Life's been good to me so far

I'm so glad it's the weekend.

I hate waking up in the mornings, and it's been clear for the last couple of years that there is no (weekday) end in sight for as long as I have kids in the house. I am consciously setting up my future so that I can stay up at late as I want and totally avoid mornings, and that is not a joke. My ideal would be to see people for counseling/do a late shift in a mental health facility/teach classes, in the afternoons and evenings, and write at night. I have a personal life goal of not seeing 7 am for an entire decade.

For the last couple of weeks (summer schedule has been constantly in flux), my morning routine has been this nonsense involving waking Aaron up at 7:30, waking Isaac, Jake and Elise up at 8, getting Aaron to a carpooling point in town for his ride by 8:30, and having the little kids to music camp by 9. Somewhere in there I cook and serve some kind of breakfast and pack 4 lunches, and try to give out a lot of hugs and make sure nobody is forgetting anything. Then I come home and wake up Annie, have breakfast with her, and we talk about things she's supposed to get done that day. M, W and F I'm here with her. Tuesday and Thursday I go to college all day, and Grant is here working from home. College feels like a lot at the moment, because I had multiple papers due this week, am participating in a couple of research studies for extra credit, and next week is finals.

I'm also sick with something minor that involves a cough, which has made my coffee reliance reach new heights. The other day Grant laughed when he saw my huge mug and asked if I'm drinking from punch bowls, now.

The revamp of Annie's privileges and guidelines and all, that I mentioned a couple of entries back, is going pretty well. She's burning through a lot more math and science than usual, anyway. Monday when she was done with chores and regular assignments, we watched Slumdog Millionaire together, pausing periodically to convert rupees to dollars on my phone or explain some concept like what the Taj Mahal is. She loved it. It's the sort of thing I can only do when Aaron's out of the house because I am not ready to field the months of woe and sleeplessness when he finds out there are little kids living in trash piles and being purposely disfigured so that they can get more change from tourists :/ We also listened to and read this story on NPR about people in slums using Google Maps to make others aware of the realities of slums, and sometimes advocate for change.

I get really frustrated with how quick Annie is to just do nothing, if people are not on her to do shit, and also how quick she is to do things she is not supposed to, if for one damn minute we are not leaping to capital-C Consequences. She's already got that adolescent dichotomy down pat, where kids are uber helpful and proactive and resourceful OUT of the house but act like butt nuggets for their parents. At Girl Scout camp, she was stacking chairs and sweeping floors and helping little kids with crafts and singalongs all day every day. At derby she does anything Chuck and Vee (coaches) tell her to, for hours of sweaty, bruising relentlessness. This is the case with PATH enrichment classes and cello rehearsals - she is interested in all kinds of volunteer jobs, too. At home, she wants to do nothing.

This is actually one of my biggest areas of skepticism surrounding homeschool; the teenage battle between the adult self (that tends to come out in the world) and the baby self (that tends to dominate at home) really makes me want to drop her off with some other adults she'll be more eager to impress, more often. I hate hawk-watching and I hate nagging, a lot, as a parent. I mean all the kids to some degree try to get away with stuff that is not really ok if they can, but I think it seems more irritating with Ananda because she is so intelligent and well spoken that it seems avoidable (and intentional), in her case. It's also amped up significantly in the last 6 months, like ANYTHING she can manage to do - watching the next episode of a show she's into without asking or me seeming to notice, for instance, leads within one week to me realizing she's streaming whole seasons all day every day, and then trying to play dumb like, "What? You said this show is ok for me to watch" when I question it.

It can be (to me) surprisingly hard to really draw a line in the sand. She is such a whole and complex person, standing there my same height, and we'll have been getting along great and she's so obviously distressed and distant and resentful when I force issues ("you have to ask to watch a show or movie so that I know you have all your chores and schoolwork done first and aren't turning into a mold-covered sloth, this is your warning that the next time it happens without asking your laptop is going in my closet for a week, blah blah blah"). I do it anyway, obviously, it can just blow as much for me as it does for her. Wednesday we had already taken so many things away to get her schoolwork back where it belongs, and her screen time under control, and then I was at this loss when it was DAY TWO of her "putting away the laundry", and hours in, after 3 warnings she was still just sitting out there trying to watch her brothers play or talk to Elise or look at a book or anything but actually sort the piles of clothes she was surrounded by. I had to have her put her phone in my bedroom for the next 24 hours AND threaten that she was not going to be going to meet her friends for lunch like she'd planned, if it wasn't done before a set timer went off, before she would even sigh and get on with it.

