Archive for August, 2008
August 30th, 2008
Ok, forgive the blog-nature of making everything that happens in the lives of everyone around me somehow about ME, and please trust me when I say I really am not the world’s most solipsistic person.
My best friend, J., 2000 miles away in Richardson, Texas, gave birth to her fourth daughter on Monday, and if you want to see pictures of all four perfect and beautiful girls, you should check out the blog of J.’s sister-in-law, a professional photographer who captures the girls’ overall gorgeousness quite amazingly.
And though I got to talk to J. briefly while she was in labor Monday night, and her husband called to tell me when the baby was born, I finally got the detailed story in a phone call yesterday. Like most of our phone calls, there were our shorthands, and there was a lot of laughter, a little bit of teariness — not like sad crying, but more like the poignancy of just resonating. Frequently we both laugh and cry at the same time, and it’s just messy. And then something she said somehow took me back to what it was like for me recovering from Rainer’s birth. Better-rested, not so hormonal, there are things about what that was like I couldn’t articulate then, the not wanting to admit to being overwhelmed sometimes, not wanting to burden anyone else with what I was feeling, not wanting my feelings misinterpreted as a failure of gratitude or anything, and just the strangeness of being lonely when surrounded by loving people who wanted to be supportive.
What I wish, now, that I had said on the phone, was, “Oh, dearest, I think lonely is perfectly natural and acceptable because you have spent nine months sharing this most profound connection with another human being, and feeling a little bereft in its absence doesn’t mean you aren’t excited to meet the small mystery who was inside you, to come face-to-face with her. It doesn’t mean you aren’t relieved to have the discomforts of pregnancy done with, or grateful for the family surrounding and supporting you right now. Go ahead and feel that loneliness, and when you’re done crying please describe for me again the dimples on her hands, the hair at the back of her neck, the pearl-like shape of each of her toes, and the way she smells, milk-drunk and drowsy.”
The thing is, I think the loneliness resonated in another way with the funk I have been in this week. I feel like a person with an eating disorder trying to learn to recognize my body’s cues for hunger, for satiety. There was this moment of “Have I been lonely?” which sounds so strange on the face of it, I’ve been with the kids all week and gone out and done social stuff two evenings in the last seven, after having had a good visit with Raven’s father, brother, and all-but-sister-in-law… how could I be lonely?
And I think of the weird cultural connotations of lonely I had been accepting. The pathetic Eleanor Rigby, the alienated and angry Kaczynski (really just a grown up version of the trenchcoat mafia). Lonely as maladjusted, as dangerous. The shame of loneliness as it stands in opposition to the people-on-televison image of happy, actors acting out scripts of well-adjusted good times. But I cannot think of a better word to describe a deficit in meaningful connections, whether it’s being at social events and being distracted mid-conversation by a child of mine wandering too close to a street, or the small toll we’re paying as Raven is preoccupied trying to build a new business, giving us less time to talk to each other. And it’s not even always about who is around me or what opportunities i have for connection, it can be just my own capacity to connect being diminished by my being preoccupied, tired, defensive, resentful, or anxious. Talking to J., I was able to recognize that this last week before school starts is a transitional one, we’re all a little anxious and in-between, anticipating and preparing and unable to see clearly the summer we have just finished, while still unsure what the coming year is going to be like.
So I don’t know if I try and express this loneliness if anyone else reading will ever have experienced it thus… funny the fear you will be shunned for being lonely? And yet, it was this chink of light, the resonance between how J. described her postpartum experience and what I remembered, and being able to say to her the words I wanted most to hear most at that stage: You can do it, you’re amazing, I’m so proud of you, and I love you. And I am most grateful for our connection.
