@ Home in the World

(Mis)Adventures in Social Media

Hi, I'm back. I feel like I fell off a cliff there for a while. I hate that. I get going in a particular direction and it's all good, but then I drive into a rotary and can't decide which exit to take.

So while mentally traveling around in small circles for the last week or so, I've been puttering around on various social media outlets trying to set up connections for Artifactual. It's been slow going. I tried to create a page for it on Facebook, but when I try to link the blog to it, it only wants to post to my personal page. As I struggle to keep the last vestiges of my semi-anonymous blogging life away from my family, I do NOT want them to make that connection. I still can't get it to work. The only option I can see is setting up a separate account for Artifactual, but apparently Facebook frowns on that sort of thing. I think I may have to share posts to Artifactual's FB page by hand. I also cannot figure out how to get a FB badge from the Artifactual FB page to put on the actual blog. I can get one from my personal page, but that defeats the purpose. What a pain!

Google Plus. Okay. I'm on it. Now what? I have "Circled" my SIL and one of my husband's cousins, both of whom have reciprocated. I've also added a handful of bloggers who don't know me well and have no idea I've linked to them. And while I love the idea of the hangout feature, I don't yet know enough people on Google Plus to have one. The functionality is fabulous enough that while the rest of Google Plus will probably never catch up to Facebook and Twitter and will eventually wither away, the hangout will thrive, as it is both useful and fun.

Muppet break! Frustrations notwithstanding, this ad makes me smile every time:

 

And while I have never been a huge fan of either Queen or David Bowie, I have loved this song since the first time I heard it back in High School. It never gets old.

Moving on...

So maybe you've heard of the next big thing - Pinterest? I've been avoiding it because what I saw of it early on looked like an endless Anthropologie catalog.  Just what I don't need when I'm not working. But hearing about how fast it grew and its usefulness as a content sharing site, I thought it might be useful for Artifactual once it gets off the ground and decided to get lost in try it. 

As kids my sister and I used to sit around leafing through my mother's stacks of ridiculously priced catalogs and claiming numerous items for our future houses and closets with no concept of how to actually pay for them.  Pinterest is exactly that impulse with some organization and quirky captioning. It is a lovely time suck. As someone who does not do a whole lot of shopping (though my husband might beg to differ), I just had no idea there were so many things in the world. Of course there are annoyances, like the repetition of images that multiple people have repinned, and the overwhelming desire to delete things you don't want to look at (not possible). The whole thing reminds me of the stuff we used to cut out of magazines and tape to our dorm walls in college; beautiful clothes, beautiful people, pithy sayings, and an overabundance of food. There are some truly stunning things to see at but in less than three days I was sick of the mustache as a design element. Stop, please.

As of this writing, I still haven't accumulated any followers. I'm Lisse13 on Pinterest. By the way if you haven't yet seen Pinterest, You Are Drunk, you should.

On Saturday, I did something really crazy and drove across the state to attend a PodCamp.  They have a version of this in Boston, but I just missed it. I got up earlier than I have for weeks and drove over two hours to Holyoke Community College. I wasn't sure whether I belonged there, but it was a very mixed group of professionals - marketers, audio engineers, videographers, photographers, and people who ran small businesses in need of better understanding the tools. I figured I was there to mostly learn, but I was surprised by how much I talked. As SoMe enthusiasts go, I'm still pretty much an amateur, but that even made it clear that there are many others who are interested in these tools with even less knowledge and more floundering. I came away from that event thinking of the many small businesses on the North Shore that could use an event like this...

Wheels aturnin'. Stay tuned.

A Candle, and Not a Flag

**Note: This post is from last year. My attempts at writing something more meditative than angry for the 10th year anniversary are, thus far, not going well. The anger is still valid, but I will save it for another day.

I could tell you where I was, what I was doing, what I first thought, and how we were all sent home just in case. I could tell you that the only time the reality of it hit me was when someone on a crowded train home told me that 300 police and firefighters were trapped in the building that collapsed. But really, what I remember of that day hardly matters.

