Category: Writing

Lessons learned from PBS mini-series.

I have just discovered Downton Abbey and am in agreement with
all the fawning reviews I have been reading. 
It is fascinating, watching a social system that does not exist any
longer, and the contrasts between the upstairs and the downstairs.  The characters are wonderfully drawn and
shaded and I’m hooked on the plot.  But
this is not a fawning essay about a PBS show, it is an essay about discipline.
Watching the special features that accompany the DVD, I was
struck by someone’s comment that the life both the servants and their employers
lead takes a lot of discipline—and not imposed from above, but
self-discipline.  Self-discipline is
something I feel I could use more of, in more areas of my life and it’s
interesting that it doesn’t seem to be in vogue.
I think when we do mention discipline, it is in relation to
diet and exercise.  We are to be
disciplined eaters—firmly pushing away whatever food is “bad” for us and
regimentally heading out of doors for our daily—mostly punishing—exercises to
keep us toned and fit.  I think
discipline in this context is why we are nation of fat people.  It’s just so grim, and there are so many
other enticing offers—say a season of Downton Abby on DVD complete with extras
and a bowl of popcorn—that it is easy to throw that discipline out the window.
To me, discipline means setting up a routine that works for
you, and then doing it.  I’m pretty good
at this at work: the checks get written on Monday and Wednesday, Tuesday is for
data entry, Thursday I do the lunch order and manage the lunch program and
Friday I clean out the staff refrigerator. 
I don’t always feel like doing these tasks, but they all (except for the
refrigerator, which I notice I abandon around February every year) get done and
I feel the better for it. 
Home is another matter. 
Home is entirely ruled by the whiny, sullen teenager, especially of
late.  “But I don’t wannnnnnttttt to do
that,” the lazy teenager whines when it is time to cook, to clean, to
shop.  The lazy teenager wants to spend
her life in bed, reading books, watching movies and the occasional worthy TV
series.  The problem is that if the
teenager takes over, there is no one to procure the food, cook and clean the
house as well as plant the garden and do all those other things that make life
worth living.  So the lazy teenager finds
herself jangly from lack of exercise, living in filth and with an empty
refrigerator.
I think this is one of the tasks of adult life.  Finding a way to get things done so you can
live in comfort with a sense of accomplishment as well as time for rest and leisure.  It’s a difficult task, at least for me.  It’s also probably one of the reasons there
are so many self-help books on the market.

Essay: My favorite time of year.

It’s my favorite time of year and it is because of the
light. When I was growing up, summer was my favorite time of the year.  It was hot and sunny and I got to swim every
day and turned a nice brown color.  Now I
live in a place where summers are mostly sunny, but rarely hot and often I
don’t even bother to own a pair of shorts because the weather does not require
them.

Also now too, I’m an adult and don’t get to swim every day
even if it was warm enough to compel me to. 
I still like summer, even the “bring a sweatshirt” variety that is
Portland, Oregon, but now my allegiance has switched to late spring.
Sometime in late April or May it begins to get light very
early.  When I am a steady exerciser, I
am a morning exerciser.  I also seem to
gravitate to paid employment that begins early. 
This means that I get up very early to exercise which, for the past six
years, has meant being out the door by 5:00am.
Let me tell you that for most of the year, 5:00am is
DARK.  I wear a reflective vest, I peer
through the dark of night and I’m going to have to eventually wear some sort of
light on my head to better see the many things that can trip me up.  Most of the year, it is hard to get up at
5:00am.  It is dark, and cold, and rainy
and I just want to sleep for a little bit longer.
However, sometime in late April, the light shifts and I just
start waking up.  First at five o’clock,
then earlier and earlier until my eyes pop open at 4:30 with no trouble at
all.  I also need less sleep.  During the dark months I fall asleep by 9:30,
and battle every morning to drag myself out of bed.  When it gets light early, I’m up until 10:00
easily and my eyes automatically open at 4:30.  I
also have more energy.
I attribute this surge to my left over agrarian
genes—telling me to get up, get out and till the fields—get the corn planted,
the chickens fed, the gardens weeded and watered.  It makes me wonder if I’d be happier shifting
my sleep pattern to follow the sunrise, sleeping in later in the winter,
getting up earlier in the late spring and early summer.  This will probably not be a thing I will ever
get to experiment with until my retirement as the jobs I seek have firm start
times.
It’s a brief period, this magic time of light.  By mid-July the morning runs begin their
slide into complete darkness and I am left to enjoy the (comparatively) warm
and (comparatively) dry mornings for the rest of the summer.  Then the rains come and it is another long wait for my favorite
time of year.