August 26th, 2008
Almost a year ago I wrote this little bit on trying to write when I get interrupted regularly, and I was thinking about that when the unreliable narrator asked me about multi-tasking yesterday. I was chatting with her while buttoning a child’s shirt and I don’t think she was asking if my kids were coping with getting mere shreds of my attention but, since I was having a good morning I told her that the multitasking that is the fabric of my life is, at its best synchronistic, things working in parallel to one another. Today, I was exhausted, tired from staying up too late reading, frustrated at how inefficient my own distraction was making me, completely unable to process the interruptions and the answer I would have given her about how the multitasking works would have been very different and involved words I am embarrassed to put into my blog.
Multitasking was probably hardest when I first had my second child, because it wasn’t multitasking, it was triage, it was trying to figure out, always whether the needs of the baby or of the two year old former only child were more urgent. And I’ve never been much of a multitasker. I still get panicky when I have three or more pots on the stove, all of them needing different kinds of attention. But, I have gotten better at planning when I make a meal, since a lot of the process is actually waiting, and so, possibly boring, but I’ve learned to chop vegetables while waiting for the water to boil instead of doing all of the prep work beforehand. It may also be that experience has made me a little better at also multipurposing my activities: if I involve a child in the cooking, the time has value in the time we spend together, in the learning the child is doing, his increased willingness to eat food he has helped prepare, in his not spending that time whining and fighting with his brother and causing me to want to pull my hair out, and, let’s not forget the value in the getting a meal on the table. But just as I am suspicious of zero-sum equations, where limited commodities like time spent on one activity can thus not be spent on other activities, I am also suspicious of trying to calculate the value of time spent doing one thing versus another.
But neither multitasking nor multipurposing is about the parallel, synchronistic thing. That’s more like… ok, back in college, trying to do a philosophy major and math minor and an idea would come up the same week in Hellenistic philosophy and in a logic class, which would feel really strange and random, or this summer reading Sophie’s World with the boys and watching the Cosmos DVDs we’d see the same themes reiterated and expanded and played back from different perspectives. It’s the way “Hawaii” will come up in three different contexts in three different conversations with three different people in three days until you think that the universe is sending you a message. And I know it’s really about the interested brain perking up at the things that interesting to it, taking notice, but there are days when I break away from thinking about how we construct metaphors by picking out specific features of items to listen to my kids in imaginative play using specific features of things to stand in for whole objects (a firefighter’s helmet becomes full protective gear, transforms a four year old into a powerful man). Or the violin teacher will talk about strategies for memorization, telling yourself the story of the underlying pattern of the music, and I’ll see the story-telling organization that goes on as my kids explain relationships of things to me. And then what the synchronistic, parallel thing of all the different parts of my life and interests working in concert with each other is more like a reminder that there is no conflict, there is only one task, only one purpose.
The un and I were tangentially discussing artist’s fellowships at the MacDowell colony, which is the sort of thing I sometimes fantasize about, imagining a day with no interruptions, no responsibilities except to think and to write. And at the same time I am terrified, like Stevie Smith, that without the interruptions I might have to GO ON. Or face some terrible emptiness. At this point, the prospect of more than a week or so away from them, I imagine missing them would be more of a distraction than having them around. And maybe it isn’t all so zero sum, maybe the time with my hands submerged in dishwater, dreaming, experimenting with different words without committing them to paper, is not antithetical to whatever it is I want to do. Even as frustrated with myself as I was today when an attempt to help a child find a part to something he wanted to play with ended up with a complete, thorough cleaning and organization of their room, taking several hours, and pushing a dreaded trip to Target for school supplies back one more day, and I kept thinking of all the other things I would rather be doing, and getting annoyed as I realized dinner was going to be a very late production, even through the growling of PMS and giving myself a time-out on the elliptical so I could remember how to speak kindly to them, I acknowledge that the life I have might not be an ideal life for a writer, but it is an ideal life for me. Their childhood is not going to last forever, and the balance of their needs and mine feels healthy and right to me, and they are teaching me stuff about how people work, about myself, that I would never have guessed possible before they were in my life.