I feel like I need a giant spatula to slip under her and flip her onto her damned feet, sometimes.

She made me laugh so hard, the other afternoon. Aaron thought one of our chickens looked sick or something, and she (the hen) was looking kind of bad, but I thought she might be hot and we misted them all with water. I said, "Maybe she has some problem she was born with that we can't help, Aaron, or maybe she ate some bad bugs or developed an issue or who knows..." and Annie said, "Or maybe she's a chicken, and so she just drops dead randomly." I laughed SO hard. It's horrible, I know, but every chicken owner I know has the same issues (any random stray dog or cat or bird of prey or raccoon or ANYTHING wants to eat them, they are so stupid and try to run away from home often, if you don't dip baby chicks' beaks into any new water dish to show them the water they will just dehydrate, sometimes one suddenly kills another one - it's crazy). Aaron was scandalized, and she was like, "Aaron when we went to the feed store looking at chicks we saw a breed you HAVE to kill before it grows up, because they're bred to get so fat that their legs cannot support their weight by the time they're grown." Which is true, and also (really) horrible. I don't know, man.

Her lunch out with people was great. She has amazing friends that I really like and feel good about. I was thinking how fortunate she seems to have found such great WAY OLDER kids, since way older tend to be the only ones she relates to and acts comfortable with. This "lunch followed by pet store followed by Izzy's house" afternoon really underscores this - it was Francois and Izzy (siblings, 18 and 15), Joe (18), Mia (18) - and Annie (13. Barely). They are all teenagers we've known for at least a couple of years, and Izzy is the one in the group that Annie is closest with, but. I dunno. The age gap is going to start to close in the coming years because all the oldest TLC kids are going away to college. Her derby team is all 11-16 year olds, and she tends to hang out with a 10 year old at GMYS. *shrug*

I love that those 18 year olds, and the others she knows, have to study and go to class all the time because they're all in dual enrollment. Most of them also either work or volunteer. Because they're cool people she wants to be like, it's great motivating stuff when we talk about how important it is for her to get used to studying, more assignments, etc NOW.

She totally flipped tonight because we were talking about how she's going into the 8th grade this year, meaning she'll be (in her words) IN HIGH SCHOOL NEXT YEAR. She was slightly disturbed, I think :p

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I'm super fucking over our van at the moment, since the AC up front is broken - it works in the back, so the kids have AC, so we've never prioritized fixing it like we would if they were suffering. No, it's just us sweltering in the front on our own (and the smaller car has good AC), so we deal since there's always something we'd rather spend that couple hundred bucks on. There have been way too many times I find myself ripping my wind-tangled hair out brushing it or changing gross clothes as soon as I walk in the door, after being on the highway. It keeps being 97 degrees in the afternoons. The worst is when the pressure and humidity hit their peaks just before it rains. UGH. It's like being squeezed through some kind of vice, and then on the other side when it starts to pour we lose about 20 degrees in just a few minutes.

I took Ananda and Aaron to a new antique store that was pretty great, this afternoon. Here's a tumblr picture entry about it.

I've been thinking a lot about charity we can get involved with as a family, today. Over the last few months I've heard (directly and indirectly) about childhood hunger in our county several times - basically, lots of kids are ONLY reliably eating free breakfast and lunch, at school, and/or their families struggle big time with bills during summer vacation because they have to buy those additional meals. This is something that I'm trying to address with as much sensitivity as possible, with the little kids, since they are having recurring issues with other kids begging for snacks out of their packed lunches at music camp (which also has a free lunch option for people who qualify, that about half the kids there are using). Isaac and Elise both also felt bad for kids who didn't have snacks for snack time in school, last year, and would sometimes take extra for friends. Obviously I cannot always afford to feed every kid in town, but the newspaper ran something not long ago with a long list of food distributors and I think I'm going to call around and see what is needed and how I can include the kids in helping to fill some of those gaps. For now I am proud of them for no longer complaining about being sick of clementines and pistachios and granola bars, and probably giving in more than I really should when they ask to take extra for other people.