Essay: Summer Reading recommendations.

Someone just asked me for summer reading recommendations and
I’m happy to oblige! Her parameters? 
Kind of light, or really good.  I
read a lot of books like that.  Pick up
any of these books and settle in for a good read.  Note.  If
you take me up on my recommendation and read one (or many) of these books,
please arrange for a date to chat about your feelings about the book.  We can have tea.

My top three:
(Curses!  All by men
and mostly about men. See below if you are looking for books by women about
women)
The Art of Fielding
Chad Harback
It is new.  It is
about college baseball, but you should read it anyway, even if you find baseball
the most boring thing in the world.  The
reason you should read it is that Harback is amazing at creating characters you
instantly care about after only three pages and his syntax is delightful. I
copied 12 separate passages from the book into my “quotes” feature on
Goodreads.  Mike Schwartz will forever
live in my heart.
One Day
David Nichols
A very good premise in the book realm that was (sadly) made
into a so-so movie.  Check in with the
two main characters on the same day in July for twenty years, from their early twenties
to their early forties.  Funny, and
packed with astute observations about life’s passages during those twenty
years.
Freddy & Fredericka
Mark Halprin
This will be a book I recommend to many people and no one
will read it because it is very thick and the author is very wordy and spends
five pages setting up a joke.  Why do I
think you should read it?  Because the
jokes are very funny and so you are happy at the massive set up.  Because it is fun to see the USA through the
eyes of an exiled English Crown Prince and his wife.  Because it is about the honor you find in
labor.  Because I still choke up thinking
about different parts of the novel. It is summer. You have time to read a long
novel. Invest in this one.
You’ve been meaning to check
out this “YA” thing?
YA Series Recommendations
The Hunger Games (Hunger Games/Catching Fire/Mockingjay)
Suzanne Collins
It is a big hit movie, before that it was a big hit book
series.  The hero is a heroine and she’s
flawed and confused and muddling her way through a fabulous plot.  There are tons of parallels to our modern
lives. It is good reading and there are two more movies coming, so you might as
well read the books now.
YA Series that is not the Hunger Games
Graceling, Fire, Bitterblue
Kristen Cashore
This is another series with strong heroines. I
recommend this with the caveat that it took about 150 pages of Graceling for
everything to click, but then I was all-in, in that “avoid chores” way.  Also, just for fun, it is interesting to read
reviews of these books on Goodreads because a lot of people are offended by the
(very mild and uncontroversial, in my opinion) sex.  Should people be that scandalized?  You will have to read the series to give an
opinion.
Have you not read anything by John Green?
An Abundance of Katherines
The Fault in Our Stars
John Green
John Green, as you might know, is one-half of the Vlogbrothers
who make being smart incredibly cool. 
John Green also happens to be quite talented at writing YA novels.  Abundance
has Math!  And footnotes! And is
funny!  TFIOS is the funniest cancer book I’ve ever read.
Feeling Sorry for Celia
Jaclyn Moriarty
Are you looking for a loosely connected series about girls
who attend a girls’ high school in Australia? Do you like books made up of
letters?  This here is the series for
you. Cecila  is the first book, but if you are going to
just read one of the four, my favorite was the third one:  The
Murder of Bindy Mackenzie
Book that you need not
actually read:
The Disciples
James Mollison
Pictures!  So
fascinating!  The photographer took
pictures of fans at different concerts and then knit 10 representative samples
into one big photo.  It’s incredibly fun
to page through this book.  In the back
he has a short paragraph about each concert which makes the photos even more interesting.  And you can open the book to random pages and
ask someone what concert they think the fans are attending.  It’s a book and  a game!
General Fiction:
Just read this. Don’t question me:
The Elegence of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery
When I talk about this book people become uninterested so
I’m not going to tell you what it’s about. 
I can tell you it’s translated from the French, has two women—really one
girl and one woman—that I loved and that everyone in book group related to this
book, even the men.  It was a big hit at
book group and you should just read it. 
Note that I did not like the last chapter AT ALL, but until then I loved
it.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Aimee Bender
This was one of my top favorites last year.  I loved the magical realism of this novel and
I still think about the main character now and then.  What if you could taste what people were
feeling when they made you the food you were eating?
Downtown Owl
Chuck Klosterman
There are a lot of Chuck Klosterman haters out there and let
me say that I’m not one of them.  I love
his nonfiction and I found a lot to like in this novel about a small town in
North Dakota.  I was not prepared for the
ending, which left my face twisted a bit into a skeptical look, but until then
I was delighted because Chuck Klosterman is a funny man with a unique way of
looking at the world.
Three Girls and their Brother
Theresa Rebeck
This was such a delight and is a perfect summer read.  Three sisters become “it” girls and this book
follows each one of them—and their brother—in turn.  This book features great commentary about our
tabloid society and wonderful voices and characters.
Historical Fiction
I read a lot of historical fiction because it feeds my
