tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24649771092293593492024-03-14T14:49:52.800-04:00A Gift UniverseG. K. Chesterton used to say that it is wrong to look a gift universe in the mouth. I think that peeking into its mouth and ears is just part of enjoying the present.Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.comBlogger785125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-1121618034452836172023-05-30T20:47:00.002-04:002023-05-30T20:47:48.971-04:00The problem of peopleOne of my biggest problems of the last few years has been going out and dealing with people. First I didn't do it because I had many small children who needed naps and were hard to take anywhere. And then I didn't do it because of the pandemic. And now I don't do it because, if I ever did know how, I've forgotten.<div><br /></div><div>Periodically I realize I am achingly, heartbreakingly lonely. Despite being very well loved (and sometimes smothered) by my family. I want to go OUT. I want to see PEOPLE. I want to have FRIENDS. I know that I like these things. There have been lots of times when I did like these things, when (I at least thought) I was good at them.</div><div><br /></div><div>But now, I go out, like, quarterly. It's just so much work. I have so much anxiety before I go, and there's always a certain amount of organization required to actually do it, and then afterwards I think that everyone was annoyed by me and I shouldn't have bothered. And that's if I actually successfully do it at all. Sometimes my idea of being social is to go to a fair, walk around looking at stuff and speaking to no one, and go home. Not because that's what I wanted, but because I didn't know how to do anything else.</div><div><br /></div><div>This past weekend, I actually did successfully do a social thing. A <i>very</i> social thing! I went to a convention for three whole days, stayed overnight, and interacted with people a lot while I was there. This is my third convention. The previous two involved a lot of wandering around through crowds of people, wishing I could be part of their conversations and not knowing how to join in. This time I felt like I knew better what I was doing. (Also, masks weren't required most places. I cannot explain just how heavily I rely on people being able to see that I am smiling and hear that I am trying to say something.) I met at least half a dozen people, attended three parties, and went to lunch with people once instead of simply scarfing down a granola bar in the hallway.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the one hand, this was great. I am extremely proud of myself and hope this presages a future where I do this more.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the other . . . It's hard to explain this without sounding like a horrible person.</div><div><br /></div><div>But in-person people are just so much more challenging to deal with. They take up space, they have smells, their mouths sometimes make wet noises when they talk, they have annoying physical and verbal tics.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is just a normal thing about being with people that I had just kinda....forgotten. You learn to not notice many things about people, in the interest of being able to hang out with them. But if you've spent the past several years interacting mainly online, you lose this skill and the physicality of the people around you feels like way too much. I sometimes put my mask back on just because I was disgusted by the very idea of breathing <i>previously breathed air</i>. And even with a mask, the elevator was upsetting. People stand so close.</div><div><br /></div><div>On top of this, you don't get to be nearly as picky about in-person friends. My online friends are not all very similar to me, but I have <i>many</i> who have almost <i>everything</i> in common with me: background, politics, favorite jokes, interests. If I want to talk about, say, historical costuming, I have at least five people I can chat with online. But if I'm at a convention, even a <i>science fiction</i> convention, sometimes I find people who are not interested in talking about any of the same things I am. Even though we both like science fiction! I'd be like "do you like Bujold?" and they'd be like "no, how do you feel about Heinlein" and eventually we would drift apart because there was <i>nothing</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>I can tell doing most of my interactions online is not good for me. It's given me habits that don't serve me with people. However, it annoys me when giving up social media is floated as a solution. It's not like I'm on social media <i>instead of </i>hanging out with people (except that one party recently when I got shy and spent half the time on my phone: oops); I'm on social media because I can't hang out with people at that moment. And social media has brought me all four of my local friends: every single one of them, I know because of the internet. One of those friends introduced me to more people recently and one of<i> them</i> invited me to something. Giving up the internet would not have helped me like this!</div><div><br /></div><div>But I definitely need to work harder on prioritizing in-person stuff, even if it's horrible at first. It's like I'm slowly starving to death but I've forgotten how to chew and everything tastes too strong. That's not going to get better by continuing to go hungry. It's a thing I have to muscle through. (I hope people take that in the spirit it's meant: "I am really messed up so this is hard but I am doing it because you are great and bring me joy," not, "I am enduring you but hating every moment.")</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyway, I made a roaring success of this convention and friended two of my new con friends on facebook. I gave my business cards to lots of people and I even showed off my costume on stage. I am proud of all that and I think I'm right to be.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I also feel like I have a long way to go. I can't go to conventions very often (it cost me over a month of what I make at my job), so I'm going to have to find smaller-scale ways to be a normal person who interacts with other people. Probably I should reach out to my local friends and organize more things. Or actually go to the game store Magic: The Gathering evenings. Or an SCA event. There are so many things I could be going to. I could try, a little bit more than I do.</div><div><br /></div><div>But probably next week, because it's so hard and I'm so tired.</div>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-58230054190379377542023-04-11T20:43:00.000-04:002023-04-11T20:43:38.931-04:00In which I abandon utilitarianism<p> Okay, to be fair, I've never really described myself as a utilitarian. I find utilitarianism to be a handy rule of thumb when considering policy issues or charities to donate to. The things that prevent the most suffering, or make the most people happy, are the best ones. These are two different things, but in everyday ethics it doesn't even matter which you use. "Saves the most lives" is another good one. It's just a way to come up with a unit you can measure interventions by, to pick the most effective one.</p><p>But I've always known it gets a little wonky when you try to use it for everything. For instance, should you have another child? Well, it will cause suffering if you do that, so by negative utilitarianism you shouldn't. But it will also cause happiness, so by positive utilitarianism, you should. And if you try to expand it universally, it comes to either "everyone should have children, provided each child is likely to be even slightly more happy than miserable," or else "no one should have children, ever." Neither one of those seems like a very good answer to me. (I think you should have a child if you want one, personally. Whichever the "right" option is, there are plenty of people choosing each, and you will not be saving or damning the world personally by the one you pick.)</p><p>But I haven't thought about it much in a while, till recently I came upon two things that made me think utilitarianism is much worse than I realized. Sure, it might have been handy when used casually by people who also have other ways to do ethics and quickly abandon ideas that lack common sense. But some people want an ethical system to <i>replace</i> common sense, and when used that way, utilitarianism becomes as rapidly disastrous as most theoretical systems.</p><p>The first thing I ran into was the concept of longtermism. It's an offshoot of effective altruism (the people who say we should give to the charities that do the most good--which seems unarguably a good idea). Longtermists point out that there may very well be more people in the future than there are alive today. And if we want to do the most good, shouldn't we worry more about future generations?</p><p>So far, not too bad. I mean, I certainly don't want to set humanity up for a future where we either destroy ourselves or have miserable lives. That's why I care about the environment--well, that and my fondness for going outside.</p><p>But, as I read further, things started to get weird. For instance, there was the idea that, given a billion times more humans might live in the future than do in the present, harm to those future humans is a billion times more important than the lives of people who, you know . . . actually exist. Then, they dream up a possible extinction scenario that might happen. Does it have a .0001% chance of happening? Well, then preventing it takes priority over saving the life of any individual alive today. Because after all, a tiny risk to a very large number of people is like murdering a moderately large number of people, right?</p><p>My first objection to this is the math. All of these problems should be multiplied by the <i>certainty</i> that your efforts are going to help at all. The farther out in the future we look, the less we know, and the more vanishingly small become the odds what we do will make the slightest difference. Next, we could refute it by saying that a person alive today might have one billion descendants, so saving his life is saving a billion potential people, so really, it's more efficient to save lives now than to plan to save future lives. Third, we could point out that future humans, since they don't exist, have no real rights. If they did, we'd have to live in moral terror, knowing that every butterfly we diverted from its course might wipe out one billion and create a different billion. That's . . . that's not how ethics works.</p><p>But that is just introductory stuff. Once you get into their actual dream of the future, it gets weirder. (By they I mean: a few cranks I read on the internet. It doesn't really matter who, the stuff just got me thinking. I'm sure there are better longtermists.)</p><p>These people think the ultimate future of mankind is to somehow upload ourselves into computers. In this scenario, we can simply program ourselves infinite bliss. We can be thousands of times happier than any person alive today. So in that way, our descendants matter much more than anyone can possibly matter today, because we can only be mildly happy at best (everyday life being what it is) whereas they can be perfectly happy, potentially forever.</p><p>In service to this end, they think it's justified to ignore any issues around today, focus on creating AI, plan to colonize other planets, and so on. If <i>whole continents of people</i> are lost to war or climate change, that's small potatoes. So long as any humans survive (preferably the most privileged ones, as these are the most likely to invent the tech we need to reach this future) it's all good.</p><p>I stopped, at this point. I didn't need to read any further or do any more math. I simply thought: these future digital people are nothing to me. They are not human in any sense I care about. I sense no connection to them. And I don't see why I should want them to exist.</p><p>Utilitarianism could bring people to thinking that endless techno-bliss is worth fighting for, just because someone, somewhen, could be happy. But my common sense says no. I do not want endless techno-bliss. I want my species to survive, sure, but that's not my species anymore. I want to prevent <i>actual suffering</i> by <i>actual people alive today</i>. I care about a homeless guy getting to come inside when it's cold, and medical care in another country so that a mom doesn't have to mourn her child. These things are real. The rest is . . . simply not.</p><p>So that was the first thing. I realized that utilitarianism can take you to some weird places, and maybe instead of working out better math (which I think you can, it's completely valid to) I can simply drop the whole idea.</p><p>The second thing was a pair of books by Hank Green, <i>An Absolutely Remarkable Thing</i> and <i>A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor</i>. Both are fantastic, especially the second one, and I won't spoil them because I think everybody should read them.</p><p>But they brought up the question, from the perspective of an extra-terrestrial, about what the best future of humanity is. From that perspective, humanity is not a collection of individuals, it's a beautiful system of interconnection, which has a destiny to be and do great things.</p><p>But from another perspective, it's too dangerous to let humanity try to achieve any of that. So doesn't it make more sense to plug us into a digital matrix and dream away the rest of our future? We won't be unhappy. We'll be pacified. We won't be able to harm other societies. So what if we don't achieve anything further, don't do or dream or make contact with the rest of the galaxy?</p><p>The negative outcome in that book is the dream of the longtermists. Plugged in and happy.</p><p>It made me see why I reacted with such strong disgust to that idea in the first place. Infinite happiness isn't the way humanity has ever lived, or how it was meant to live. We always have a bit of dissatisfaction--and that can be a good thing! It drives us to do more. You don't get the Star Trek future of exploration and achievement by being contented.</p><p>I tried, when I was very depressed some years ago, to get into Buddhism or Stoicism. They promised to hold the secret to happiness. That secret is to stop desiring. If you're sad, it's because you wanted something and didn't receive it. If only you wanted nothing, you would be happy.</p><p>Then as now, I recoiled. I want to be happy because I've earned it somehow. I don't want a happiness that is simply an absence of desire. I can even be happy while desiring more.</p><p>Happiness can be kind of a treadmill. You wanted a big house, you thought if you had a big house you'd be happy. Now that you have it, you're no longer conscious of it. If you lost the house, you'd be sad. But you aren't happy now--now you want a house by the beach.</p><p>I've noticed this in my career as an author. I wanted to get good at writing, and I did, but I wasn't happy. I wanted a book deal. So I got a book deal, and was I contented? Heck no! Now I want to sell a zillion copies and get good reviews. I see other authors who have achieved all that, and are they contented? Nope! They're afraid their next book won't do so well, they want to be a bestseller, they want a Hugo Award.</p><p>But . . . to me, this isn't misery. This isn't an outcome to be feared. This is the nature of being human. Sure, we could all do a little better to appreciate what we have. And there are goals we strive for that aren't really worth the effort--stuff like being popular or rich, which are both black holes of your effort that never pay as much back as you hoped.</p><p>But wanting? striving? having dreams? I <i>want</i> to live like that. When I play a video game (Stardew Valley, naturally) I enjoy the part where I'm building up the farm. When it's all perfect and I've achieved everything, I'm bored.</p><p>A good life, to me, includes both happiness and striving. Smelling the roses and digging a fresh garden bed. I want to always have dreams. When I think of a positive future of humanity, I don't imagine people plugged into a vast network where we can't feel the slightest discomfort. I imagine a future where we've learned how to achieve the different parts of a good life in a sustainable way. Communities the right size to really get to know your friends. Art that we can all participate in without needing to make a living off it. Homes that rest easy on the earth, without extracting resources that aren't replaced.</p><p>Looking at my life, I feel I maybe haven't been striving enough. I've been trying to protect my mental health and my energy by taking it easy on myself. I've been reading a lot, playing some video games, taking walks. And that's fine, I don't feel guilty since I get my work done. But it hasn't done as much good for my mental health as I hoped. Thinking over all I've said here, I think maybe I should be striving a little bit more. Every time I'm drafting a novel, I feel much busier, but I'm also more happy. I like working on a difficult problem and making progress. The same with crafting--I can sew or weave happily the whole day long without feeling restless the way I do when I'm just scrolling the internet.</p><p>I've wandered far from the topic of ethics. I don't have an answer for what to do instead of utilitarianism. I'd hesitate to substitute it with "the good life," because everyone has a different idea of what that is. Instead I'd just say, when your ethical system leads you to ignore good sense, you need a new one. </p><p>But I think that considering only happiness and suffering is just not enough. What kind of happiness? What kind of suffering? I'm happy to work to reduce suffering such as poverty, sickness, and death. But I'm not going to try to change who I am as a person so that I don't suffer. Instead, I'm going to try to pursue goals that are meaningful to me, and see how that goes.</p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-2125296208506321862023-02-27T11:57:00.005-05:002023-02-27T11:57:44.349-05:00Three basics of parenting autistic kids<p> When Marko was diagnosed with autism, I spent a lot of time stressing out. I wanted to know what this meant for my parenting. Where was the book that would tell me how to raise him? Where was the expert that was going to come and tell me what to do?</p><p>What I didn't realize right away was that I already had a leg up on any expert or book, because I had been raising him already for seven years. At this point, I've been raising an autistic kid for almost 13 years, and another one for six, and it's safe to say that I kinda know what I'm doing.</p><p>Especially as nobody else knows any better. Books exist, but some of them are dead wrong, and others simply can't tell you everything you need to know about your kid because the variation in autistic children is vast. I would argue it's much greater than the difference between a neurotypical kid and an autistic kid. I did read lots of books on autism, some of which seemed to be describing something very different than my kid, and some which had some helpful tips. Memoirs by autistic people actually helped the most, because what I really wanted to know was what was going through my child's head. When you know that, you can figure out what to do about it much more easily.</p><p>I could probably write a series of posts about this (and I might) but for today I just want to say: it's not complicated. It's just parenting. You have the same goals as other parents have, and while some of the tactics in standard parenting books will not work, plenty will. And that depends more on your kid than on whether they're autistic or not. Sensitive kids do not take well to yelling. Spirited kids hate to be told what to do. Some kids love when you joke around (Jackie does) and some will get more upset when you're silly (like Marko).</p><p>One of my main worries at the time was, do I try to <i>change</i> his autistic behaviors, or do I treat them as hard limits beyond which he can't grow? Should I be frantically trying to catch him up to his peers, or shrugging and watching them sail by?</p><p>In the end, it wasn't a helpful question. The real question is, which skills does an autistic child <i>need</i> and which behaviors are harmful? You should help them develop the skills they will need in life and guide them away from behaviors that harm themselves and others. Exactly like you do with other kids. But you need to have a lot of inner strength to stop yourself from comparing to peers, separating out the autistic side of your kid from the rest of the kid (you can't. your kid is your kid), or letting other people tell you to panic more. The person who tries to make you panic more is almost never a person giving you helpful advice. Either they're panicky themselves about autism, or they're trying to sell you something, but either way they clearly aren't here to help you.</p><p>Here are the three most vital skills I can think of for autistic kids. Though I am sure this is influenced by the specific ones I have; yours may be different. </p><p>1. Regulate their emotions</p><p>2. Detect and regulate their sensory needs</p><p>3. Communicate needs to others</p><p>These are skills everyone needs, and autistic children may struggle with them more than others. There are many other skills autistic children struggle with: speech, fine motor skills, stylish dressing, detecting sarcasm, etc. But many of these are kind of optional, when it comes down to it, or they will naturally be getting some help with them at school. If you have an autistic child, you need to let go of the idea of your child being cool in school. They may eventually develop their own brand of coolness, but it's not a thing you can make happen. If they struggle with speech or writing or numbers, go ahead and nab all the therapy that seems useful, but be aware that some autistic kids won't catch up to their peers on these. You just can't know.</p><p>But these three are going to be vital, and the bulk of teaching them is going to rest on you, the parent, because you are there in more situations, when the need for them arises.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Emotional regulation</h3><p>Not every autistic child struggles with this, but it seems like most do. I have seen arguments that autistic children only melt down a lot because they're treated so much worse, but I don't think it's just that. I have a sample of two autistic kids and two neurotypical kids, and the autistic ones just freak out more about the same size problem. Apparently the emotion parts of the brain are straight-up bigger in autistic kids.</p><p>At the same time, I'm not going to just roll with a house full of unhappy screaming. Let alone the physical aggression and property damage. I want my kids to be able to meet their upset feelings and work their way through them. At the same time, I don't want them to become repressed or self-hating.</p><p>I think a lot of emotional regulation problems stem from not being able to detect and name emotions, so that's step one. "I am upset, this is what upset feels like." This lesson alone took us years. And then "I can pause between becoming angry and acting on it." And last, "I have strategies to calm myself down."</p><p>This is all a work in progress. As kids are growing, you're not getting to step three on every meltdown. My main efforts lately are stopping them from hurting anyone, eventually de-escalating, and bringing the child to a point of being able to reason again. This looks like taking the angry child to another room, sometimes distracting with a conversation about a topic they like or giving them time to read or play a game, and then talking through the issue. How did you feel when that happened? Do you think it helped to scream at him? What could we do instead? Let's go back downstairs and ask him if he would like to play the game later.</p><p>To that end, I also bargain with my kids a lot. I want them to know that <i>no</i> is not a hard wall they have to crash into and then melt down, but only a roadblock on one specific avenue. What if they could still get something they want? So, no ice cream today, but maybe we could put an ice cream date on the calendar. Or we could go home and have the ice cream in our freezer. Whatever. </p><p>And I never, ever set boundaries on the kids just for the heck of it. If there's no reason I can explain, well then I guess you <i>can</i> take a bath with your swimsuit on. You can go to school with your shirt on inside out. I'm going to encourage the whole underpants thing but that's not a hill I'm going to die on. With an autistic kid there <i>are so many hills</i>. You can't die on them <i>all</i>.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Sensory regulation</h3><p>Everyone has a zone of sensory stimulation where they're happy. Maybe you're bored if you don't leave the house every day and you enjoy noisy parties, but after two hours of loud music you want to go home. Well, autistic people have a much narrower band of sensory comfort than other people. This may mean being over sensitive to some things, like textures or tastes or noise. But it also sometimes means they get twitchy and restless if they don't get to jump up and down, swing on things, or crash into the walls. So all the time you're working on giving your children the sensory things they need and protecting them from the ones they can't stand.</p><p>When your child is small, this is mostly your job. Your child can't communicate why that shirt is a bad shirt, but eventually you figure out it's tight on the armpits and go looking for shirts that aren't. You may learn how to bake veggies into muffins to avoid unpleasant textures, or give your kid hot sauce so there's a nice strong taste and they eat more food. It's a whole trial-and-error process. There's a growing market of items like ear defenders, seamless clothing, sensory swings, and compression garments to help autistic kids get into the zone where they're happy. There will be way fewer meltdowns this way, the child will be much more free to learn and relax and make friends and eat food when they are comfortable.</p><p>But while you're working on this, a lot of society is on the opposite track. They think sensory needs are a thing we fill for small children and have to train out of as they get older. Do they really <i>need</i> the headphones still? If they don't actively complain, we should take them away! And all that hand flapping or chewing on things is getting annoying, let's train them to stop.</p><p>The problem is that this strategy does not actually expand a child's zone of sensory comfort. It only gets them used to spending most of their time outside of it. They are under more stress, learn less, and are less happy. They may eat less and lose weight, but since they're a teenager now it's called an eating disorder instead of a sensory issue. They often melt down the second school is over.</p><p>It burns my cookies. Instead of transitioning to less sensory adaptation as children get older, we need to transition to children regulating their own sensory needs. They need to learn how comfort feels in their body and what tools they have to get there. I am 36 years old and I'm still working on "am I feeling listless because I am overwhelmed, or because I am bored?" If that's a struggle for me, it's obviously a struggle for a 12-year-old too. But it's so important to teach this, because at some point they'll be an adult and will need to keep themselves in their own sweet spot. And they may have to advocate for themselves about it. So at this age, we should be encouraging kids to understand their needs and ask for what they need. First from us, then from teachers and other adults. A child who can ask the teacher, "Can I please sit in the front, it is too loud in the back," is a child who will eventually grow up to say, "Can I work from home? I'm much more productive there."