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I've been having this wack existential crisis bullshit. I don't know what my deal is, but I lie down in bed at night and just get so crushingly sad and feel so freaked out, thinking of how each of my kids are mortal and every single person I know is going to die eventually, and...it's terrible. I move away from Grant's body, imagining it rotting one day, as it is really going to. It's terrible! I can have a great day and still end up reading myself to sleep after I stop crying, just to distract me. On the one hand I think I'm crazy, and on the other hand I think we're all crazy, like - HOW is it that EVERYONE isn't ALWAYS having a crisis about the fact that we're all going to die?! And it can happen anytime?! I understand that it's not productive, but not how we don't do it regardless.

I think the biggest reason I am an Anne Rice fan is that Lestat, one of her most ongoing and recurring characters, had this huge mortality freakout while he was still human that perfectly captured the fears and feelings and melodramatic poetry I already had, then (at 15ish) about time, and death, and impermanence, and...it's like a swelling, desperate longing in the background and a cresting panic in the foreground, all silent in your brain as everything goes on as usual around you, until the sight of a lone tree in a field makes you burst into tears and you don't even know why.

Ananda, for instance, was a baby. A little baby. The other night I laid down with Elise on her bed in their room for awhile, because she wanted me to, and just lying in that very teenage bedroom that Ananda has completely taken dictatorship over - dim with the shifting light of a lava lamp and some emo ass nice music on, with shit all over the walls - took me back to it being ME experiencing everything in the world for the first time, and I see how fast Annie will be through the other side of it, and then my head explodes.

Not helping: Adrian, A&A's good friend from PATH, just fell 20 feet off some cliff and broke both of his lower leg bones (tibia and fibula) - they snapped totally in half, the x-rays are brutal. He spent the afternoon in surgery and now has titanium pins in his leg for the next 6-12 months. Poor Cybele (his mom) was posting the pictures of him lying there on a stretcher, surrounded by paramedics, on facebook, from where she was ACROSS THE COUNTRY (Adrian has been staying at his grandparents' house for a couple of weeks).
AND, a girl from Ananda's roller derby team has been out sick a lot these past months, and is now admitted to Miami Children's Hospital. We don't know what's wrong yet, just that she has had to have fluid drained from her brain and isn't getting out right away :/ Teammates are all meeting up there tomorrow morning, to visit and bring her things...

Those situations were both today, though. My cresting crisis has been all week, and I don't know what's stirring it up.

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I'm also trying to have nice, soft feet for the first time in my life. I've typically been barefoot or in flip flops all day erryday, since I was toddlin' along in a diaper, and I usually have really thick callouses that I consider beneficial and a-ok. I can walk around outside and it doesn't hurt, which is cool. Nothing hurts my feet, which almost never seem sweaty or smell bad, since they are encased in their own natural leather, as it were. I have never understood foot fetishes or the idea that your feet, the things you walk on the ground with, are supposed to be pretty. They're feet! Why do you want them all raw and vulnerable? I make fun of Grant for having "tender vittles" (which is actually a kind of cat food). We do too many rocky beaches where the sand is a million degrees!

Anyway. There are two reasons I am conducting this soft experiment now, which thus far involves ped eggs, foot files, heal cream, oil, lotion and (gag) socks.

1.) For the last couple of years, my feet have taken their traditional leathery reptillian qualities to new levels, that are gettin annoying. I get actual deep CRACKS on my heels now, if I don't try not to, which cause irritating problems by catching on the sheets and causing my tights to run, that I am not into. That sharp dinosaur shit is also not nice on the calves of anyone trying to sleep. I don't know why my dumb skin couldn't leave well enough alone.

2.) Ever since I got shin splints in New York, Grant periodically gives me pretty amazing foot rubs that make my eyes roll back in my head. And, I discovered at some point over the last year's worth of mornings, that I wake up with really sensitive and almost erogenous feet. I find myself rubbing the arches, aka the only parts with semi-normal nerve endings, all around the top of the opposite foot and my sheets, thinking, "What the heck is going on here? Why is this so awesome?" I have an online friend who is far more brazenly open than I am about sex on her blog(s), who talked about actually managing to have an orgasm from rubbing the soles of her feet on her bedsheets for a long and patient enough time. I want in on this weird action I didn't know existed. I at least want some full sensation foot rubs.