history major “needs” without making me work through informative nonfiction
tomes.  Ps. I’m a nerd!  I put them in order chronologically for you.
Trask
Don Berry
Early Oregon history with former mountain man turned
restless settler setting out from too-crowded Astoria with two Native Americans
in tow to explore the Killamook country. 
This is slow to start, but then whips into an action-packed frenzy.  It’s also beautifully written.
(Note that in one overly complex sentence up there I used
“too” “two” and “to.”  Get me to an
editor, STAT!)
Becky:  The Lives and Loves of
Becky Thatcher
Leonre Hart
Have you wondered what Becky Thatcher has to say about the
whole Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn thing?  She’s
quite a spunky narrator and I greatly enjoyed this book.
Jubilee
Margert Walker
So you’re a slave and then suddenly you are not.  What exactly do you do next? It’s not like
you’re getting any 40 acres and mule. 
This was some very interesting historical fiction about the
Reconstruction era, based on Walker’s research about her own family.  It gets a bit wordy near the end, and some
people in book group had trouble with the dialect (though I was not one of
them) but it is worth the read.
The Given Day:
Dennis Lehane
A sweeping tale set in Boston just after World War I it
includes Babe Ruth as a minor character, a lot of reasons to support your local
union and also the great Molasses Flood. 
And there’s some NAACP stuff in there too. There is a lot going on in
this novel and it is very interesting. 
Also, no author living does star-crossed love better than Dennis
Lahane.  No one.
Suite Franciase
Irene Nemirovsky
Maybe, like me, you are kind of done with World War II
novels.  Maybe, like me, you should make
an exception and read this one about the occupation of France.  The novel itself is amazing.  While you are still reeling from how amazing
it is, you read the author’s own story and everything just takes on a whole
level of wow.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society
Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows.
Okay, so maybe also you should read this World War II novel
because 1)You learn all about the occupied island of Guernsey which you
probably didn’t know was interesting or perhaps even where it is.  Also 2)It is in “correspondence” format and
that is always fun.
Science Fiction
Soon I will be Invincible
Austin Grossman
Do you want to read about Super Heroes and Super Villains
and you don’t want to read a graphic novel, but instead a novel? This is your
book!  Do you not want to read about
either of those things? It might be worth checking this book out anyway, as it
is quite fun.
Essays
Manhood for Amateurs
Michael Chabon
Unlike his very wordy and lengthy novels (which I also
recommend) these are short essays that are amazing.  I wanted to read them out loud to whoever
happened to be passing by at the moment. Usually that was Matt. I think I
managed to restrain myself and read him only two, although his life would have
been enriched if I had read them all to him. 
Just go read this.  Chabon is a
fabulous writer and funny.
Detective Series I always
recommend:
Kenzie/Gennaro Series
Dennis Lehane
So, in general, I’m not a fan of the mystery as a
genre.  It tends to have dead people and
isn’t known for carefully crafted prose and I’m also quite lame at solving them
on my own so I always feel a sense of inferiority when I finish.  But if you are looking for a fun way to spend
your summer, spend it with Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro.  The novels are mostly set in the Boston
neighborhood of Dorchester and begin in the late 1980s.  Patrick Kenzie is a smart-mouthed
detective.  Angie Gennaro is his tough-as-nails
partner.  At some point in the series I
realized I wanted to marry both of them, I loved them that much.  Lehane has a good bead on characters and the
books are very engrossing.  Also, this is
the same guy who wrote the The Given Day
and see above about what I said about star-crossed love.  The series is done now, so you can read
straight through.  If you are like me,
you will read straight through and then start again at the very beginning.
A Drink Before the War
Darkness Take my Hand
Sacred
Gone, Baby, Gone
Prayers for Rain
Moonlight Mile
Good books I just tend to
recommend:
American Wife
Curtis Sittenfeld
Another book I absolutely adored and can’t get anyone to
read.  Won’t you please read it so we can discuss it?  This is a novel about a woman whose life
follows a path that will be very familiar to anyone who knows the basics of Laura
Bush’s biography.  Why should you read a
novel about the wife of a president of which you perhaps were not a fan?  Because Sittenfeld is a good writer and she
writes a very good story.  I read this
book a few years ago and still think about it.
High Fidelity
Nick Hornby
For anyone who loves music and relationships.  I’ve been recommending this since the
90s.  A lot of people have read this, and
they aren’t sad they have read it.  I can
also recommend the movie adapted from the book, which is a big rarity.
Prodigal Summer
Barbara Kingsolver
This is my favorite “thick” Kingsolver book (Animal
Dreams is my favorite “thin” one.) 
I fell in love with the characters and the landscape is lush.  It’s also a nicely woven tale, though it
doesn’t seem so at first.
The Brothers K
David James Duncan
It’s about baseball, but it’s about so much more.  It’s big and dense and sweeping and funny and
sad and tragic and moving and chock-full of amazing words.  Every person who has read this book speaks of
it fondly after they have finished it, even people who don’t like baseball. 
It’s also set in Camas, so has a local flavor for people familiar with
Portland.

