Sacrilege

So I have a list of interesting things to write about and the attention span to just sort of look at the list and then go and see if any of my favorite blogs have been updated in the last fifteen minutes again, and, good lord, I hope it isn’t permanent, but I guess I will live if it is. But it’s pumpkin day and we commemorated by offering to run a game of Werewolf/Mafia in Aodán’s school, and it was fun but also sort of strange because the kids are clearly brilliant but not quite strategic enough to try and figure out who is lying, I sort of think that at 11 and 12, they are just not that practiced at seeing outside of themselves, they’re so much more absorbed with figuring out for themselves how to lie convincingly that they don’t...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Oct 31, 2007 | 1 comment

For Online Scrabble Addicts…

it’s one of those blog entries I wish I had thought of writing on one of the more eloquent mommy blogs — momomax. Too tired for a real blog post tonight, but I was completely inspired by the event I went to tonight, Ignite Portland which my husband has been spending all of his spare time on planning and helping organize. It was a cool chance to meet some people I had only interacted with on-line, and a reminder that the whole point of social media and communication technology is people with their quirks, passions and interests, and how exciting it is to get glimpses into these things, whether it’s unicycle riding, raising chickens, cooking Southern meals, preparing for the apocalypse, or romancing somebody on-line. It was very cool to see 300...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Oct 25, 2007 | 2 comments

Out of Sorts

After a couple of gloriously sunny and temperate days, it’s raining again, and I hate blog posts that start with the weather, but I am out of sorts today, and that’s the first thing. Since the boys have been home from school this afternoon, I had the door slammed in my face when I complained that one child had only cleaned up part of the mess he made when he knocked over all of the cookbooks; I know I should have been thrilled he got them all put away and swept the knocked over catfood into a pile, but the pile remained in the middle of the kitchen and I didn’t use words like “Thanks for cleaning up the mess, would you mind doing just one more thing to finish?” but, as I said, I am out of sorts today. I argued with another child...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Oct 24, 2007 | 1 comment

Motive

“The last temptation is the greatest treason, To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” — T.S. Eliot When I was a teenager I was fascinated by this quote, by the notion that in the end, purity of motive made the difference between deed being good or not. It seemed clear that you were supposed to do the right thing because it was right, and at the same time everywhere there was this subtext of “Treat people the way you want to be treated (so they’ll treat you that way back)” or “Be nice so people like you.” Here’s the problem, I cannot separate out the philosophical, the religious, and that which is just obligatory to satisfactory participation in relationship with another person. I struggle with generosity;...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Oct 18, 2007 | 0 comments

Back to Blogging

I survived Art and Soul and even made a couple of paintings I like, though I guess the point of the whole thing was, for me, as much a chance to spend time with the best friend I left in Texas, the one who is really artistic… is that the carry-over from the polarizing effects of being one of two sisters growing up, the universe divided between us, the differences always in much higher relief than the rather overwhelming similarities? Sometimes this friendship and my relationship with my sister take on dream-like confusion, I respond to one as if she were the other… So my sister was the social one, and I never was, my friend is artistic, more ambitious, the one who gets attention when the two of us go out. Art and Soul was also, I guess, a chance to...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Oct 14, 2007 | 3 comments