</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Communicating Needs</h3><p>This follows off the last one. Unfortunately autistic kids can sometimes be their own worst advocates. Some, of course, don't speak. Others can be amazingly articulate so teachers don't realize they don't know how to ask to use the bathroom.</p><p>I hardly know what advice to give, because communication difficulties vary so much and I'm only doing middling well at teaching this. Marko can ask to use the bathroom now, but he's constantly missing assignments in class and is terrified to ask the teacher for permission to turn them in late. A work in progress. And Jackie, for reasons I can't hope to understand, sometimes refuses to say "I would like some strawberry-kiwi juice, please," but will trace the letters SKJ on my stomach and expect the juice to arrive.</p><p>I think it's vital to accept every attempt at communication and encourage it. The last thing we want to teach is that efforts to communicate aren't worth it. We don't always know what is preventing a child from communicating in the way we might prefer. So refusing to comply until they communicate the way we want can result in the child getting frustrated and giving up. It is okay to become something of a telepath when it comes to our children's needs, detecting that "zzz" and a vague gesture toward the top cupboard means "raisins" or "I'm just going to change my clothes, no reason" means "I have had an accident and feel embarrassed, please play along." What we are teaching is that attempting to communicate is good and gets you things you want. Demanding "please" or clear enunciation often trips the stubbornness switch and they'll just climb on the counter and try to get their own dang chips.</p><p>When Marko was about four to seven years old, he refused to talk to any adults outside the family. He had a really pronounced stammer at the time, but even when it was important, he wouldn't even try. I finally found out--after years of this!--that he had noticed that adults in the family understood him when he spoke but adults outside the family often didn't, or didn't have the patience to let him finish his sentence. So he figured, why bother. It was considered "selective mutism" but what I call it is very sensibly saving his breath on people who might not listen. Once he went to school, he quickly overcame it because the adults at school asked him questions and waited and waited and when he finally did try answering, they listened patiently.</p><p>So always listen, even if the communication is a sign, gesture, tugging at you, sidelong vague passive-aggressive comments, whatever. And then after you've listened, you can suggest other ways. "You know, you can say 'strawberry kiwi juice' in words, I would have understood that one a lot faster." "Can you hand me your card next time instead of dragging on my body? I like that more." "Once upon a time, there was a little girl who peed her pants, and she decided to tell her mom, 'I had an accident, can you find me some fresh pants?' And her mom was not mad at all! The mom said, 'Thanks for telling me,' and got her some new pants." (This last is a real story that actually, to my shock, worked.)</p><p>When it comes to hard conversations, like talking to a teacher, our kids will need our coaching. I've sat by Marko and helped him draft emails to his teacher. I've sent him to go and talk to the counselor while also shooting off an email to the counselor saying, "I have sent Marko to you, please talk to him if he doesn't approach you." We don't expect our kids to be able to do things the first time without us holding their hands.</p><p>* * *</p><p>This list is obviously not exhaustive. There are a heck of a lot of other important things to teach autistic kids. But these are my main focus right now. I know that my kids will be on the way to building their own successful lives if they master these skills. None of these skills have to do with being less autistic, and all of them are about achieving their own happiness.</p><p>In another post, I hope to write a list of general tips about managing autistic kids. There are so many things I've learned along the way that baffled me at first. Parenting autistic kids is not mainly a list of hacks (which is why I decided to leave the other one in drafts and publish this one first) but I'm pretty sure we all need more hacks.</p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-23537306102566906712023-01-01T20:26:00.000-05:002023-02-27T10:50:25.235-05:00It's that time of yearYears are funny things. You'd think I would remember what year things happened in, but I absolutely don't. I had to go back through my blog archives to remember what my resolutions were. And the word that was supposed to guide my year? Yeah, total news to me today, reading it. (It was "nurture." I guess I did it?)<div><br /></div><div>My goal was to take care of myself and my family. Which I did. Today was the year I've been waiting for for years and years . . . the year all four kids were in school. So, for the first time in years, I've actually had abundant time for self care. And I pretty much did use it for that, although I didn't meet some of my goals.</div><div><br /></div><div>Practical resolutions were these: </div><div><br /></div><div><ul style="background-color: #f3ffee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, serif; font-size: 15.4px; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0.5em 0px; padding: 0px 2.5em;"><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;">Go on a vacation.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;">Submit the next book to agents. </li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;">I'd like to look into taking some classes at the community college in the fall. </li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;">I have already found a pool I would like to purchase a membership for in the summer. </li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;">Finish my solar sailing trilogy and keep looking for a small publisher for it. </li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;">Keep writing and submitting short stories.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;">I want to make sure to take my boat out a lot in the coming year. </li></ul></div><div><br /></div>
So, mixed success. I took four trips this year. Two as a family (a weekend at a mountain lodge, and four days at the beach). Two on my own (to Rochester for a friend's wedding, and to Cincinnati to meet a long-time online friend. However, I mainly discovered that we are all absolutely terrible at traveling. The kids whined all of both vacations and just couldn't settle down as much as usual without their usual routines. Of course in retrospect they remember having a lot of fun and wanted to do it again. Maybe we will but I am not in a hurry.<div><br /></div><div>And I don't travel that great by myself either. I can drive eight hours by myself, though I don't enjoy it. But then I get there and sleep barely at all and am weird and shy with everyone because I'm out of sorts from traveling. Just . . . I am <i>terrible</i> at this.</div><div><br /></div><div>I sent maybe ten or fifteen queries. It was hard to get excited about querying, and I've mostly gotten rejections or silence. And I just don't know about this book. Maybe it's bad?</div><div><br /></div><div>Did not take community college classes. I decided not to on account of being exhausted and overwhelmed. I'm probably missing out and would be meeting fun people and stuff, but . . . ugh, it feels hard to even contemplate. I'm so tired.</div><div><br /></div><div>Did not purchase a pool membership. It ended up not being worth it. But we did go to the pool most weeks and also the kids had swimming lessons. Everybody but Jackie was swimming by the end of it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Did sell my solar sailing trilogy! Biggest triumph of the year.</div><div><br /></div><div>Don't think I submitted short stories at all. Maybe once? </div><div><br /></div><div>Took my boat out exactly once. It is very hard to go boating by oneself.</div><div><br /></div><div>Overall, this year has been a little disappointing. I imagined that when my kids were all in school, I'd have all this extra time and jump into loads of interesting new hobbies and a previously unseen dedication to chores. But instead, I just took twice or three times as long to get started doing work. Oh, and laid around a lot. The only part of the house I really like is my room, and the only place comfortable to sit in there is my bed, so . . . I spent a lot of time in bed. I did read quite a lot, which I'm happy about. But I also wasted a lot of time, which I'm not.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm unclear if having less to do just made me that much more sluggish and my time more formless, or if I genuinely have been tired and would be even more overwhelmed if I'd committed to more things. Part of it is that I was sick the entire month of November. And I did manage to finish one novel and write a whole other one. So, it's not like I've been doing nothing. But have I been exercising, sewing, finishing my knitting and weaving projects, or hanging out with friends? Not very much, no.</div><div><br /></div><div>I did do one thing that nurtured myself, which I've been putting off since we moved. I found a new doctor and finally had a checkup. Turns out my thyroid numbers are not right. I probably have Hashimotos. However, it's not very bad yet, apparently, and therefore there is nothing they can do about it but wait. This seems wrong to me, and I'll have to follow up with an endocrinologist I guess. Because if it's bad enough for me to feel this tired, maybe there's something that can be done?</div><div><br /></div><div>It's the most reassuring and wonderful thing to think my thyroid has been busted all this time and that's my excuse for all this slacking. Very un-reassuring to then be told I shouldn't be this tired and there is nothing they can do it yet. </div><div><br /></div><div>I <i>think</i> I have been less depressed this year. At least, during the summer and fall. Being home alone with just Jackie was, in retrospect, really bad for me. Getting a break helps. But I still have days when randomly I feel horribly sad. This, too, can be caused by thyroid disease, so . . . ? I don't know, it's a thing to look into.</div><div><br /></div><div>Thinking about the year to come, I find I don't really know what I want to do. Do I want to get better at accomplishing things every day? Do I want to cut myself slack and realize this is my recovery for <i>twelve years</i> of almost nonstop kids? Do I want to get out more? I am lonely, but all my efforts to hang out with people this year have mostly led to me concluding that I am so bad at it I should just give up and stay home. So do I keep working on that or accept the inevitable?</div><div><br /></div><div>Here are a few things I hope for in the coming year:</div><div><br /></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I made it into a by-application-only online writing seminar, which terrifies me, but I'm going to do it. (I mean, I paid my money so now I can't chicken out.) Hopefully that will be good for my career and my ability to handle zoom.</li><li>I wrote a romance, which I hope to revise and then do something with. I'm considering self-publishing something after my book comes out, hoping to coast on my improved reputation (if . . . anyone likes the book, that is).</li><li>I've got my novel coming out in July, so that's one thing that's definitely happening. I hope to talk to some bookstores about carrying it and maybe doing a launch event. I am <i>so bad</i> at that kind of thing. But I may end up even doing some podcast and youtube interviews. I gotta do my best for my book right? No matter how terrified I am of being perceived?</li><li>See an endocrinologist.</li><li>Get that stuck wisdom tooth out finally.</li><li>Keep prioritizing my mental health: go outside, exercise, don't spend too much time on social media, do creative things.</li><li>Go to two science fiction conventions. I am dreading both, but maybe I could meet some people or publicize my books. I feel like they could be fun if I could only get the hang of them. One of them, luckily, is close enough I won't have to sleep away from home.</li></ul><div>I came up with my word after several days of struggling to think of what I even want to do next year. The word is SIFT. By this I mean, sift through the things I can't change (and should accept) and the things I can't accept (and must change). There are so many of these things in my life, and my default is to accept them all. But maybe some things aren't going to get better until I choose to change them.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>One thing to sift is moving again. I don't like living here, there's no getting around it. This place is not good for me, it does not make me happy. But I also hate moving. So every time John brings it up (given that he's working from home again, and we could live anywhere) I just panic because I remember how bad it was going through the last move, how many months it took me to stop feeling terrible every single day. And there's the question of whether it's worse to disrupt the kids' lives yet again just because I was unhappy. If I <i>sift</i> this, I work out whether there is a way to be happy here, or whether this is a thing to be brave and do despite the temporary difficulty of doing it. </div><div><br /></div><div>I want to <i>sift</i> whether to keep trying to get a literary agent or keep working on small presses or self publish some things.</div><div><br /></div><div>I want to <i>sift</i> whether trying to apply more willpower and get out of bed more will, in the long run, make me happier and better able to do more things. Or whether this is simply the speed I can manage my life. Or whether in fact there's a combination of different pills that can transform me into a reasonably energetic person!</div><div><br /></div><div>Because the fact is, there's no one kind of answer to all problems. Sometimes you make a brave resolution and do a hard thing. Sometimes you gradually get used to a thing until it doesn't bother you anymore. I need the wisdom to know the difference.</div>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-87183444764986403912022-12-14T13:51:00.000-05:002022-12-14T13:51:55.913-05:00A web content writer's take on AI<p> My day job, as many of you know, is writing web content. Basically just writing informational articles for a company to put on their blog. It's a great job because I can do it at home, I can do it part time, and the money is pretty good for the time I spend on it. And, of course, I've been blogging regularly for 18 years, so you could say I have some experience.</p><p>But I realized recently that a lot of people don't understand what the job of writing web content is, or why it's a bad thing for this job to be automated.</p><p>Web content started to be popular when companies realized their websites weren't ranked as highly in search results unless they had recent updates on them. It made sense to run a small blog. At first, this was just something anybody at the company did, perhaps mentioning recent updates to their services. But more and more, they realized it could be helpful to hire someone to produce quality content and post it often. People searching for the answer to a specific question, like, "Why is my toilet overflowing?" would land on the page of Gold Star Plumbing, and as often as not, they'd go, "Huh. These guys seem to know what they're talking about. I'll give them a call."</p><p>As search engines developed more and more methods of finding good results, content writers had to keep up. This process is called search engine optimization (SEO) and involves stuff like including keywords, subheadings, and pictures to convince Google and its competitors that your page is high quality and has the answers people are looking for.</p><p>This led to a golden moment in the history of the internet. Companies with no real interest in educating the public for free still created lots of informative content for you to find and read, just on the off chance you might need their services at some point. And they employed armies of writers at decent wages to provide this service. Any big company tends to run at a certain surplus, and some of that got rolled into providing a real good for humanity. I love it when that happens.</p><p>So, my job consists of four things:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>researching a topic so that I can provide accurate facts for the readers</li><li>putting the information in my own words--plagiarism is theft</li><li>explaining it clearly, in a way that's easy to read</li><li>optimizing the content so search engines can find it (and, by extension, my company)</li></ul><div>If I failed at any of these, I wouldn't be doing a very good job. My main audience is robots--the little crawler bots that index things for search engines. And I feed them what they want (keywords). But I also do have real people reading my work, and hopefully they learn something from it. My boss particularly wants to provide financial education for free for those who can't afford to use our actual product (appointments with financial advisors). So all this time I've been working for them, I've built a knowledge base you can go into and learn about budgeting, investing, picking a good health insurance plan, that kind of thing. All in terms I hoped were easy to follow and understand.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Enter artificial intelligence. A bit of a misnomer: hardly anyone claims current AI is actually intelligent. It's a remixing machine. It takes in text that we feed it and produces more in the same style. It's a little mysterious because it's programmed to be self-teaching. It's not, strictly speaking, <i>taught</i> to use good grammar, for instance--it mimics us. That leads some people to think it must understand what it's doing. After all, humans learn to speak the same way and we understand what we're doing. But, as far as I can determine, there is no sign it understands any of what it says, can tell fact from fiction, or wants anything.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of the jobs I do, AI is amazing at job number four, search engine optimization. And why wouldn't it be? The audience is robots, it's a robot. They are definitely speaking each other's language. Already, I've noticed AI-written articles leaping to the top of search results, especially if you're searching for something very basic or AI-adjacent.</div><div><br /></div><div>So imagine the owner of a company. Currently, the company website publishes an article every weekday, at a cost of $100 per article from a freelancer, for a total of $26,000 a year. But now, they can buy a content creating AI engine like Jasper, which will cost them about $1000 annually for the mid tier package. The savings is amazing, you can hardly say no to a deal like that.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now, the thing about Jasper is that it cannot tell fact from fiction. It can't even keep its facts straight over the course of a single article. It can, with a bit of trial and error, produce something readable, something that looks like real web content. But the gold kernel in the heart of it, the truth, is not there at all.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here's an example I found while trying to answer a different question.</div><div><br /></div><p></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2d3748; font-family: "Noto Serif", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: var(--global-md-spacing); margin-top: 0px;"></p><blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2d3748; font-family: "Noto Serif", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: var(--global-md-spacing); margin-top: 0px;">We are living in a world where artificial intelligence (AI) is taking over jobs that were once reserved for humans. The question of whether an AI can write a novel has been asked many times. And the answer is yes, an AI can write a novel.<span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></p></blockquote><blockquote><div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2d3748; font-family: "Noto Serif", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: var(--global-md-spacing); margin-top: 0px;">The question of whether or not artificial intelligence can write a novel is a difficult one to answer. It’s not just about the ability to generate text, but also about the ability to generate compelling and engaging plots.<span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></p></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2d3748; font-family: "Noto Serif", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: var(--global-md-spacing); margin-top: 0px;">AI-novel writing software is still in its infancy stage and it is hard for them to create engaging plots, which is what makes writing novels so challenging. However, there are some use cases where AI writing software has been used successfully such as generating content for an online course.<span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></p></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2d3748; font-family: "Noto Serif", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: var(--global-md-spacing); margin-top: 0px;">Some people might think that the quality of the novel would be lower than if it was written by a human, but this isn’t always true. There are many examples of novels written by AI that have received praise from readers. One such example is “The Day A Computer Writes A Novel” by Patrick Malone and David Levy, which was published in 1973.</p></div></blockquote><p>It starts out okay. Not the world's best writing, a little cliché and redundant, but we're used to that already. (This is because a lot of web content already is of very poor quality, produced for low pay and in a hurry. The problem, you see, starts before we introduce the machine--a pattern we can see with industrialization everywhere.)</p><p>But then you start to notice contradictions. First the answer is yes, then it's difficult to answer, then it's still in its infancy, and then suddenly there's the wild claim that AI has written lots of novels that readers loved, even back in the seventies!</p><p>I can tell this is wrong, because a) I know that AI can't yet write novels, and b) this wasn't edited even enough to look convincing. But at times, some of this content may reach the level of being believable, and then it becomes truly dangerous.</p><p>Because AI can't think. It can't consider the truth of falsity of anything. You could probably train it to seek out legitimate sources, but it still wouldn't be able to tell what's fact, what's fiction, and what's speculation. It could go looking for sources about what to do about headaches, find a passage about paleolithic treatment for headaches, and recommend drilling a hole in your skull. Because hey, the encyclopedia said that's a thing!</p><p>Ah, you might say, but a human could oversee it. That's true. Very often we think of machines doing things, when really, machines are tools allowing humans to do more things in the same amount of time. Like the self checkout. It's not checking out my groceries for me. It's allowing one cashier to supervise the checkout for 10 people at once. This cashier is way more harried, doesn't have time to trade pleasantries with me, and I'm doing most of the work myself and having a terrible time, but--efficiency is improved, which is what capitalism cares about.</p><p>So, okay, the content writer has been fired and the boss is using Jasper. But the results are pretty wonky, so the boss calls the writer back up. "I don't need to hire you as a writer at 10 cents a word," says the boss. "But it says here in your ad that you'll edit for 2 cents a word." Okay, sure, says the freelancer. It takes her two hours to write an article, but only ten minutes or so to edit one, so she figures 2 cents a word is fair. </p><p>Unfortunately, the job is way more than editing. She's having to fact check every claim and ends up rewriting most of it. It took an hour and a half, and she only made $20, bumping her hourly rate from $50 to $15.</p><p>So she complains to the boss. "This work is a lot harder than editing a human," she says. "It basically only did a quarter of the job, the SEO stuff. I want 8 cents a word at least."</p><p>The boss looks at the text Jasper wrote, and then at the text the writer edited. Sure, the latter is clearer, more accurate, and the only one a human would ever want to read. But then he thinks, "It's not my company's job to inform the public for free. I really only want to boost my site in the search results." He calls back the editor and fires her. Every day, a thousand more words of misinformation go up on the internet, and it doesn't hurt his bottom line much at all.</p><p>Already search engines aren't as good as they used to be at finding good material. Remember when you used to search for something and get sites run by hobbyists in the field, collecting every single fact available on the topic? Now all the top ten results are the exact same six facts, in the same obnoxious contentese ("Most of us have wondered about this question. To find out the answer, read on!"), covered in so many animated ads it's hard to find the text. AI will only accelerate the decline. And it will become even less possible to hold anybody accountable for plagiarism and misinformation, because nobody actually wrote the text at all. You can hardly blame the boss for something he didn't write.</p><p>Now I can tell you this is a bad thing that will take jobs from people and make the internet worse. But that won't stop it from happening. I'm not sure, at this point, that anything will. An informative internet was always a bit of a lucky break. We all benefit from it, but nobody makes money creating it except on the edges here and there.</p><p>I hope that many businesses will realize this stuff hurts their reputation. Mine, at any rate, is counting on attracting human eyeballs and educating real people so they are in a good financial position to eventually hire their services. Nobody shares an AI-written article with their friends except as a novelty. You can't go viral with that stuff.</p><p>I also hope search engines evolve a bit to reward good sites, whether it's by measuring what sites people click on, allowing us to report bad content, or learning to detect the markers of AI. They, at least, have everything to gain here, because their service is not usable unless they do. However, I worry that their real customers are the businesses they point you to, and they will be more worried about upsetting those businesses than about serving you machine produced word salad.</p><p>We will see what's to come. I find myself depressed that we finally got artificial intelligence, and instead of a kindly robot who can teach me the meaning of human existence, I got jumbles of words and surreal pictures with distorted hands. This was not the future science fiction promised me.</p><div><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2d3748; font-family: "Noto Serif", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: var(--global-md-spacing); margin-top: 0px;"></p></div>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-68197843047494652972022-11-16T19:49:00.000-05:002022-11-16T19:49:18.650-05:00Goodbye to Pandora<p> Today, I said goodbye to my beautiful cat of 13 years, Pandora (Kitty Kitty to her friends).