August 21st, 2008
n one of those “duh” moments I realized this week that everybody has different models for how people work and interact. It may be as simple as categorizing people by their interests, (Totally Breakfast Club, “You see us as you want to see us… in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at seven o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.”) Or explaining somebody doing something by their astrological sign, or their Meyers-Briggs profile. Raven explained that he sees people as interacting with others either in a performance mode, an interview mode or an exchange mode, which is a really useful way of explaining why some people are easier or more rewarding to interact with.
So I try doing a theoretical experiment where I don’t use a model for how people are, and it just doesn’t work, to have every interaction as a new experience, not attributing the things I experience to the other person to some degree or another. Ready for the crude metaphor? It seems to me like the model you use for how people are/interact is sort of like a browser window, some explanations work better for some situations than others, sorta like my knowing that my current CSS looks ok with Safari and not so great with other browsers (and that fixing it is on hold while my tech support is absorbed in his paying job.) The thing is that we’re all getting more or less the same content but the model of interaction you use is going to impact how you perceive it. And if you can’t just take people as they are, not classifying them or categorizing them, because our brains just aren’t wired like that, maybe the best you can do is to be aware that you are experiencing interacting with people in this mediated way, and if it’s not working for you with the model you have you might try doing it another way, open up Firefox to look at this situation instead of Safari.
And I have this spiritual struggle with feeling like I am “judging” people when I fit them into my explanations of how we are interact — I think my own model looks at how much we have in shared interests, what needs are being expressed in the interactions (à la Marshall Rosenberg) the self-awareness they demonstrate. In trying to understand myself, what I am feeling and why, I keep being bumped into awareness of what other people are experiencing, an insight I didn’t ask for. It’s uncomfortable when some people seem to be advertising their insecurities by how hard they work to distract you from them. It’s like being a three dimensional person in Flatland, and seeing the insides of people. But that seeing isn’t condescending, because it’s seeing myself too and having a basis for compassion. It’s not being hurt by other people when I see that they are acting according to their own psychological imperatives and not aware that what they are doing could be hurtful. And it turns out that even the “judging” aspect of it doesn’t change my responsibility to treat other people with respect and kindness.
August 17th, 2008
I got a practice mute this week for my violin and viola. Its metal heft perches on the bridge and keeps the voice of my instrument a whisper that only I can hear, so I can practice late at night without disturbing neighbors or children. It surprises me, the need to practice for myself after practicing with all of them.
I am practicing with four boys now, most days. With several weeks when both teachers are on vacation we’ve been missing days here and there, and not beating ourselves up about it, either, even though a little voice in my head nags me about the importance of consistency. Rainer, who is four, just got his tiny violin a few weeks ago, and we squeezed in one lesson before his teacher left for a month’s vacation, so he and I practice rest position and playing position, with more confidence than when I was doing it with any of his older brothers, aware of how many times he has to practice putting the instrument up before we can move on to the next step. We don’t negotiate practice, it’s a fact of life, and I think he feels like it’s a privilege he’s grown into, like his brothers.
I practiced with Aodán, who is eleven, late tonight, after dinner, impressed yet again with how gracefully he accepts my suggestions, wondering how long that will last, how long until he feels like there isn’t room for me in his practice, like I don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t know as much as he does, which is surely inevitable. I may grumble about the time commitment of practicing with each of the four of them, but this can last only a brief time, and it has sweetness. When he went in to get ready for bed, for me to read to him, and I stayed out in my studio where we practice and slipped the mute on and imagined my viola singing out more fully.
A week ago at Bahà’í camp Xander, my nine-year-old son, and I performed a duet in front of 150 people, my first time performing since high school. He had been talking about doing this since the day we got back last year, and I love his eagerness to perform and for him I worked to overcome my ambivalence about performing. I don’t want to pass on all of my baggage, so I try to examine it, my fears of not being good enough, my fear of people appraising, my fear of my own desire for attention. So many days I can feel almost invisible, safe, surely, but it can be its own hell. I can practice with the practice mute, secure in the knowledge that I am not disturbing anyone, and yet there is a creeping awareness that at some point I am going to need to remove the mute, and let my viola sing out. Playing something short and simple in front of the most un-critical and supportive group of people one could ask for was a tiny step, and I still had to spend an hour by myself beforehand thinking the crazy thoughts, got through it by focussing on my amazing kid.