Since I was in Boston, and not in New York, since I had no friends or relatives in any of the buildings, or aboard any of the planes, there isn't much of a story to tell.

This year it snuck up on me. Sure, I've got plenty going on, but I think the real reason is that there isn't feeling that the anniversary is being used for political gain. We have a new president now, one who is not a "War President" even though we are still at war. The focus is returning to where it should be, not on the politics or the President, but on the people who died that day and the families they left behind.

Of course, the politics aren't gone entirely. There were so many rude and inappropriate comments left on an editorial about a national day of service that Boston.com had to shut down the comments for the piece. Apparently, being asked to do something for the people around you is unthinkable. And all of that is without going to the overtly political sites, who have their own questions and objections.

I wonder if and when we will reach the point that 9/11 is like December 7; a day to be remembered, but no longer so fraught with political overtones. It's hard to say whether 9/11 really changed the country, or if our reaction to it did.

When we remember September 11, I wish we could also recall September 13. Before we mistook revenge for justice, and Saddam Hussein for Osama bin Laden; before the flag stood for belligerence and machismo, and before it was co-opted for a single party. Two days after the attacks, the nation stood together in candlelight vigil to honor the dead and comfort each other, and that, we should never forget. 

I'm not alone. You're not, either.

One of my goals for going to Blogher11 was to sit in on the Special Needs Mini-Conference.

Prior to this, I had never really identified as a special needs blogger and somedays I don't really identify as a special needs mom. Over the years however, I have come to realize how others who have had the experience of raising an adopted child - particularly, but not always, one adopted internationally - were drawn to one another at gatherings. More recently I have noticed the vast difference in my personal comfort level in the company of mothers with special needs children. These women have seen it all. A temper tantrum here, an unusual mannerism or several, an aversion to transtions, a sensitivity to the seemingly innocuous, a vocabulary of strange sounds - these parents try to help or they nod in recognition - but they don't judge.

Beyond seeking the company of others who had "been there," I can't say that I had any specific expectations of the extended session except to learn how people, beside those I was already reading, handled this topic. Mir and Christy, for instance, handle it with particular grace; something I have to assume is partly an extension of their personalities, and partly their writing talents. I was also intrigued by the notion, in the session blurb, that we were telling a story that no one wants to hear.

Well, maybe no one outside the special needs community, but as we are learning, that community is a whole lot bigger than people think. The fairly large room at this one conference was filled with people, and this was just one subset of a conference of people who called themselves writers or bloggers. Imagine how big the population outside this one room could be and what we could learn from each other.

It turned out that one of the things author Rob Rummel-Hudson was talking about was advocacy - writing and talking about what it's like to raise a child with special needs when the people around you, who haven't experienced what you are going through, want mostly to avert their eyes. Aurelia Cotta spoke about the people around her not wanting to hear how medication worked for her and how people compared her to a drug addict. Someone in the audience mentioned that she struggled with the hopeful but impossibly high expectations of her relatives for her preemie daughter when the future was far from certain.

At our tables we talked about what and how much we shared about our children or ourselves on our blogs and in real life. How much do the people outside of our immediate lives need to know? Particularly for those with so-called invisible disabilities, how much do we need to explain their behaviors?  How much will they hold against us? Why are each of these encounters and the decisions associated with them so much more of a struggle?

Interestingly, I found myself once again at that scary intersection between my public life and my semi-anonymous blog, and the more we talked and I listened, the more I realized how many dimensions there were to the struggle of parents, including one I have spent much of my life defending - the public school.   Before I knew it, I was standing and speaking and addressing something I have never really discussed on this blog - I outed myself as an elected School Board member.

I am and I have been for the last ten years, a local school board member. I got involved out of a lifetime interest in education, educational technology, and educational policy. I have worked my way through nine budget seasons cognizant of the tension between the cost of special education services and the pressure they put on the rest of the school, I have learned more and can go on and on about how to run a school, what works and what doesn't, what we as a society should have but aren't willing to pay for.