</p><p>I'd always had cats, but John swore when we got married we wouldn't have any, because he did not like them.</p><p>Six months later he got me a cat for Christmas because of course he did.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRtlrYddPsks85Fxw48CLggrcJ3669x7GeoZ3lG_YpWq73Ehdos6kKQCmUx5Mvw3wy_2ydaQUVnDP2PY3_uoE3SUOo3SmQEhEjJowBvj7vYaXg2dDH0n0-orFjkjb3f5wjXryqJbBZ7YK0x5DJ5xNOiwNeCF-JmfnQf1DXakifsPcAIU9vUqxXHZJo/s604/1913888_375125140439_1774754_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="453" data-original-width="604" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRtlrYddPsks85Fxw48CLggrcJ3669x7GeoZ3lG_YpWq73Ehdos6kKQCmUx5Mvw3wy_2ydaQUVnDP2PY3_uoE3SUOo3SmQEhEjJowBvj7vYaXg2dDH0n0-orFjkjb3f5wjXryqJbBZ7YK0x5DJ5xNOiwNeCF-JmfnQf1DXakifsPcAIU9vUqxXHZJo/s320/1913888_375125140439_1774754_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>She was a teeny-tiny little thing, found on the mean streets of Philly by some college students. But she didn't get along at all with their other cats, so they put her on Craigslist and passed her on to us.</p><p>She was terrified at first. She spent her first week hiding behind the washing machine; all we saw of her was a pair of yellow eyes. Another time I couldn't find her anywhere and thought she'd escaped, when we found her behind an open dresser drawer.</p><p>But after a while she warmed up and turned into a very affectionate, one-person cat. She loved me and only me. She demanded to sit on my lap or, if I had my laptop on my lap, would get on the back of the couch and purr against my shoulder. Every single day, if I was home, she was snuggling with me.</p><p>She did not like it when we had kids. The nerve. Marko once tried to play with her and she scratched his face. She wasn't having it. She especially hated the dog, when we brought him home. Honestly I'm not sure what we expected. Gilbert always respected her space, having been smaller than her when we got him, but she never relaxed around him.</p><p>She had a spot to nap out of his reach, on my desk, and she kept me company every day, despite all the other chaos that was going on.</p><p>Then we moved, and she decided the only part of the house she liked was the basement. I tried and tried to convince her otherwise: no dice. But when Gilbert had been shut up for the night, she would come upstairs for a little snuggle sesh on the couch.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsh_lOfppX2cuF9eCz8HE_IrpqcSDRR38_O9BRKlDDB68tDTfmY1OE-0SjI_B1Ek_6k1eAlYQO1RQNqlQqjQqGuvGSQhomYy_JwIM0uPL9HzdTOc-EJ1Grs7eckUrA-4ImcRh-TwbaU_Xf3jOGYttwy0f1EEZfWfh4qn63BvqhZa1eQosoNl6sd8BV/s4000/20220818_184637.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="3000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsh_lOfppX2cuF9eCz8HE_IrpqcSDRR38_O9BRKlDDB68tDTfmY1OE-0SjI_B1Ek_6k1eAlYQO1RQNqlQqjQqGuvGSQhomYy_JwIM0uPL9HzdTOc-EJ1Grs7eckUrA-4ImcRh-TwbaU_Xf3jOGYttwy0f1EEZfWfh4qn63BvqhZa1eQosoNl6sd8BV/s320/20220818_184637.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div><br /></div>Tummy rubs were even allowed, under the right circumstances.<div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqsqYQCw3WHY5gB5uuvUDSB--rHI1uJPu8D7mQemXzHaDL66RAMWd17ZDd8udlCy00nvD2PeWtBMQFNwp60ssYaXVRK5pvy23CE4zaIyqBh4nyyR22_WUJLgymqA3BinC8MzAxk330ochzc3wF9pmoJJndAfrYkyVf-20oNsITFpOwh7-woFFY1Ycr/s4000/20221108_163421.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3000" data-original-width="4000" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqsqYQCw3WHY5gB5uuvUDSB--rHI1uJPu8D7mQemXzHaDL66RAMWd17ZDd8udlCy00nvD2PeWtBMQFNwp60ssYaXVRK5pvy23CE4zaIyqBh4nyyR22_WUJLgymqA3BinC8MzAxk330ochzc3wF9pmoJJndAfrYkyVf-20oNsITFpOwh7-woFFY1Ycr/s320/20221108_163421.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>Curled up, she was so tiny.</div><div><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaEXDGyAfbXwYt8LFECx_HqDfVg_s1nnT_qRP3Es17cT5KG1EdPEbtgik5ZMGAOZQNdJ87lpFiARkmyvJgK1LH9Yn2DybgR76q-TXJpyc1Knu7OrUalvDyX3CHYsXz8P6tOCJZ-eLYki67GgrlvHL56lVxkh5R3VZraIawWLCO1T3DJHM6CwbhVVSu/s4032/IMG_20200901_221422.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaEXDGyAfbXwYt8LFECx_HqDfVg_s1nnT_qRP3Es17cT5KG1EdPEbtgik5ZMGAOZQNdJ87lpFiARkmyvJgK1LH9Yn2DybgR76q-TXJpyc1Knu7OrUalvDyX3CHYsXz8P6tOCJZ-eLYki67GgrlvHL56lVxkh5R3VZraIawWLCO1T3DJHM6CwbhVVSu/s320/IMG_20200901_221422.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>She was a picture of elegance, as only a black cat can be.</div><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDoOZM4TxWLmIx7NdoPKmE8Rmcv96-0l2SoDBAwGctgjvwuRVY9HpNko6gq6TBQJfsFi6Hl7AEe4hwyaRqkhWtDTHJliAMPAl-VfngQgTWBJJJJcC8ULUUUewD5wuP-WMRNXHwYcs0wkhWiOpMRMn6fwpxk5p06A3rkHp7Up17DpEmvqv_5Jg-l8xR/s4032/IMG_20190805_201405.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDoOZM4TxWLmIx7NdoPKmE8Rmcv96-0l2SoDBAwGctgjvwuRVY9HpNko6gq6TBQJfsFi6Hl7AEe4hwyaRqkhWtDTHJliAMPAl-VfngQgTWBJJJJcC8ULUUUewD5wuP-WMRNXHwYcs0wkhWiOpMRMn6fwpxk5p06A3rkHp7Up17DpEmvqv_5Jg-l8xR/s320/IMG_20190805_201405.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">But don't let her elegance fool you: she was as derpy as the next cat. Sometimes she would try to leap onto something, fail, and walk off casually hoping nobody saw that. (We did.)</span></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLS-d3f0bNRbsBpjbRNSXTXeiJawfJpm3GX29YQ2chXH5qhVYWOm7szpO4OdPP5HQf_YAfwsFmMyyF0qYhununRSJ5wgGyKAQ5Zc_mMzHFCKSUHILcuBpZnxcrsXuuAnkcK3A0KU_wu6ZvHhnPUKGxgjSw73UZMPEpz0iIMcNQp8fRu9llDX-IZsO4/s4032/IMG_20201030_143151.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLS-d3f0bNRbsBpjbRNSXTXeiJawfJpm3GX29YQ2chXH5qhVYWOm7szpO4OdPP5HQf_YAfwsFmMyyF0qYhununRSJ5wgGyKAQ5Zc_mMzHFCKSUHILcuBpZnxcrsXuuAnkcK3A0KU_wu6ZvHhnPUKGxgjSw73UZMPEpz0iIMcNQp8fRu9llDX-IZsO4/s320/IMG_20201030_143151.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>As she got older, she started warming up to the kids a little bit. She didn't come to them, but if I was already petting her, they could join in.</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4H0FDGAvN7_R7Qir2DlTYWGxKPLYdVAtYlKHP7Wkp9FnlF626l654lsC47zen1WYvM9gAWznELaV8u3ZG7WJWo2kkPld5dQviOvLnD3gOfbyZFnRr7S6pLMXpZLF3qQmdRv4cvU0vh4Pdzfp9DJSnRhJ_4Y0EdbXBw2eTEjZLr8PuRpCNO3Fq9vKm/s4032/IMG_20210318_214306.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4H0FDGAvN7_R7Qir2DlTYWGxKPLYdVAtYlKHP7Wkp9FnlF626l654lsC47zen1WYvM9gAWznELaV8u3ZG7WJWo2kkPld5dQviOvLnD3gOfbyZFnRr7S6pLMXpZLF3qQmdRv4cvU0vh4Pdzfp9DJSnRhJ_4Y0EdbXBw2eTEjZLr8PuRpCNO3Fq9vKm/s320/IMG_20210318_214306.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>We got Tiger, and she hated Tiger. Tiger tried to be friendly but no dice. Kitty Kitty would attack her without warning. Sometimes I think Kitty Kitty did not know how to speak cat. She didn't do the normal warnings cats do, and she failed to recognize Tiger's signs of friendliness. Maybe she was kitty-autistic. Or maybe she'd just had some bad experiences with other cats before she came to us.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyway, there were a few precious moments in her life when both cats would tolerate each other in order to get close to me, and I always took a picture.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3ykMpqaz1sr0NI16rZa92IofRmKxK2mYMRvcfpm9Qd5g-Rv0mpLMTMGOvNGAJduk3wGThhBrR1RgttCXcDYVnQAb_HSTLLC5Ed9HN81gRZz3WtU3gTzp8ST4QEvmQOHsBrTHWlATeOdk5uw3XYekCB8GSiCljThxRlrCRH5RozVUClcXeC6t2b9Rm/s4032/IMG_20220305_154231.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3ykMpqaz1sr0NI16rZa92IofRmKxK2mYMRvcfpm9Qd5g-Rv0mpLMTMGOvNGAJduk3wGThhBrR1RgttCXcDYVnQAb_HSTLLC5Ed9HN81gRZz3WtU3gTzp8ST4QEvmQOHsBrTHWlATeOdk5uw3XYekCB8GSiCljThxRlrCRH5RozVUClcXeC6t2b9Rm/s320/IMG_20220305_154231.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div>When we moved, she decided the basement here was not adequate, and she claimed my room for herself too. She always wanted me to be on the bed with her. Sometimes she would wander the upstairs hall crying until I came and sat with her. Sometimes she would just hide in the back of my closet instead. But anytime I came to sit or lie on my bed, she would join me.</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinANuW9rBcPO49ViuPERiG_8EE07Lp5iVM8gcTpFqlRakLULCRjathrW39pi_WMvHQpu0lFQ26V1o53ocwin1eixwAqce8HyPCHE6bi8Y0ot0UFJuszN_NMjjWU1n5plI0IUN2ZEjMTFVzc3TlfV0-0qRGwGU1LiuCoGwA3VUUZIegPNBwncjZFbpu/s4032/IMG_20210623_201055.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinANuW9rBcPO49ViuPERiG_8EE07Lp5iVM8gcTpFqlRakLULCRjathrW39pi_WMvHQpu0lFQ26V1o53ocwin1eixwAqce8HyPCHE6bi8Y0ot0UFJuszN_NMjjWU1n5plI0IUN2ZEjMTFVzc3TlfV0-0qRGwGU1LiuCoGwA3VUUZIegPNBwncjZFbpu/s320/IMG_20210623_201055.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>Have I mentioned her toe beans? Look at those toe beans.</div><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>Well, she got old. She had a few concerning symptoms, we took her to the vet, and it turned out her whole belly was full of cancer. There was nothing anybody could really do. It was strange to hear that when she seemed pretty close to fine, just a little on the skinny side and more snuggly than she used to be.</div><div><br /></div><div>But within a week after that she had a rapid decline. It was really hard to see it happen to her. The hardest part being that she no longer wanted to cuddle. She only wanted to hide under my bed or pace around the house crying. It's been a hard week with her like this. I've woken up at night to carry her to the litterbox, I've syringed water into her mouth. Not because I thought there was hope, but because I wanted to make it easy for her as long as I could. She deserved everything.</div><div><br /></div><div>I said goodbye to her today. I had told myself a lot of things about it. That she was a cat, that this is not too bad of a lifespan for a cat, she had a good run. Or that nobody would miss her but me, because at least she was a one person cat. Or that having cats that grow old, and then you get another cat, is the circle of life.</div><div><br /></div><div>But when it came down to it, I cried so hard. She's been my friend for such a long time, longer than I've known any of my children. She was so tiny and soft. She loved me with her whole heart, a heart that was not open to very many people. I wish we'd had more time, even though I know no amount a cat could have would ever have been enough.</div><div><br /></div><div>Telling the kids was really hard too. I thought they wouldn't care, but they do. She's been a distant, hostile part of their whole lives. And in the moments when she let them approach and scritch her ears, they felt so special.<br /><p>We will eventually not be sad anymore. At some point we will get another cat, hopefully one that Tiger gets along with. Loving cats hurts because you know the whole time it won't be forever, and then it's not and you're somehow still surprised. But I'm not going to stop doing it. They are beautiful creatures whose time with us is always worth the pain of loss.</p><p>But today, I'm crying because when the kids go to bed tonight, she's not going to pop up to cuddle with me. I wish she could.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5ib7cLd822M5S6x763XjwebyPnGK8HLOR2ZdH7nMrZQMFldjU-2Nmic3VCISHzztA3WBO62qAYk8Tq9nUYf4RYhXd7SJBbfO6XoIUvy8pJ-JPJi9VFsdqrwHq7TobyUYP_hEWA56ash3BveHdKT9SCvVI9LitNAr_3GSOAvgA3SwRUW7pM8fovwqZ/s4032/IMG_20220209_145944.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5ib7cLd822M5S6x763XjwebyPnGK8HLOR2ZdH7nMrZQMFldjU-2Nmic3VCISHzztA3WBO62qAYk8Tq9nUYf4RYhXd7SJBbfO6XoIUvy8pJ-JPJi9VFsdqrwHq7TobyUYP_hEWA56ash3BveHdKT9SCvVI9LitNAr_3GSOAvgA3SwRUW7pM8fovwqZ/s320/IMG_20220209_145944.jpg" width="240" /></a></div></div>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-50476099620014985172022-10-22T12:04:00.004-04:002022-10-22T12:04:57.068-04:00It's somehow fall now<p></p>So, uh, I haven't updated here since June. Oops. I try to post here at least once a month so my archives look nice and neat, but July was stressful and I missed it then, and then my perfect record was gone so I wasn't motivated anymore. You know how it is. Or maybe you don't, not many people have decade-old blogs they still keep alive anymore!<p></p><p>My parole from fulltime parenting has finally come. Jackie started kindergarten. I've been looking forward to this moment for YEARS and it finally happened!</p><p>I was terrified Jackie wasn't going to adapt well. The open house before school started was a disaster. The teacher hadn't seen her IEP, called Jackie "Jacqueline," and had that name on her desk and cubby and everything. Way to give the worst possible impression to a kid already skeptical about the whole business. Jackie spit at her and called her stupid and basically made <i>her</i> worst impression possible.</p><p>And yet, once the first day of school rolled around, she was actually fine! She loves her teacher now. Her name has been fixed on everything. She has a best friend she plays with every recess. She always gets ready fast on weekday mornings and wants to go wait at the bus stop 20 minutes before it's time.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYT7snlWlGv4oY_Q8vH8N5Xcl_lNgVXmFnMUq903JVLQDMGEv7M0kMYdMwc5uj5kxqKXRePTYVFL7CIKE8-L0UsRilB9BKXf60nBKvpN60Ca9c8dQylYJQj52feSEKSsEmKR5RdmB0TifwUZ9eE2nUK91dDdF1YESYKKDtkjC4C0oN9IDj3SH-msCW/s4000/20221017_082932.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="3000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYT7snlWlGv4oY_Q8vH8N5Xcl_lNgVXmFnMUq903JVLQDMGEv7M0kMYdMwc5uj5kxqKXRePTYVFL7CIKE8-L0UsRilB9BKXf60nBKvpN60Ca9c8dQylYJQj52feSEKSsEmKR5RdmB0TifwUZ9eE2nUK91dDdF1YESYKKDtkjC4C0oN9IDj3SH-msCW/s320/20221017_082932.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><p></p><p>Everyone else is doing fine in their new classes. Marko is in Advanced English, which is exciting for him. His grades aren't great, because he keeps missing assignments and not asking for help, but he's learning a lot and trying. I just hope the teacher understands it's an executive function issue, not a lack of effort. Michael is in robotics club a second year running and is also learning the cello. To me, it's just amazing that they give a kid a cello and lessons for free. I want a cello and lessons for free! That was never an option at any of the schools I've been to.</p><p>Miriam likes school less this year, because her best friend is not in her class. But she's still doing extremely well and is pulling As in everything because of course she is. I worry about her perfectionism, but I'm proud of her hard work.</p><p>John quit his library job and is a project manager now. I feel bad about this, because I think he could have loved libraries if his particular library hadn't been so dysfunctional. Plus a pandemic. Plus underfunding and understaffing and libraries being expected to solve all societal problems simply because they're the only place people can go. But he's very happy in project management and is working from home. It's so nice that he doesn't have to spend hours and hours every week fighting DC traffic. </p><p>Of course I feel like a colossal fool for moving here only one year before he stopped needing to commute. We could have stayed in our old house! We can, of course, move back, but moving is so stressful for everyone and everyone's finally settled in at school, so it feels impossible to consider doing it again. It took me a year to even feel comfortable here. I don't want another year where I feel homesick and homeless because I don't feel like home in the perfectly good house we moved to.</p><p>Having Jackie in school had an instant positive effect on my mental health, as I hoped it would. She's just a lot, and I need quiet time to recharge. Now I finally have some.</p><p>It did not, however, increase my productivity as much as I thought it would. I have all this time! How is it taking me all that time to do my work, run a couple errands, and occasionally clean the house? My hope was to make a schedule for myself that made my responsibilities routine. I can do just about anything if it's a routine. Unfortunately, that routine keeps getting thrown by other things. I get sick, or a kid gets sick, or I get a bad headache. Every fall I get lots of headaches, and I still don't know why.</p><p>So it could be better, but honestly being productive isn't everything. I'm doing the same amount of paid work as before, but I don't feel massively stressed about it. I'm getting book deadlines done. The house looks slightly better than it did during the summer. And I feel significantly better about all aspects of my life.</p><p>But my prior ideas of taking on more freelance work or maybe taking some college classes feel ridiculous. With what time? With what energy? Would I maybe <i>have</i> more energy if I had some scheduled activities? But what if I did and it just made me stressed all the time again?</p><p>Since I don't know the answer, I'm sticking with this for the present. Just getting done the stuff I need to, and maybe having a little more time for my hobbies. Hopefully going outside a non-zero amount, at least until the weather gets cold. And once it does, maybe making a weekly visit to the local indoor pool.</p><p>How are you all doing?</p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-60752360196223241652022-06-08T09:55:00.000-04:002022-06-08T09:55:33.504-04:00A dream of mine is coming true<p> So, April was pretty much a wash for getting anything done, because I had two different trips I took plus two birthdays. And May was mostly lost to COVID. So here we are in June and I'm realizing that this blog hasn't had an update in a while and so you don't know my news!</p><p>I finally, FINALLY got a book deal. It is an extremely small book deal with a very tiny, new publisher. But I did my due diligence and they are neither a scam nor complete amateurs, so I think they will do a good job with my books.</p><p>Yes, that's books plural, they want the entire solar sailing trilogy. I've been feeling like the world needed more historically-inspired, low-tech space opera, centering the struggles of the common man. Or, in this case, woman. So I wrote one, and then I hadn't managed to fit in all the interesting worldbuilding I'd dreamed up, so I wrote another, and I'm working on the third. And these will ALL be coming to you, starting next summer! With pretty covers and available from major online booksellers!</p><p>It's very exciting. I know that publishing on this level, without an agent and separately from the publishing oligopoly (I can't remember if it's Big Five still or Big Four but it's Few Options, anyway) means I won't be selling thousands of copies, becoming famous, or making millions. But it's a chance to reach the select batch of people who will enjoy these books. And lots of authors do start here and gradually build a much bigger following. But honestly, what I wanted was to be picked by a non-me person (eg, not self publishing) and then to be read without having to nag my friends and family to do it as a favor. Which I will finally accomplish.</p><p>Now, there's a little snag, which I knew was coming if I ever published these things. The books have a lesbian romance in them. I knew some people wouldn't approve. Other people would start asking questions about me that I haven't answered, at least not in their presence.</p><p>I could, of course, try to pretend that I have written *counts on fingers* four novels now with queer romances in them as an exercise in empathy. But I doubt anybody would believe me, and in any event it wouldn't make me happy. The second you begin to doubt whether people would love you if they knew the truth about you, it starts to feel like they already don't love you. Because after all, the only you they have access to is the one with the uncomfortable truths edited out. They love that one, but it isn't you.</p><p>Anyway, I <i>am</i> bisexual, and I <i>didn't</i> hide it, and a lot of people got upset about it when they figured it out. Some people seem to think bisexual means that I sleep with a lot of people. (I do not. I am a boring monogamous married lady.) Or that I'm basically straight but want attention. (I would honestly prefer less attention, at least for this.) What it really is, is that some of the things I imagine and dream of and relate to, are women falling for women, so that's what I write. And people could just accept this as a normal thing that people do. But they don't, so I feel the need to explain myself. To say, sure, this is a thing I feel.</p><p>It puzzles me that some Catholics disapprove of me because of this. I mean, I left the church some time ago. <i>That</i> was, by Catholic standards, a sin. Feeling butterflies in my stomach because a pretty woman smiled at me is not a sin. It's simply a feeling. You could, I suppose, urge me to try not to feel that way, to pretend I don't, to write only universes in which those feelings never happen, to write only some of the romances I think are beautiful.</p><p>But why would I do that?</p><p>When I was Catholic, the idea that gay marriage and gay relationships were wrong was a thing I simply had to take on faith. And I no longer have any faith. There is no<i> reason</i> why I should condemn them; there never was. And it just feels better not to second-guess half my feelings, to treat half of myself as broken. I don't feel that I am.</p><p>Anyway, if the idea of a Navy midshipman and a notorious pirate falling in love while pushing back against two dystopian governments appeals to you . . . you'll have to wait about a year because publishing is slow, but I'll share the links here when I have them.</p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-87738092547872600752022-05-21T14:13:00.000-04:002022-05-21T14:13:54.615-04:00The pale horse caught up with me<p> Two years I managed to escape it, but now we all have COVID.</p><p>It's not hard to figure out how. Two months ago, the schools lifted the mask requirement. Since then, we've all been sick several times, even though my kids still wear theirs. Cloth masks aren't that great to begin with, and they only protect others, not yourself. But N95s aren't available in child sizes. I got them better masks during the steep wave earlier this year, but they cost a lot and weren't reusable. If I'd known cases were on the rise now, I would have gotten more, but the first I noticed was when we were already sick.</p><p>Marko caught it first, no surprises there. Middle school requires a lot of mixing around; there are always cases in his school. He had a sore throat and a fever for two days. I should have tested him, but I didn't. Last time I tested him, it took two adults to hold him down and swab him, and it just felt a little heartless when he'd be staying home till he was recovered anyway.</p><p>He was sick for two days, well for two, and then I got sick. Sore throat that felt just like a regular cold, with fever following very shortly after. I tested myself that evening and tested positive. So did John.</p><p>Various kids have had various symptoms all week. I'm sure the school district would love us to keep track of everyone's individual symptoms and test everyone. But they agreed to my plan to keep us all locked down for ten days and test each kid once before they return.</p><p>I'm glad we're all vaccinated. Nobody has been seriously ill. But we adults have been very <i>uncomfortably</i> ill, with excruciating sore throats, coughing, fever, whole days in bed. Today is day 6 for me and I'm sneezing and blowing my nose like I've got allergies, and I still kinda want to stay in bed. But this counts for very good improvement, all things considered.</p><p>I feel frustrated and helpless. Sure, there have been times when I've taken calculated risks. I don't know if it's better or worse that none of those times actually gave me COVID, just the non-optional duty of sending my kids to school. (Virtual is not an option this year, here.) I'm mad that we didn't keep masks; people can fight over their effectiveness but I'm pretty sure they kept us COVID-free for two years. Now certain sources are saying that cases are high enough now that people should consider masking again. Seriously? Talk about shutting the barn door after the horse is out. I feel we always do just a bit too little for the current risk scenario. If I briefly feel that we're doing enough, and I actually feel comfortable going out . . . the rules relax further, it becomes less safe, and I stop feeling like I should go out anymore.</p><p>I wish I could just relax now, having had it, but they're saying now it's mutating fast enough that a person may be able to get it as much as four times a year. This is just how we live now. Just tolerating an amount of sickness we never did before, with of course a certain number of deaths annually. I hear the flu was the same. There wasn't a seasonal flu before 1918, and now there is, and we just accept tens of thousands of deaths from it, plus of course the misery of the rest of us having to get it. And it's such a little deal that we write off other illnesses as being as insignificant as that.</p><p>I'm tired, you guys. None of this had to be this way, but everything seems to be getting stupider all the time, so why not, right? Can't have our health, can't have anything.</p><p>Anyway, the kids are mostly well now, and bored, but they're murdering each other significantly less than they sometimes do, so that's something. They'll get back to school in time for two weeks of end-of-year fun, and then it'll be summer. As worried as I am about keeping them entertained without school, I'm glad we'll be able to go outside and play with the neighbors at least.</p><p><br /></p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-90438385943192828862022-04-30T11:29:00.001-04:002022-05-01T12:01:59.475-04:00My ideal vacation<p> We went on vacation this weekend. There's a mountain lodge just an hour and a half from us, and John had a three-day weekend. It's sort of an agritourism place—a little farm, horses, a creek, apple trees, that kind of thing.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAlzVAEutGt25wh4AqCNhSrNHXUFhXOUGzLU2yTLUGezZWd1vqpp4ERFdZMeqNA2aKh9cWDkO6l0A5Cza-FfAEUyulpcLujrbwq4sraCOfIQlukmzF_mJJDTt1ZzlL0FsRjC6lnPEmGEiVrRSZtPECWH9riXCebNXCOEIWhpcwo6MWbADoVMWmjinV/s4032/IMG_20220430_195944.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAlzVAEutGt25wh4AqCNhSrNHXUFhXOUGzLU2yTLUGezZWd1vqpp4ERFdZMeqNA2aKh9cWDkO6l0A5Cza-FfAEUyulpcLujrbwq4sraCOfIQlukmzF_mJJDTt1ZzlL0FsRjC6lnPEmGEiVrRSZtPECWH9riXCebNXCOEIWhpcwo6MWbADoVMWmjinV/s320/IMG_20220430_195944.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>Going on a vacation with kids is rather fraught. The adults are stressing out trying to make sure we eat and sleep and say on. The kids are bouncing off the walls with excitement to do [future fun thing], or they're currently doing the fun thing and fighting over who can do it first/ most/ best, or they're complaining that the fun thing, which they absolutely did enjoy, was retroactively not fun at all now that it's over.</p><p>That said, they did have a good time for the most part. They played foosball, fed goats, and made s'mores. Me, I enjoyed the folk music around the fire, the pond, and doing puzzles in the game room.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1gCUd_83zdIVo5vk1b9_9wF8VUmfQS2O3FtCBR4k6tOmt_DzLUj0-lZVVxQsGjPEzmtVOiNaCoOKG0r8eizl6ld-ljbPltF21tqkb9zpjAuN9D15DGmTsduw8AiltBf_4WS1uQkymu_2V0bLPilx-7FTWpDR-gf2vCBQaoqFqxChJBAgy2DGPWUe9/s4032/IMG_20220501_093900.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1gCUd_83zdIVo5vk1b9_9wF8VUmfQS2O3FtCBR4k6tOmt_DzLUj0-lZVVxQsGjPEzmtVOiNaCoOKG0r8eizl6ld-ljbPltF21tqkb9zpjAuN9D15DGmTsduw8AiltBf_4WS1uQkymu_2V0bLPilx-7FTWpDR-gf2vCBQaoqFqxChJBAgy2DGPWUe9/s320/IMG_20220501_093900.