Today’s assignment from Blogging 101 is two fold:
publish a post for your dream reader, and include a new-to-you element in it.
So without further ado, let me get part two of the assignment out of the way post-haste by admitting that, ever since I saw the phrase “Dream Reader,” this has been stuck in my head.
The dreaded earworm strikes again!
The Day 2 challenge for Blogging 101 is about editing your blog title and tag line. To me, it’s an additive exercise to yesterday’s “who am I and why am I writing” meditation — now just taken that one next step of distilling that mission statement to its essence in order to create a title and tagline that, to quote the assignment, “give visitors context and help them decide to stick around.”
Obviously, being as I am already 5 years and/or 6 months into the game, I have a well-established blog title,* and it’s one I’m not eager to change. The question of tagline, though, is wide open for consideration, and I’m happy to talk about both these elements after the jump.
Because I have decided that 5 hours of sleep per weeknight is just too much of a luxury, I have decided to enroll in another challenge over at WordPress’s Blogging U. Blogging 101 is intended for individuals right in the start-up phases of bloggy creation. This invitation to register articulates the deliverables in this fashion:
On Day 30, you’ll have six (or more!) published posts and a handful of drafts, a customized theme that reflects your personality, a small but growing audience, a good grasp of blogging etiquette — and a bunch of new online friends.
So, considering that I first founded JALC some 5 years ago, and revived it more than 6 months ago, I am either well behind the times or way ahead of the game on this one. Still, I think it’ll be a good exercise for me.
I’ve been in recent conversations about the value of design thinking, and the ways that taking the time to step back and question your automatic habits and questions can be a good way to unlock a more intentional creativity. I see the Blogging 101 container as a way for me to foster that sort of intentionality here on JALC.
So, here we go…
On some axis of consideration or other, I had a more productive weekend than last. Less TV time, a bit more in-the-house puttering (laundry!) and out-of-the-house errand-running (haircut!).
There was even a bit of time carved for self-care. Not through using Mr. Mezzo’s birthday present — the time for that will come soon enough (at least, one hopes it will) — but through a appointment Mr. and I already had on the books to try out one of the local massage studios. From our comparing of notes, it seems as if both practitioners had a good energy and level of expertise, and we like the ambience of the place. In the spirit of being a little bit more regular in the practice of self-care, I’m wondering if I can budget my time and dollars so that I can go back every 3 or 4 weeks for regular sessions.
I had a birthday not so very many days ago. Mr. Mezzo had rather the thoughtful and aspirational gift for me: a bathtub tray. You know, one of those things that allows you to have a glass of beverage (wine, water, pick your poison) and a book propped up while soaking in the tub?
My unfolding internal study of this object and its meaningfulness to me is, if nothing else, a nice capsule example of the ways I am — for better or for worse — so often deep in the study of my life, even down to its tiniest details.
Continue reading “Self-Care as a Political and Spiritual Act”
Turns out that, as with dancing, sports are a thing that I greatly enjoy to watch, even though I don’t have any particular talent — or any talent at all, really — for doing those things with my own body. Now, it’s not like I’m a rabid sports fan that must find something live and sportsy to watch whenever I have a free minute:
But I do follow a few of the “big” sports casually — baseball, football, a little hockey (a more recent addition from when my nephew started playing it). And I’ve always been a huge fan of the Olympics and Grand Slam tennis.
We’re up at the lake house for our last getaway of the summer — spending some time in the water, some time hanging out with the fam, watching the Red Sox on TV, and doing a fair amount of reading.
With one breath, with one flow
You will know
SynchronicityA sleep trance, a dream dance,
A shared romance,
SynchronicityA connecting principle,
Linked to the invisible
Almost imperceptible
Something inexpressible.
Science insusceptible
Logic so inflexible
Causally connectible
Yet nothing is invincible.~ The Police, Synchronicity I
One of the reasons The Cruise was such a treasured experience was that it gave me a chance to touch into the energies of my ancestral lands, at least a little bit. I’m Scottish on one side and Lithuanian on the other, so this trip to the Baltic states was my first-ever chance to explore the Lithuanian side of my heritage.