I have sat in on countless IEP meetings as a parent and wondered what it would be like if every student got this kind of attention instead of the half-hour parent/teacher conference twice a year, but the national conversation about education seems to be going in exactly the opposite direction. I have involved myself in countless discussions online about the conflict of reformers who act as though we aren't demanding enough from our teachers and simultaneously maintain that they are overpaid because any idiot can teach. I have argued with people who simply do not recognize the presence of special needs students in their calculations of what makes a successful school, or worse, claim that special ed services are simply a ploy by union members to increase their numbers. What I have found most disturbing though, is the more recent tendency of people, who were once only against mainstreaming, to assert that our scant educational resources should go to those who have the best chance of being productive members of society.

This sentiment has only been escalated by the rise of the Tea Party. Many of those who once feared that such arguments would meet with disapproval for their very selfishness are afraid no more. They speak of our children as a burden for which they should not have to be responsible.

And so, I stood in that conference room and identified myself and advocated for advocacy. Because this fight is going to get worse before it gets better, but it's not a fight any of us has to face alone.

In case of the Rapture

So do you think it's all the social media that's causing us to pay more attention to some lunatic's claim of the End of the World than usual? I mean, someone comes along and predicts this sort of thing every few years and usually it gets mentioned in a few jokes and we all move on.

This thing has taken on a life of its own like no other prediction, except the one those Heaven's Gate people were involved in - and that was after the fact!

I wonder what motivates these people in their "certainty." I've read some articles suggesting that people put together emergency kits for those left behind (a truly Christian thing to do, I suppose). There are billboards and buses all over the country announcing this stuff. There's a Facebook page dedicated to a post-Rapture looting party. People are talking about the earthquakes and the floods, and the widlfires, and the Terminator. Of course none of that would have anything to do with global warming - except the Terminator and that's just too hot to touch.

It seems to be surpassing even Millenial whackjobbery.

Of course, back then, I knew people who bought guns to protect themselves from Millenial Mayhem. You don't hear about that so much now, but I suspect it's because the people who really believe that a gun would be helpful in an Armageddon situation, think they are going to be the ones who get taken.

I maintain that if you think you are good enough to be taken in the Rapture, you probably won't be.

I'm not planning on it.

Fundy-lit's fascinate me. All signs and no science.

I wasn't brought up with any of this. Catholics don't really talk about the End Times, and I'm not sure the book of Revelations is even in the Catholic Bible (there's a lot of stuff that's not in the Catholic Bible that other Bibles kept), but it's been a while since I've really looked at one of those.

There was a period of time when I studied the fundamentalists, to see if I could better understand what made them tick. This was also a period of perhaps the deepest unhappiness in my adult life. Coincidence? Well, maybe.

I came to the conclusion that the very religious are looking for a set of rules for living, one that might absolve them of responsibility for things that don't make sense. Complexity challenges them so the more black and white they can make the world around them, the better they can function. And if it defies logic? Well, God works in mysterious ways.

I'll admit that I envy people who can live their lives that way, who can accept aphorisms, Scripture, and inspirational soundbites as guideposts for living. I call it the Forest Gumping of America, and I feel that it's gotten worse in the last couple of decades, but that could just be my age and general crankiness about the subject.

Do you remember the Left Behind Series? It was this dramatic story of the End Times that never seemed to end and sold millions of copies in WalMarts all across America. I actually read one of those books. I bought it in an airport in Nebraska, where the was no chance of running into anyone I knew, and I read it all the way home. Curiously, the main characters are in an airplane when the Rapture occurs and one of them has to land it with half the passengers and crew missing. Just what you want to read when you are flying home. Here's the thing about those books - they are written at a third grade reading level. The characters were one-dimensional, story was simplistic, the dialogue was terrible, but the action drew you all the way in. Kind of like an Arnold Schwartzenegger movie, now that Ithink about it.

The fact that the series got so much airtime, even on NPR, and no one mentioned how bad the writing was, spoke volumes about what we are dealing with in terms of anti-intellectualism.