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>Still, vacations are not easy for me. I always spend the first day or two feeling out of sorts. Sleeping in a new place leaves me tired, and without my familiar routines and surroundings I don't feel like myself.</p><p>For a weekend vacation, before I can adapt I go home. If the vacation is longer, I get attached to the place and miss it when I leave. I just bond to places more than most people seem to!</p><p>But I still amuse myself imagining my ideal vacation. Surely if everything were perfect enough, I could still have a good time!</p><p>The most important thing to me is that it's in the country somewhere. I need a nice view out the window and somewhere to walk around outside. If I wanted to overlook a parking lot I could just stay home.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-p-quL53UHwsW5bQ7JLynp2FVgBSsYCfTs0chCUzOmYEw4FjUDK9yZIx4dFpJ1dijcWd7jI7rhih6HmxLVQBgrFQ3umt60Rdhl1DqYNh5K0LNBtQY2Fqq-FDo9aGb1e5SY9UiioN_sW-cds67fPtzo6xkNWnhwm-pCxsNt3Gj-iWjhWfeEwtOqW13/s4032/IMG_20220430_132048.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-p-quL53UHwsW5bQ7JLynp2FVgBSsYCfTs0chCUzOmYEw4FjUDK9yZIx4dFpJ1dijcWd7jI7rhih6HmxLVQBgrFQ3umt60Rdhl1DqYNh5K0LNBtQY2Fqq-FDo9aGb1e5SY9UiioN_sW-cds67fPtzo6xkNWnhwm-pCxsNt3Gj-iWjhWfeEwtOqW13/s320/IMG_20220430_132048.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>Second, social time is not a vacation. It's still worth doing, and I will travel to see friends because I love them, but then I have to go back to my regular life less rested than when I left! So the ideal vacation is alone.</p><p>Third, there must be food I don't have to cook, easily accessible. Airbnbs fail on this count. The name had me fooled at first. There's really just a bed, no breakfast. You can bring your own, but cooking is one of the things I'm seeking to escape!</p><p>My ideal situation is like at retreats, where they have set mealtimes and the food is served without fuss. I'll accept a connected restaurant, but if it's 45 minutes and $20 to get lunch, that's not ideal to have to do three meals a day.</p><p>Things to do? Not required. I'd bring a book and my laptop to do some writing and be perfectly happy.</p><p>These kinds of places exist, for sure. Most of them are religious retreat houses, but I have an allergy. The rest are all inclusive spa resorts, which are too expensive for me. </p><p>But the place we went was pretty close to all I want. I might come here again for a writing retreat, all by myself.</p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-54640734296209659982022-03-22T12:15:00.003-04:002022-03-22T12:15:32.097-04:00Two views on parenting<p> I noticed, rather early in my parenting career, two very different attitudes toward parenting. One, which was mine, was that it is a job. I do it for the sake of my children. It is hard. I cheer on their milestones. The older they get, the closer I am to being done.</p><p>The other is that it is an experience to treasure. You are supposed to love every minute. You keep a baby book and tons of keepsakes. You are sad when they grow older, because then you're closer to this magical time being over.</p><p>At the time I kind of despised the latter view. I felt it instrumentalized children, made them a fun consumer item rather than a sacred trust. Isn't it our job to help them grow up, not enjoy ourselves? Won't this lead to people pushing their children backwards because they dread them growing up?</p><p>But I was watching Jackie ride her bike the other day, and I thought, you know what? This moment won't last. I need to treasure it. Even though I forgot to get a picture of it. Even though I never kept a baby book and lost the kids' ultrasound pictures and don't, honestly, miss the baby stage. There is something to be said for simply delighting in your kids. Because kids deserve to be delighted in. They need to know that being with them makes you happy. That they're not just a chore for you.</p><p>I feel that this was missing in the definition I learned of love from various Catholic sources. Love, they reminded us sternly, is not <i>good feelings</i>, it is <i>desiring the good for the other</i>. To which I say, sure, it isn't <i>just</i> good feelings, but when people crave love, they don't simply crave being cared about. We want to be liked. We want to know the other person enjoys being with us. It's the knowledge that the good in us is recognized and appreciated.</p><p>This is especially true of kids, who are kind of a chore sometimes and are generally aware of it long before they are able to not be a chore. They know their parents love them, that their parents have to love them, but it doesn't feel good to know that you are loved just for duty, that your presence doesn't make your parents<i> happy</i>.</p><p>Obviously this isn't something you can force as easily as "willing the good." You can force yourself to work toward anyone's good, no matter how awful they are, but to like someone, there has to be something good about them. Plus, when you're exhausted or depressed, it can be hard to delight in your kids.</p><p>Still. It's important to remember that appreciating what a child (or anyone) has to offer us isn't purely selfish. It's giving them a chance to feel good and worthy. So I've been trying to remember to both say and show to my children that I like being around them. That, sure, some games I play with them purely because they beg me to, but some things I truly do enjoy. I love taking my kids on walks in the woods. I like hearing the ideas they come up with. I like listening to an audiobook or watching a good show together. And it's important that I make that obvious--that my kids know I'm not their grudging servant, I'm a person who is honestly lucky to have such delightful children.</p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-9425754016929415742022-03-11T10:33:00.002-05:002022-03-11T10:33:52.693-05:00The post on inflation I can't write for work<p> I'm learning so much about finance from my job. However, since the financial advice I write is mainly for rich people who might need someone to manage their accounts for them, not poor people I want to radicalize into socialists, there's stuff I can't really address.</p><p>Inflation is really bad right now; it's the worst it's been since the 80s. Naturally this is bad in a lot of ways. It means that rent and food and transportation and healthcare are all more expensive than ever, but since wages lag inflation, you're probably still getting paid about the same. Meanwhile the money in your bank account is also worth less than it was. If you're really rich, you can get around this by investing your money at rates above inflation. But that's not normally something you can do if you don't have a pile of extra money lying around.</p><p>People have been asking what causes inflation, and mainly they seem to want to blame the president. Which is odd because we don't live in a country where presidents are permitted to set prices. Still, I have to admit that extra tax credits and stimulus have contributed to the price increases.</p><p>Here's how it works. Say a loaf of bread costs 50 cents to make and you can sell it for a dollar. If you sell it for more than a dollar, people aren't willing to pay that much for it, so you actually make less profit than if you keep the price at a dollar. Well and good.</p><p>Trouble is, people need to eat bread. So if all your competitors and you hike the price of bread at more or less the same time, people will still buy it even if it's $5 a loaf. Because they have to eat, and presumably you've hiked the price on all the other food you sell too.</p><p>Demand here is inflexible so prices can skyrocket--with one small check. This is that, if the price goes up enough, a certain number of poor people can't buy it no matter how much they want to. They go hungry rather than buy the bread. Now you're losing profits, so you grudgingly have to lower the price again. Low prices are generally good. Some very poor people still can't afford the bread though. You'll drop it to the point that <i>most</i> of your customers can afford the bread. Nobody's actually interested in making sure every single person can afford their product, just that they can sell enough volume to make a good profit.</p><p>Imagine, though, that the government realizes some people are going hungry, because they can't afford even a dollar a loaf. So it subsidizes food for the hungry, either by food stamps or straight-up cash.</p><p>Immediately demand goes up, and you (you're still a baker in this metaphor) sell a lot more. And you think, hey, with demand like this, maybe I can hike the price! So you hike it a little, and a little more, until demand drops off (some poor people cannot afford your bread). Then you've reached the sweet spot when you're making the most profit on bread you can.</p><p>It's safe to say, then, that providing for the poor causes inflation. It will always do that, because as long as suppliers are seeking only their own profit, the more money you provide to consumers, the higher demand will be, and the prices will go up.</p><p>This has happened with education. Easy-to-obtain student loans > most people can afford to at least try college > college prices go up. Now everyone's crushed by debt and all, but the profit margin is great. If we subsidize college more, prices will simply go up more. There is no reason for them to ever stop increasing prices until the point at which people stop buying the product. The price will <i>always</i> be set at a number some people can't afford.</p><p>And healthcare. Healthcare has very inflexible demand, because nobody likes dying. And so you can see the prices increase and increase; they don't stop increasing because sick people never stop buying healthcare. They will only stop increasing at the level when a significant number of people can't afford to buy it and die instead.</p><p>And rent, of course. And houses for sale. The costs go up and up and up, and we are all squeezed tighter and tighter, trying to pay for it. A certain number will not be able to do so, and we have homeless people. We <i>have</i> to have homeless people, to demonstrate we've reached the maximum price for the demand. A certain group of people do not even want there to be anywhere for homeless people to live, because if there is a painless option besides paying a thousand a month to a landlord and accepting a terrible job to pay for it, <i>people will take that option</i>. There has to be punishment for people who don't grind hard enough.</p><p>There is, of course, competition, and that helps. If someone wants to carve out a niche as the budget option, they can do so. (Much as I hate Walmart as a company, they make it possible for me to dress my children so I'm not going to say I'm not grateful.) But, in general, there's not <i>enough</i> competition. I heard from a guy on twitter the other day who lives in an area with only one grocery store. Bread there is $7 a loaf. Because when you're a monopoly you can do that. Here where I live, I've been able to reliably get bread for 60 cents, because we have quite a few different stores.</p><p>In this country, most things are provided by a very short list of companies. If they all agree-- either explicitly, or simply by watching each other's prices-- they can easily drive prices up and wages down. Take publishing. Since there are only five major publishers, there isn't a lot of competition for any book you want to sell, and advances get smaller while fringe benefits vanish. Likewise if the only department stores in your region are Target and Walmart, Target can set its price fairly high and all Walmart has to do is set theirs just a little bit lower to still be the budget option.</p><p>So, is it true that if we raise the minimum wage to keep up with inflation, it will cause more inflation? Probably, yeah. </p><p>I still think we should do it, though. Because I would rather run a race trying to keep up with inflation than simply let a huge number of people fall further and further behind.</p><p>But I think we're eventually going to need some longer-term solution. Anti-trust enforcement is a big one we haven't done enough in a long time. But I'm open to hearing more ideas. I know that division of wealth was once a lot more balanced in this country, and that there are countries where you can flip burgers for a living and still own a house. So it shouldn't be impossible.</p><p>But first, I think, we're going to have to want to. And there are a million and one reasons why people don't want that at all.</p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-62269291521621329742022-02-27T10:27:00.004-05:002022-02-27T10:27:24.835-05:00The meaning of suffering<p>When I was Catholic, my life was pretty hard. Some of my difficulties were specifically caused by being Catholic. I didn't see suffering as a reason not to do anything--in fact, I sometimes sought out things that would make me suffer more, because I thought it was good for me. But my religion also gave me ways to handle any suffering I experienced. It all felt meaningful. And it was all, of course, going to be canceled out by future reward.</p><p>Now, my life is still difficult. There are things that are easier now that I decided to see suffering as a bad thing, a thing I could avoid by making different choices. Unfortunately, not all suffering can be avoided, especially not without causing harm to other people. So there's still suffering.</p><p>The difference is that now there is no answer to any of it. No meaning. If suffering is actually bad, then there's no bright side and no reward for putting up with it. It simply is.</p><p>If suffering, on its own, is purely bad, you'll avoid it more, which is good. I see some major problems with people failing to see suffering as bad, but rather priding themselves on being able to put up with it / see meaning in it / offer it up. Notable is Mother Teresa not giving painkillers to the dying, even though she had them available, because she felt suffering was the kiss of Jesus. From my perspective (as a person who does not believe suffering is the kiss of Jesus, or anything good at all) this is terrible. But I see similar attitudes in Catholics I know, who are pretty willing to tell you how much their life sucks, but pretty unwilling to make any real changes. Because, after all, it's only suffering, it's not sin or any kind of lasting harm.</p><p>I certainly had that attitude as a Catholic. I didn't want to suffer, I didn't worship suffering, but I just didn't see any point in avoiding it. My goals were different. So I always tried toughing out headaches instead of taking anything for them, only taking something when it was already bad and therefore not very responsive to medication. And I took jobs and situations that I knew would be hard on me, because I thought being pushed harder would be good for me.</p><p>Now, I take steps to avoid suffering. I put my kids in school, in large part, because having them all at home all the time was making me miserable. There are good things about it for them also, but it was including my own happiness as a point to consider that really pushed me over. I take ibuprofen when my head first starts to hurt. If I want some ice cream, I eat some dang ice cream. I'm not chasing suffering.</p><p>But suffering still happens. I still have chronic headaches. It took me years and years to go to a doctor about it, and then I did that and they still didn't know what the matter was. My kids are still overwhelming, and I have already done all the things that might make that job easier on me without neglecting them. I am still living through a global pandemic that makes me isolated and lonely.</p><p>And this time, there is no reason for any of it. It just sucks.</p><p>It kind of takes the pressure off, in some ways. I don't have to offer it up. I don't have to worry that complaining once in a while robs me of merit. I can cope in whatever way helps and isn't harmful.</p><p>But at the same time, a lot of coping strategies have been lost. "Hold my breath and get through it"? I have only one precious and unrepeatable life, and it's being <i>wasted</i> on being unhappy. "Things will get better"? Yeah, maybe, but maybe they won't. I don't believe in heaven, and this life is notoriously unfair. "Offer it up"? There is no logical reason why me suffering will help anyone else ever, and no evidence it ever has.</p><p>I don't regret having moved away from a belief system that valorized suffering. When I see suffering as a problem to solve, I make better choices, both for myself and when it comes to helping others. But at the same time, I wish there were some option that allowed me to see a meaning in meaningless suffering without denying that it is, in fact, bad. Something that made me feel I can have a week where I'm overwhelmed and struggling and nothing good happens, and yet somehow it's okay, something has been gained.</p><p>Any tips?</p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-15474461484743666202022-01-02T17:04:00.004-05:002022-01-11T10:14:23.911-05:00Interfaith relationships<p> One of the most common things people message me out of the blue to ask about is interfaith relationships. I guess when they're looking for advice, I'm the person they think is most likely to have the answer.</p><p>My first response (which I don't say) is generally, "What makes you think I'm any GOOD at it?" I don't have many marriage rules but one of the ones I do have is, never set your marriage up as a model for anybody. Everybody I know who does that ends up having a humiliatingly public divorce. And besides, it's embarrassing.</p><p>But I do have some rather general advice I tend to offer, and I think it's as good as any. I read a book once, <i>In Faith and In Doubt</i>, hoping it would have something helpful to say, only to find it was mostly about atheists marrying progressive Christians or Jews. The only thing they had to say about marrying more conservative religious people was "well, our book isn't meant for that, it probably won't work out anyway." THANKS THAT'S REALLY HELFPUL.</p><p>There are two kinds of advice I can offer. Advice before you get married and advice for after.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Should I marry somebody with different beliefs?</h4><p>I can't answer that for you, obviously. But there are a few questions worth considering.</p><p>First, are you both people who prefer not to talk about religion, or both people who love to talk to religion, even with people you disagree with? Either way is fine. Where you get hung up is when one person loves their religion and wants to talk about it a lot, and the other is upset by the reminder you don't agree. Or when one or both of you find religion an important topic you'd want to talk about with the people closest to you, but also can't stand to talk about it with people you disagree with. Either of those is going to be a big problem. Religion is fine as a thing people don't really bring up. Not so great as a thing you desperately want to talk about, but it's a big fight whenever you do.</p><p>Second, how out-there are the beliefs we're talking about? Not just in terms of ideas. I imagine most people aren't that threatened if you believe in aliens or something, but what about practice? Here are a few beliefs and practices that can be a red flag if only one partner believes in them:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>no birth control</li><li>male headship</li><li>no meat</li><li>no medical care / limits on medical care</li><li>clergy get a say in family decisions</li><li>children must be raised in the religion</li><li>everyone not in the religion goes to hell</li></ul><div>Rules like this tend to affect both partners. So you can't just say "well <i>you</i> don't use birth control and <i>I</i> will." And I highly don't recommend going with, "well, let's hope it never comes up." It'll come up.</div><div><br /></div><div>I think you can sometimes have a happy marriage while disagreeing on things like this, but whenever a belief will affect the other partner, I think it's really important to discuss what you'll do about it before you get married. For instance, if he believes in male headship but she does not, it's worth getting clear that he doesn't actually expect her to obey him since that's not her belief.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course as your resident nonbeliever, I'm here to point out that your faith does not give you the right to dictate how another person behaves. You can't say, "Well, I have a belief against meat, and you don't have any beliefs about meat, therefore mine takes precedence and no meat can ever be allowed in our house." I don't believe that "my religion teaches it" should be any stronger (or weaker) an argument than "I really want it." You do really want it, because you really want to be loyal to your religion! And the argument that you really want it, sincerely (and not just because your church is making you) is generally the argument that will play best with a nonbelieving spouse anyway.</div><div><br /></div><div>In general, I don't think different beliefs are a reason not to get married. Not even if your whole family says it's absolutely unthinkable to. But you should respect their beliefs, and respect them for having them. You should not believe they are deluded, brainwashed, or willfully rejecting God. If you believe that about somebody, you don't <i>really</i> respect them and you shouldn't marry them.</div><div><br /></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Once you're married or in a long-term relationship</h4><div><br /></div><div>So let's say you're already in the relationship you're in, and your partner announces they are joining a new church or has left the church you shared. These are generally the more difficult situations, because none of this stuff was gone over ahead of time. It feels like you went into the marriage expecting one thing and got something completely different.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, it happens. People change throughout life; part of the scary part of marriage is that you will be married, not just to the person you said vows to, but the person they grow to become over the next twenty or fifty years.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the person you married did not (and could not) promise not to change for you. No matter what church you married in, they have to follow their conscience. So try to understand this change in light of your respect and love for them. What good thing about them led them to this change? Is it their intellectual curiosity, their spiritual side, their conscientiousness? Whatever it is, it probably existed in them when you got married, and you probably loved it then. Your marriage has a better chance of weathering this change if you can respect and love the qualities they have that led them to join or leave a religion.</div><div><br /></div><div>I say "chance" because let's be completely honest here: a lot of marriages <i>do not survive</i> a change in religion. Sometimes, a church itself tries to break one up because one spouse left! Sometimes, both partners have to accept that their life paths have diverged too much to stay together. I think it's always best to honestly talk about the possibility of divorce. Is that something you've thought about? Is it something they've thought about? What are the reasons you <i>don't</i> want that to happen? Are they on board to stick with something that's more of a challenge than they signed up for?</div><div><br /></div><div>Another thing to discuss, as above, is whether or not religion is something you still enjoy talking about. Are you up for hearing all about their spiritual journey, or would you rather you both quietly just believed other things? Do they agree with you on that? Is there a compromise where you talk about it a little bit but try not to argue?</div><div><br /></div><div>I want to very adamantly stress that it is never your job to convert your spouse. I learned that as a Catholic and I still believe in it now. Each person's spiritual journey is a path they have to walk in perfect freedom. Other people in their life can try to guide them on it, but you're their <i>spouse</i>. It's impossible for them to take your advice in the same light they take anyone else's. It feels like pressure. If you want, you can offer to talk about your beliefs any time they'd like. But talk about them as<i> your</i> beliefs. Don't bring out your apologetics stuff. Offer to set them up with another person to have those conversations if they want to. But make it clear that you're committed to them as they are now, not in the hope they'll someday change their mind.</div><div><br /></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Making decisions together</h4><div><br /></div><div>There are tons of decisions you make as a couple, and religion affects a lot of them. For instance, what are you doing for Christmas? Can the kids do Sunday morning soccer? What will you eat? How many children will you have?</div><div><br /></div><div>In general, the tip in the first part still stands: the fact that your religion calls for something is not a trump card. Just say you really really want it. You believe that it is important, so you should be willing to compromise on other things to get it. If you're in the habit of wanting the last word on everything, you don't have much relationship capital left to argue for church on Sundays.</div><div><br /></div><div>Try to be fair. If you want to go to church by yourself on Sundays, your spouse should get some kidfree time to do what they want on Saturdays. If you want to instruct the kids in your faith, it's fair that they should get to explain to the kids why they believe differently. If you want a kosher menu, offer to cook it. Never make your religion a burden on somebody else.</div><div><br /></div><div>Where having children is concerned, I strongly believe it's important that both parents agree before having a child. If one says yes and the other says no, the answer is no. Why? Because a child will be a massive undertaking for both parents.</div><div><br /></div><div>Birth control is the decision of the person whose body it is--even the Catholic Church admits this. But I would add that, despite what the church says, it's a lot healthier to make that decision together. Try to come to an actual agreement, not a deadlock. Never ever pressure your spouse to put something in their body they don't want to. Never ever pressure your spouse to have unprotected sex (or any sex) if they don't want to.</div><div><br /></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Raising children</h4><div><br /></div><div>Whether or not to raise the children in a faith is one of the biggest decisions you'll ever make as a couple. Personally, I don't believe children have a faith, because they aren't yet in a position to judge what they believe. My kids change their minds about it all the time. I gave permission for them to be baptized Catholic<i> and</i> chrismated Orthodox, so they count as far as the church cares, but in my view they are just children. The religion(s) they choose as adults will matter a lot more.</div><div><br /></div><div>You can make any compromises you want to. Ours goes something like this: the kids go to church, unless there's a plague afoot or they intensely don't want to. John says prayers with them and answers their questions according to his beliefs. I answer their questions according to my beliefs. I teach them a bit about various religions, and ask them if they have any guesses about God. I tell them their guesses about God are as valid as anybody else's, because nobody knows for sure.