Illiterate

I was a history major in college, which is a great major if
you want to be interested in your subject and do well in trivia games for the rest of your life.  It’s not a good major for actually working in
your field.  After graduating, I went off
in the world and was astounded at the amount of Americans I encountered who don’t
know basic US History, let alone European History, let alone World
History.  I’ll never forget the time some
coworkers and I were listening to the song “All That Jazz” from the musical Chicago.  There’s a line in the song where the singer
says, “I bet you Lucky Lindy never flew so high.”  This flummoxed my coworkers.
“Who the heck is Lucky Lindy?” one of them asked the
other.  She shrugged.
“Charles Lindbergh.” I called over.
“Who?” they both said in chorus.
“Charles Lindbergh.” I repeated, to confused stares.  “You know, the guy who was the first man to
fly a plane solo across the Atlantic?” 
Nothing.  I switched to tabloid
media history.  “The guy whose son was
kidnapped from his bedroom, was missing for a while and eventually found
dead?”  Nothing.  I could have gone on about his support for
fascism during WWII, or his wife the poet, but clearly they had never heard of
the man.
Encounters like this are not rare in our country.  In fact, about every five years, someone
publishes a newspaper article and or book about the massive gaps, or complete illiteracy in
the historical realm.  I find American’s
disinterest in history odd as I see history as made up of interesting stories
and stories are the things that we consume in the form of TV shows and movies,
but that’s a topic for another day.
Because lately, I’ve been getting the creeping sensation
that I too, am illiterate. 
It started with the Vlogbrothers Crash Course.  The Vlogbrothers make weekly videos about
whatever interests them.  Last fall, they
started a new series of ten-minute videos with John taking Western Civ and Hank
teaching Biology.  I was ready to watch,
glad to review Western Civ—a course I took in high school and college—and shore
up my biology, a class I avoided both for the dissection of frog and for the
finger prick blood type lesson.
It was interesting to note my differing reactions to each
subject.  With the history course I nodded along. “Yep.  Yep. Oh,
interesting, I had no idea. Yep.”  If the
history course was a review, the biology course was wandering far into the
unknown.  “Huh?  What? 
Wait, what was that word? ” Aside
from the “historic scientist” segments, I didn’t follow much. I’d like to say
that I buckled down,  watched the videos
again, memorized the vocabulary and finally learned all that biology I’d
missed.  But I didn’t.  I just stopped watching.  Without the base of knowledge, I couldn’t
find the topic interesting.  And since
there was no grade attached to the outcome, I didn’t bother to acquire the
basic knowledge to know if I enjoyed the subject.
My realization about illiteracy continued with a letter to
the editor about composting.  Portland
had recently adopted a residential composting system which delighted me and
made a lot of people very angry.  One of
the reasons cited by the city for the adoption of the food composting system is that food
waste thrown away with other trash makes methane.  A letter writer pointed out that the food
waste either made methane with the regular garbage or while being composted, so why do we
have to go through trouble of composting? 
I think that he’s wrong, that food waste composted makes something other
than methane, but I don’t have any idea of going about finding the answer.  Except perhaps the handy google search:  “Does food composting make methane?” [post first draft note:  I googled that phrase and found this article.  It did not answer my question. Ask Ashley had a better answer.]
So I’m a bit dumb in science.  I see this as a bad thing, because it has