Societal fringes both attract and repulse me. I have spent way too much time thinking about them. What makes people join an anti-government militia in Montana (answer: usually a Democratic President)? What makes people think that government should get entirely out of the education business? How do people become convinced there is evidence of aliens being hidden at Area 51? Why do people insist on Creationism when it defies all logic and available science? Why does the birther movement have so much traction? And while we're at it - what the hell was Donald Trump thinking?

You know there's so much information out there, and yet it doesn't seem to be making people any smarter. In fact just the opposite. People are free to take refuge under any form of foil-hat publishing outlet that they find fits their views. No critical thinking needed. It reminds me of that scene in "So I Married an Axe Murderer" where Mike Meyers confronts his beleaguered mother about getting her news strictly from the supermarket tabloids.

 

"Mom, why do you refer to Weekly World News...as 'the paper?'
The paper contains facts."

   
"This paper contains facts.  And this paper has the eighth-highest
circulation in the whole wide world. Plenty of facts.
'Pregnant Man Gives Birth.' That's a fact."

 

Wait, wasn't that also in an Arnold Schwartzenegger movie?

This thing has taken on a life of its own like no other prediction, except the one those Heaven's Gate people were involved in - and that was after the fact!

I wonder what motivates these people in their "certainty." I've read some articles suggesting that people put together emergency kits for those left behind (a truly Christian thing to do, I suppose). There are billboards and buses all over the country announcing this stuff.

Fundy-lit's fascinate me. All signs and no science. 

My 8 year-old can find Egypt on a map

Have you seen this nonsense from FOX News?

 
Credit

Turns out the image is over a year old, but it seems to be authentic. Really? Can they not find Iraq on a map after all those years of drum beating for the war?  As one clever commenter said about the original image; "that's one way to liberate a country."

 I can kind of understand confusion in the Middle East. Very few Americans will actually ever go there. We don't want to think about where oil comes from. We don't get the whole tribal thing, and what is an Emirate, anyway?

But Egypt is on a whole other continent. We learned about Egypt in our childhood story books and Middle School Social Studies. Doesn't anyone remember World Civ? Oh wait, it's that whole 40 years in the desert thing, isn't it?

It's been incredible to watch so much of this whole thing transpire on Twitter. I have a Twitter account that I use mostly for work. The people I follow are mostly learning specialists, but there are some personal bloggers, a few journalists, a couple of comedians, and the State Department (still a Hillary Clinton fan, you know). Almost immediately after it was announced that the Egyptian goverment  was shutting down the Internet, Twitter came alive with people retweeting anything that could get out of or about Egypt. My favorite so far is from Anil Dash: "Mr. Mubarak, tear down this firewall!"  Only the Haiti earthquake has attracted this much attention from people not directly involved.

(A brief pause while we consider what it would have been like to have had Twitter in 1989)

Clearly as a Democracy we don't like dictators and shouldn't be supporting them, but I'll admit to being a bit concerned about what might come after Mubarak. Is this going to turn into the experience we had with Iran? Who exactly is the Muslim Brotherhood, besides the most organized entity in all of this chaos? Are they friend or foe? Okay, they are not fans of al Qaida, not at war with the West so far, so good. Mohamed ElBaradei; Nobel Laureate with strong Western ties, another possible positive outcome. Omar Suleiman; friend of Israel, okay; friend of the Bush Administration's Extraordinary Rendition program, not so good.

The point I'm trying to make here is that although we shouldn't assume that Egypt will become the next Iran, there's really not a whole lot we have to say about it if it does. We've been touting the benefits of democracy, while supporting some decidedly undemocratic regimes; usually for the sake of "furthering our interests." Over the years, and particularly in the last decade, this kind of hypocrisy has diminished respect for the United States around the world and threatened the security we enjoyed, both as a nation, and as individual American travellers. Interesting, isn't it that those who most fear a conservative theocracy in Egypt are those who want to come as close as possible to such a thing here at home.

In the meantime, while street protests move from Tunisia to Egypt to Iran to Libya, Americans are getting a much needed lesson in spreading democracy without invading a country.