</div><div><br /></div><div>If at some point one of the kids takes a strong dislike to church, we'll have to re-evaluate. On the one hand, I strongly believe in respecting a child's wishes when possible. (Especially because you never know what's given them such a strong aversion to something.) On the other, I'm also aware that dragging a child kicking and screaming into a church is a surefire way of making an atheist adult. This is generally my argument to John for why we shouldn't do it--his best bet for these kids growing up religious is to make it something they <i>get </i>to do, not something they have to do.</div><div><br /></div><div>And if one of our children is gay or trans, I will support them immediately and request that John do the same. His faith is against it, but I think his conscience is for it, so we'll just have to see what happens. I know that my belief in supporting a child's identity is every bit as strong as any person's religious faith, so I'll go to bat for that where I didn't for other stuff. I feel like when you are willing to compromise about most issues, it makes it mean a lot more when you dig your heels in on specific things that matter to you.</div><div><br /></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">To sum up</h4><div><br /></div><div>Respect and compromise go a long way in any marriage, doubly so in an interfaith one. Respect that your spouse's religion is a part of them, and that, even though you don't agree, you know it comes from a good place. Compromise on everything you can, to win agreement on those things that are truly vital to you. Never assume that your religion is a trump card your spouse is obliged to defer to--even if they shared it when they married you. Treat religious and non-religious beliefs as equal.</div><div><br /></div><div>Only talk about religion if you both are comfortable with it. If you sense your spouse is upset by discussing areas where you disagree, drop the issue before it gets heated. Be ready to explain, but never try to convert them.</div><div><br /></div><div>And if you can't agree on important decisions, you can't respect their beliefs as a part of them, they don't respect you in turn, or you can't stand being married to someone who believes differently . . . it's okay to break up. Just remember that, if you have kids, you will still need to be an expert on interfaith dialogue to be a good coparent.</div><div><br /></div><div>I hope that helps. All of these ideas are things I've personally learned, but remember: I'm not perfect at this either. An interfaith marriage is playing on hard level. As long as you keep what you love about your partner at the forefront of your mind, I think you can get through a lot of mistakes and arguments.</div><p></p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-68539783923859255732021-12-31T11:46:00.000-05:002021-12-31T11:46:09.900-05:00The turning of the year<p> It's time for the annual re-assessment of life, where we look at where we've been and where we're going, and make any course corrections necessary.</p><p>But it could hardly come at a worse time. I don't want to think about 2021. I also don't want to think about 2022. I want to hide under my covers and eat Christmas chocolate.</p><p>My resolutions for 2021 were:</p><blockquote><div style="background-color: #f3ffee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, serif; font-size: 15.4px;">Things I would like to have happen, COVID willing and the crick don't rise:</div><div style="background-color: #f3ffee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, serif; font-size: 15.4px;"><ul style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0.5em 0px; padding: 0px 2.5em;"><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">I want my COVID vaccine.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">I want to go to WorldCon, the convention where the Hugo Awards are happening.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">I want to relearn how to spend time with people. And hug them. I'm gonna hug<i> so many people</i>.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">I want to spend as much time as possible this summer outside. In the pool if at all possible. I finally have pool-age kids and we missed a whole summer.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">I'd like to sign my kids up for ballet, gymnastics, or martial arts next fall.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">I'd like to take a long break from writing, because of burnout, but then write something completely new in November.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">If I run through my agent list and still don't have an agent, I'm submitting my novel to indie presses. The publishing industry is consolidating too much and sometimes small is better.</li><li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">Pick up some freelance writing contracts maybe.</li></ul><div>It's going to be a sad year if most of this stuff has to be canceled. Please stay home till you get vaccinated so we can have a real summer this year.</div></div></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>That last line just walked on my grave. Yikes.</p><p>Anyway, I did get a lot of this done. I got vaccinated. I went to WorldCon. I signed up the kids for ballet and taekwondo. I finished one novel and started another. I sent books to indie presses and got some very nice rejections.</p><p>I did not hug very many people. I did not spend much time in pools because we moved and the pools here cost a million dollars. I made so much money at my writing job that I didn't bother looking for more contracts. Basically, my limit on my current job is only the time I have to spend on it.</p><p>The year just feels very static. Sure, I moved 40 miles and got everyone signed up for new schools and battled with Child Find for three months and took a cross-country trip. And still. I feel like nothing is any different from last year, and all I wanted was for things to be different from last year.</p><p>In a pandemic, when you're vaccinated, and when no new vaccine-resistant variant is sending the COVID numbers to new records, you can hang out with your friends. That is a good and pleasant thing to do.</p><p>But if what you were hoping was to make new friends, relearn how to exist in public, maybe join some activities . . . you can't do that. Nothing is happening. There's some zoom stuff, if you want to confront your social awkwardness while receiving not even one molecule of dopamine for your trouble. But none of the activities I would like to participate in are happening.</p><p>I did try. After we moved, I met some internet friends I now live closer to than before. I met my boss. I met lots of people at WorldCon, and signed up for a writers' group that currently meets on zoom but which I could theoretically attend in person someday, if life ever changes.</p><p>But in general, post-move, I am less social than ever. The two families we used to hang out with, we still see, but it now takes an hour each way to get there and it's no wonder we're doing it a lot less.</p><p>I am getting out of the house more, thanks to having to drive Jackie to preschool every day, and getting a little better about existing in public with a mask on and not having a total meltdown. I "smile with my eyes" at people and perhaps they can tell, I dunno. I talk to the neighbors sometimes. I'm trying, dangit. But I feel intensely lonely a lot, more than I did last year. There's nothing so lonely as being in a crowd but not knowing a soul, and that's how this new town feels to me.</p><p>In the face of all this, it's just hard to make any kind of plans. Lord knows what Greek letter we'll be on this time next year. Perhaps we'll be into futhark runes by then. I certainly can't imagine I'll be hugging people barefaced. Heck, I can't even watch a movie without feeling vaguely uncomfortable seeing how close everybody is standing. Even once the danger is gone, we'll all have some major trauma to unpack.</p><p>So what can I reasonably, and with a straight face, aim for in the year to come?</p><p>The word that is coming to me for the year is something self-care-ish. Maybe NURTURE. I want to actually take care of myself, which does not mean hiding under the covers eating chocolate. I would like to eat actual lunches and ride my exercise bike more than once a month. I need to make myself go outside, because it always helps me feel better. Maybe I should get back to meditating and writing in my journal.</p><p>I just know that I have a lot of recovering to do already, and the new year may very well bring me more things to recover from. So I can only do that by treating myself as a person who matters, who maybe needs to be coaxed out from under the bed and reminded to try the stuff that helps her feel better.</p><p>Other resolutions/hopes/wishes include:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Go on a vacation. Probably not anywhere far away. I just really need to take at least a weekend in a place closer to nature than this place. A week would be better. I want few responsibilities and spotty internet and a stack of books. I usually am not very pro-vacation because I believe in building a life you don't need to take a vacation from. But I failed on that goal, so I just need to take a dang vacation like everyone else.</li><li>Submit the next book to agents. It's ready to go and I'm starting tomorrow. This book has been a real struggle to write and it's hard to say if it's any good. If I get an agent with it, I'm going to laugh and laugh and laugh.</li><li>I'd like to look into taking some classes at the community college in the fall. By then, all four kids should be in school full time. (This is the third year I have said this.) I will at last have time for something I want to do. And the thought of being in a classroom again makes me feel happy. I like learning. I'd also like to meet people there.</li><li>I have already found a pool I would like to purchase a membership for in the summer. I didn't last year because I only found out about it 2/3 through the summer, and the price is for the whole season. But I think I can afford to do it if I get the whole season out of it. And it's outdoor. Our closest pool is indoor and it's just a shame to do that in the summer--as well as a COVID risk.</li><li>Finish my solar sailing trilogy and keep looking for a small publisher for it. I believe hardest in this book, of any of them. If I get through my entire long list of possible publishers--right down to the newest and sketchiest--and still can't sell it, I think I might self-publish. I just need people to read this thing! I <i>know</i> it's good. I don't know what is wrong with the industry that nobody has given me a million dollars for it. 2020 was probably a bad year to query book 1 of it, but I can't undo that.</li><li>Keep writing and submitting short stories. I <a href="https://littlebluemarble.ca/2021/03/26/uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow/">sold one this past year</a>, did I tell you that? So next year, if I sell one more story at pro rates, I'll be eligible to join the Science Fiction Writers of America. That's definitely a big career goal for me.</li><li>I want to make sure to take my boat out a lot in the coming year. This will be a challenge, because not all of the kids like to go in it, and I do need John to pick me up or drop me off. So I can only do it on days he's home. But still. I have a boat! I want to do lots of boating. Preferably without tearing giant holes in it this time. But if I do . . . I have stuff to patch it now.</li></ul><div>That is a lot of goals, I'd better stop there to cut down on the amount of tragic laughing 2022 Sheila has to do.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjIDKfhb9nq2hZz600FqmqA4JycNCJNio4370eCBzi6ZVBQr0c66GGnjJC3jJ5VpiCXO00ODj2g3lV662SfZZulE5BPboE_yJLaD3OPM1KXF0_Trik5fv51FrN93_g18i_KV_rex0tzQ6JEOfkn2mNJ9zH1sdMXSf6CF_vYBdeBSNw0qDj6YguL3jVS=s4032" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjIDKfhb9nq2hZz600FqmqA4JycNCJNio4370eCBzi6ZVBQr0c66GGnjJC3jJ5VpiCXO00ODj2g3lV662SfZZulE5BPboE_yJLaD3OPM1KXF0_Trik5fv51FrN93_g18i_KV_rex0tzQ6JEOfkn2mNJ9zH1sdMXSf6CF_vYBdeBSNw0qDj6YguL3jVS=s320" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Mostly, I just want to make it a year that makes me happy. I am not resolving to keep the house cleaner or be nicer to my kids or cook better dinners. I already work hard on those things and if I poured any more energy into them, it would have to be taken from other things important to me like occasionally sitting down and cracking a book. I might try to spend less time on social media, to find out if that makes me happier or not. But in general, it does make me happy because that's where all my friends are, so I'm not going to set a whole goal about that or anything.</div><div><br /></div><div>Basically, I just want to have a year where I take care of myself without forgetting what I owe to other people. I owe my children the most, and have no intention of neglecting them. And I owe it to the vulnerable to not spread COVID around like glitter at a Pride march. But I am going to still take care of myself as best I can. It's been a hard . . . *checks notes* eight years or so. I'm due for it.</div><p></p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-75421196230018126122021-11-30T09:55:00.000-05:002021-11-30T09:55:01.832-05:00A damp, drizzly November in my soul<p> Around here, November isn't drizzly. It starts with the leaves <i>finally </i>peaking, and ends with bitter winds and bare gray branches.</p><p>But I find it depressing. Everything nice about the entire outdoors slowly fades away, and it's just cold and dismal for the next three months.</p><p>That's why NaNoWriMo goes so well in November. The only month that would be better is January. January has the advantage of a) thirty-one days, and b) no holidays to throw off your routine. But at any rate there's no reason to go outside and very little joy you don't imagine for yourself, so it's a great time to write a novel.</p><p>My NaNoWriMo has been a mixed success. That is, I did write 50,000 words. But they resemble a finished novel even less than usual. At least 10,000 words will have to be discarded because of plot changes I made midstream. I guess I'm still glad I did it, because writing one's way to a story still leaves you with more ideas than you had at the beginning, but good golly, I wish I could have ideas ahead of time like a good outliner.</p><p>In other news, Jackie got her placement from the school district. You know what they did? You know what this incredibly exhausting, difficult to deal with Child Find team came up with? They put her at a preschool exactly like the one she was at before, three days a week, 2.75 hours a day. A private preschool. Which they pay for because it is her official placement (yay) but which could not be her old preschool because it's not in the same county (ugh). There is a lady there from the district who is supposed to play with Jackie and help her gain social skills. So I agreed to it, because it saves us $280 a month, and because this aide could theoretically do some good.</p><p>But this place is further away, and it's all new people, and Jackie hates it. I was considering not switching her over at all if she minded, and she swore she wanted to do it, so I committed . . . and THEN she decided she hated it. OH MY GOD JACKIE. So every time she goes, she behaves well, everyone tells me she was great, and then she whines the whole way home that she hated it and hates everyone there. I don't know what to do with this information. I gave away her spot at the other place!</p><p>Meanwhile, because it is further away, I spend approximately an hour and a half every day driving her to and from it, with the dubious reward of two hours without her to "get things done." (I.e. collapse on the couch and stare into the middle distance and hate myself for not accomplishing more. Leaving the house REALLY exhausts me, doubly so when there are lots of left turns and traffic.)</p><p>I just had hoped they would put her into the public preschool which is basically across the road from us, and which also has a bus which could pick her up. I cannot fathom why they didn't. Because they were trying to keep her in the situation she had? Because the public preschool was full? Because they hate me? I don't know. But it's really exhausting. And still, despite all this talk about how gifted she is, this place is academically like every other preschool. They sing songs and color pictures and build things out of marshmallows and toothpicks. She is ready and willing to learn to read (so long as it's not from me) but this school is doing nothing for her in that regard.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxGdBQF-12l1WSzPGT7vxMRIP4oGdgNaFOEcBvXABIn9WBNcQO51dKk-AFo3m4WZKfYUEkayX1dBQhcFm_ypVSeIFzZPeSsUexLu4yBWlcEmOAuPZC1CokXjiCBchkVAKDHewfZDeOdgE/s2048/IMG_20211120_082301.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxGdBQF-12l1WSzPGT7vxMRIP4oGdgNaFOEcBvXABIn9WBNcQO51dKk-AFo3m4WZKfYUEkayX1dBQhcFm_ypVSeIFzZPeSsUexLu4yBWlcEmOAuPZC1CokXjiCBchkVAKDHewfZDeOdgE/s320/IMG_20211120_082301.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>Her behavior is, in general, much better when she is in school regularly. So we've got that going for us. But she's had kind of a rough couple of weeks so it's still a struggle. I'm just so tired.</p><p>The older kids love their schools and are doing well in them. Michael is in robotics club. Miriam has a new best friend she goes on and on about. Marko is trying to teach himself Anglo-Saxon, which I find amusing because I also had an Anglo-Saxon phase after my Quenya phase. I don't choose his rabbit holes, but they still end up being a lot of the same rabbit holes I went down as a kid, so it's just really fun to watch.</p><p>I resolved, this year, to try to be a Regular Mom and sign up my kids for activities. Especially now that they're fully vaccinated. So next week they start in ballet (Miriam and Marko) and taekwondo (Michael) and we'll see how they like that. I do not like the idea of spending Saturday morning driving them places, but *loud sigh* I do love my children. Besides, they mostly spend Saturdays playing video games and fighting with each other. This is sure to be an improvement.</p><p>I still don't love living here. Especially with all the pretty leaves gone, I'm basically living in a gray suburban wasteland for the foreseeable future. But the immediate grief of it has faded, and I'm focusing on other things. This mammoth weaving project I started over a year ago. My novel. Planning for a science fiction conference I'm going to next month.</p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJQCmRPKYjdRgIcQ8n1lfFkmcS4w4pFG3P043EmDUta_7iBt2F3nmK74ouOIg9bWqXW9bnHRQgImytnMwUHi_dRk7EmdjI_p_adMlB_8VdAkoS3O-iqryrrXTuVHRyrBgT83NiIDvW4wA/s2048/IMG_20211129_145511.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJQCmRPKYjdRgIcQ8n1lfFkmcS4w4pFG3P043EmDUta_7iBt2F3nmK74ouOIg9bWqXW9bnHRQgImytnMwUHi_dRk7EmdjI_p_adMlB_8VdAkoS3O-iqryrrXTuVHRyrBgT83NiIDvW4wA/s320/IMG_20211129_145511.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><p><br /></p><br />What I really need is to meet people. I've seen several people at various stores that I thought "heyyy now there is a person I find interesting! We could be pals! See, there are cool people here!" But I don't know where these people hang out when they are not grocery shopping. Where do you find cool people? Especially in a pandemic when everything is canceled? <p></p><p>My plan was to meet people at NaNoWriMo write-ins, a thing I never did in the old town because there were none closer than half an hour away. But this year they are all virtual. I'm sorry, writing a novel on my laptop with zoom on is just like writing normally but with performance anxiety. It is not a social occasion and you can't convince me it is.</p><p>So uh go get your vaccines so we can beat this thing and I can develop a social life for the first time in literally years! Please!</p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-11996765846780162462021-10-17T14:41:00.001-04:002021-10-17T14:41:08.684-04:00Seattle trip<p> As you might have guessed from the last post, I just got back from a trip. My work is based in the Seattle area, and my boss has been wanting me to come out and work in person for a few days, and with life somewhat settled I figured it was a good time to make plans.</p><p>Traveling is really rough and exhausting for me, but I gotta say, it's a heck of a lot easier to do without kids than with them. I flew out by myself, stayed in a hotel by myself, and worked in an office for whole normal-people days.</p><p>I'm not what you would call a flexible or adventurous person, but I did okay for myself. The biggest challenge was probably the acquisition of tea. Coffee, you see, has way too much caffeine (and I dislike it) and decaf coffee does not have enough. But airports and hotels do not always have tea.</p><p>Day 1: Peet's Coffee sells tea. Win! It's scaldingly hot and they don't leave much room for milk and I didn't have time to properly steep it or let it cool down. Burned my mouth. Two stars.</p><p>Day 2: Tea bag brought from home brewed in hotel room coffee maker. No milk. No sugar. Ghastly. Half a star.</p><p>Day 3-4: Tea provided by work especially for me. Did I feel bad that my boss went to the store specifically to get me a better chair, black tea, and whole milk? Yes. Did I feel bad enough to tell her not to? No. No I did not. The tea was excellent. In the afternoons I had rooibos chai. Five stars for all of the office teas.</p><p>Day 5: Rushing at the airport, no time to find if ANYONE in Seattle will sell you decent tea. But I had the clever idea of buying iced tea at a newsstand. Iced tea is actually really good. Between the copious sugar and the caffeine you can <i>feel</i> the dopamine slotting into your neurons. Four stars.</p><p>While I was out there, I couldn't see my parents because they have moved. Idaho is on the way if you drive, but not at all on the way if you fly. But I did get to see my aunt, my cousin, and my dear friend from high school and college.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIMIS8NP_AlV3_L1F4WvXCcJzDs3H62Jxbzdvt0sC7EDh5Z_06B8TfY3dpkCk0yBKj9M2zdFHjzKtRtCBFpuqMfzTACUrrMPm-Ll-jiFKVKUr8o4BT1c2wJtoWoCRKt9yTAgk3-MEsLy8/s1440/244489771_10159793854384962_61759937172031323_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1433" data-original-width="1440" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIMIS8NP_AlV3_L1F4WvXCcJzDs3H62Jxbzdvt0sC7EDh5Z_06B8TfY3dpkCk0yBKj9M2zdFHjzKtRtCBFpuqMfzTACUrrMPm-Ll-jiFKVKUr8o4BT1c2wJtoWoCRKt9yTAgk3-MEsLy8/s320/244489771_10159793854384962_61759937172031323_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p>My aunt and cousin are absolutely amazing people. I love them so much. My cousin and I have been best friends since we were tiny and it really felt like no time had passed at all since then. Our lives have taken very different paths, yet somehow I feel like we ended up in very similar places.</p><p>For extra wonderfulness, we got to take a little walk. It was raining. I did not care.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRcPa96UOOW29nQLyM61Lvf4bzytonA6-wyhU7h1Qoj7Pv0C7BE8fzSI3X-3UH_ax_mQu7XO56NYpcwUTvr3rzaTr31jFpY2CEi9PXhyphenhyphengTQTjRuvovlWadCTlmZhnRv7mt32bbNY_p5GA/s1663/243321482_10165553739195440_7994017255519053621_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1663" data-original-width="1247" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRcPa96UOOW29nQLyM61Lvf4bzytonA6-wyhU7h1Qoj7Pv0C7BE8fzSI3X-3UH_ax_mQu7XO56NYpcwUTvr3rzaTr31jFpY2CEi9PXhyphenhyphengTQTjRuvovlWadCTlmZhnRv7mt32bbNY_p5GA/s320/243321482_10165553739195440_7994017255519053621_n.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p>We also went for pho. Pho is a thing that one must eat in Seattle, and I never had.</p><p>The next day I had no plans after work so I ate supermarket salad in my hotel room and soaked in the hot tub. Hot tubs are kind of boring by yourself. You can read, but then your arms are cold!</p><p>The day after that, my friend Sarah picked me up and fed me dinner at her house. She has built such a beautiful life for herself and seems happy. We both agreed we need to call each other more!</p><p>The last day, I didn't have plans and didn't want to make any. I lay in my extremely soft bed and read a novel I wrote two years ago and cried. Then I watched Community and laughed a lot. It's just an amazing thing to have like five hours of time to myself and no responsibilities. Highly recommend.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnnFoo16BWEeaRR2gwuV2UDL2x7KQvlZ-Bx1zq4szx5Jhbvs0bxwOcmP4IbyVILUtItt-mpU60DgrzhhUDUScqs2UI59zTqyfLUfngX-OdE3Fm9vnzW5GxEy-NQR5Np8zUzJf_DNja-uU/s3264/IMG_20211014_220927.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="2448" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnnFoo16BWEeaRR2gwuV2UDL2x7KQvlZ-Bx1zq4szx5Jhbvs0bxwOcmP4IbyVILUtItt-mpU60DgrzhhUDUScqs2UI59zTqyfLUfngX-OdE3Fm9vnzW5GxEy-NQR5Np8zUzJf_DNja-uU/s320/IMG_20211014_220927.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p>I missed my kids a lot. The first day I felt awful, being so far away and in an unfamiliar place. I felt guilty for having left and stupid for thinking I had any reason worth coming that far for. I gradually got used to it, but I was still very happy to go home and get back to them.</p><p>I had been needing a change, because everything had been feeling very hard and exhausting. So having a week that was very different from a usual week was badly needed. I felt more like my old, pre-kids self: less stressed, more emotionally labile (as evidenced by bawling over a book I have read at least ten times before), more creative. I still feel that way.</p><p>I feel like, with the level of stress in my life and the rather fragile personality I have, I need to do more things like this. Well, maybe not flying across the country and being deprived of tea! But a retreat. A few days in a hotel once a year, maybe, or even at a retreat house. Just time when I can stop keeping track of ten million things to do and just focus on feeling feelings and maybe writing.</p><p>It helps that John managed everything just fine and the kids had no major issues. They missed me, but they didn't fall to pieces over it.</p><p>Makes me think they're old enough for me to slowly incorporate more non-them things into my life. Which is a really good feeling, even while at the same time feeling reassured that, in general, I prefer the life I live. I officially do not like working eight hours a day, eight hours is f o r e v e r. I don't like not being with my kids for very long. I don't get any special thrill from being an adult with no responsibilities in a big city. Coming home felt good, even though I have no particular love for this house yet.</p><p>I think I've actually made the right choices for my life, maybe. It's a thing I've spent a lot of worry on lately but a little skip down the road not traveled made me perfectly happy to get back on this one. I just need to keep a few of the good things more present in my life: time with other people I love (even if it's on the phone); quiet time all by myself; and of course beauty. If I can do that, I think I will be a lot happier with my life.</p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-2087501632831088112021-10-17T10:40:00.003-04:002021-10-17T19:32:55.672-04:00Some reflections composed on an airplaneUgliness comes in a thousand colors: cold, white, antiseptic ugliness; dull gray-brown winter ugliness; the grungy, cheap, crumbling ugliness of a city's fraying edges.<br /><br />But beauty also glitters in a thousand places, some of them very small and hard to notice. The tiny chip in a featureless wall that tells you other people have been here before you, with their stories and their mistakes. Green moss growing under slush, long after the other green things have died or gone to sleep. An old woman's face crinkling with joy behind the counter of a dirty shop.