closed off careers to me. For instance, there was a brief period of interest in becoming a
civil engineer, but a quick look at the coursework squelched that.  There is a lot of soil science involved with
being a civil engineer.  But this lack of knowledge means I walk through the world not understanding things.  I’ve arranged my life so science is not a
part of it, but am I missing something? 
Do smart science people pity me the way I do people who don’t know the
great stories of history?
I feel like I was exposed to science as a child.  There was a period of intense interest in
Chemistry, mostly fueled by the coveting of a chemistry set I was too young to
have.  When I came of age, (10) I did perform
experiments with the set, but my enthusiasm waned in proportion to how dirty
the test tubes became (there was no test tube brush included with the set*) and
I wandered off. I also checked out books from the library of the “kids explore
science” variety and I did some exploring. 
But it didn’t seem to translate into interest in science as a
subject.  I preferred reading about young
scientists in my biography series about great young Americans.
The other thing that has happened to me is that science seems a
bit made up.  Because I don’t understand
it, I survived my five science classes in Junior High and High School by
memorizing things, nodding along as teachers explained things the same way I do when crazy people are talking to me.  Then they were
promptly forgotten.  So when I encounter
science today it seems rather magical.  I
can see why some people who did understand science back in the day used their knowledge to
perform “magic” for the masses.  I would
be nearly as amazed.
I will say that the subject of Geology seems very real to
me, as I can see it around me. But the science subject that does seem real to me is
also the topic I find the most incredibly boring topic in the universe.  I would rather look at actuary tables than
discuss Geology.  Except for a brief
visit to Yellowstone with someone who had taken a course in the Geology of
Yellowstone, any time someone brings up Geology I get a trapped, panicked
feeling and pray for them to stop talking quickly.
So what will happen with my science illiteracy?  I’m guessing not much will change.  I’m an adult and adults are good at paying
bills and saving for the future and having a better idea of who they are then
when they were 15, but learning new things from scratch is not a big thing
about being an adult.  Plus, most grown
up desire to learn about new things comes from interest, like say, learning to
play the stand-up bass at 50 when you’ve been thinking about it since you were
13, or taking riding lessons so you can finally have that pony.  Because science doesn’t interest me, I doubt
the status quo will change for me.  I
find this troubling, but not enough to do anything about it.
*The lack of a test tube brush frustrated me.  The instructions referred to one, but I was
supposed to procure one for myself. 
Where the heck is a ten-year-old supposed to find a test tube
brush?  And how is she to afford one once
she finds them?  The lack of access to a
test tube brush made the object grow in my mind to something rather fantastic.
When I took chemistry in high school** and encountered my first test tube brush
I felt a great letdown.  This little thing
was all it was?  And why did I never have
one?
**Admittedly, the whole of high school science may have
gotten off on the wrong foot simply because I refused to take Biology as a
sophomore as all sophomores did at my school and vaulted myself straight into
Junior-level Chemistry.  As a sophomore,
I was still developing high school study skills, which most of my classmates
had already probably mastered.  So when
we had to memorize the entire periodic table early on, I flailed and faltered
and it was downhill from there.

