anything to serve as a review of the ‘life altering events’ I referred to above.

When I started that last paragraph I was intending to list a half dozen or so of the books that I started and/or finished in the last month or so. But I guess I will save that for another post now.

Can you tell I’m not in the Holiday Spirit? But that too is another post.

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A Cauldron of Complex Emotions Simmering on the Embers of Regret

(updated June 2006 for minor edits and an attempt to add photos that didn't work. does Blogger not allow you to add photos to old posts?)

The longer I put off posting, the harder it gets. But the harder I try to write something relevant, the harder it gets. I was interrupted in the middle of a short post announcing a brief hiatus last Friday morning, December 2nd. But I never expected that hiatus to last a full week. The whirlwind trip to Gerber, California for my aunt’s funeral was over by 7:30 Saturday evening. I was sufficiently caught up on my rest by Sunday afternoon that I was already composing a post about it that I hoped to post that night. I’m still tied to the graveyard shift for online access. I was tentatively titling the post: I Hope the Rule of Three Is Inoperative This Time, referring to that saying that bad news comes in threes, because I could not bear to face the concept of another death in the family, another funeral in such a brief span of time. My Dad’s Funeral was held October 3rd in Longview, Washington and my Mom’s twin sister’s was held in Gerber December 3rd. Enough already. We need a break. My Mom especially. I was quite worried for her last Saturday. Her sadness seemed significantly intensified and she exuded a weariness and a frailty I had not seen in the entire two months I spent with her after Dad’s funeral. I have never seen my mother as frail before. That was never a word I would have put in the same sentence as her name. Never. It was disturbing on levels I was barely able to contemplate.

But these were the things I was contemplating as I attempted to compose a post for Joystory last Sunday afternoon. I was also sorting through all the emotions involved in having just seen, greeted and briefly visited with dozens of cousins, aunts and uncles and others who and played significant roles in my childhood and most of whom I had not seen for ten to twenty years.

All of this was entangled with the bindweed of emotions associated with having been raised in a tight-knit fundamentalist sect which seemed like one, very large extended family and then having that ‘family’ implode under doctrinal disputes during the decade of my twenties when a handful of Teaching Brethren--as they styled themselves--began to excommunicate one another. It was the ultimate: You’re either with me or against God ultimatum and excommunication meant that all social interaction of any kind with the offender--from attending Bible Meeting functions to sharing meals--was forbidden; and not just with the offending Brother but with his wife and children as well. After over fifty years of discouraging marriage outside the sect, families were related by blood and marriage every which way times three. By which I mean, there were often multiple links of blood and marriage tying any one family to another.

The Gerber Bible Meeting was the one my mother was raised in and where the double wedding with her twin was held. Her twin’s husband came down on a different side of the doctrinal dispute than did my Dad. Need I say more? I don’t even want to characterize their ‘sides’ as right or wrong or any other adjective like liberal or rigid etc. But I will say that it was not my Dad who discouraged fellowship between the sister’s and cousins for nearly a decade. But my Uncle did soften his stance recently. Maybe it was his wife’s bout with the cancer that helped him put his priorities into perspective. But he brought her to our family retreat in Bend, Oregon last August, the weekend of the two couple’s fiftieth anniversary. And he complied with her request to have her funeral held at the Gerber Meeting Hall. So this funeral--unlike my Dad’s which had not been held in the Longview Bible Chapel as it had been sold in 98--had much the same ambience of the old Bible Conferences held several times per year at Gerber or Red Bluff or Portland or Eugene or Boise….
Though most of the tiny town of Gerber looked very much the same as it did when I was young forty years ago--and Mom says it hasn’t changed all that much in seventy years--and I could recognize almost every other building on the street the Meet Hall stood, I did not recognize the building itself as I had never seen it before. When I was there for my Mother’s eldest brother’s fiftieth anniversary celebration in 96, the lot was empty as some months before, on the eve of Thanksgiving Bible Conference, an arsonist had burned it to the ground. Inside though there were a number of familiar items for when the Longview Assembly disbanded and sold their property in 98, they sent much of their furnishing, including the piano and the pews, to Gerber. Those pews, simple hardwood benches throughout my childhood, had been built by one of my uncles and upholstered by another uncle after they had survived the arson of the Longview Chapel in the eighties.