<span id="docs-internal-guid-09245367-7fff-39f0-e24d-0df254cfab02"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></p></span><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5Su0EM0qWOeJXORMR7Dm_LKuG9JZSmZvOcaNSKB50uQOhQ6u6bxwvnvcPVwS4vSa7pAYbXab1Y-bBC2zzbhz9Fzr7SHBDQ_LXq-e_dB4ycNlDlaCYa3MW23nCjwwLP7u3etFJwvC5hKw/s4032/IMG_20211016_080212.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5Su0EM0qWOeJXORMR7Dm_LKuG9JZSmZvOcaNSKB50uQOhQ6u6bxwvnvcPVwS4vSa7pAYbXab1Y-bBC2zzbhz9Fzr7SHBDQ_LXq-e_dB4ycNlDlaCYa3MW23nCjwwLP7u3etFJwvC5hKw/s320/IMG_20211016_080212.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p></span><br />Seeing beauty when it surrounds you, beside a forest stream or on a starry night, is easy. Seeing beauty in the places that leave you hungriest for it is hard. The delicate feathers of the soul, whose task is feeling out beauty, shrivel up and tuck themselves away under the onslaught of so much ugliness. It hurts to leave them still bare and questing. You harden the outside of yourself as if to face a hard vacuum. You know it will crush you if you leave yourself open.<br /><br />But if you do, you’ll never see beauty. You might not even feel that part of your soul slowly dying for lack of light. So I leave myself open. I’m not sure I have a choice.<span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDUDmOmrYHrMSnNB7oMPcx9s6m0uLbfk428AzN0dPwK8-NfyK7qRgUbWkXURH9E6V23w3GJdL0LisslumJ3_VOp5uTW2ZKq7F_8mIv_C4ta0YCTaq9gyFZy9GyI2Pz4Lt07DpCOret3f8/s4032/IMG_20211016_140344.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDUDmOmrYHrMSnNB7oMPcx9s6m0uLbfk428AzN0dPwK8-NfyK7qRgUbWkXURH9E6V23w3GJdL0LisslumJ3_VOp5uTW2ZKq7F_8mIv_C4ta0YCTaq9gyFZy9GyI2Pz4Lt07DpCOret3f8/s320/IMG_20211016_140344.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /></span><br /><br />Those of us who leave ourselves open to beauty suffer. We feel all the pain, we are worn away and exhausted from ugliness. Every day it hurts us, living in the world as it is, so battered and bruised and grimy. It feels we can't live among all this ugliness. It feels we will wither up and die of beauty-hunger.<br /><br />But we find it. We find it, those of us who can't stop questing hard every moment of our lives, who reach out with the delicate parts of our souls, in hope that can't die because it never stops being hungry. A flash of light off a puddle. The swish of tires in the rain. The spark leaping from eye to eye, from soul to soul, as two of us recognize what is divine in each other, no matter how briefly.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTAsUxGzBW5Qvsx3WF-vWUHcKot4koItXFhTPHTgBwL_6QTdAUQnmaB-aEzWjhA5wTcQY01r6mhWiHCLzwszgSq3AieDOrt8SQA1i1ifbykl1vp1zu9qPh2qG-u_S4DvXw1I_4VKZpcDs/s4032/IMG_20211016_124649.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTAsUxGzBW5Qvsx3WF-vWUHcKot4koItXFhTPHTgBwL_6QTdAUQnmaB-aEzWjhA5wTcQY01r6mhWiHCLzwszgSq3AieDOrt8SQA1i1ifbykl1vp1zu9qPh2qG-u_S4DvXw1I_4VKZpcDs/s320/IMG_20211016_124649.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><span><p></p></span><br />There is more pain in this life than pleasure. More ugliness than beauty. Hunger gnaws so much harder than food has ever brought joy.<br /><br />But in those moments when beauty flames out--tears prick our eyes, the heart leaps upward, and we know it's worth it. The hunger, the quest, the finding, the losing again. Life, in all its ugliness. Just for these moments, if for nothing else.<span><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlpFhCiEfqEszJbuMGnsE_NUpoClHXeO6c2r1e6rRFvr5C_l9B9hKJExhmH22d9HU8KQ-Op7goWL2IOC_jCyUDABxBJ5TDj7j1flURtdSOr8vx8__OfIa7PZ5VWHhuOtqygFVXhTcS89Y/s4032/IMG_20211016_095932.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlpFhCiEfqEszJbuMGnsE_NUpoClHXeO6c2r1e6rRFvr5C_l9B9hKJExhmH22d9HU8KQ-Op7goWL2IOC_jCyUDABxBJ5TDj7j1flURtdSOr8vx8__OfIa7PZ5VWHhuOtqygFVXhTcS89Y/s320/IMG_20211016_095932.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-38807265351523535652021-09-28T12:00:00.000-04:002021-09-28T12:00:10.960-04:00How we're doing latelyIt's been a while since I've posted, so what's up with us?<div><br /></div><div>Really, not a whole lot. Jackie has started preschool at her tiny but inexpensive co-op. It's three days a week, three hours a day, which amounts to about seven hours of Jackie-free time a day. I desperately need more, because I am exhausted and have this job I'm theoretically supposed to be doing? But she seems to feel it's the right amount.</div><div><br /></div><div>She likes school and behaves flawlessly at it. I got to volunteer there yesterday, and it was funny watching other kids jump around and shout out and she just . . . sits there very nicely with her hands in her lap. When asked a question, she answers in a barely audible voice. When other kids try to talk to her, she mostly ignores them.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was an odd experience. I have spent the past several months trying to convince the school district she needs help (about which more later), and honestly she doesn't look like she does. She suddenly displays a level of maturity none of the other kids do, and which she certainly doesn't show at home.</div><div><br /></div><div>But she also doesn't interact the way the other kids do. She tells me she <i>can't</i> talk to the other kids. But she also says she likes playing by herself.</div><div><br /></div><div>If I'd known I'd find a preschool I could afford, and she'd do so well there, I wouldn't have spent all this time fighting the special ed system. She's really fine. Sure, she doesn't socialize, but she's in an environment with lots of opportunities to learn and will hopefully pick it up a little bit. She's certainly better at talking to people than Marko was at the same age.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I <i>have </i>done all that work, and Jackie got assessed. It was much more rigorous than her autism diagnosis, which happened in a short session a couple hours long. This time, I was interviewed several times and she went to four different assessments and somebody watched her at school. The results were mostly glowing, all about her far-above-average intelligence and thoughtfulness. But, coupled with the stuff I told them about her behavior at home, and the reality that she does not play with peers, they agreed to declare her eligible on the grounds of developmental delay. They said using the autism criteria would be harder, since we didn't have much school-related data, whereas developmental delay just required her to need help in one area.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't know yet what services, if any, they will provide. They might let her into public preschool. That would be nice for me, because it's free and because I'd have more time to work and clean the house. But it would be hard for her, because she's pretty well settled into the preschool she has. Alternatively, they might only put her in a social skills playgroup. That's more work for me, but might be helpful for her. And, of course, she would have an IEP when she starts kindergarten, and we could put things in there like sensory breaks, which she definitely needs.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEp2lvM7s6_ced5amiT6OBEwPksPy0YPES3GsfGKSgaHOqUIteE1HFjs7OkOl_6JV0ywGJK-EjxxX0I3P9u55Fr7SOpLTDjVLDNK1ovV1oRJTSOieEuw6pGeTkpFVU6EI5T6l4toGWPoI/s3264/IMG_20210924_185744.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="2448" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEp2lvM7s6_ced5amiT6OBEwPksPy0YPES3GsfGKSgaHOqUIteE1HFjs7OkOl_6JV0ywGJK-EjxxX0I3P9u55Fr7SOpLTDjVLDNK1ovV1oRJTSOieEuw6pGeTkpFVU6EI5T6l4toGWPoI/s320/IMG_20210924_185744.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Meantime, while the school district and I argue about her needs, she just keeps growing. She is gaining skills all the time. She can sound out short words. She can count to a hundred. She is getting better at communicating her needs, and she's eating more. She watches way too much TV. Every day she has me print out a coloring page of an LOL Surprise doll (or two), colors them, cuts them out, and makes them talk to each other. She and Miriam have a complicated Barbie game they play a lot. I gave her a sticker chart and she's now motivated to brush her teeth and let me brush her hair every day to get stickers.</div><div><br /></div><div>Everyone else is doing fine. Marko in particular loves his school. Apparently he does still melt down pretty regularly at school, but the special ed people take him for a little walk and he cools down. There's one special ed teacher he absolutely adores. He's in this guy's Life Skills class and apparently life skills means playing Dungeons and Dragons and making podcasts. But there's a lot of social skills in activities like that.</div><div><br /></div><div>Michael and Miriam aren't as enthused about their school. I feel bad, because they had friends at their old school and don't yet at their new one. But they do play with their classmates and recess and mostly come home happy.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm struggling a bit. I feel like I'm juggling way too many things: work, the kids' school, special ed stuff, housework, and writing. This was supposed to be the year things got easier, but they sure haven't yet.</div><div><br /></div><div>What helps me is spending time in nature. There are lots of parks near here and they're very good, despite not being in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sometimes I hike while Jackie is at school.</div><div><br /></div><div>I started daydreaming of boating Bull Run Creek, because allegedly it's possible to do. John, out of the blue, got me an inflatable raft. So last weekend I took the kids and we took the trip.</div><div><br /></div><div>I can report that Bull Run Creek is not, in fact, exactly navigable. Sometimes it's too shallow, sometimes there are logjams, sometimes a branch pokes a hole in your boat. But despite that, we did in fact manage it. It was mostly very peaceful, sometimes exciting enough even to please Michael, and in general a lovely experience. But next time I'll try the lower section that might be a little less intense.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTIVfmOVVeP_96S9yKdNvicK6kyjlA7fTuyeTkcbG85f2qMR_OqREW5TU47kkjZYUb-LHR6AmUEzQYGgfuyV52NGH2yvYW4dqIjB3i84KdgnJFMH51aYaG-5eO78Ck8jIUKJ7wXk57U_s/s4032/IMG_20210926_115332.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTIVfmOVVeP_96S9yKdNvicK6kyjlA7fTuyeTkcbG85f2qMR_OqREW5TU47kkjZYUb-LHR6AmUEzQYGgfuyV52NGH2yvYW4dqIjB3i84KdgnJFMH51aYaG-5eO78Ck8jIUKJ7wXk57U_s/s320/IMG_20210926_115332.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjZcgEVqo2s2lWYGCQNWwXbf-3_HAQ5mLYM0_9sucZeL0-G5AdDGxNZZxjFmeiXaTYJZA8d9We2QPSWRhUwtVil5RzjkqGN9DhZfXK3uDmXvh6W4r_9ULeJ07BG5br98wYCUkSRShgtPI/s4032/IMG_20210926_093827.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjZcgEVqo2s2lWYGCQNWwXbf-3_HAQ5mLYM0_9sucZeL0-G5AdDGxNZZxjFmeiXaTYJZA8d9We2QPSWRhUwtVil5RzjkqGN9DhZfXK3uDmXvh6W4r_9ULeJ07BG5br98wYCUkSRShgtPI/s320/IMG_20210926_093827.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Well, after I patch the hole in my boat. </div><div><br /></div><div>September's writing goal was to finish a novel I started two years ago. It's about a colony on an alien planet, intended to explore themes of ecology and colonialism, but actually focusing mostly on my main character's feelings about being a stay-at-home mom and about her religious disagreements with her husband. Stuff just SURFACES, okay?</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyway, I finished the draft today. It felt like pulling teeth most of the time I was writing it. The plot got way too complicated. I lost faith in it six or seven times. Because of that, I really can't tell you if it's any good. There are lots of feelings in it anyway?</div><div><br /></div><div>I entered it into a contest, because the prize is getting professionally mentored and edited by somebody who knows what they're doing and that's what I desperately need. I don't feel like it has much chance of winning, but I may as well, right?</div>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-89799955605473931012021-08-15T22:20:00.000-04:002021-08-15T22:20:05.011-04:00Human spaces are not Aesthetic<p> Today I drove 75 minutes each way to see a friend who used to live near me. The drive wasn't bad, but I got to thinking about how much better I feel once the highway passes into the mountains and I can't see buildings from the road anymore. Nature is always beautiful; it always feels right.</p><p>But buildings and parking lots generally do not. They make me feel depressed, grody, angsty, or ill. Neon signs. Gray concrete. Featureless warehouses. Power lines clogging up the sky. Ugh. Hate it.</p><p>Of course developed areas don't have to be like that at all. There are cities people go to purely to look at. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNZorLxGeN1XW90tsWL9h_1itdMfXGPA7Zys-ONamDiD6IFEtAnBmoZqt-enJVUQBwu0wb9_9xb-97FQlR4Qp0cH9gGOfQ34bMWHjssL7IZkfD3E2FPUqhb2kuHOMDUHZnYJ70R1di20A/s640/591f5446f6db856bcc2a4dab_seineroad3.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="419" data-original-width="640" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNZorLxGeN1XW90tsWL9h_1itdMfXGPA7Zys-ONamDiD6IFEtAnBmoZqt-enJVUQBwu0wb9_9xb-97FQlR4Qp0cH9gGOfQ34bMWHjssL7IZkfD3E2FPUqhb2kuHOMDUHZnYJ70R1di20A/s320/591f5446f6db856bcc2a4dab_seineroad3.bmp" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>There are residential neighborhoods with mature landscaping and cute little porches. There are main streets with cute little shops and trees by benches. It can be done!</p><p>And yet, largely, in this country . . . we don't. We have:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>cities with impressive skylines, that are gray and trashy up close</li><li>industrial zones where everything is low and flat and oppressive, specializing in loading docks and dumpsters</li><li>giant shopping centers that are mostly one vast concrete desert surrounded by glowing signs</li><li>strip malls, just rows upon rows of grody little pawnshops and tobacconists</li><li>housing developments formed by completely bulldozing a piece of woods, leveling it out, and cramming it full of giant identical boxes</li><li>crumbling apartments that overlook parking lots</li></ul><div>There are nice places, but they're all pretty expensive. Much of the DC area (see: the part I don't live in) is like that. You can see that, at least, an effort was made to keep the shopping areas looking somewhat pleasant, to line the streets with trees, to make all the houses look slightly different. Things are also kept up, which makes a world of difference. Houses there cost $700,000 on up, so the people there can afford to keep things nice.</div><div><br /></div><div>But all of that costs money, and we don't all have money, so we have to live in ugly places. My neighborhood itself is . . . fine, I guess. The townhouses are all identical, but there are green spaces with trees in them. And some people have bushes in their postage stamp yards. </div><div><br /></div><div>We also have woods and a creek, hidden behind the playground. When I found that, my morale about living here got at least 30% better.</div><div><br /></div><div>Beyond my actual neighborhood, you can go two ways. West, there are winding residential neighborhoods for a good ten minutes. The yards have lovely mature landscaping. The houses, though, are also mature. They're a little ratty. Mostly I like this drive. I grew up in a neighborhood like that, a little old and ratty but filled with huge old trees and character.</div><div><br /></div><div>The other direction, there's a big busy road, where you can choose north or south. North it turns into a highway, and you can get to a shiny, fancy town that can afford to make an effort. South, where I go more often, it just gets grodier and grodier. Car dealerships. Ratty old shops for tires or whatever. No trees or hills, just one dismal looking business after another.</div><div><br /></div><div>And I find myself wondering: is this how it <i>has</i> to be? Because of the lack of money, because this is where the working class lives, because of population density? Is there any way to make this road not feel soul-sucking to drive on, to feel like the drive out into the mountains feels?</div><div><br /></div><div>If I could do a few things, I would plant more trees. Just more trees everywhere. They feed my soul. Bushes too, and grassy patches. I'd bury the power lines underground. Maybe find a place to park all those cars that isn't massive expanses of asphalt. This town has tons of creeks and little artificial ponds (as a flood measure); if those were actually visible more often, it would be really nice.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm not sure any of this will ever happen. But I do feel that beauty is a human right. That we shouldn't have to be rich to afford it. And also, that we should be able to live more densely (because it saves gas, preserves wilderness, makes population growth workable) without having to feel like bees in a hive.</div><p></p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-28272151598824218992021-07-28T12:32:00.002-04:002021-07-28T12:32:50.986-04:00I...think I might be autistic after all?<p> I have known I'm not quite like most people for years and years. For a while I identified as "highly sensitive," then as "probably sensory processing disorder." Whether any of this fits into the autism spectrum is a harder question. The autism spectrum is broad, not just in severity but in actual traits. These days, you don't need to fill out every trait for a diagnosis, just a certain number. The result of this is that you have autistic people that are far more different from each other than they are from neurotypical people.</p><p>I don't love this. Treating these disparate conditions as one thing means that my children, when I say they are autistic, are always assessed based on the most classic symptoms and then told they "must not have it that bad" and therefore don't need help. Jackie's speech has been tested and found normal twice, and it may disqualify her from special ed preschool this year. Because autism includes language delays and she has none. The teachers don't seem to be very knowledgeable about the other things autism can entail, like emotional dysregulation, lack of adaptability, need to be in control, difficulty playing with other kids. I like to think that in the future, autism will just be the broad umbrella, and we can have "type 1" for verbal delays and spatial genius, "type 2" for typical speech but spatial problems, "type 3" for social and emotional issues without the other things, etc.</p><p>But we're not there yet, and in the meantime I'm left finding a lot of autism stuff relatable and other stuff completely alien. There are autistic people who don't know how they're feeling (alexithymia) and I analyze to death everything I'm feeling. There are autistic people who are uncomfortable with things that aren't black and white, whereas I see so much nuance in everything I can't complete a personality quiz. Would I rather be in a garden or in a city? Well, wouldn't that depend on the mood I was in? Do people think of me as the life of the party? I don't know, I suppose I would have to ask everyone I know.</p><p>So I think I'm going to write a post listing out things that have made me think I may be autistic, or a little autistic, or on the trailing edge of the spectrum, or whatever I feel like I can get away with without being <i>too</i> inaccurate. Really, I would like a professional to tell me, but getting diagnosed as an adult, especially as a woman, is incredibly difficult. Not many people do it, and you pretty much have to do all the digging through your life and your brain yourself. There's no blood test or brain scanner or even convenient puzzle you can get graded on. (Perhaps there would be, if autism were one thing instead of like a dozen things.)</p><p>The reason I've always resisted describing myself as autistic is that I don't feel that I'm disabled. All the definitions of autism include that it has to be <i>disabling</i>, it has to interfere with your normal functioning. I do pretty okay for myself, so it just doesn't seem right to claim an identity belonging to people who need significant help. But I do feel that autism can't be about what you can't do. It's about the way your brain works, the things you need, the things that bother you. If you have the things you need, if your environment works well with your brain, you're not disabled, according to the social model of disability. And isn't that the goal for every autistic person, to have everything they need to accomplish what they want?</p><p>I'm realizing more and more, as I read stories of autistic adults, that I have had so many things they didn't have. I had a supportive childhood that didn't demand of me much that I wasn't able to do. I have chosen small, manageable social spheres. I have never lived alone. I have only once in my life had a job that wasn't handed to me based on connections. Most of those have not been full time. This works great for me, but it doesn't tell you anything about what I would have been able to manage with a less than optimal environment, if I didn't have so many privileges. </p><p>Feelings</p><p>The first thing is my emotional regulation. I have always seemed to have more feelings than everyone else. As a kid I cried all the time, loudly. My mom once told me the reason nobody had any sympathy when I cried was because I just opened my mouth and bawled instead of trying to cry like a lady. I remember being confused. If I had <i>control</i> of what I was doing, I wouldn't <i>be</i> crying!</p><p>In the fourth grade the teacher nicknamed me "The Perpetual Frown" because I cried at school so much. (Bugger off, Mr. Wells.) In the fifth grade, my teacher took me into the coat room to ask if there was something wrong at home, if something was bothering me. I told her my uncle had died, which was true if several years out of date. I just felt like I had to have some excuse or she'd never leave me alone. Later, she dismissed me for lunch early and kept everyone else back. I assumed they were in trouble. In reality, she had told everyone they had to be nice to me because I was having a tough time and had no friends. Thanks for the thought, Mrs. Pfahl, but you might have predicted somebody would tell me everything.</p><p>In boarding school it was worse (because of the psychological abuse, obvs). I cried and cried. I learned to cry quietly, but I still cried all the time. I remember once I was expecting to get to sit down and eat dinner only to get pulled into the kitchen at the last minute to wash dishes instead. I sobbed and sobbed. I felt like my heart would break.</p><p>It was called, at the time, "emotional immaturity." I was told I would someday gain the ability to manage my feelings the way everyone else did, that I would be able to control them somehow. And I did stop crying all the time, after boarding school. At first it was mainly severe depression, but after that I felt like my feelings did settle down somewhat. It felt like there was a space between the inside of me and the outside, that I didn't have to let things out if I didn't want to. Or sometimes, I couldn't let things out at all. I don't really laugh when I'm alone. I usually can't cry even if I want to. But if I'm startled, I'll let out a reaction I didn't intend, sometimes a larger one than appropriate. Thanks to Zoom, I now know that I look extremely angry when I'm trying not to cry. That's not my favorite thing in the world.</p><p>Rigidity</p><p>I don't like the word rigidity. It sounds very negative, which is of course how it's perceived. I'd rather say that I love the things I'm used to, that they make me comforted and happy. You know how, after a long journey, you see the lights of your house getting closer and feel glad? I feel that about all my familiar things. I don't always think about how important they are, but this move has brought home to me how badly I function without them. It made me <i>angry</i> that the couch wasn't how it used to be. I had trouble drinking water because my favorite cup was lost in a box somewhere.</p><p>When I was younger, I was a lot more adventurous. My life was already very familiar so I felt willing to branch out. I think that's true of autistic people in general. Routines are comforting; if things are good, you don't need the same degree of comfort and are willing to be flexible. When you're having a hard time, though, every little change is going to be a big issue.</p><p>Sensory processing</p><p>The diagnostic guidelines barely touch on sensory processing, but to me they're almost the heart of autism. If you sense things differently, you'll react all kinds of different ways. And the sensory side of autism is the thing I relate to the most; I know I have serious sensory issues.</p><p>I'm hypersensitive to a broad array of things: textures, noises, smells. Some of them are very easy to explain, like loud noises or crowds. A lot of people don't like those, though most of them seem a little better at putting up with them. Others are just weird, like I get goosebumps all over my body if I even <i>think</i> about touching velvet, and my entire day was ruined once by King George's song in Hamilton. It just feels unsatisfying somehow? Like you have to keep singing it forever to get to a resolving chord but <i>there is none</i>. Ten years ago I loved pop music because it was devoid of those progressions. Now they're everywhere and I hate them so much.</p><p>I have two sets of clothes: the aspirational stuff I bought because it looked nice and I imagined being a person who would wear that, and the stuff I actually wear. The set of things I can wear keeps shrinking and shrinking. I basically live in cotton t-shirts (NOT cotton blend, UGH) and my gray elastic-waist shorts. I'm becoming intolerant to my only pair of non-ratty jeans because they slide down, but I also can't wear high-rise jeans because they make me feel smothered. I can't wear anything tight, especially on the armholes. I usually can't wear hats or scarves. It takes me about a month of winter to get used to wearing coats, and I sometimes try to get away with a light hoodie (pure cotton. no fleece lining) till it's below freezing. I don't just like being comfortable, I'm actively miserable when I'm not. I wouldn't even wear heels to my own wedding.</p><p>It takes me a second to process things. If I'm walking along the road, I walk slowly and look at everything. If I can't do that, I have very little notion what I saw or where we've been, and I end up feeling stressed. When I was a kid, I tried various sports, but I just can't keep my eye on the ball. It goes too fast. I got hit in the head with balls way too many times. I can't play any video game with a first-person camera; I have no idea where I am. I can't listen to audiobooks. Watching TV, I miss about half of what is said unless I put the subtitles on. Walking around the house, I constantly bump myself on things. I'm scared to go downstairs holding a laundry basket because I can't see my feet.</p><p>This is the part that severely limits what I can do. Things I can't do, or find so unpleasant that I never do, include: concerts, fairs, movies in the theater, going multiple places in the same day. When we were showing the house and had to be out all day, I was miserable. I have never liked going to work. Only now that I have a job from home, I'm discovering I don't dread going to work or collapse in an exhausted heap when I get home. Teaching is especially exhausting; I don't think I could ever go back to it. In college, both times I tried to add one (one!) extracurricular on top of my classes, I got sick and had to quit.