In the collection of paradoxes I treasure and keep at hand there lies this one: humility and confidence nearly always accompany each other, two sides of the same coin. We sort of confuse insecurity with humility, or we have a hard time accepting applause, play a false humility, put ourselves down, pretend like the validation doesn’t feel so good. We have stories of divas and people who are so insecure and broken they seem to live only by performing. I haven’t gotten this one figured out, I think it’s somehow about getting into some sort of proper relation to the self (only I am not sure who is doing the relating then, or whether the self is so simple to talk about) only that the best moments practicing the stuff that isn’t the music falls away. I don’t know how to do that in front of people. But I suspect that true humility comes when we’re finally confident enough to realize that the performance really isn’t about us at all.
August 16th, 2008
Looking for any explanation for having been unable to bring myself to keyboard since I got back from Bahà’í camp a week ago, and they all sound like excuses. Spending a week with a hundred and fifty Bahà’ís and having the kids go off all day to their classes and activities so I had lots of time for prayer and reflection was wonderful, but it’s not what I write about here, I feel completely inadequate to writing about my religious life, and in a society where religion seems to divide people up all the time, where people are prone to shoving their beliefs down other people’s throats, I tend towards caution, wanting you to know that I don’t judge you on your beliefs, that I am going to look for all of the things we have in common rather than the things that divide us. Never mind that that for me is a lot of what being a Bahà’í is about, and there is something peculiar about feeling like my life gets compartmentalized.
There’s reflection, too, on what I am blogging for… a friend is nudging me to write more about parenting and I am wondering if I don’t want a separate, non-personal site for doing that, leaving Oleoptene.com to be all about me, me, me. Or for conversation about things that really aren’t parenting at all. The thing about writing about parenting is trying to imagine a supportive and encouraging tone to take when I believe that any of us could examine the scripts that pop out when we’re under stress, but mostly what any parent needs to hear is “Trust yourself, trust your love for your kid, you’re doing just fine.” What would a parenting blog/forum sound like if it was based on the idea that outside perspective and insight are useful, but every parent is the expert on their own child? I am flattered that this friend believes that there is anything that sets my parenting apart, but am hard pressed to identify what that could be.
So if a friend called this morning and asked what was going on, what would I have to say? Today is a bead on a string with little to set it apart from the bead before, the bead following, but I’m well-content with the shape of the bead, the elements in my days seem more or less in balance, quietly domestic, I hardly feel any urge to leave the house because everything I need and want is already under my roof?
In the cool morning, I write on the back porch, while outside is more pleasant than inside, watch a spider racing on its invisible highway between two chairs, and gently remove the thread from one chair hoping the spider will find somewhere else to be industrious, as everyone else in the house freaks out at spiders. I’ve refilled my coffee cup, checked on the boys, and the most pleasant thing I can imagine doing is trying to count the number of shades and hues of green in the sunlight filtering through the bamboo that borders our yard. Or possibly chasing down the difference in meaning between ’shade’ and ‘hue.’ Or forgiving myself for the various small ignorances that now seem unavoidable, my memory having such limits, my time for reading being, indeed, zero sum, so my best now is to not to pretend to know what I do not, so as to skip the embarrassment of getting caught, worse than the embarrassment of not knowing… (how often have I not lied, exactly, but nodded knowingly because it seemed to be incidental and liable to distract from a telling if I asked for a clarification? And perhaps I made a mental not to myself to look it up later, but of course, forgot to). I keep thinking life is like one of those fantasy books I loved as a preteen where if you keep pausing to go to the glossary and refer to the map, you can so fail to engage that you never get into the book, where as if you nod and move on, immersion and context will be all you need.
