Goal Oriented

I swear I am not writing this just to urge everybody who has ever dieted to go read this Shapely Prose blog entry on the magical thinking that goes into thinking about the life you’re going to have when you just hit that magical number, even though I think it was one of my favorite blog posts I’ve read in a while. No, I’m writing because I am still trying to sort out what it means to have goals, about the difference between “I am accomplishing” and “I have accomplished” and why the first one feels so much better to me than the second. The end of NaNoWriMo is about 56 hours away as I am writing this (and why I am writing this now?) and I am close, and that does freak me out a little bit, because as long as I only have to...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 29, 2007 | 0 comments

Left-overs

The good news is my small house can hold nine people for three days and really not feel crowded. And the bad news, it feels sort of empty when everyone goes. What made it worse was Raven having to fly to Boston for a conference Sunday night, so today we were really thrown back into the non-holiday world abruptly. My oldest son has a cello lesson with a teacher who is across town, and because traffic can be pretty gnarly the hours right after school gets out, we’ve settled on evening lessons. When Raven is in town, the whole family goes together for sandwiches and then Raven sits in the van with the younger brothers while I go in and take notes on the lesson, good Suzuki mother that I am, but tonight, we had dinner at home, and I suspected that the...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 26, 2007 | 0 comments

Just Sharing

So eleven year old son has figured out how to use Garage Band with the Mac and play pieces and record himself and accompany himself, and yes, he added a track where he says goofy things over it, and I just die over this, so in compensation for how embarrassingly verbose I’ve been this weekend (and with his permission): Etude rap.mp3 This is a Suzuki ‘cello Book 1 piece called simply Etude.

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 19, 2007 | 2 comments

Feminist Motherhood

The thoughtful and wonderful feminist mother blogging at Blue Milk interviews her blog readers with a bunch of interesting questions, and it has taken me weeks to get to it, but I found the questions provided a good starting point for crystallizing some of my own thoughts and enunciating some of my own views: 1 How would you describe your feminism in one sentence? When did you become a feminist? Was it before or after you became a mother? Ack – one sentence? Feminism is cultivating a society and a personal life which allows and values the expression of our diverse and different selves. No, that doesn’t quite get it. I grew up Bahá’í with the precept that the realization of the equality of women and men was essential to the progress of the...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 16, 2007 | 1 comment

Seven Things

I’ve been tagged by Marjorie with the cool blog 280 Main Street, and felt all honored she reads my blog because hers is interesting and well-written and her blogroll has been so fun to explore, and there are times when you start seeing this all as an interesting conversation that is spinning off in all of the potential directions that conversations could spin off in at the same time if they weren’t so generally linear, and at this pace that allows for thoughtful response and yet is constantly moving, and I feel like I’ve been sitting on the periphery, but it is such a relief to realize how many interesting and thoughtful and funny and literate people are out there after feeling just slightly out of place at PTA meetings and going to preschool...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 15, 2007 | 0 comments