After the graveside service in Tehama, we all returned to the Gerber Hall for a meal. Again, so much like the Bible Conferences back in the day. Or the Pot-Luck Sunday’s every Assembly held once a month. The meal and the visiting--AKA fellowship--was still going strong when the ride my sister and I depended on to return north--Phoenix for me and Longview for her--needed to the hit the road so as to get over the Siskiyou Pass before dropping temperatures made the roads risky. We left at four-thirty and I was back in Phoenix by seven-thirty. Since I awoke at ten that morning, I had spoken to more people than I had in the entire previous year. And I am including the day of my Dad’s funeral. The memories of the day combined with the memories of the past in a swirl stirred into a cauldron of complex emotions simmering on the embers of grief and regret. All of this on very little sleep since the previous Tuesday when my Mom called with the news of her twin’s passing.

That phone call came in the final hours of the NaNoWriMo challenge. Does this seem like a non sequiter? Well, adding to that cauldron mentioned above was the two months I spent in Longview. I think I mentioned in one of the posts I made during that time, how out of place I felt, how like an alien in the midst of my own family. And in the week following my Dad’s funeral, I had a series of dreams which were all set on the property of the Longview Bible Chapel. These dreams had inspired me to use the NaNoWriMo challenge to attempt to work through those intense feelings by setting my story within the culture in which I was raised. The culture of the Assemblies. This was a first for me. And it was emotionally excruciating. I spent the entire month of November actively imagining the characters and events of my novel, Brooding Instinct, evolving in the remembered settings of the various Meeting Halls I had encountered throughout my childhood, their floor plans and the landscape around them. Longview’s primarily but also Gerber’s among several others. Thus, this visit to Gerber held the quality of a dream for me and by Sunday evening the memories of it and those stimulated by it were already starting to bleed into the dream which was, Brooding Instinct, informing and enlarging and intensifying it.

I was anxious to get back to working on Brooding Instinct. Even though the NaNoWriMo challenge was done and I had come nowhere near reaching the goal, I was sufficiently engaged by my story now that it was its own reason for being. So I guess the NaNoWriMo challenge served an important purpose and I needn’t feel shame that I barely made twelve percent of the 50,000 word goal. There were extenuating circumstances, not the least of which was that I had chosen a theme that was too complex and too emotionally raw. But, last Sunday I was determined to keep on working on it. Meanwhile I was planning a post for Joystory which would update the events but stay pretty much on the surface, saving the emotional depth for Brooding Instinct. The title for it, referencing the rule of three, was kind of flippant and I may not have gone with it, but it reflects the need I was feeling then to stay somewhat detached for the time being. After all, even if one isn’t superstitious and thinks the saying that bad news comes in threes is on a par with black cats and broken mirrors and stepping on cracks, even so, just contemplating that title made me feel as though I were flipping off fate. And that was the state of my mind when the phone rang Sunday evening.

It was my sister calling from Longview. Her first words were: Joy, this is going to freak you out. She had been back in town for less than an hour and upon picking up her son at our cousin’s house she had been greeted by his excited tale of watching a fire that had burned down the place our cousin had lived when she was a little girl. My sister did not immediately understand that he was referring to the Bible Chapel. Or rather the building that had once been know as the Bible Chapel. For she had been a toddler when our cousin’s family had moved out of an apartment in the back of the building into the house next door. The new owners of the property had donated the building to the fire department for practice exercises and they had burnt the original wooden structure to the ground that day. The cement-block addition built in 77 was still standing--for now--further exercises pending before it is knocked down. On a Sunday no less. Did they know it used to be a Church? But I guess that couldn’t be allowed to matter. The stretch of Ocean Beach Highway on which the building sat is one of the busiest thoroughfares in Longview so any other day of the week this would have disrupted traffic and thus commerce too much. And don’t you know, that is the official, though unnamed, religion of America.