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I made some peach cobbler tonight that I was pretty happy with. We ate it with coconut (So Delicious) vanilla ice cream. Om. Jake actually said to me, "Mom, thank you so much for making this dessert. I really appreciate you cooking this." Elise added, "I've never eaten anything this good in my entire life."

I suppose that it shouldn't have a big effect on my own beliefs, as none of it changes my own personal faith experiences, but the truth is that I'm sort of heartbroken and confused in the wake of several people I never expected leaving their Christian beliefs behind. It's had a lot to do with my own doubts and troubles over the last year.

One of them is Anne Rice... I came into Catholicism directly following reading her book about returning to The Church, Called Out of Darkness, as a long time fan of hers. I follow her on facebook and we have even chatted there a couple of times, and...well...silly as it might sound, she has been very influential in my life. Her vampire books were some of my very favorites as a teenager and her witch/crossover books are some of my very favorites now. Her deeply researched and beautifully expressed reasons for returning to her childhood faith really touched me, and when we were talking we seemed to have a bizarre lot of things in common (she was starting the Eat to Live doctor's Beans and Greens diet and wrestling with her faith vs her (anti-Catholic) friends, and had always wanted to write, and was with one man most of her life, and is really pro-gay rights and anti-abortion but has such a hard time with religion and politics...) I've always found it comforting and inspiring that she didn't START writing until her 30s. Anyway, it really rocked my boat in a big way when she publically, loudly decried Christianity and said she would not be a part of it anymore.

Then someone else, who I will not name, but who I thought of as a real living saint of the Orthodox faith...who has inspired and moved me and countless others and had bishop approval for their writing and who I had had long conversations about, with several other believers, and had traded emails with...found out that their bishop, the one they had been directly interacting with for blessings, prayer and counsel, was sexually abusing children. It was very painful and this person left Orthodoxy and is still going to a (different sort of) church, but it is painfully obvious that they are much more ecumenical and are also reading about many other faiths, and open to practicing them, and...I am not judging them! It's just a completely different path and definitely not the same one I'm on anymore. Everything this person says makes complete sense to me, still, as they try to sort out where they are and what they need and deal with persecution from those who feel they should have stayed the course with Orthodoxy...and that is...hard, I guess, for me, as someone in RCIA classes.

Those two things happened very close together, along with my ex, my baby daddy 1.0, so to speak, telling me he regrets his own Catholic conversion and feels he's agnostic at this point. I mean part of me wants to be really judgemental because of our history and say agnosticism is just more compatible and convenient with his lifestyle at the moment...but if I'm honest and shrug off the baggage I understood everything he had to say on the topic very well. Which is...jarring, I guess? Because we went to church and youth group and church camp as teens and attended bible study and prayed and grappled with premarital sex guilt together, and I told him all my deep dark spiritual secrets and just, I don't know. First kiss in a prayer circle and all this. I mean he kind of led me to Catholicism and to Humanae Vitae, several years ago, too. So it's like, damnitt, now you pull the wool out from under me??

The biggest whopper, though, the blow that leaves me winded and makes me tear up to think about, is Mother Theresa. I've read just about everything you can read, by and about her, and been so moved - I truly believe her words are as powerful as the gospels and that's what made the idea of saints make sense to me. Her obedience to The Church and all she accomplished in her life, through it, blew my mind. There is really no way to overstate this. Her ideas about seeing Christ in everyone and being Christ to others are the foundation of my beliefs about what it means to be a Christian (they'll know we are Christians by our Love).

But the Vatican let this whole somewhat unethical, breach of confidentiality book be published, of her letters to her mentor priest guy, her confessor. Private letters she never meant for the public. ANd in them it's revealed that she went MANY DECADES without ever feeling the presence or love of God. That she lived nearly her entire life in the proverbial dark night of the soul, lonely and miserable inside.

This is "supposed" to make me feel really comforted about the times when I don't sense or feel the presence of God, like, oh, well, even the great nearly beatified Mother Theresa herself had those times of doubt and despair! It's perfectly normal!