I lay on top of the blankets this morning, not looking at the stacks of paper on our bedroom floor, but knowing they were there, and I don’t know if it’s the green humidity and the heat, or just the non-New-Mexican-ness that takes me back to waking up in my grandparents’ house when we would visit them in Connecticut, but I muse on how their lives seemed so much more constrained by rules (papers in the office and not the bedroom, no white after Labor Day, three forks at dinner) that seemed somehow arbitrary but maybe made things more secure, more predictable. I don’t know how much I know about how things actually were and how much is reaching across three decades to an emotional truth, the unchangingness of How Things Were Done in their house, to the more adapting How Will Things Work Best in my own home. There was a ritual to arriving at their house and walking through the house checking that all of the details were just as I remembered them, the angle of the piano to the couch, the small rocking chair, the stack of comic books, the array of coasters. And I see my kids do the same when they arrive at my parents, but would swear I’d inherited from my mother a tendency to move furniture around when other elements in life are not flowing as I think they ought to. Still, right now? Every piece of furniture in the house seems to be just right, and it’s a novel but not surprising feeling.
Picture taken at the Japanese Gardens this week with our friend Todd, who knew us each before we knew each other, with whom reconnecting has been effortless and joyful.
August 2nd, 2008
Gentle Reader,
Or, no, what I mean is, please be gentle and forebearing, reader. Because in the maw of the absent husband and having watched too many TEDTalks yesterday my brain is near-to-bursting with needing to talk and sort out five or six different ideas that may have nothing at all to do with each other, but lying side by side set each other off so prettily.
First I woke this morning to the second-hand drama of the unreliable narrator’s domain name being swiped out from under her, and, while I’m not trying to say that everyone else’s problems are all about ME, I still got lots of musing on “To Blog or not To Blog.” Lots I cannot generalize from: the blogs I love I love better than anything else I read, and even so, what keeping my blog gives me is not symmetrical with what I get from reading blogs. It has made me more comfortable with the terrifying idea of people seeing/reading/judging what I write. That having a blog has allowed for deeper connection than I might get from small-talk: my hypothetical reader is given, yes, a self-selected, picture of who I am, but I imagine it’s still one with more depth than I am capable of in most social situations and it gives me a glimpse of light outside of the imprisoning box of the idea that, subsumed in roles, no one ever really sees me, no one will ever really know me. Unable to see beyond the footlights, I cannot see who exactly is out there and whether or how they are responding except for the hints of site stats and comments, but having it just a little murky is so inexplicably liberating.
And still, for me, blogging has its dark side. I don’t like living my life looking for blog fodder, it feels unnatural, like I am looking past the inherent value of an experience for the secondary value of “and I can write about it!” even if I have principles about not writing exploitatively about people and relationships in my life. I worry that it takes some of the time and energy that I ought to be putting into relationships with the people around me or other sorts of writing. Sometimes I feel like what I need to write, and what is going to bring hits to the site, and what is going to generate an interesting conversation in the comments can be so divergent that I am not sure that blogging is always good for me, or I toy with breaking it into different blogs, only I am worried about what I would learn about myself by which one of those I favored.
Which loosely ties in to another set of ideas bothering me. I get very nervous about the notion of “competing interests.” In recent conversations there has been the idea that the institutions we grew up trusting (medicine, education, law enforcement, and the media primarily, but I can think of countless smaller ones) have become harder to trust when you first have the glimpse of how the interests of the institution are different from your own individual interests. It doesn’t mean you can throw them out wholly, but the experience of realizing that the obstetrician I talked to when I was pregnant the third time was going to do things that might not be in my interests or my baby’s was sort of shocking to me in the way loss of religion could be for someone else. And noticing the damage that our school systems have wrought in people I love, warping their self-images, their value, their self-worth, I have started wondering whose interests schools serve. I grew up with some idealistic notion of schools being identical with universal education and thus the prerequisite of democracy, and I still sort of believe that, but in a tempered “why isn’t it working as well as it could way?” I would no more close all schools than I would go back to trying to deal with a headache with leeches, and yet, I am not sure that either education or medicine always starts with the right question.