During our time there, one of our tour guides shared stories from his childhood — both his own experiences growing up as well as myths and folktales that were told to him during his early years. One such story was about the rooster.
Now this caught my attention especially. You see, I was born in the autumn of 1969, which means my animal in the Chinese zodiac is — you guessed it — the rooster.
———-
Chinese astrology isn’t ever something I’ve studied. Actually, let me just say I’ve never really studied astrology at all. (End of sentence. Full stop.)
Still, somewhere in my childhood I saw the list of animals and years and matched my birthdate to the rooster.
Oh, let’s be real. The self-proclaimed online guide to the Chinese zodiac puts things this way:
Most people’s understanding of Chinese astrology and the Chinese zodiac doesn’t extend beyond what they see on the paper placemats that cover the tables of their favorite Chinese restaurants.
Yes, that was me. I can see it in my mind’s eye: a red paper placement with a ring of animal pictures and their associated years around the border. And there was Mr. Rooster sitting at 1969.
I remember being generally dissatisfied with that match-up. At the time, I don’t think I knew the slightest bit about what types of personality traits were associated with different animals/astrological signs. I was just making a visceral, childish comparison: there were cool animals (dragon, tiger, snake), strong and useful animals (horse, ox, sheep) and lovable animals (rabbit, dog). And then there was the rooster. But at least I wasn’t the rat.
My dissatisfaction with being “a rooster” was so instinctual and unreasoning that my guess, looking back with these decades of perspective, is that I would have disliked whatever sign matched up to me. The habits of comparison and finding myself less-than were just so strong back then, the degree of self-rejection so total, I don’t see myself as being satisfied with any sign that was mine, however glamorous the associated animal.
‘Cos ultimately, I just didn’t want to be me.
———-
So when our tour guide started talking about how the rooster was an especially treasured animal in Lithuanian folk tales, my ears, they perked up. According to his telling, roosters were treasured because they were the one animal not afraid of the devils or demons — in fact, the rooster’s voice was believed to be the one noise that could drive the demons away.
I haven’t found much online to further illuminate or corroborate this snippet of folklore our tour guide mentioned. The closest I’ve found is an entry on this website about different pieces of folklore regarding protection against witches:
During the Middle Ages, the cock was an important Christian symbol of resurrection and vigilance. A rooster represented God, goodness, and lightness. Cocks’ places were earned at the top of buildings, domes, and church steeples. They crowed at the birth and death of Christ, and they herald the dawn, “which brings light to the sins of the night and rouses men to the worship of God.”
Witches Sabbats were dispersed, and enchantments were dissolved, by the crow of a rooster. The rites of Satan ended because the Holy Office of the Church had begun. The 4th-century Christian Latin poet Prudentius sang, “They say that the night-wandering demons, who rejoice in dunnest shades, at the crowing of the cock tremble and scatter in sore affright.” In the time of Saint Benedict, Lauds and Matins were recited at dawn and became known as Gallicinium, or Cock-crow.
Now, as a card-carrying witch myself,* there’s a bit of disconnect between this interpretation and my own beliefs about who needs protecting from whom. But, knowing how often Pagan folklore was folded into medieval Christianity, I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to imagine one of my Lithuanian fore-mothers, a wise women and a witch, standing against the demons with a rooster on her shoulder.
After all, if Baba Yaga’s hut has hen’s legs, and the goddess Gabija sometimes chooses the form of a rooster for her earthly visits, why not an ancestress with a rooster familiar?
Amazing how a piece of synchronicity can give you a perspective shift, turning an old source of dissatisfaction into something to embrace. To claim.
* Okay, not card-carrying. I’ve lapsed on my membership dues.
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Image credit: http://danielmackie.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/rooster-in-various-mythologies/
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d been holding the hope that we would be all the way unpacked and organ-imized at the one-year anniversary of moving into our “house on the hill.”
Well, we still have a few weeks till that anniversary — 24 days, to be exact — but I’m ready to call it: I will not be making that hoped-for deadline.
Quite frankly, the momentum for unpacking and all has ground to a complete halt during the last few months.