The building I went to Sunday School in and later taught Sunday School in, watched my Grandfather remarry in and some years later was married in myself was gone. They burned it down two days after my 27th anniversary, an anniversary that had so totaly slipped my mind that I did not remember it until I was relating this to my husband as my two sisters passed the phone back and forth taking turns discribing the scene as they stood across the street from it taking pictures with the cell phone.. This news plunged me into that cauldron and turned up the heat. For days, I could not think, let alone write, a coherent sentence. There was a time, a decade or so ago, when I was angry enough at all sides of the dispute, that I would have gleefully watched that building burn. I might have even lit the match myself, if assured no legal repercussions would ensue. That white-hot rage has since simmered down and recent events in my life had pushed me into close proximity with the people and places of my childhood and allowed me to see the people as separate from the doctrine and the love they exhibited towards one another then and now as more real and more relevant than the disputes which wrenched them apart and not, as I once believed, belied and sullied by them.

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Another Funreral

Forgive me for not keeping this up. So much has been happening since I got back to Phoenix. And now I have to leave again. Only this time it is just overnight. I am waiting right this moment for my ride which is coming from Longivew. We are all on our way to Gerber California for the funeral of my Mom's twin sister, who lost her three plus year battle with cancer Tuesday morning.

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Happy Thanksgiving

Just dropping in to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. Brrr. It's cold in here. 52 degrees F in the livingroom and 31 degrees outside. And foggy! I bet the Medford International Airport has made national news for giving people the holiday blues. Socked in my fog every day from before sundown until hours after dawn all week. Gotta go get warm now. And try to get some sleep. So I can enjoy the day. One of two my husband has off (Sunday is the second) between now and the eve of Christmas eve. Starting Monday he'll be working seven days a week. That's what you get when you work for a company that specializes in mail-order specialty gifts and special occasions.

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Back In Phoenix

So much has happened since I last blogged. Was that the morning of my birthday? Must have been. Eight days ago. Haven’t done much writing of any kind since then. Kept my daily journal diligently but not in any depth until last night. Learned that day--the 13th--that the day of travel was set for Saturday the 19th. My brother had been able to get the time off so their whole family was going down to Gerber a week early to visit cousins. I didn’t learn this until after we got back to my Mom’s house in Longview that night because I had slept through the conversation about it. My brother had too apparently. They were teasing us that we had been in a deep private conversation for a real long time that evening. My brother works a graveyard shift and hadn’t slept that morning and I had been online most of the night.Don’t know if it was just sleep depravation or if something I ate that day played a role but I was plagued for two or three days with a mental fugue resembling that of the aftermath of a migraine. Couldn’t think with coherence and couldn’t read for more than a few minutes without feeling nauseated. Actually it was all the symptoms of a migraine without the headpain. This was so frustrating as there was so much I wanted to do before I left. Little of which got done.

Spent my last day in Longview running errands that I had known I wanted to do since early in my stay there. Many things had been put off because of all the things that had to be done regarding my Dad’s estate in the first several weeks after his death and then because of my sister’s two week bout with a toothache and the flare-up of my Mom’s back pain. There were urgent appointments and errands being discussed constantly and I kept waiting for a lull in it to bring up my own seemingly frivolous requests It didn’t help that I was sleeping days. I wasn’t hermitting though. I was spending a lot of hours with the family in the late afternoon and evenings. Going for walks with my Mom, eating dinner, watching TV, visiting. I was generally upstairs continually between five and eleven every day. And often my sister and I continued to visit past midnight. Then I would get on the computer and usually online and next thing I would know it was eight or nine in the morning. I would often come upstairs and get breakfast when everybody else was before i headed for bed.

Spent the last evening of my stay packing. Left it all to that last minute too. Including chasing down my belongings which were scattered throughout the house. My sewing and shoes from near the chair where I watched TV, my coffee mug and food supplements form the kitchen, Items I’d left in my Dad’s office, items I’d left in both upstairs and downstairs bathrooms. And of course the two downstairs rooms where the bulk of my stuff was--the room I shared with my sister and my ‘office’ in the laundry room. I had clothes in three of the loads waiting to be washed too. Did not get started on any of this until after my sister and I got back from running errands Friday evening about five and did not finish until the last load came out of the dryer about 1am and then I needed a shower so I did not get on the computer until after two and by then of course I was too exhausted to write and would not even have gone online at all if I hadn‘t needed to email my husband. But once online, I got hooked into a lengthy IM exchange with my sister living in Vancouver and then into reading news and political commentary.