But...it doesn't. It makes me feel like if SHE was just going through the motions, if SHE was just forcing herself through what the faith dictates without that real emotional conviction, if she could sacrifice and give and pray and devote herself on that level and still feel like the sky was empty and it was just her doing the good work....If she could give lip service to others about how great the joy of knowing God was while she was not at all joyful...

Well fuck.

I mean, really, FUCK.

Does this make sense?

*sigh*


Last night my mil was on facebook chatting with me and she was talking about how she missed our old Disciples of Christ (female) pastor, Robin. And I understood what she meant, but I was thinking of all of this already, and so I could not help but recall standing 20 feet from the live nativity scene we were putting on by the highway as a teenager, with her telling (horrified) me that she didn't think it mattered if Mary was ACTUALLY a virgin or Jesus was TRULY conceived by the Holy Spirit. That the faith itself, the comforting metaphor, the belief in something, was what mattered.

Well, that is not good enough for me. I need it to be real or not be real. I am not someone who can respect and adhere to rules and rituals for the sake of themselves.

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I am still deeply in love with Jesus Christ; all He said and did, everything He stood for. I'm deeply disillutioned with His followers and not so sure about anything being done in His name. I'm even curious about whether or not He's quite who I've typically been thinking.

I was out tonight, and feeling a little pang at every smudge of ashes I spotted on someone's forehead. I feel I need to throw myself into Lent, and then I feel like I just can't, or don't want to, or don't understand why I should. Then I go back to feeling I need to just do it. Because there is this pure love I can't help but feel in spite of all this consternation and grief, when I see the icon I'm using for this post or even think the word "Christ". There is a real longing in me for God, even when I can't bring myself to repent for anything because I'm just not sorry. Not even sorry I'm not sorry.

I guess that for now that has to be enough.

Bad News:
I was totally wrong about how I was surely losing tons and buckets and megatrons of weight in NYC what with all the walking and stairs - I actually GAINED SEVEN POUNDS in one week from all the milked up coffee drinks topped with whip cream, the creme brulee, pastries, restaurant food, enormo-sandwiches and so on. I also got an ear infection for all my dairy troubles!

Good News:
In the nearly two weeks of being home since, I have lost 6 of those 7 pounds just from my normal, more produce-laden eating.

Bad News:
I was already at a freaky WTH all-time-high weight before I went, so I'm now one pound OVER that. Yee-haw.

No more good news to report on this front :p

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I am really interested in e-readers right now, "right now" being 2010. Initially I was REALLY resistant to the idea because:

-I am deeply invested in the paper book industry with my in-house library o' 1500 titles
-I am resistant to change in general and have been curling up in bed with books for a lot of years now, so it makes me stamp my foot and pout to have that threatened in any way
-I worry about what e-readers will do to small bookstore owners, as they and the books for them are sold by huge conglomerate corporations and I really do like SMALL business, with one particular local family coming to mind
-I have some vague fears about things like computer glitches or power failures causing great literature (or even current bestsellers) to dissapear. Obviously paper books are vulnerable to everything from fire to time, but it still makes me fret with my hands together over my heart and my eyebrows all a-twist to imagine there not being hard copies of just about anything.
-I SPEND ENOUGH TIME STARING AT A GLOWING SCREEN! Books are a way to get away from screens!

HOWEVER. Being the incredibly deep and intellectual person that I am, I had to stop and reconsider when Anne Rice started updating her facebook statuses with what each of her fictional vampire characters would have to say about the Kindle. For instance, Louis (a couple hundred piddly years old) would hate it because he's romantic and nostalgic and unchanging, and Lestat would love it in a "as if I had time to take away from being awesome for READING" sort of way, but Marius - ancient, wise Marius who collects books on a far grander scale than I - would see it as a natural evolution. Having lived through cave paintings and scrolls to see the printing press come into play, this next development would be easy to take in stride.

O_O

That's right, she got me.

What?