We're learning a bit about geography, too.

 
(Drawing by Pumpkin)

 

 

 

What should you do with $50?

All the Black Friday hysteria, the frantic post-Black Friday counting of the numbers, and the speculation about the health of the economy/Christmas season has brought to mind something that's been bothering me since the recession began.

Commentators discussing our annual spending spree pointed to the higher-than-last-year numbers almost universally spoke of them being a good indicator of things to come and the importance of the retail sector to the overall recovery.

Here's where I get concerned. Although, much of the downturn had to do with the abuse of banks and investment firms playing while the cat (SEC and others) were looking away, a fair amount of the trouble can be atttributed to the ridiculous amount of credit card or mortgage debt people were carrying vs. the appalling lack of savings. That's why it seemed so wrong when President Bush asked people not give up their way of life, but to "go shopping." This encouragement of excess contributed to the extreme difficulty people found themselves in when the housing bubble collapsed. Because they had no savings, many of them had nothing to fall back on when they lost their jobs or got upside down in their mortagages.

Now, the savings rate is up; higher than it's been in decades. People are waiting to make big purchases and forgoing many smaller ones. But economists are talking about how much the economy relies on people, not just corporations, but average people, exercising buying power.

It just seems foolish to rely so heavily on people buying crap they don't need.

Especially when so much of that crap is not even made here in the USA.

What that means is that we are counting on Walmart and perhaps Macy's to make a dent in the unemployment picture. But what kinds of jobs are these? Not only do they pay poorly, but many of these businesses dependent on hourly labor seek to keep these jobs from straying into full-time, benefits earning territory. They might artificially lower the employment rate, but these are not growth producing jobs, either for the economy as a whole, or the people in them.

Thirty-one years ago, Jimmy Carter gave a speech discussing our way of life and the challenges we faced as a nation; economically, culturally, and spiritually. The country was in the midst of an energy crisis and a recession. In it, he implored Americans to face the reality of our situation and its implications.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

 He never actually used the word, but this became known as Carter's malaise speech, and he was castigated by Republicans and others who felt that Americans should never have to make sacrifices.

Unfortunately, our failure to pursue serious energy saving technologies has helped to put us right back in the same situation 30 years later. Refusal to do serious R&D into hybrid and alternative power technologies contributed to the near demise of GM and Chrysler, resulting in large bailouts and enormous job loss. George Bush's "ownership society" quickly turned to owership, with relief efforts that are either non-existent or badly botched, and with many banks still making money hand-over-fist, but not contibuting to the economy in the form of loans.

Yet here we are again, talking about consumerism as the key to economic recovery. This strikes me as irresponsible and dangerous. Buying crap we don't need is not going to lead us to investment in the kinds of things we do need, either as families, or as a nation.

What do we need that hasn't been invented yet?  A cure for cancer? Large-scale water purifying technology? More efficient vaccine or medication development? Better public transportation? Less polluting energy sources? Cleaner, less disease-prone aquaculture?

If you had $50 to invest in something meaningful with a host of other people what would it be?

P.S. If you leave a comment, don't be afraid to get a little silly, as long as it would truly be useful. Great inventions have sprung from impossible ideas.

Cross posted at Beyond the Blackboards.

Sandwiched

I finally snapped at my mother on the way out the door. I had managed to keep it all submerged for two days, but the pressure finally got to me. When she tried to give me advice about packing the car, suggesting that I could simply sit with a large suitcase at my feet in the front seat for the three-hour ride home, I lost it. She might have thought it was okay back then to try to squeeze us in the back seat with all her furniture and other things at our feet, and in our laps, and poking into our sides, on the long rides between New Jersey and Connecticut every weekend.  Those trips were so indicative of the priority of her things over her children. It really wasn’t okay then, and I will certainly not put up with it now.  My outburst hinted at, but did not truly approach, the twenty years of crap that will never truly be resolved between us.