</p><p>Executive function</p><p>These days, the internet is full of stuff about executive function, to the point that I'd almost wonder if anyone is actually good at it. Except that my husband is; he's like my executive function doula. He knows when the bills are due and when the car needs to be inspected and he never, ever loses his keys.</p><p>That's, uh . . . not me. It took me <i>two years</i> once to call the dentist after my tooth started hurting. I carry tons of to-dos around inside my head all day, because I can never manage to write them down. I drop balls all the time. It was my biggest flaw as a teacher, forgetting who had missed a day and whose parents wanted me to call them back. I didn't plan my lessons, I winged them all. In school, homework sheets exploded out of my backpack, but were somehow never there when it was time to turn them in. When our notebooks were collected for a grade, my literature notes were just a title and some doodles. I leaned hard on raw intelligence to succeed in school despite never knowing there were tests coming up and writing all the papers the day before. But once you're an adult, raw intelligence doesn't count for very much. You have to actually remember what day yearbook money is due.</p><p>I'm getting better at this, because I have to, but it's still one of the biggest challenges of my life. I constantly miss work meetings I am supposed to zoom into; my boss is luckily tolerant of it. I was supposed to call the elementary school after two-thirty on Monday; it's Wednesday, and though I remember it now, I wouldn't lay odds on me remembering after 2:30.</p><p>My current job is so great. It might take me an hour to get in the zone to do anything, but once I'm there I pound out an article in a couple hours. I might, however, forget to eat. When working on a novel, I used to go five hours or longer without a break. I don't have trouble with focus if no one interrupts me. I have a lot of trouble switching from one task to another. Sometimes dinner is late because I was doing a puzzle, and I knew it was time, but I had to fit one more piece, and one more piece, WHAT, it's six pm.</p><p>Social skills</p><p>This is the thing that always gave me pause. I can't be autistic because I function really well socially. Don't I?</p><p>Well, I admittedly didn't in school, but that was because I was homeschooled. Everyone somehow picked up on me being different and was mean to me. Complaints I remember: that I talked to myself, that I talked like the robot voice of a talking car, that I dressed funny, that my hair was messy, that I smelled bad. These are all, admittedly, common autistic things.</p><p>One time all the cool kids decided to be nice to me and invite me to play Truth or Dare. I assumed that I had finally been there long enough that I was going to be accepted, and joined right in. Turned out they just wanted to quiz me about stuff like who I liked, so they could torment me about it. Was that a lack of social awareness?</p><p>In high school everyone was nice to me, because it was the rules. I knew I was not one of the coolest people, that the consecrated had decided I wasn't "leader-type," and I'd been told more than once I talked too much, hogged the conversation, was too loud. Other girls found me funny and happy and charming, but a little weird. The consecrated made it their mission to make me normal, including a lot of explicit teaching about hygiene and hair and fashion and conversational turn-taking.</p><p>College was great for me socially. You'll never find a denser concentration of weirdos obsessed with all the same things I was at the time. I had so many friends. I couldn't stay up late like they could, but I always had someone to hang out when I wanted to.</p><p>I have not really made friends since then. My friends are all my old college friends, or people I didn't hang out much with at college but at least knew. I keep trying to make other friends, but it never seems to work for very long. I have tons and tons of online friends. In person is so much harder, not least because of my other challenges. Hanging out with kids is a very hard sensory experience; you're juggling attending to the kids and attending to the other person, and switching my attention like that exhausts me and makes me itchy. Hanging out without kids involves a lot of advance planning and executive function. I say, "I'll check with my husband and see if he can watch the kids that day," and then I don't.</p><p>I don't know if I make eye contact right. I do look at people's eyes briefly and then look away. Isn't that what most people do? I remember getting in trouble for disrespect when I made eye contact with a teacher who was chewing me out for something else, and getting yelled at by a girl who said I "had a staring problem." So I guess I'm a little afraid of looking at people too long. I remember one spiritual director always looked straight in my eyes and it was the very worst thing in the world.</p><p>I'm bad at turn-taking in conversations. I spend a lot of effort trying not to talk too much, but dead space makes me anxious so I tend to leap in and fill it. I know I used to just talk a mile a minute and people couldn't get a word in. In groups of more than two, I really struggle. The gaps you could jump into are so tiny and gone so fast. And they change topics all the time! I hate having something interesting to say, but it's about something three topics ago because the conversation wandered. I want to talk a subject to death before moving onto the next.</p><p>A lot of the things autistic people say on this, I don't relate to. I very much like small talk, at least small doses of it with strangers. I'm always anxious in public, and if a kindly stranger tells me that I have a lot of children, it cheers me up somehow. Like oh! this person is being friendly with me! I guess I can survive this after all! I hate mask wearing because nobody smiles at me. I am not blunt. I lean hard on etiquette and social scripts; if you ask me how I'm doing, I would sooner die than say anything other than some version of "oh, doing all right, how are you?" Saying things that might upset people is very hard for me. I read a lot into what people say, and I would ten million times rather hint that I could use a hand than ask.</p><p>This part is the hardest for me to accept. Am I still a weirdo, and it's just that people are too nice to point it out now? Am I missing something everyone else is getting? I spend a lot of effort understanding people and trying to fit in. I don't want to admit I'm not good at it.</p><p>Stimming</p><p>As a kid, I used to chew on my hair. So my mom cut my hair, and then I chewed my nails. Then I got braces and I didn't have a fidget. In boarding school being fidgety was very much frowned upon. I don't think I really stim anymore. I do sometimes play with my eyelashes or sway back and forth when I'm reading. But this is one that isn't really such a big noticeable thing with me. Whereas Marko is so fidgety that he can be chewing on a random piece of plastic, pulling on his hair, <i>and</i> dancing around the room at the same time.</p><p>When I'm very stressed, though, like at the grocery store, I've started shaking my hands at the wrists, like I'm limbering up to play piano. It seems to shed a little of the stress somehow. I'm not really doing it intentionally, but I could stop if I wanted.</p><p>So am I or not?</p><p>I really don't know. This feels like a lot of reasons I am, when I lay it out like that. But getting a diagnosis sounds like an insurmountable burden. How would I find someone who even assesses adults? Would I have to call them? Get childcare? Make an appointment? And what if then they were like all the people I've dealt with for my kids, who say "well, they're smart, they're doing fine" and I hear "why are you wasting my time?"</p><p>I suppose what I should do is just be gentle with myself. Try to understand myself and give myself space for my needs. I do a lot of that already, which is why I don't feel like I'm suffering. I don't put myself through things I know I won't like. I don't commit to things I know I would flake on. I build a lot of down time into every day. I just need to try, as best I can, not to be ashamed of myself for needing to do that. Sometimes I feel really bad about the things I can't do, the things I've failed to do. I don't need a word for what I am to know I'm not choosing to struggle with things.</p><p>But would that be easier if I just said, hey, I probably have autism? If I joined autism groups and said, yeah, that's me?</p><p>You, the five or six people who still read this thing, know me pretty well. What do you think?</p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-48317488984251418492021-07-09T16:57:00.001-04:002021-07-09T16:57:06.114-04:00Well, we moved.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Our move to Big Town is behind us. It was a painfully stressful week or so. Packing our things. Hiring movers. Getting six people, two cats, and two cars to the new place. Directing movers, in an empty house. Getting stickers for our cars so we would be allowed to park at our new house. Weathering many, many tears from the children. Waiting till they weren't looking so I could shed some tears of my own while still pretending that This Is So Great, Aren't We Having Fun? in the hopes that they would play along.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'm not going to lie to <i>you</i>, though. This whole thing has not been much fun. And even now that the most stressful part is behind us, I'm not super jazzed about these changes. I guess I was hoping that all I dreaded was the transition, and once we were a little used to it here it would all be find. Instead I'm seeing more and more ways that this place is just not as good as what we had.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In a small town, we could afford a large house with a large yard. And much of what we did for fun was free. Here, we are in a townhouse with no yard to speak of, and everything I try to drag the kids to is stressful and expensive. Of course it doesn't help that it's the most miserable month to live in Virginia, where even in Small Town we would be hunkering down with crayons and playdough rather than attempting the kind of summer fun I remember from my childhood. (Not that even the Pacific Northwest is still cool enough in summer to go outside every day, anymore. There's a lot of heavy "you can never go home" feelings around right now.)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I don't know anybody here, yet. I don't even speak the same language as half the people here. I was hoping to introduce the kids to diversity. Instead they shriek, "I can't play with the neighbor kids because they TALK FUNNY and I HATE people who talk funny!" I know that this mostly has to do with missing home, but it also makes me worry. Fear of the unfamiliar is natural, but it's also where racism comes from and I am not sure how to combat it. Especially in my culturally-alienated but legitimately Hispanic children.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I thought moving here would make me closer to things and give me more options. But it's actually significantly further to the next grocery store than our old house was. Closer to Aldi, I'll admit, and that's my favorite, but even if we want to just run out for a couple things, it's still ten minutes. There are more restaurants, but they're all more expensive. There are more pools, but I still haven't found an outdoor one that's open on weekdays, and the indoor one near us gives me a headache and costs $25 for the massive bunch of us. There are parks but none of them are the sort of shady/ splashy/ uncrowded parks we had back home.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The roads around here are either grungy or massive and busy. Or both. I hate wires that crisscross over the road, and huge parking lots, and places without trees. There is a part of town that's more scenic, and we don't live in it because it's even more not-cheap than where we do live. Driving north is pretty nice, because we pass through a large regional park. Though there is no entrance to that park from our end, only from the county on the other side. I wonder who made <i>that</i> decision, and why.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The new house is newer than our old one, less broken. It has central air, and I'm certainly not complaining about <i>that</i>. I did dream of buying a house with fewer stairs, though, and this one does not fit my hopes.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTrsq6cIWrYm1WDPL6i4cZbyG3L2MLkKs-pkxjyywhaDX03QxA6Yf6aFAA2ZVh9lvfhvQ8Hwvi5fBHxqX7q4BUgkgBtTXYkkGRA-sQgrIcTYlW4R0WrhuwsUZd9gOeVCoGGq5Bhmw_4HE/s2048/IMG_20210707_110409.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTrsq6cIWrYm1WDPL6i4cZbyG3L2MLkKs-pkxjyywhaDX03QxA6Yf6aFAA2ZVh9lvfhvQ8Hwvi5fBHxqX7q4BUgkgBtTXYkkGRA-sQgrIcTYlW4R0WrhuwsUZd9gOeVCoGGq5Bhmw_4HE/s320/IMG_20210707_110409.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">I put friction tape because I'm terrified of slipping, but I've still slipped on them twice.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The kitchen is pretty. Of course I'm the rube who doesn't like gas stoves. There weren't enough cabinets, which was the tragedy of my existence for a few days. I felt near tears even going in the kitchen because it was all scattered with dutch ovens and ice cream makers that I had no possible place for. But we got an IKEA cabinet to put along the side wall and now everything fits. It makes me feel marginally better about my life.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsyFbQKySDlapc5WWoe8_1k43aEKR8aU3mKrJfGnD7aaiqVLBayxoYhD8Y4PCXEbE5Y-dVZJzGLZPU1WRARprIh7Md6zVCISZPtoUeVOHPrQHi_rxJ_zCRsLT7cK5KaSocmsDUOSrlDlc/s2048/IMG_20210629_213820.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsyFbQKySDlapc5WWoe8_1k43aEKR8aU3mKrJfGnD7aaiqVLBayxoYhD8Y4PCXEbE5Y-dVZJzGLZPU1WRARprIh7Md6zVCISZPtoUeVOHPrQHi_rxJ_zCRsLT7cK5KaSocmsDUOSrlDlc/s320/IMG_20210629_213820.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">New cabinet not shown in this one. The hatch into the living/dining room is cool though.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The view off the back deck is quite acceptable. This green patch doesn't really belong to anyone but the HOA, so it's not like having a yard, but if I can just coax the children to have adventures in there with me it might be a little bit the same.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIyum8qcl8A3cxJfGYaya7SMdvhZbjmvItvDRn4rp1es4Gw-g5naG9H6RCrkcszcS2PVVyBfC-DGzPTebK534nlquflsLcBn73-6wcnZ08OOvH-HAnwhCtfcB0ukFDcFK7ro_i_6aA528/s2048/IMG_20210709_094656.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIyum8qcl8A3cxJfGYaya7SMdvhZbjmvItvDRn4rp1es4Gw-g5naG9H6RCrkcszcS2PVVyBfC-DGzPTebK534nlquflsLcBn73-6wcnZ08OOvH-HAnwhCtfcB0ukFDcFK7ro_i_6aA528/s320/IMG_20210709_094656.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />I don't care for the view out the front. It is a parking lot and there's no getting around that. But the kids can scooter there so they use it more than the back. We've managed to play with the neighbor kids some, the ones who are younger than my kids and don't speak English. It turns out you don't really need to talk much to scooter. Their dad seems to be the social center of the block and talks to everybody. I am so thankful for him.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMUVmiuvFz2g80JIvtMgEaI5JlvfzpH9ADXSS369LldvwGh5pTFswSaiuHbXF_DGD8bHeP-ysWnoH3bEVOZRP9t6kFlvcW6y8LyMldQVozmwHW2U2D_EGESBMQNh9rr4cV9rDtWfE7Fww/s2048/IMG_20210701_180136.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMUVmiuvFz2g80JIvtMgEaI5JlvfzpH9ADXSS369LldvwGh5pTFswSaiuHbXF_DGD8bHeP-ysWnoH3bEVOZRP9t6kFlvcW6y8LyMldQVozmwHW2U2D_EGESBMQNh9rr4cV9rDtWfE7Fww/s320/IMG_20210701_180136.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>He's the one who tipped me off this creek spot. The whole time I've lived in Virginia, creek spots have been precious; if you know a spot, you spend your whole summer there if you can. This one is within walking distance of our house, on the other side of the HOA, and three out of four kids loved it.</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS9xbqz-M3NGPqIigBskhVtGwm23kbF1RHHn06Q4zgdyJLhWsZWbOlWkV_cHGV6RWwbuHjRlc99Hu_prluNT-LzHXRw0Rt19z1syGqjnEOeFl3ID9LKDM-1I4RqKtr8up9W9usHfZzFKs/s2048/IMG_20210701_094126.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS9xbqz-M3NGPqIigBskhVtGwm23kbF1RHHn06Q4zgdyJLhWsZWbOlWkV_cHGV6RWwbuHjRlc99Hu_prluNT-LzHXRw0Rt19z1syGqjnEOeFl3ID9LKDM-1I4RqKtr8up9W9usHfZzFKs/s320/IMG_20210701_094126.jpg" /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></a></div>Problem: it was covered with trash. The whole woods behind are apparently a general party zone for everyone in the area, and there aren't any trash cans. It's the tragedy of the commons in action. If it belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one, and no one seems to be responsible for cleaning it up.<div><br /></div><div>WELL, while we were there, and I was feeling morose about the garbage situation (which was much larger than I had the slightest hope of cleaning up), a guy showed up to tell us it actually did belong to someone, which is the HOA (if I understood him right). So there will now be RULES. And a cleanup day. And maybe paved paths.</div><div><br /></div><div>I like the idea of cleaning it up. I didn't much like this guy's insinuation that the problem was Hispanic people from outside the neighborhood coming in and drinking there. First because most everyone here is Hispanic, in or out of the neighborhood, but that isn't super relevant when it comes to finding out who's littering. Second because who really cares if the people from the neighboring apartment complex hang out at the same creek; nature <i>should</i> belong to everyone and it's honestly more fun the more kids there are to play with. Third because I don't care if people drink so long as they throw their bottles away. Fourth because his solution was unsightly no-trespassing signs and fences that are hostile to walkers. It would be much easier to get there from our house if there weren't so many fences, but I understood from talking to him that making it impossible to walk around was a goal. That people who walk from one neighborhood to another are a problem, and it's better to make it impossible for people in this neighborhood to get around without burning gas than it is to let apartment-dwellers get to our creek.</div><div><br /></div><div>I am just feeling really demoralized about our future here. Maybe I'll feel different when the kids start school, especially if they find more friends here than they did back in Small Town. (What if they don't??) Maybe I'll feel different when I finally find a way to meet people (if I ever get that brave). Maybe I'll feel different if I start taking classes at the local community college, a thing I mean to do if I am never not overwhelmed and stressed all the time.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I keep thinking, what if I don't? I'm a hermit at heart; maybe what was best for me was to have a little space to be a hermit in. I can't believe I had two friends and a school in walking distance and a splash pad that was eight minutes away and free, and I gave that up seeking . . . what? Friends? Opportunities? Happiness? I had those things available to me at the old place, but I couldn't access them because I was scared and bad at leaving the house. Which I still am, just in a smaller house.</div><div><br /></div><div>I hope things get better soon. They kind of have to.<p></p></div>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-80958814851307480572021-06-03T22:36:00.001-04:002021-06-04T09:39:10.722-04:00How to leave the Catholic Church<p>I've been intrigued by Steve Skojec's last <a href="https://skojecfile.steveskojec.com/p/against-crippled-religion">few</a> <a href="https://skojecfile.steveskojec.com/p/an-epidemic-of-brokenness">posts.</a> I disagree with him on most things, to be sure, but where it comes to the Legion of Christ and the traditionalist movement, he gets it. Both groups are high demand and abusive, and he knows that personally.</p><p>He certainly sounds to me like he's thinking of leaving the church altogether. In general, I approve: it's not just fringe movements that can be abusive, and as long as you're in the church, you're always going to find more of those anyway. But I also worry a little bit for him. A life inside the church doesn't prepare you very well for a life outside. If he goes dashing outside the church without rethinking a heck of a lot of first principles, he'll run after the next nutty person he sees who promises him the complete ideological purity that attracted him into his first two cults.</p><p>That's true of anybody who leaves a church, so I thought I'd write a little how-to guide.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">How to Leave the Church</h2><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Hf-YHP8M_GOGasr2WYowuZiBPMf-zx9uLC1T69iWSS68f-ptOwQUYrMrv7foR-a6qn7izljPNB5DMK1eWCiRs6SCSTlAm7RbaxbYHMJ3XcGKjmEOADmogggiRePfOSlUoCaB95I-bAA/s460/leavingmass.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="344" data-original-width="460" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Hf-YHP8M_GOGasr2WYowuZiBPMf-zx9uLC1T69iWSS68f-ptOwQUYrMrv7foR-a6qn7izljPNB5DMK1eWCiRs6SCSTlAm7RbaxbYHMJ3XcGKjmEOADmogggiRePfOSlUoCaB95I-bAA/s320/leavingmass.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">1. Stand up from the pew</div><p></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlGdSG-vBLRw3LPU8RX5MyOenKCPLUt84qPY6edJfVluwfhHtBKC7urAoizwgB_TK4PByRL4DQ4lIqfO7v-R6EnJAJ5Ob-fuifp-3YmLbGJXXX16bL-iITblgTB_yfhSeJyFf0VHdEbYo/s421/2021-06-01+%25283%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="316" data-original-width="421" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlGdSG-vBLRw3LPU8RX5MyOenKCPLUt84qPY6edJfVluwfhHtBKC7urAoizwgB_TK4PByRL4DQ4lIqfO7v-R6EnJAJ5Ob-fuifp-3YmLbGJXXX16bL-iITblgTB_yfhSeJyFf0VHdEbYo/s320/2021-06-01+%25283%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;">2. Go through the doors, they're at the back</p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEievYQkkVLn_djl44S6ETMT3CLr2jhgHCsDMlK2w92xYaKsXJDBaCFkPZFj3oKl1gO4SjfOBz_pZ9anpiETnp22QuN9BOuqDFZaFE6zqAiYVUFWN9mxG-6wAyIpcdvms6yQ1qnrjAoTCOk/s352/2021-06-01+%25282%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="352" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEievYQkkVLn_djl44S6ETMT3CLr2jhgHCsDMlK2w92xYaKsXJDBaCFkPZFj3oKl1gO4SjfOBz_pZ9anpiETnp22QuN9BOuqDFZaFE6zqAiYVUFWN9mxG-6wAyIpcdvms6yQ1qnrjAoTCOk/s320/2021-06-01+%25282%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">3. Run and don't stop</p><p><br /></p><p>I kid, I kid. It isn't hard to leave the church, once you've made up your mind it's the right thing to do. You simply stop showing up, and if they call you, tell them nobody by that name lives at your number anymore. It's not like leaving the Mormons. They really aren't going to try to stop you. They will, of course, insist that you are still Catholic, per canon law, and count you in any numbers they keep track of. But you can leave them counting those beans, because you're not there anymore.</p><p>But what do you do next?</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">1. Take a break from religion.</h4><p>You know how, when you get out of a bad relationship, any subsequent relationship looks so good by comparison? "Wow," an abuse survivor raves to her friends, "he doesn't beat me at all! I had no idea guys could be this good!" And the friends look at the guy and are like . . . "Okay but he still forgot your birthday and expects you to clean up after him, are you sure this isn't a rebound?"</p><p>If Steve jumps ship straight into Orthodoxy (as I suspect he will, the trad-to-Orthodox pipeline is well traveled) he'll be so amazed it isn't as toxic as a traditionalist parish that he'll boast about it to anyone who will listen. But that doesn't mean it will be healthy. With a long break (months, maybe a year) without going to church at all, he'll be better able to weigh whether a new church is actually bringing goodness into his life or simply less badness.</p><p>Of course you can still pray during this break time, study theology, call yourself a Christian. But a person needs to decompress a little from church. I think the enforced decompression of the pandemic has gotten a lot of people realizing how little they were getting from their churches, how perfectly capable they are of worshiping at home. The churches they return to will be the ones that actually offer something other than obligation.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">2. Dig down to first principles. </h4><p>Steve sees something wrong with the church, which should be adequate proof he has a moral code apart from the church. If you can judge the church and find it wanting, then there's something in you that knows right and wrong apart from the church telling you so. What is that compass telling you?</p><p>Steve knows it's wrong for the priest not to baptize his child. But why? Is it because of the first principle "Nobody says no to me, Steve Skojec"? Probably it's more some sense of fairness. The feeling that everyone deserves to get the things they absolutely need. How could Steve extend that outward to more things? If his child deserves baptism, do all children deserve food? What does it mean to deserve something, and how can we obtain for everyone what they deserve?</p><p>I highly recommend reading some moral philosophy, or, if you're not up to homework, watching <i>The Good Place</i>. You don't have to have a perfectly spelled-out moral philosophy, but it's good to have some general principles to guide you.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">3. No, further down than that.</h4><p>It's too easy to become exactly the same brand of person you were before, sans church membership. To keep the same politics, the same biases, the same ingroup. People like Jordan Peterson, whom Steve Skojec likes so much, promise to let you do that. Here's a non-religious defense for all the same things you thought before!</p><p>The world does not need more repackaged, atheist patriarchy, homophobia, or hierarchies. You don't need to do evo-psych to work out why the same moral code you had before is scientific. It doesn't actually work that way. It's like when Aquinas tried to make Aristotle prove the church was right about everything. If the church is wrong about some things, what else could it be wrong about? Maybe it was wrong about gay marriage, or monarchy.</p><p>It's easier to keep mostly the same opinions you had before. If the church taught you to be constantly afraid, constantly angry, about "how the world is going," it will be hard to change your point of view. But Steve believes, as I believe, that one has a responsibility to know the truth. What if all of that was fear tactics? What if the way you vote, the things you promote, or the condemnations you've pronounced have done harm? Reconsider everything. </p><p>Take your time. You don't have to have it all worked out right away. Catholics will demand, "So are you contracepting now? What do you think about abortion?" It's okay to say, "I'm still working all that out." In fact, that's almost the only answer you can say that won't get you attacked with either, "Here's why you're wrong," or "If you agree with the church on that, you should just be Catholic again!"