The past and my own future.

Saturday night, looking for something to do while watching a
four-hour version of Hamlet, I set to combing through my boxes of memorabilia,
shuffling through old bus passes and identification cards, sorting through
pictures, stacking letters, and dipping into and quickly flipping past the
pages of the journals and planners of my twenties.  I got a lot done.  The photos were shifted to a drawer, the
journals and planners tucked away in a different part of the house and the
letters relocated to one box.  Hamlet was
good too.  I found it engrossing in
places, though nowhere near as engrossing as I found my own past.
Saturday night I was astounded—though really shouldn’t have
been—to discover that the same two problems that come up repeatedly for me
today were front and center in the journals of my previous decade.  I also thought about a great many people that
wander through my synapses only in passing, and only now and then.  After sorting my past, I retreated to the
computer, where I teased out information about those same people. The
information I found astounded and excited me: a previous coworker runs a successful business overseas, a sister of a former friend is a florist, a
not-surprising, (but-still-incredible-to-me) number of my former classmates are
ecstatic about their children, and a person I always assumed to be gay is apparently
not.
On Sunday, I thought about all these people, imagining
myself in some of their places.  I worked
hard to stay in my own present, a skill I’ve been building for some time now,
with still no mastery in sight.  But my
mind zoomed around to various points in the past, to what I imagine other’s
futures are, and refused to settle anywhere near my own present.
On Monday, I hit a high. 
I was in a fabulous mood because I was
not in my twenties any longer. 
Though I still have far to go to be the person I strive to be, I had
seen a massive amount of evidence of how far I had come.  The two recurring problems?  They are clearly a part of me and something
to be happily integrated and not a point of weakness.  I felt ecstatic and light and liberated and
happier than I had been in a long time. 
Some part of my conscious nudged me that this wasn’t a good place either
and I had better pull back, but I was unable and unwilling to leave that
feeling.
Monday night I awoke and stayed awake for hours, thinking
about connections between people, the present, the departed and the long gone
and mostly forgotten.  I wanted to sleep,
to be rested for my day, but sleep eluded me as people from my past wandered
through my brain.
Tuesday I crashed. 
Groggy from lack of sleep, I woke up to my own, ordinary life.  A life that seemed less shimmering and
satisfying than the one I lived only the day before.  Thoughts of my past began to fade and my
present loomed before me, the same as it ever was.  I was exhausted.  I stumbled home from work and into bed,
desperate for rest and oblivion.  I
didn’t sleep very long, but I awoke feeling better and unsure what to do with
this episode.  Essay writing time called
and so I sat down and wrote.
Over the past few months I have experienced this cycle to
lesser degrees again and again.  I fixate
on something for a day or two and it becomes a way to ignore my present.  I think I have engaged in this
pattern for years, with the object generally being a book I can’t stop
reading.  I seem to struggle with the
monotony of day-to-day life.  The daily
shower, the finding of food, the keeping house, the daily grind of the
job.  I want to make these things
rituals, but I push them away, again and again. 
I chide the boyfriend for constantly living in the future or the past,
but I am guilty of escaping from my own present.
I’ve come a long way from the rampant poor choices of my
early adulthood.  I’ve managed to build a
solid relationship, a community of people, a steady income and a home I
love.  But I probably need to pay
attention to the times I still seek to escape all of these things.  This is what I learned this weekend.