So I started digging deeper. And I came across some things about e-readers that I really, REALLY like:

-there is talk about and plans for making short stories available for something like $1 each in the same way that single songs are on iTunes. This could revitalize the (currently non-existant)short story industry in a huge way! Short stories used to be a big deal because people read literary journals and magazines were all full of them, but nobody does hard copy periodicals anymore and so short stories have kind of fell by the wayside as big collections of them are the only real vehicle to publication. Short stories are the main thing I find myself compelled to write so this is of great interest to me in a selfish way.

-E-readers make length unimportant in general. Right now in hard copy publishing there are niche lengths everything has to fit into to be considered, by new authors at least, regardless of other merit. This again is something I'm selfishly drawn to as I keep finding myself on fire to write something that comes out a totally wack length (publishing-wise...reading wise I think they work). Edward Allen Poe and many others had things like 45 and 70 page books out, that have stood the test of time...but would never get a chance nowadays.

-when I was in the aparment in NY, and we were bored, we took the subway to Barnes and Noble and hunted through their selection and brought back a book for him and a book for me. If I had a Nook or a Kindle, I could have just logged on, bought us each something (cheaper!) and read them both off of it. When I'm here in my house reading 3 different chapter books to the kids and 2 different things myself, and can never find any of them - I could have all five of those in progress at different places in my e-reader, I would just have to keep it in a central location like my laptop (which I do not lose).

-they have cool quirky tools, like word search functions that would allow you to find every instance of "murmur" and "perfect" in Twilight and realize half the series dissapears when you take those out.

I am not convinced e-readers are more environmentally friendly. This is something I'd like to know more about. Electronics are horribly toxic both in the manufacturing and once disposed of and it seems like Amazon and Barnes and Noble both want to make this another thing like cell phones and iPods, where a newer, more superior model replaces the previous outdated crap every few months :/ If everybody could really get one and hang onto it for 10-15 years obviously that would be great for the earth.


Slightly different direction:
I was reading about how Amazon has sold a couple million Kindles over the course of the last couple of years, while Barnes and Noble has only sold like...70 or 250k Nooks, something way under one million that I can't quite remember, anyway. But, Barnes and Noble is getting ready to launch this craziness where they build a some-minimum-square-foot Nook boutique in each B&N store, staffed with specially trained Nook experts, and they think this is going to seriously tip the balance as many people who are on the fence about an e-reader are put off by how they can't test out or even hold a Kindle. B&N is going to make it so you can sit around in a B&N and read on a Nook while you're just hanging out, just like you can read books off of shelves in the comfy chairs. Amazon and Barnes and Noble have also been engaged in some kind of crazy price war, wherein one lowered the price from $260-ish to $190-ish and the other followed suit the same week, and then one unveiled a new, more basic $139 model and then the other one did the same thing 2 days later.

BUT. While they compete and scheme, APPLE has sold like 11 or 12 million iPads since it's release in April. At around $500 apiece. Because they're Apple, so they can do anything they freaking want because anything they market is automatically cool. I know the iPad does some other things, too, but it is mainly marketed as and mainly purchased as an e-reader.
(Ok, I have been schooled on how they are more web browsing media players than e-readers. But I maintain that they continue to be represented as e-readers with some perks by NYTimes writers who are doing e-reader articles - I just came across another one today: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/07/4-minute-roundup-kindle-gives-amazon-more-bang-for-less-bucks211.html?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=fanpage&utm_campaign=pbs )


It was interesting to see so many people on the planes to and from NY, as well as in the hotel lobby and coffee shops around NYC, holding and reading from e-readers. The subway, too. They were nearly as consistent as white earbud cords. I had never seen one at all IRL before and they were absolutely everywhere during the trip. I wonder if I really live in a "behind in the times" sort of area, because I spend an inordinate amount of time in local coffee shops with my laptop to have never seen one. Maybe spending time on public transit every day makes e-readers a more natural purchase. I talk to local parents about audiobooks fairly often because we can listen to them as we drive.

ETA WHOA!!!! Ok maybe this doesn't seem at all amazing to other people, or maybe everyone else already knows, but I just found out that if you have an e-reader, you can download anything with an expired copyright FREE. This makes total sense but has left me amazed regardless - Pride and Predjudice, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, collections of fairy tales, WHAT IS THIS AWESOMENESS?!
Seriously, it tips me from "that might be cool" to "I MUST OWN ONE!"