There’s plenty of good reasons for that. First, there was The Cruise, which took us out-of-town for more than a fortnight, and which required a certain amount of packing/unpacking of its own accord. There’s also the fact that one of the benefits we wanted to create by moving north from Philly was the ability to spend our weekends up at the lake in NH — and we’ve certainly spent a few of our summer weekends happily living out that intention. And then there’s been a few busy patches at work (she says, putting it ever-so-mildly).
But as I began to be aware that the one-year anniversary was approaching and to realize that I was going to miss my secret goal, I started looking at the ways I’ve been giving zero effort to unpacking, and I asked myself what other factors might have contributed to this stop in momentum. And I began wondering if those other factors had both a practical and an energetic dimension to them.
On the practical front, we’ve hit the stage where some of the unpacked boxes are definitively things we want to keep (old tax files, my cross-stitching supplies, etc.) but that don’t actually have any storage furniture to be unpacked into. (Some of our old furniture — including the filing cabinet and some shelving units — got jettisoned during the move, either because it was too old to be worth keeping, or because the ceiling in our finished basement — which is where these items are intended to be stored — is just a teensy-weensy bit too low.)
The energetic front is sort of linked to the practical lack of storage furniture: I didn’t have a vision for the room where the unpacked boxes are currently living.
———-
Let me set the stage to make this all (I hope!) slightly more comprehensible. The architectural features of the house mean that the finished basement falls roughly into three separate rooms, plus a wide long hallway. These “rooms” are open to one another, but still function as separate areas of space. When we moved in, we knew that the first room at the bottom of the stairs was going to be a little library/reading nook area, and that was, for the most part, set up pretty quickly. The hallway was wide enough that we could put up shelves for my prodigious CD collection (plus our movies), which was perfect because the third room, where the hallway leads to, was where we wanted to set up a media room. Those CD shelves were also taken care of pretty quickly, while the future media room and the undetermined center room were where the tons and tons of unpacked boxes waited for attention.
As we unpacked, we kept consolidating the geography so that a higher and higher percentage of unpacked boxes were in the center room, the room we simply began calling “unpacking central.” By taking this approach, we were able to get the media room clear — or, at least, clear enough — so we could start setting it up. The decor is still what we’ve been calling nouveau dorm room, but the core elements — big screen TV, soundbar, PS3 — are there, and we can deal with having milk-crate shelving for the time being.
And then there’s unpacking central.
———-
It was actually really helpful for a while not to have any other vision for the center room aside from its current role as unpacking central. The unpacking process, as a whole, has required me to really come face to face with all my hoarding/shopaholic impulses — facing up not only to the shame around that specific behavior pattern, but also to all the emotional baggage and patterning that led me to be a hoarder to begin with. Quite frankly, it’s been hard emotional work. Good work, important work, work well-worth the doing. Absolutely worth the effort. But hard, nonetheless.
Amidst that hard work, I definitely appreciated not having the extra burden of pressure in thinking “We could already have our ______ (game room, exercise room, whatever), if only I could get my fucking act together!”
Yeah, it was nice to not have that piece of internal monologue running.
But my recent spate of inaction had me wondering if I had now become just a little bit too complacent in that room’s identity as “unpacking central” — like, somewhere in the back of my mind, was I thinking “Well, we don’t even know what we’re gonna use the room for, so what’s the hurry to finish cleaning it up?!?”
So tonight, Mr. Mezzo and I did a little bit of talking and visioning about the kind of hybrid storage/crafting/creative nook we want to create for that center room. We don’t have everything figured out, but enough is settled that we can take advantage of Massachusetts’ tax free shopping weekend with an Ikea run tomorrow to get a couple storage pieces.
Two birds with one stone: start creating and carrying forward a vision to help re-inspire me towards the unpacking, plus some furniture pieces that mean unpacked item actually have a damn place to go.