Essay: On houses, homes, corporations and large armies

Women who make a house a home
make a far greater contribution to society than those who command large armies
or stand at the head of impressive corporations. Gordon B. Hinckley. 
One of
my friends posted this quote on Facebook. 
I have several problems with this quote and Facebook was not the place
to dissect it.  But luckily, we have the
essay of the week.  And so:
Making
a house a home is an important part of society. 
Let’s just get this out of the way right now.  People (right now primarily women) who “do
not work” outside the home are a valuable part of our society.  Families who can have one parent happily stay
home full time not only benefit their own children, but the availability for
volunteering, carpools, baking and the like has a ripple effect around
them.  At the school where I work, we
have parents who work outside the home who volunteer.  However, a lot of the heavy volunteer lifting
gets done by parents who do not have paid employment outside the home.  If you are a “stay at home” mom (or dad), I
greatly salute you.
Why
only women?  I think the part of this
quote that irks me the most is that it takes one gender and assigns them a
role.  This closes the door for people of
the opposite gender to take that path and it relegates the assigned to that
role.  This is often done blatantly by
religious leaders, and subtly by a good portion of the society.  Once upon a time, a Muslim man came to talk
about Islam to the high school youth group I was advising and he stated that
women spend so much time raising the children, they don’t have time to be
involved in politics.  I wondered if
women who did not have children and thus were not busy raising them could trade
in their free time for politics instead, if that was what interested them.
I think
I would also like a better sample size before making Hinkley’s pronouncement
above.  Few women are the head of
corporations and fewer still command large armies.  If the few that do those things do those
tasks well, are they still not making a great contribution to society?  And is it because they are women and not
making a house a home?  That seems a
little unfair. Given that we don’t yet have a representative sample, I would
say that the data is not yet in.
This
quote also gives us a false choice of either “house/home” or
“armies/corporations” Can one not do both? 
Granted, in the United States today we lag far behind the rest of our
peers in the world in making jobs friendly to families, but say that a woman
works part-time outside the home and part-time inside the home?  Is she still making a great contribution to
society, or is she required to only be a full-time homemaker?
If a
person does not want to make a house a home, but does it under duress, that
person’s home probably isn’t much fun to be in. 
The fact is, if you are a woman who is not into making a house a
home—and there are many such women out there—but you do that because you are
“supposed to” your results might not be very good.  Better to outsource some of your homemaking
work to others who are more into it and put your energy where your interests
are.  As the needlepoint says, “When mama
ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”  If
full-time homemaking isn’t your thing, find something that is.
I must
take a moment to note the speaker. 
Gordon B. Hinckley was the President of the Mormon Church for nearly 13
years.  Why is it that powerful men make
statements such as this?  While it
supposedly lifts women up, it also cuts them off from roles other than
homemaker.  Currently, no woman can be
head of the Mormon Church, as Hinckley was. 
His job is not available to women. 
Thus his words seem to put women in their place, hand them a bit of
candy and pat them on the head, as he gets on with other business.  Business that no one will ever question the
value of.  Making a house a home is an
important part of our society and I think both men and women should be able to
do it, if that’s their calling.  But if
it isn’t their calling, society is best served if they go into the world and do
what they do well, even if that is heading an army or running a large corporation.  And even if they are a woman.