The developments on that front in the last month have been breathtaking and I could barely restrain myself from blogging about some of it. But I was deep in the heart of that territory where Bush is considered the Bee’s Knees and it tore me up emotionally to be dwelling too much on these issues. The days I couldn’t resist reading about it I would also be unable to stop thinking about it and it colored every other event and encounter of the day. My Mom especially was sensitive to my mood and would always ask me what was wrong on those days and I couldn’t give a completely candid answer. And that was just one extra element of pain I could not justify subjecting either myself or my family to.

So I was still online when my sister got up Saturday morning and had so lost track of time that she had to come let me know it was after seven. She had already taken most of my bags upstairs and out to the car. She was going to be driving me to my brother’s house in Portland and wanted to leave by eight. It was closer to eight-thirty when we finally backed out of the garage. When we got to my brother’s house it was obvious they were hours away from being ready to hit the road so I asked for the box in which I’d packed my power cord so I could use my computer while saving the battery for on the road later. I suppose I could have used the time to take a nap or read a physical book but I was itching to get back to the blogs and news articles that I’d left open on my taskbar or else synchronized for reading offline. Besides reading those, I also worked on my NaNoWriMo novel, Brooding Instinct, worked on a jigsaw puzzle and fiddled with my files. There is never nothing to do when my laptop is in arms reach and has plenty of power. But that is to blame for the fact that I am still reading the same novel that I started in July--A Light In August, which was one of the summer Oprah Book Club books. I used to average eight to nine finished books per month but since I got my laptop September 20th, I have finished exactly one. I had to return the copy of the novel I was reading to the library before I left town and my sister checked out a copy for me at the Longview library--my childhood haunt--about two weeks after Dad died. I finally reached the halfway point just before my birthday but I didn’t get much beyond that in my final week there so I had to leave it behind again.

We finally hit the road south at two-thirty Saturday afternoon. But twenty minutes later we stopped for dinner so it was about three-thirty before we were truly on the way. My sister-in-law drove so my brother could sleep. I was so tired by then that I knew it would be a waste of battery power to turn on my laptop so I prepared to sleep too. But the kids were listening to an audio book. One that I had read in Junior High. It is hard for me to not listen to a story. And Where the Red Fern Grows is an especially hard story to tune out. Except for about one hour shortly after sundown when the kids had dozed off, that reader’s voice owned the cab of the truck we road in. I dozed off several times in spite of the gripping tale as sleep depravation plus moving car is not a recipe for alertness.

When my sister-in-law told me that we were about two hours out from Phoenix, I decided to get on my laptop and do my daily journal so that obligation would not be hanging over me. It was also quiet for the moment as everybody else in the cab was asleep so the story wasn’t playing. I was sitting in the front passenger seat though so in order not to disturb the driver, I had to work under a blanket. I had thought to move on to working on Brooding Instinct after journaling since I had about 140 minutes of battery power but it soon became apparent that adding oxygen depravation to sleep depravation plus moving vehicle was an hypno-gogic hallucination inducement. I typed steady for nearly forty minutes but the letters and the edges of the windows wobbled and I kept seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. Mostly voices and faces from the recent past but also images triggered by the story of a boy and his two coon hounds and their escapades in a swampy forest.

When they put in the next CD of the audio book, there was no way I was going to be able to compose my own words with someone else’s well-written words foisted on my ears. So I closed my laptop and came up for air. The story had just reached the point where the obnoxious boys were making a wager with the hero of the story regarding the ability of the hero’s famed coon hounds to catch the legendary Ghost Coon when we pulled off I-5 at the Phoenix exit. I remember the story has a traumatic ending but I don’t remember the details. If I continue to be haunted by the story, I guess I will have to order the book from the library.