She moved away from me then, choosing to wave good-bye from the safety of her glassed-in porch, perhaps to spare me another five minutes of her nit-picking, her lack of faith in my judgment, her inability to give me the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, it’s just as likely that heading back toward the house was an unconscious decision on her part and that I was the only one in the exchange to feel any guilt, any kind of burden of the past. She absolves herself of any responsibility for my brother’s poor choices by blaming genetics; “he’s just like Dad’s brothers,” she says in the same tone she used to remind me how much I looked like her mother-in-law, whom she clearly resented.

It is enough that I must bring my two rambunctious boys to stay for two days in a house full of antiques. It is enough that my sister has bailed at the last minute and that she and her family are not there to act as a buffer between me and our mother, as I have so often been called upon to do for her. Having more of us there blurs the focus, spreads the critique; reassures each of us that we did not imagine the dysfunction with which we were raised.  Now it is only my husband and I, listening to her constantly berate our boys for their odd posture and involuntary leg swinging at the table. We are compelled to join in the nagging, lest my mother’s furniture be ruined by them just being boys.

In one of her stories, my mother recalled standing at the foot of the stairs yelling for my brother day after day so that he would get up and get out the door to catch the school bus. I wondered, but did not ask, if it ever occurred to her to go up the stairs and into his room to speak to him – one human being to another, instead of some overbearing master yelling at a dog.  I was a freshman in college before I realized that most families do not communicate by screaming at one another. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that many siblings did, in fact, enjoy each other’s company.

It is hard being the eldest daughter in my mother’s house, and even harder to simultaneously be the mother of two imperfect boys. In my mother’s presence, I see them through her eyes; note every misstep, cringe at every jump and slide and lean and push. It is so hard not to bring her wrath down upon them in my own voice. It’s hard enough in my own house, never mind hers.

On this visit, Pumpkin was freaked out by the radiator, something that had never bothered him before. This time though, he insisted that it sounded like a man, standing in the corner of their bedroom, sniffing. Last night, I watched him walk around my mother’s house before bedtime, counting all the radiators (perhaps his way of controlling his fear of them). While I sought to calm his nerves against this formless hissing, I felt the usual dread that consumes me on these visits, reveal itself as menace. The cavernous Victorian house felt claustrophobic, and the world outside its windows threatening. I could not wait to get back to safety.

On the car ride back to Massachusetts, pressure valve released, I could not stop crying. I struggled not to completely lose it on the boys squabbling in the back seat. I was exhausted from protecting everyone, including myself and my mother, from the ugliness of the past. It also occurred to me that it was finally time to acknowledge that I was never going to move back to Connecticut, that I would never be comfortable there, and that even though I still had lots of friends in the area, the simple fact was that I was strangely reminiscent for a time that had really not been all that great to begin with. Never mind that Piper would never consider such a move; it had been in the back of my head since I left 25 years ago, always the possibility of getting back to my roots.

No more. Perhaps it’s not so much that you can’t go home again, it’s more that sometimes, you just really shouldn’t.

A Whole Lotta Nothing

Or, where I've been for the past month or so.

The kids are in bed. My husband is upstairs fixing the dryer. I am sitting in the living room and the TV is OFF for the first time in just about as long as I can remember. I am largely caught up at work. I'm going to blog. So there!

I am taking Wednesday off to do things like color my hair, go to an eye appointment, bake my cranberry gingerbread, and get bagels to take to my mother's.

We will leave here Thursday morning for CT and we will stay at my mother's for two days. I wish I could say it will be relaxing.

I will probably not do any Black Friday shopping, but a lot depends on my desire to get out of the house. My mother lives near a bunch of outlets, and I always feel obligated to go when I am down there, but I'm increasingly realizing that I don't get very many gifts there, I tend only to buy stuff for myself.

I really don't need anything.

Each year has been increasingly difficult in terms of telling people what I want for Christmas. I really don't need anything, as I said, and what I want is stuff that is too expensive to be asking for.

I want an iPhone 4. Mine is version 2 and the apps my company makes for the iPhone don't even work on the old model that I have.