Essay: On Gradual Changes

Around this time of year, I begin to catalog the many tiny
changes that mean we are finally on the road to my favorite time of year:
summer.  Just recently I noticed that
rather than putting on my warm wool socks immediately upon crawling into bed, I
had been going to sleep with my feet bare. 
Instead of wearing both my warm flannel top and bottom pajamas I have
switched out the flannel top for a long-sleeved cotton shirt.  Not only do I not immediately grope for my
robe upon waking, I haven’t worn it in weeks. 
And most importantly, I’ve stopped constantly checking the thermometer
next to the thermostat to see just how cold it is in the house.  I haven’t turned on the heat for weeks.
So we’re on the upswing to warm weather, hallelujah!  And I’ve been thinking about how trying to
make big changes in my habits and patterns follows a similar process. Just as
the weather can’t change immediately from lows of 20 degrees to lows of 70
degrees, but instead must move slowly from one day to the next, so do my attempts
at change make a transition at a pace that seems almost glacial.
Recently, I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of an
early morning walk.  For most of last
year I successfully rose early enough to wander around my neighborhood for a
half hour.  I liked my walks because they
ensured I had a minimum amount of fitness every day, I got to see the small
changes in the neighborhood and they were good for my mental state.  The exercise was not difficult, and though it
was hard to get out the door on those freezing cold days that just kept on
coming last spring, I persevered and was rewarded on many levels.
At some point, I fell off the horse.  For some reason, remounting proved to be
incredibly difficult.  For months I tried
various strategies to wake myself, get up and out of bed and out the door.  I tried gradually moving back my waking
time.  I tried going out for only fifteen
minutes.  I tried plunging in and setting
my alarm earlier.  I bought a dawn
simulator. I made deals with myself that were continually broken.  It seemed I would never rise at 5:00am ever
again.
Many years during Lent I assign myself a Lint Project.*  They generally have to do with
self-improvement and some years are more successful than others.  This year part of my Lint Project was a 30-minute walk every day.  At first nothing
changed.  I set the alarm, the alarm went
off, I reset the alarm and no walk occurred. 
Even three weeks into the project I wasn’t having very much
success.  But something clicked near the
end of the project and I’m headed back on track.  I haven’t made it out for a walk every
morning, but there are more mornings that find me wandering than find me in
bed.  It might have a lot to do with the
return of the light.  Though sunrise
still happens after I have returned home from my walk, there is at least the
beginning of light when the alarm goes off. 
But I also think it had a lot to do with my perseverance.  I wanted to get back outside and so I kept at
it. 
A few days ago I came across this quote by Marian Wright
Edelman in my quote pile:
We must not, in trying
to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily
differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we
often cannot foresee.
I was reminded of the many daily differences that deliver
summer to me each year and the many daily differences that resulted in my
change in early morning walk habits.
*So named because one of my first official Lint Projects was
revitalizing my wardrobe during the season of Lent.  Because I don’t think improving the clothing
in my closet is what the Christian season of Lent is all about, I renamed it
the Lint Project.

Essay: On being engaged

“I had no idea that was happening!”  “I never heard that!”  “I wish I would have known about that.”
Do you find yourself saying those phrases a lot?  Perhaps you are disengaged.  Would you like to be more engaged in your
school, a club, your church, your child’s school?  Here’s why you should and how you can.
If you are involved in something on a surface level, you
don’t really feel a part of things.  In
my work as an office manager of a school, I often hear that parents feel disengaged
from what’s going on at school.  Becoming
more connected to what’s going on in an organization gives you satisfaction
because you know what is happening, but also because you feel more connected to
the organization and thus you feel better about not only yourself, but also the
organization.
How can you become engaged? 
I guarantee you that the organization is probably trying desperately to
communicate with you.  At my school we
have a web site with new content updated frequently, a weekly email drawing
attention to content on the website, weekly newsletters posted electronically
and on paper, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed as well as individual
emails.  You don’t need to follow all of
those things, just pick the one that will give you the broadest coverage and
keep up with it. 
Set aside time to keep up with things.  Yes, that means that you have to take the
initiative.  If an email comes to your
inbox about the organization’s activities and you have decided that reading the
emails is the way you are going to keep up with the information then you need
to actually open and read that email. 
Remember, you want to be a part of this organization which means you
need to put in some effort to learn about what’s going on.
If you still feel out of the information loop, ask someone
how they know what’s going on.  They may
tell you about how they get their news and their story may inspire you to
follow their lead.  Or, if you can’t
possibly follow what’s going on, ask an informed friend if they will keep you
abreast of developments.  In doing this,
you are depending on someone else to prompt you, but if they happen to be a
person who enjoys disseminating information and you actually listen, then
everyone is happy.
Once you get in the flow of information, make some
friends.  If your only contact with the
organization is reading the emails you might lose interest fast.  See if you can volunteer for a one-time
event, serve on a committee or host a social of some sort.  When you meet others who are also interested
in the organization introduce yourself and do your best to get to know
them.  Having friends in the organization
will make you feel like an insider.
If you are not going to do your part to be involved with the
organization, don’t ask the staff to go out of their way to accommodate
you.  Accept that you won’t ever know
what is going on and it is not their fault that you didn’t hear of something in which you were interested.  There are many
organizations in this world and you don’t have to be a member of any of them.  The organizations do welcome your interest
and enthusiasm, but if you don’t bring those things, this organization might
not be the right fit for you.
Both in my paid work and at my church I constantly hear
people express surprise about information that has been made available to them
in a variety of ways.  Being engaged is a
part of being human.  Get yourself in
sync with the flow of an organization you care about and feel more alive.