This has already gone on longer than a blog post should probably but I don’t want to leave my story hanging here nor to I want to come back to it later. I want to be free to move on. So I will try to wrap it up with as much alacrity as I am capable of. Ha Ha. Anyway there isn’t much to be said about the rest of Saturday. My husband had been awake since four that morning and had worked that day and was fighting a cold so he was as greedy for sleep as I was. We left the five larger bags in the front room overnight. His Mom had to work Sunday morning and our goal was to have those bags out of there by the time she got home around noon. But I couldn’t move them into the room nor start unpacking them until the room had been cleaned. I made a deal with my husband that if he helped me get the room prepared for my bags, he could spend the afternoon watching football while I unpacked them. So between eight and noon we stripped the bed of all bedding and the floor of the closet of several weeks worth of his laundry, cleaned the litter box and the cat’s food and water dishes, dusted, vacuumed, sorted the laundry into four loads and kept on top of them, took lots and lots of trash out to the garbage can and reorganized several areas of the room--a corner here, a shelf there and over yonder a drawer.

The morning got off to a roaring start and then about an hour into it I fell on the front porch steps while taking out trash. It was 32 degrees outside and the metal strip on the edge of the steps was slick and my feet just went out from under me. I thought I was going to dive to the ground five steps down but I threw myself backwards against the handrail and landed on the steps with my feet crossed at the ankles under my butt. Any movement forward, backwards or sideward and the metal strips on the steps bit into my shins or the top of my foot--the same one I injured last July. I couldn’t call to my husband for help as he was running the vacuum cleaner in our room. I finally got one foot out from under me by suffering the few moments of pain needed to lean back and yank my knee toward my chest. Freeing that foot gave me the leverage to get the rest of the way up. I did not let that incident stop me nor even slow me down much. In fact knowing that if I were to rest for more than a few minutes I would be rewarded with pain and stiffness kept me going until I finished at a quarter after eight. Leaving me just enough time for a shower before Desperate Housewives. By the time Grey’s Anatomy started I knew I would not be doing anything besides my journal on the computer that night.

I woke up at nine Monday morning. I was home alone and the heat was off. It was thirty-two outside and fifty-four inside. I turned on the heat and fixed a cup of coffee, playing with my in-law’s dog, Sweetie, while the water boiled. As soon as my hands were warm enough to type I got to work on this blog post. Have been working on it in fits and starts all day. Had to take a break in order to run the library books I had taken to Longview with me back to the library. They were already two weeks overdue. I lucked out to find a copy of A Light in August on the Phoenix branch shelf. I had expected to have to order it from another branch in the two county system. I visited with my mother-in-law for a bit when I got home but got back to work on this as soon as I got settled in my room again. I sat on the bed with the laptop in my lap. I didn’t move the computer off my lap when I turned on the TV at three for Dr. Phil, nor when I changed the channel for Oprah at four. I worked during commercials. I left it behind though when I went to sit with my husband’s grandma so his folks could go out to dinner.

I moved out to the living room with my laptop after my mother-in-law headed for bed about eight-thirty. Now it is time to wrap this up so I can actually go online and post it before I am chased out of this room by the cold. It is after one now and the heat has been off for nearly five hours. I started out in just a t-shirt. Added a flannel shirt about nine and a fleece jacket about eleven. Just put the hood up on my jacket. Would put gloves on if I had the kind that allowed enough flexibility to type. I will soon loose flexibility anyway once the cold settles into my fingers. It is thirty-four outside and fifty-seven inside. This is the reality I contended with for the past two winters when my access to my in-law’s computer was limited to overnight. But now it is only internet access that is limited to those hours. I had hoped to have this ready to go by eleven so I would have several hours to catch up on news and blog reading. Now that is looking iffy.

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By the Way

Today is my birthday.

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Brooding Instint

That is the title of my NaNoWriMo novel. I linked it (this post title) to the writer profile page on the NaNoWriMo site where I just posted a short excerpt. Be advised that the flash version of that page truncates the excerpt by over a hundred words, cutting it off in mid sentence but the non flash version has it intact. Don’t know if that is my browser’s problem or what but it is frustrating.