I want a dog. Sort of. I would like to have the kind of life that would let me spend lots of time with a dog. I could certainly use the exercise. I'm just not home enough to really enjoy a dog, and that kind of makes me sad.

I want a slow cooker. Again, sort of. I want to have the kind of family that would eat things from the slow cooker. As it is, my kids don't want to eat soup that didn't come out of a can. It makes me very sad.

I want a housekeeper. I have always hated house work, except laundry, which most people complain about, but I actually like.  I simply don't see dust, and it hardly seems worth my time to deal with it. I want someone to clean the bathrooms.

I want a massage therapist. I had one, and he was fabulous, but I stopped going when I got laid off, and I really don't have the time to go back. I'm not even sure he's still at the place he was because that place has changed names.

I want a vacation. A real one. I want to be able to take my kids and my husband on a plane or a train and go away for a week or more. I want to not have to think about work. I love my work, but it is all-consuming these days. I want to take Pumpkin to some of those cities he askes about nearly every day now.  "Is Toronto bigger than Sydney?" "New York bigger than San Francisco?" He's obsessed. He discovered Google Earth a couple of weeks ago, and it can be difficult dragging him away from the computer now. That child needs a passport.

I would like a new grill. Of course what I would really like is a proper outdoor kitchen. Unfortunately, the last time we paid a landscaper to do anything for us, it didn't work out so well. My husband is now building his own walkways outside - one bag of peastone at a time. It will look fine - when it's done - next spring.

I would like more time to write. How much does that cost?

Watch your language!

My grandmother would be mortified.

Somewhere in my teenage years, the goody two-shoes in me learned to swear like a sailor. It was probably along the same time I learned to sail. Sailing was surprisingly competitive, and the kids would verbally abuse one another brutally all in the name of winning a boat race. Hell's Kitchen for me was a 14 foot Blue Jay on the Long Island Sound.

I tell myself that I have toned it down since I had children, but my husband would probably not agree. I maintain that there is a big difference between cursing in front of someone and cursing at them. Still, my grandmother would be horrified. She was very proper about her language, and I grew up in an era where you couldn't even say "Oh god!" with out being taken to task for it.

A couple of weeks ago, Piper called Tigger out for exactly that phrase, and I had to turn away in order not to show how surprised I was by it. I live in a world now where religion is more of a suggestion. I often find myself doing a mental double take when I discover others who take it more seriously. "Oh god," is just one of those phrases that's in the vernacular, no one seems to think much about it, or its orgins anymore, like "awesome."

Oh, and it's not that Piper takes the religion thing any more seriously, in fact he seems to fall farther on the atheist side of agnostic than I do.

Thinking back, I seem to recall that our elders' objections to bad language were as much about linguistic laziness as coarseness or disrespect.

And then there are time that I just can't figure out what it's about. Like this time in the fifth grade when I was called out on the carpet for a misshapen letter.

I can't remember the exact reason I turned in my assignment in an envelope. It might even have been a letter writing exercise, I'm not sure. For whatever reason, I thought it would be funny to put a fake return address on the back of the envelope. Instead of ending with a ZIP Code, that address ended in the phrase "and so forth and such and such."  Even without completing the reading of that phrase, you know what the last word is supposed to be.

Let's just say that my handwriting was never up to Private School standards, and in my version of the phrase, the last word looked distinctly like "suck." Ms. Lockhardt called me up to her desk, and in a very stern voice, she asked me why I had written it. Did I realize it was a very, very, bad word, and did I know what it meant?

Well, no, in my fifth grade, ten year-old innocence, I had no idea what it meant.  She managed to make me feel so horribly embarrassed that I started to cry, and then I had to go back to my desk in that condition. When I think about it now, and how clearly accidental my part in it was, I'm still wondering why on earth she felt she had to do that, and then how ridiculous it seems in the context of our comparatively lax our standards are 30 years later. That word, in particular, is something we use without thinking; most kids are using it regularly, hopefully without any knowledge of the origin.

I know there are people who might consider this and point to it as a contributing factor in the coarsening of our political debate, but I'm not sure. Again, the difference between cursing in front of, and cursing at a person. It also doesn't take the use of curse words to tear a person down; something the bullies in my fifth grade class proved every day.