</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">4. Don't look backwards</h4><p>You know how Lot's wife was turned to a pillar of salt for looking over her shoulder? That's a terrible story, the bible is messed up. Anyway, there's an impulse after leaving the church to keep obsessing over it. You study the theology you already know, in order to reassure yourself that you weren't making up the problems. You keep talking with Catholic people, maybe arguing with them to get some kind of closure, a point where they admit you did the right thing by leaving. (You will not get this.) You can even make an entire living, like Rod Dreher does, out of criticizing the church you're no longer a part of.</p><p>It's one thing to do this for a little while. Maybe it's even healthy. But if it's been a year and you're still mostly surrounded by Catholics, reading Catholic blogs, coming up with ever more airtight refutations of Catholic teaching . . . it might be time to move on a little bit. That history is always going to be a part of you; you don't have to pretend otherwise. But it can be like picking at a scab a little bit. Leaving the church is painful, and constantly putting yourself back into that mindset keeps that pain going. </p><p>Find some non-Catholic friends, both ex-Catholics and never-Catholics. (The former get you so well. The latter remind you that you have to have something else to talk about besides that.) Have new interests and hobbies. Get, eventually, to a point where having been Catholic is just one thing about you. (I'm not going to claim I'm fully there.)</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">5. Replace those things that actually helped you.</h4><p>When I first left the church, I tried to replace all of it: the prayers, the holidays, the songs. The church was just such a big part of my life, I felt like I needed all of that. These days I don't do so much of that. Many of the things I used to do, I found I didn't really need, so they fell by the wayside.</p><p>You have to ask yourself, what have you been relying on the church for? For good reason,* the church doesn't encourage you to think about what you're getting out of it, but it's very likely you did get something out of it. A way to self-improvement, some daily or weekly meditative time, a coping mechanism for anxiety, an opportunity to do charitable work, a community of like-minded people. Where can you get those things? It doesn't have to all be in the same place.</p><p>(*it's because if you actually kept a tally, you'd see you give much more than you get, and very often you get nothing)</p><p>There's one thing, though, that you shouldn't replace. Don't replace one all-inclusive, package vacation to truth with another. The church claimed to have all truth so you never needed to go elsewhere. Don't find some other organization or guru and eat up everything <i>they </i>say. Don't fall for ideologies that claim to explain everything. Everything is not privilege vs. oppression. Everything is not order vs. chaos. Everything is <i>complicated</i>. Listen to a variety of people, read different sources, keep thinking.</p><p>The church taught you to doubt yourself and seek an outside arbiter of truth. It's not wrong that your reason is fallible. But if your reason is fallible at finding the truth, it's even worse at picking authorities that can find the truth for you. Everyone else's reason is fallible too. The best safety measure against all of that is to double-check other people's claims of truth against your own reason.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">6. Heal emotionally.</h4><p>When you're newly out of the church, you're recovering from two traumas. One of them is leaving the church, and the other is the time you spent in it. Depending on how it went for you, those may be more or less severe.</p><p>Your time in the church might have loaded you down with:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Terror of hell</li><li>Conviction that you are not a good person</li><li>Fear of the outside world</li><li>Guilt for small things</li><li>Fear of enjoying yourself in any way, and guilt when you do</li><li>Sexual dysfunction or shame</li></ul><div>These aren't things that will leave you all at once. As a result, when you leave the church you may find yourself feeling worse at first. You might have rationally worked out that there is no hell, but when it's 1 am and you can't sleep, you might still feel afraid of it. This isn't a sign that you did the wrong thing necessarily; it's just that you were taught to be afraid of certain things and that lesson went deeper than reason.</div><div><br /></div><div>Meanwhile, leaving the church can cause problems like:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Social rejection by your community</li><li>Existential angst or fear</li><li>Worry about doing the right thing</li><li>Grief at losing God</li><li>Panic that this life might be all there is</li><li>Regret at how you've spent your life this far</li></ul><div>I hit many of these things very hard. I worried all the time that one of my children would die and it would be my fault and they wouldn't go to heaven because there wasn't one. I cried because Jesus had been my best friend. I lay awake at night because I was afraid I would go to sleep and not wake up, and never have a chance to do anything different with my life.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>You see why it's so tempting to jump into the first religion or ideology that presents a soothing answer. I'm not saying you shouldn't, at some point, find one. But it should be after you've done a little healing on these things, so you're not just trying to fill a church-shaped hole.</div><div><br /></div><div>I can't get you through any of this with a blog post. It takes time and emotional processing. It might take therapy. But I will tell you it gets better. You're living each day without whatever pain the church was causing--which, as you go on, you'll realize was more than you thought. And you find new ways to cope with the different pains of human existence, things the church once answered for you.</div><div><br /></div><div>I hope that helps.</div><p></p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-68157637420741006822021-05-28T22:26:00.000-04:002021-05-28T22:26:06.339-04:00The soul of a house<p> I don't know where I got the idea of the lifelong family home. It certainly wasn't from my family. My father and three out of four of my grandparents were in the military, so although we didn't move <i>that</i> often, I always understood a house is a base of operations where you live for a while before moving to the next place. When I was a kid, I always wanted to move.</p><p>Maybe it was It's a Wonderful Life. You know how Mary wishes on a broken window that she could someday live in that drafty old house, and then she does? She makes a home of it, somehow, painting while the kids are in their playpen and putting up with the banister end coming off all the time. Which gives the impression that it is affordable and possible to buy a big house and fill it with children if you're just not picky about banister ends. We got awfully close to buying one of those for our first home, till the inspector said "no, the back of the house is literally sliding off, you cannot possibly." What a buzzkill, that guy.</p><p>Anyway, here's the dream. You buy a house when your first child is a baby, or before. (Already the millennials in the room are shaking their heads at me.) It's in a good neighborhood, with a nice yard. Or maybe it's out in the country, but still close to work.</p><p>It's not a perfect house. It's probably inconveniently laid out and the paint is a little chipped. And that's when you start. Over the years you build onto it or knock out that inconvenient wall, probably by yourself. The gardens develop thick soil from years of planting. You put in an apple seedling, and by the time your kids are teenagers they're harvesting apples.</p><p>You know how the Velveteen Rabbit becomes real when all his fur gets loved off? That's what happens to houses. There's a doorway somewhere with marks showing all your kids' heights at different ages. There's a door that doesn't close right because a kid swung on it too much. Your kids have names for the different faces you can see in the paint chips. There's been a heap o' living there.</p><p>Most importantly, you stay there the entire time your kids are growing up. They never have to leave. You look at old photo albums and everyone knows the house, because they're sitting in it while they look at the album. The neighbor's baby grows up alongside your baby, and 18 years later they have their first kiss in that apple tree you planted when they were toddlers. Of course you couldn't leave that house. That house is family.</p><p>You stay in that house when all the kids are gone, and fix it up a bit the way you never could when they were underfoot. But you keep a couple boxes of their toys under the stairs, and when your grandkids come over, they sleep in their dad's old bed. With luck, you die in that house, peacefully in your bed.</p><p>I don't know how often that <i>ever</i> happened. People have always had to move, for one reason or another. But it feels even less possible now. Nobody stays at one job their whole career anymore; they carefully hop diagonally through the job market, accepting big changes to go slightly upward because they're never getting a raise where they are. Nobody has money enough, early on in their career, to buy a house big enough for the family they'll have later. We could never have bought this house when Marko was a toddler, but we also could never have fit four kids into the house we did buy. And nobody can be certain their kids will stay in the area; people of my generation and class very commonly live across the country from their families. When we were young, flying to visit seemed easy. Now that we're older, moving closer seems impossible.</p><p>Houses these days seem like commodities more than homes. You have to be doing improvements all the time. Mark your children's heights on the wall? Heck no. You need to be updating the kitchen for when you sell it. Don't make it too individual, too <i>yours</i>.</p><p>Selling a house feels like ripping the soul from its body. You tone down your presence in the home, you clean it to make it look like you don't even live there. And soon you won't. The house you filled with your laughter is a set of bare floors by the time you say goodbye to it. You'll miss it all your life, but your last memory of it is just echoing rooms.</p><p>Sometimes I think I like houses more than I like people, because I cry when they're sold and I don't always cry when I say goodbye to people. Then again, often a person's house is a symbol, in my mind, of the person. I miss my great-grandpa's house because it was his, because a big part of what I ever knew of him was his house. He talked to the grownups, but we kids were downstairs investigating his knickknacks, discovering what kind of a person he was from the things he left lying around.</p><p>The house I loved the most was my grandparent's lake cabin. My grandpa built so much of it himself, and I remember the process from bare beach to the polished, hand-carved towel hooks. It was in such a special place, where we made so many important memories. But most of all, it was <i>his</i> house. It meant Grampy to me, in a lot of ways, while their town house held more of Grandma's soul.</p><p>I did take my kids to that town house, showing them the couch with lemon upholstery and the elephant statue and the trees. It felt like a link I had to forge, connecting my children with at least one place I had been as a child. The house I grew up in was sold when I was fourteen. Now my parents don't even live in the same state. It feels disconcerting, wrong. That a place I felt was my home no longer has a place I can stay.</p><p>I feel like I am taking something away from my kids by moving, even though they are mostly on board with the move now. I wanted them to have roots. I wanted a place that connected them to their memories, so the past doesn't seem like it happened to somebody else. I wanted them to feel more grounded in a place than I have been able to be.</p><p>I didn't want them to feel homesick their entire lives, like me.</p><p>I've stopped being agrarian because I no longer feel like it explains anything or has any of the answers. But, even though I don't have an alternative, I still object to modern society. Maybe the things that were traded away were for good reasons. But sometimes I feel it was because nobody felt they were worth anything at all. I don't think people get what I mean when I say a house has a soul, when I say it has to be more than an asset and a way to save on rent.</p><p>But, if I linger in this house when the movers are gone and hide in the closet to whisper goodbye to its bare bones, I hope you understand why.</p>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464977109229359349.post-65936884367988921312021-05-16T22:34:00.000-04:002021-05-16T22:34:04.822-04:00The city mouse and the country mouseI grew up at the edge of a city, but I always dreamed of being a farmer or living way out in the country. Living here in a small town has been the closest I've ever gotten to that.<div><br /></div><div>In many ways, living in a small town is the best of both worlds: there's plenty of nature around, but it's still five minutes to the grocery store. And our town isn't so small as to limit what we can access very much. There might be fewer options, but we have doctors, dentists, restaurants, even a (rather minimal) hospital.</div><div><br /></div><div>Despite that, though, we're moving 45 minutes closer to the big city, to a suburb I'm just going to call Bigger Town. Because what we don't have are jobs that pay a one-income living for a family of six. John's been commuting over 90 minutes a day for about two years now, and that's really sapped his spirit. He's tried and tried, but librarians in this area tend to make under $40,000 a year--it's a job for married ladies whose husbands also work, or perhaps older people who don't want to retire.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm sad about it, but I'm also trying to find the bright side in moving closer to the city. Tons of people would love to live near a city, and many would never dream of living anywhere else.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>People</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Cities are full of things to do. Museums, restaurants, concerts, big libraries, water parks, community theaters, classes for kids. The libraries have more books. The shopping district has more shops.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the city, there are more people to hang out with. That means a better chance of finding people who share your interests. I could find a writing group near me. I hear there's even a children's Magic: The Gathering club.</div><div><br /></div><div>Downside of all this is that there are people when you don't want to be with people. Your yard is small if you have any, and you might share walls with noisy people. The streets are never quiet. More people means less starlight and birdsong.</div><div><br /></div><div>My relationships with humans have always been fraught. The worst thing nature has ever done to me has been a bee sting. So it's no wonder I tend to pick nature every time.</div><div><br /></div><div>But, you know, I'm looking to relearn how to interact with people, so maybe having a lot of opportunities to do that will be Good For Me.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Nature</b></div><div><br /></div><div>The tradeoff for more people is less nature. I live next to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah River. It's absolutely gorgeous here, especially if you go two minutes or so out of town. Even from our upstairs windows we can see the Blue Ridge. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrUOy6qN0a2j_6IR9-PSgFJOgmjb8ZMGqQsIewmW6tlFi-eTEkL1-xHuLSkL0RllqZLEozy5Qj6TULA4gO21zazE6CRJVMLwsaNOUrKwKJOzzriK0PNNGQXFFU6PAYoizhk78TGn-hOB8/s2048/IMG_20210508_190824.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrUOy6qN0a2j_6IR9-PSgFJOgmjb8ZMGqQsIewmW6tlFi-eTEkL1-xHuLSkL0RllqZLEozy5Qj6TULA4gO21zazE6CRJVMLwsaNOUrKwKJOzzriK0PNNGQXFFU6PAYoizhk78TGn-hOB8/s320/IMG_20210508_190824.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Seattle has a giant mountain and two large bodies of water going for it--you still get to look at some nature, even in the middle of the city. Bigger Town isn't like that. It has parks, but you have to <i>go</i> to them. It's flat, and I don't like flat.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here, we have woods in our actual yard. Okay, a strip of trees, but you can climb them. We have lots of birds. We have redbuds and dogwoods and holly. When I'm feeling depressed, it's hard for me to get in the car and go somewhere. But I can sit at the window or go out in the yard and get some nature therapy. I really feel it feeds my soul.</div><div><br /></div><div>High population density, I am told, is much better for the environment. Living closer to work means less energy use and emissions. Townhouses and apartments mean less land is taken up with housing and more can be left for animal habitats. Our yard is populated by deer and bears, but that's because their proper wild habitat is shrinking. As roads encroach into the forest, more animals are killed in road accidents. So love of nature should encourage me not to live smack in the middle of it.</div><div><br /></div><div>And it does, but it's tough.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Diversity</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Small Town is more diverse than you'd think, but it's very segregated. The <a href="http://www.justicemap.org/">Justice Map</a> shows our current neighborhood as 100% white. Just down the hill there's a little block that's allegedly 100% Black. I'm sure that's at least somewhat inaccurate, but not by a lot. </div><div><br /></div><div>They say what you see growing up is what you expect, what you assume is normal and right. I grew up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood, and I think that was good for me. I knew racist garbage for racist garbage early on, because it wasn't accurate to what I'd experienced. I'd like the same for my kids.</div><div><br /></div><div>Bigger towns and cities are almost always much more diverse. And the town we're moving to is much more shaded and speckly on the Justice Map. Feels . . . I dunno . . . more American. More representative of what this country is actually like.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Politics</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Cities are more liberal. It's a reason I wanted out of the city to begin with, back when I was ten million times more conservative than I am now. Small Town is red as red can be. Trump and Thin Blue Line flags everywhere. Racist comments said openly. People lining the street to pray the rosary against gay marriage. Awkwardly, a lot of those people know me and don't know I think differently now, so I find myself constantly being assumed much more conservative than I am. I don't want to start fights, but I also don't want to smile and nod through a rant about how trans people are ruining society.</div><div><br /></div><div>I find it ironic in the extreme that I was so conservative when I lived in Seattle and am so liberal now that I live here. Maybe I'm a little contrary. Maybe I just didn't understand just how much further right the right wing went.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyway, Bigger Town is about 60% Democrat, meaning it's liberal, but shouldn't be a bubble either. I would like to meet some more like-minded people.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Career</b></div><div><br /></div><div>A thing they don't tell you, when you're considering a life path, is that most college-track jobs are in cities. College specializes you, and the more specialized the thing you do, the less likely you'll be able to find an opening for it in a town of 10,000. Small towns have openings for doctors, lawyers, dentists, real estate agents, and optometrists. Teachers and librarians too, but the pay will be low. If you have student loans, you might not be able to pay them on a small-town salary.</div><div><br /></div><div>Plumbers, cashiers, mechanics, barbers, and factory workers are needed everywhere. You can pick a town and live there; there will probably be a job for you. Though if you want to move from a small town to a larger city, you may find cost of living is a barrier.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Cost</b></div><div><br /></div><div>You know all that fun stuff available in cities? The vast majority of it costs money. Whereas the entertainment available here in Small Town is largely cheap or free: hiking, wading, swimming in the creek. If we want to pay money, we can swim in the pool or rent a canoe. It's not terribly expensive.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the city, everything costs so much more. The houses, the groceries, the activities. Making the switch is going to be tough. In Small Town, we've been living (relatively) like kings the past few years. Large house, large yard, cheap groceries. To move to Bigger Town, we will have to downsize by about 500 square feet of house and almost all the yard. We certainly can't keep up the suburban lifestyle some people manage close to the big city. Those houses are like a million dollars.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Aesthetics</b></div><div><br /></div><div>I never wanted to be rich, I just wanted to be surrounded by beauty. It took me years of adulthood to realize that beauty costs money.</div><div><br /></div><div>The country is beautiful, right? My dream was something like this:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8EEGk_PQOyYa7JNK8tP3dIFp69JkGydyV3OZzKTOZoQc8ibr9lYr19G25EkkLA9k1ooDfrJRa0ecOfWsOr060lLGIL60NzBxHz8ZN0KXzfj8h9qciJ5SU__NxdXw6BLmyVJT4HEkjUJ0/s225/images.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8EEGk_PQOyYa7JNK8tP3dIFp69JkGydyV3OZzKTOZoQc8ibr9lYr19G25EkkLA9k1ooDfrJRa0ecOfWsOr060lLGIL60NzBxHz8ZN0KXzfj8h9qciJ5SU__NxdXw6BLmyVJT4HEkjUJ0/s0/images.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div>It turns out this costs a bundle. If you are poor and live in the country, what you can afford is more like this:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBo7RyYFEMgyQ94-66rtftP3SkKUi-BROa10YN0N9M1TVZoOFqh_-imN-ZVSEQBpgPzCcnptxcazpcVrntUbA0pM962m2FAu8syXKbl8_0To0dCu0An8Cob9_-gE350vJJJJQyIeKOQK0/s300/main-qimg-1af7e77e07576d1a0f6d6d47d8df1458.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBo7RyYFEMgyQ94-66rtftP3SkKUi-BROa10YN0N9M1TVZoOFqh_-imN-ZVSEQBpgPzCcnptxcazpcVrntUbA0pM962m2FAu8syXKbl8_0To0dCu0An8Cob9_-gE350vJJJJQyIeKOQK0/s0/main-qimg-1af7e77e07576d1a0f6d6d47d8df1458.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div>Likewise, there are beautiful, picturesque city neighborhoods, like this one:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvkxEeDMOKAFdEnNyieYuWoN7vy3svvnGuHUUXZivHGqLUjiXzHxOihQvo6I9_d4lr78AdhIlBHFHYpLwZvs8wpMqRKSK1Dj92aUi66tL3JvlrF5GT1GWwty81vWFi5tcahTuFRm10pNM/s1200/Toronto-Neighbourhood-min.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvkxEeDMOKAFdEnNyieYuWoN7vy3svvnGuHUUXZivHGqLUjiXzHxOihQvo6I9_d4lr78AdhIlBHFHYpLwZvs8wpMqRKSK1Dj92aUi66tL3JvlrF5GT1GWwty81vWFi5tcahTuFRm10pNM/s320/Toronto-Neighbourhood-min.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>But if you're of reasonable means, you're just as likely to live here:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTyBZVX6lfTOr7og-BSSqdgZ5hxwV-MDIaUhLJsb3CsohgPfYVaj1ZnUWBoKJCPSqtsAnzF7j4RTg04ehnDGlHehRAJZgYRbnKGd6OX-BcV5X6dv1ULFl8PXStuaztVmvXdzMRS27x4ts/s590/IMG_0204-2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="393" data-original-width="590" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTyBZVX6lfTOr7og-BSSqdgZ5hxwV-MDIaUhLJsb3CsohgPfYVaj1ZnUWBoKJCPSqtsAnzF7j4RTg04ehnDGlHehRAJZgYRbnKGd6OX-BcV5X6dv1ULFl8PXStuaztVmvXdzMRS27x4ts/s320/IMG_0204-2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>So the short answer is, if you want beauty, try being upper-middle class. Or at least don't try to raise four kids on one income. The first street we lived on in this town wasn't aesthetic at all. Where we live now is much nicer, but it costs an amount that hardly anybody pays out here.</div><div><br /></div><div>That said, there are more free beautiful things in the country. The spur of the mountains that sticks out over Small Town is one of my favorite things, and I see it any time I drive anywhere. There are lovely drives all over this area. Even just taking the kids to school means driving past people's beautifully landscaped yards, with tulips and flowering trees . . . and yes, some number of crumbling buildings and cars on cinderblocks.</div><div><br /></div><div>I've had ten years of practice finding the beauty here. I know where it is, and I am familiar enough with the ugly bits that my eye skips over them. Whereas when I go to Bigger Town, I mostly see this: </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfKZeYf_LRrMPlaW-bQGIe16dH-YayeR2qN5EsYMvkWcEmux0h5Uo2qFUZuDc-H5K78akOEyg9ppuy_vA4JwQqAc-8m_VswE6Em1liM6NdR3LKoZ3AoLaD2k8rZk1NfIWpyzmiAoQNbec/s1037/2021-05-16+%25282%2529.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="371" data-original-width="1037" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfKZeYf_LRrMPlaW-bQGIe16dH-YayeR2qN5EsYMvkWcEmux0h5Uo2qFUZuDc-H5K78akOEyg9ppuy_vA4JwQqAc-8m_VswE6Em1liM6NdR3LKoZ3AoLaD2k8rZk1NfIWpyzmiAoQNbec/s320/2021-05-16+%25282%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>The main drag is just one long soul-destroying succession of strip malls interspersed with used car lots. I hate it.</div><div><br /></div><div>But, of course, there's more to the town than that. There are some lovely parks. There are cute, picturesque neighborhoods. The house we're hoping to buy is surrounded by some patches of trees, so I won't be starved for nature. And the art museum isn't <i>very</i> far.</div><div><br /></div><div>And perhaps I can see beauty in some unexpected things. I always need to learn to do that more. People, for instance. That's a place beauty can always be found, but fear keeps me from looking.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><div><br /></div><div>I cried today, driving back from the grocery store. I will definitely miss living here. And it feels deeply unfair the way life conspires to push me away from things I want, the way none of the choices are simple and easy, the way decisions made long ago tie us down into consequences nobody wanted. I get so deeply attached to places. I'm sometimes struck with homesickness for a place I visited one time, for one week.</div><div><br /></div><div>Small Town is going on the huge mantlepiece in my mind of Places I'll Miss Forever. And I'm going to a place that feels terrifying and strange, though I have lived there before. I worry my soul will be flattened out, stomped, suffocated.</div><div><br /></div><div>But a line of a poem came to me, <i>And for all this, nature is never spent</i>. Flowers grow in crannied walls and sunsets happen everywhere. I need the Earth, but I won't be leaving her. So maybe that's going to be enough.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpnYU-_t3CCkQn0BrpVVWjsHl5rFTmHKdk_fvP1mp1lGJFOSnvPJ9fSJzh6kUplz4czExDu98Z3G8twJAwlfNAs1RKy4BH5nxLgFWdyy4ZHfhnwjJv8Jc6hfX5f4wSWpFOr4pc6Zd7sgo/s1600/DSCF1600.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpnYU-_t3CCkQn0BrpVVWjsHl5rFTmHKdk_fvP1mp1lGJFOSnvPJ9fSJzh6kUplz4czExDu98Z3G8twJAwlfNAs1RKy4BH5nxLgFWdyy4ZHfhnwjJv8Jc6hfX5f4wSWpFOr4pc6Zd7sgo/s320/DSCF1600.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10853868724554947854noreply@blogger.com0