Anyway, the theme of my novel is rooted in..well roots, among other things. Generations and the generating of generations. Life and the instinct for regeneration. Blood relations and the loyalty and betrayal of them. The protagonist, Vivian, raised in a fundamentalist sect, returns after a number of years away, to confront the demons of despair which plague her life and sabotage her every effort to apprehend happiness. In the years she was gone, she has gotten her medical degree, married not only outside the faith but outside her race and conceived a child.

Those of you who have been following this blog for some time might recognize what looks like autobiography here. But it is not in any direct sense. I am basing the mileu of the fundamentalist sect she was raised in loosely on my personal experience of having been raised in one. But none of the events or elements of the plot or characters are remotely autobiographical. This is the first time that I have created characters and a plot rooted in the specific culture in which I was raised and I must confess that it feels a bit like coming home from a long journey to alien worlds. It has actually been an effort to refrain from creating such characters and plots. I imagine it would be like anyone raised in one ethnic or racial group but attempting to write only for and about another one. Such efforts cannot help but be shallow and lacking in integrity.

There are a lot of pitfalls potentially in the path here. I have avoided doing this for so long not only because the subject is still a raw nerve for me but because, altho I want to confront and question the doctrine, I do not want to depict the fundamentalists as loosers, loonies or self-lobotomized. I want to create real, complex, multi-dimensional characters with motivations that the most secular can comprehend and thus empathize with even when they can’t agree with the premises underpinning their convictions.

The complexity of this theme and its nearness to the raw nerve in my own psyche exposed by the recent death of my father, is not conducive to completing this novel in a month. But I am not sorry I tried for I have 5000 words that I did not have two weeks ago and a story with a half dozen characters breathing life into me as I breathe it into them. It has not been a fruitless exercise, whatever else comes of it. I now have Brooding Instinct and Brooding Instinct has me.

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NaNoWriMo Progress and Projection Report

Well, I’m probably not going to make the 50,000 word goal for NaNoWriMo yet again this year. Have only got 5000. The fact that I generated most of that in a single day leaves room for hope. If I can only string enough days like that one together between now and the 30th. But if I couldn’t do it the first two weeks it isn’t likely I can in the last two. Sometime between now and Thanksgiving, I have to spend a day or more gathering my stuff and packing for the trip back to Phoenix. The trip itself will use up another day. Will probably be riding back with my brother’s wife who is planning to drive down to Gerber, CA for a Bible Conference over Thanksgiving weekend. Her kids and my Mom will probably be going too. Unless we are traveling on Thanksgiving Day itself, there will be another day commandeered by the traditional family get together of my husband’s family.

And once I am back home there is the unpacking and that means confronting the mess I made in the rush to pack the week I left. (September 19th) Then there is the issue of creating a workstation in our room there. That will take me several hours, probably most of a day. Will have to do some significant reorganizing of space. Nor do I know how it is going to work out trying to stay focused with two cats prowling the room. Especially with one of them most likely insisting on sitting on my lap. Or shoulder. She would sit on my head if she could stay balanced up there! That’s Gremlin. So aptly named. We have never been separated this long since we got her when she was tiny--twelve years ago. So she is apt to be very demanding once she has me back in her clutches. Merlin is a bit more laid back but gets his share of attention by being a clown. He likes to chase balls, bugs and blanket wrinkles. If there is nothing else to chase, he will chase the flickering shadows on the walls or the crawl on cable news channels.

But once I do get a workstation set up in our room, it will increase my options for working. I am no longer tied to the graveyard shift to write or work with my files. Will still depend on those hours for online access until I get the phone line issue worked out in some fashion. Besides a new workstation in our room, I will have to figure out where to work with my laptop out in the front rooms--kitchen or living room--for those hours when my husband is sleeping or when I need to go online. The options are not many and since it isn’t my home, I don’t feel comfortable just commandeering a spot. Don’t know where I will be able to hook up to the phone line either.

Then there is the issue of my husband’s grandmother who I had been sitting with several evenings a week. She hurt her back the week after I left and was in the hospital for a couple days. She can no longer be left alone even after she has gone to bed at night so my father-in-law has essentially moved in with her. I am hoping to relieve him of some of that burden again once I get back down there but I have no idea what will be needed or accepted from me. So I don’t even know what my daily or weekly schedule will look like.