So maybe we won’t hit the one-year moving anniversary. Maybe by Yule, instead…
———-
Image credit: http://doingitwright.wordpress.com/2013/07/13/the-5-laws-of-moving-house/
I stumbled across this post today —
[SIDEBAR] Okay, let’s be real: a friend of mine posted it on Facebook, which is just about how all the articles I write about on JALC initially come to my attention. I like to pretend I’ve minimized Mark Zuckerberg’s presence in my life, and I certainly try not to use the platform as a way to “show off” or brag on my life. Clearly, though, I spend rather a lot of time there, if the frequency of my JALC-sourcing articles posted there is any indication. In all honesty, there’s a lot of nights (tonight included), where I pop on over for the precise purpose of finding bloggerly inspiration. [/SIDEBAR]
Anyhow. So, I “stumbled across” this post today by Glennon Doyle Melton writing about her kitchen. Evidently, she’d written about her kitchen recently and then been flooded with all sorts of helpful ads and offers so she could remodel it to make if more acceptable. Melton talks about how that initial flood of pretend-helpful criticism prompted her to feel some insecurity, and even consider starting the wheels on some sort of kitchen remodel.
But as I lay down to sleep, I remembered this passage from Thoreau’s Walden: “I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes and not a new wearer of the clothes.” Walden reminds me that when I feel lacking- I don’t need new things, I need new eyes with which to see the things I already have. So when I woke up this morning, I walked into my kitchen wearing fresh perspectacles.
Melton’s descriptions of the everyday miracles that can be seen when looking through “perspectacles”* are brilliantly on the mark. I think my favorite is the coffee maker —
I can’t even talk about this thing. Actually, let’s take a moment of reverent silence because this machine is the reason all my people are still alive. IT TURNS MAGICAL BEANS INTO A LIFE-SAVING NECTAR OF GODS. EVERY MORNING.
— but it’s ALL well worth the reading, and it reminds me of a favorite Louis CK bit:
(I don’t care if I’ve posted this here before. I may post it a million more before I’m done with JALC.)
Melton’s ultimate point is pretty well-summed-up here:
In terms of parenting, marriage, home, clothes – I will not be a slave to the Tyranny of Trend any longer. I am almost 40 years old and no catalog is the Boss of Me anymore. . . . I know how I like my house. I like it cute and cozy and a little funky and I like it to feel lived in and worn and I like the things inside of it to work. That’s all. And for me – it’s fine that my house’s interior suggests that I might not spend every waking moment thinking about how it looks.
Sometimes it seems that our entire economy is based on distracting women from their blessings. Producers of STUFF NEED to find 10,000 ways to make women feel less than about our clothes, kitchens, selves so that we will keep buying more.
This dose of perspective is especially timely since Mr. Mezzo and I are actually preparing for a kitchen remodel. Or planning for one. Or preparing to plan for one — that’s probably the best statement of where we are in the process.
It’s not like Melton’s perspectacles are making me rethink the notion entirely. As far as I can tell, there are a few key distinctions between her situation and ours. To begin with, and most importantly: not all the things inside of it actually work the way they’re supposed to. Everything in our kitchen is original to the house’s late 1980’s construction, and the age has begun to show. The oven’s temperature control is wonky, the dishwasher racks are beginning to rust, and I’m just waiting for the day our microwave gives up the ghost. In addition, there’s a few other features — poorly designed pantry, completely unwanted trash compactor, an island that’s bigger than we want and a wasted wall that could be used for more counters and cabinets if we shrunk said island — I would enjoy changing, which is why then it makes more sense to go for the full redo rather than just replacing one or two appliances.
Also, unlike Melton’s title (“Give Me Gratitude or Give Me Debt,”) we don’t have to go into debt for this project. Our house prices was “discounted” from what you might expect this house and zip code to have been priced at — in large part because of this old, teetering-on-the-edge-of-functional kitchen. So we’ve been able to save and set aside a small nest egg that is earmarked for the kitchen remodel.
Still, as we prepare to evaluate new designs for the kitchen, choose appliances and cabinets and counters, I know that Melton’s warning about falling victim to the “tyranny of trend” will be good ones to carry with me. ‘Cos, you know what? If it helps our project stay within budget, maybe we don’t need to get the most expensive marble countertops, or whatever the top-trend new shiny kitchen things are. A better designed space where all the things inside it work? So I can once again have the capacity to bake bread and cookies?
It’s a great way to think of the core goal.
* I am SO adding this term to my daily lexicon.
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Image credit:
https://www.threadless.com/product/1685/Resist_peer_pressure_All_the_cool_kids_are_doing_it
Self-Love: It's Just Another Lifestyle Change 