In an era when mothers are blogging about their kids knowing the words to songs from the Ramones and the Violent Femmes, is there room to be concerned about their language?

Pumpkin has the uncanny ability to pick up bad words and use them in context without ever recognizing the inappropriateness of the situation. He's come up with some doozies I'm pretty sure he did not get from me. But who know? Last night found the four of us crowded around the computer watching clips of The Young Ones on YouTube. I expect him to start using the word "bahstahrd" any day now.

Too tired to blog, and related rants

So, I'm reeling from the news that my beloved Women's Colony has decided to shut down. I was under the impression that they were testing the waters of expansion, but apparently Mrs. G. and her colleagues decided that it was all a bit too much.

Today came the announcement that the Silicon Valley Moms Blog is also ceasing operation. I haven't heard why, or figured out if that also means that local affiliates across the country are also ending, but that's at least two in as many days.

I wasn't a big reader of SVMoms, or any of its sister sites, but The Women's Colony was a daily check-in for me. I will miss it terribly. I appreciated the company of women who were older (can I say that?) and had seen more than a thing or two with children, husbands, and extended family. I loved the Confessional, though I rarely had the need to use it. Their decision has put my quandary in a lot sharper focus.

I don't want to shut this space down, and I don't yet plan to. However, my job, something I can't really blog much about, is consuming not only my time, but my brain space.

But you know, the lack of blogging is really only a symptom.

Piper and I had a long talk last week about the vast number of things that we were not attending to while we were working. We must make a list of things to tackle, and we haven't even done that yet. Much of it deals with getting Pumpkin some additional help, but then there is a lot of paperwork stuff we have needed to chase down, but have let go for far longer than we should. Pumpkin needs to be in a theraputic camp, but when I finally got around to looking into it, the application deadline had long passed.

We need to get a shed for the backyard, but we have needed to do that for ten years. We have a very bad habit of just living with stuff, and it's causing us to miss out on a lot these days.

We need to go on vacation. We desperately need to take our children on a trip this summer, but chances are, we won't do that either. It's too hard, and we can't seem to make a decision about where to go. We will spend our weekends trying to catch up with housework, yard work, and work work, before we know it, it will be the end of August and school will be starting.

There's a half a dozen things I want to blog about, even more when you count the other blog I was trying to launch that focuses on Education and Learning. There's so many good topics on that front; The Texas Textbook Massacre, the push for charter schools, the national standards proposal and whether they measure up to what we already have in Massachusetts, and the whole social media in learning thing, going on in the adult learning world.

I can't seem to do it. I get upstairs into the office that I created for exactly that purpose, I get two or three lines on the screen and I can't get any farther. My writing has always been slow, I agonize over every word, but it's more than that.

I'm freekin' tired.

It's 5:30 PM. I'm writing this at my desk at work before I leave, because even if I get it all written in my head on the drive home, it will never get on the screen. I will stare a mostly blank screen for hours and second guess myself. Before I know it, it will be midnight, leaving six hours before I have to get up and go to work. And that's before I've put that last load of laundry in, gotten my clothes out for the next day and gotten ready for bed.

Vicious cycle.

Here's the thing. I'm finally at a place where I have the full life I always wanted. But I feel like I am seeing that life rather than really experiencing it, because we don't have our shit together. I've always been easily distracted (except when I was reading), but the full schedule and the lack of sleep are really making things worse. I used to be able to keep details in my head, but I can't do that either. I've gotten some extra little tasks to manage at work, but since they aren't really related to projects, I'm afraid I'll forget all about them. No "system" has ever worked for me. I have never, in my whole life, been able to stick to a routine. Whether that's self-discipline or ADD, or some combination of the two, I'll probably never know.

But somehow I need to get a handle on this so I don't lose it all.  Because I have finally gotten to the point where I can say I'm a good writer. I have a good life, and a good job, and a great family, but I have no idea how long I can hang on to all of it.