I have been here long enough now that going back is going to be as hard as leaving was. That change issue again. I have a good deal going here actually. Now, anyway. Didn’t get off to a great start. The first ten days I was here I set up my laptop in my Dad’s office where his computer and my sister’s computer were networked together. My nephew does his home school lessons on their computer. My sister uses my Dad’s computer to keep the household books as coached by Dad. They all play games, read and write email, on either of the computers. And as co-executor my sister was responsible for going through the papers relating to the church books as my Dad had been Treasurer and Secretary of the church I was raised in until the weekend before he died when he officially transferred that responsibility over to one of my cousins. Even though that church had not existed as a congregation since the late nineties, it still existed as a legal corporation for managing the money from the sale of the property.

The point of all of this being that it became obvious even before Dad’s internment on October 3rd, that I could not count on productive work sessions in that room. My presence during my nephew’s school work hours distracted him as his did me. My Mom and sister were in and out of the room looking for this or that, the phone rang every few minutes. When I worked in there at night, I disturbed my Mom, sleeping in the next room and my sister, sleeping in the room below with the sound of the chair’s wheels on the wooden floor. Doubly disturbing--as the sounds I made while working were so similar to those my Dad used to make.

But from my first night there, I had prowled all 2000 square feet of the two story house for a better alternative and could find nothing. The best option I found that first week--the second evening I was there--was to hole up in the basement bathroom with the laptop actually on my lap. I just absolutely had to write in privacy and the house was full of people that week. Had not been able to journal in depth since learning of Dad’s sudden turn four days earlier. It had been after midnight the previous night--Wednesday, the day I arrived--before I had my new laptop up and running and by then I had been without sleep since Monday afternoon so that journal entry had been fairly perfunctory. So when I woke up Thursday, I was desperate for some serious face time with my journal. No one knew I was awake yet so I had a couple hours which is about the limit of the battery. There was nowhere to plug it in without a lengthy extension cord which I could not impose on anyone to hunt down for me then, even if I had wanted to let anyone know that I was awake.

I discussed this dilemma with my sister the night of October 5th as she was heading to bed and I was getting ready to start my work session even though I was already exhausted. And, lo, if she did not have a solution by the time I got out of bed Thursday afternoon. She had cleared a couple of shelves in the basement laundry room, brought in a twenty foot heavy-duty outdoor extension cord long enough to plug in behind the washer and wrap all the way around the room to the far side of the shelves, and dug out my Dad’s old knee-chair. With the phone dismounted from the wall just outside the door, my laptop’s phone cord could plug in there. As it turned out, the knee-chair did not work for me. I had one in the eighties with my first PC and loved it. But my knees don’t tolerate them anymore. Of course it didn’t help that the week before, while visiting my brother’s family in Portland, I stepped wrong off the penultimate step in their stairwell and fell to my knees on the concrete floor. I futzed around with the setup in the laundry room for several days but that was just details. From the very first day I was double if not triply productive. And besides that, I now had a role beyond hug dispenser to fulfill for the family--I took over the laundry.

Most of the time it is a nearly ideal setup for me. At least an ideal jerry-rigged setup if you reserve ‘ideal’ for a dream office, or a room of one’s own. Sometimes there are issues. Like, whenever anyone is walking or working in the kitchen over my head, I begin to feel like I am inside a drum. If I crowd loads of laundry too close together my glasses will steam up from the humidity unless I open the door which then creates a chilly draft. But there are elements that are closer to ideal than what I left behind in Phoenix or even what I imagine is waiting for me upon return. For one thing, I am able to go online for brief tasks all through the day so I don’t need to crowd it all into the late night or wee morning hours. If it wasn’t that I missed my husband and cats so much….

Well this took off in a rambling way that went in unintended directions. I was planning to discuss my progress on the NaNoWriMo front, even divulge a bit of detail about plot and character and theme and such. Was even considering leaving a snippit of a scene which is in less disarray then most… but that will have to wait until another time now.

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