So yesterday I watched Susan Blackmore’s TEDTalk entitled Memes and “Temes” and I don’t know if it had much in the way of revolutionary and new ideas, but her main point is that evolution is inevitable in any system where there is replication, selection and variation. These three things will always form a sort of algorithm, design out of chaos without mind (interestingly two days ago I watched Torsten Reil’s TED presentation on using AI to simulate humans in video game design where what they did was really set up replication, selection and variation and let the model evolve on its own). Her notion is that memes, and her coinage of “teme” for a technological meme, are as “selfish” as Dawkins’ Selfish Gene. I browsed the comments and on Blackmore’s presentation and there was lots of fuss about anthropomorphizing and will, but the message I got was that the non-personal, the non-willed, can still have an interest, a self-perpetuation and growth. Which would apply to institutions as well as ideas. (I also wonder about how this fits in with Clay Shirky’s TED presentation on Institutions vs. collaboration).
I don’t doubt that as a model, the analysis of competing interests works. But when I start doing it something funny happens to me, I cannot stop and it occurs to me that I have to weigh the interests of my family against my individual interests, and that if every being, institution, creation, meme, idea, teme, and gene has its own separate interest, that is a lot of divergent interests, a lot of competition. And through these lenses I start seeing us all just using each other and altruism as a fairy tale we tell ourselves so that we don’t have to face harsh meme-eat-meme world we live in… the systems we have built, banking and schools, advertising and publishing, are above everything else, self-perpetuating and the problem isn’t capitalism or socialism or fundamentalism, its the illusion of scarcity and struggle for survival, of our deep separateness (yes I did also watch Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight, too, the number one most emailed TED Talk where she talks about how we can choose to see the universe as one where we are all connected, why do you ask?) I even wonder what happens when the notion of our connectedness, our unity, our in-fact-more-convergent-than-divergent interests is introduced into the system of memes.
And of course, one of my long-standing themes, is to wonder about the need to model and metaphorize everything, how much choice we have in models and metaphors. What do convergent interests look like? What if there were a dialectic of memetics, that the variation, replication and selection were somehow not just synthetic but — if I say synergistic, does that mean my Santa Fe is showing? Has anybody talked about synergy since 1980? That the success of one could not compete with but inspire and strengthen another? Whenever I find myself with a sort of zero-sum model of how the universe is working, I suspect I have over-simplified, that with two children it’s not that each gets half of the love available, or that when a third sibling is born each must surrender one third of the share he had been getting heretofore. This is a crude metaphor, I guess, for suggesting that when I am happily blogging, I find I have deeper reserves for other writing as well.
Ok, so back to blogging. I haven’t tied all this together as well as I should have liked. I don’t pretend that my blog is some David fighting the Goliath of the institution of traditional publishing, or that I have figured out what moral/aesthetic value “replicability” of the ideas that survive, thrive, become popular has, when history is littered with brilliance faded to obscurity, genius unrecognized in its own lifetime and commercially successful schlock, or whether I think that our native cultural valuing of individuals over institutions means anything at all. I may have to briefly wean myself from TED which seems to have taken the place of the attention span to read a book entire (I do have Holt’s How Children Learn waiting for me!) Actually, when I think about my blog, what pops into my head is one of my favorite picture books that I read with my children, David McPhail’s Mole Music, 
. The story told by the illustrations is totally different from the story in the text, but the basic story is that a mole realizes his underground life is missing something, and then he sees a violinist on television and decides to send away for his own violin and spends years practicing and playing at the end of each day’s tunneling, and one day he’s a little sad that he should never have had the chance to share his music, but laughs it off because of the joy the playing itself gives him. In the illustrations we see his music going up into the world around a tree growing over his hole, and a war stopped and kings and presidents sitting down to listen to the beautiful music.
