Snowbound

Struggling with mood, it doesn’t feel weather-related so much as just an accumulation of chips and dings, ordinary things feeling lusterless. It’s the good enough being the enemy of the perfect, things that are functional enough that they don’t warrant replacement, and yet the little dings giving me just a moment of irritation every time I see them, the accusing voice that tells me I am careless and don’t deserve nice things, that I am superficial, materialistic, greedy to be bothered by a crack in a favorite coffee mug when I have a back-up, chipped dishes, a stain on a favorite shirt, the wearing of the beloved quilt my mother made me, a crack in the screen of my iPhone that hasn’t affected its functionality at all (spoiled! and yet...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 22, 2008 | 8 comments

Betting Against Pascal

Friday night I was really grateful that some friends who are moving to Portland, new friends I am really excited about getting to see more often, who are renting a house here for the winter break, were willing to brave Portland’s icy roads and snow-inexperienced drivers to come have dinner with me and the boys. Because we talked about real estate and the state of schools one idea that came up a few times was that of the abundance. It’s so easy when trying to buy or sell a house to start believing in a scarcity, in there being exactly one right house/buyer for you and lots of competition for that same house/buyer. The anxiety is echoed for me in the way a lot of people get worked up about their children’s education (if they don’t succeed at...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 21, 2008 | 6 comments

Snowstorm as Spectacle

I wish I had something brilliant and original to say tonight, but this week it has been all about the weather, and most weather has happened before and is happening to a whole bunch of people at the same time, and as my online activity narrows to obsessively checking weather sites, I don’t have any delusions of having any unique insight into the weather. On the other hand, the number of times I have left the house in the last ten days is actually less than the number of cities Raven has travelled to in the same period, which does seem to distort reality a little, allow me to forget about the world beyond our house, our street, our neighborhood. The amount of food (and toilet paper!) in the house was diminishing and I had thoughts of rationing, of caching...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 20, 2008 | 2 comments

Bread and Roses

Sometimes it seems like No, see, the internal editor chokes. Why all of these weak constructions, why do I start ideas with this wimpy introductions, why is it so hard to find a voice that is strong, declarative, decisive? In a moment of masochism I submitted the text of my NaNoWriMo novel to www.wordle.net and generating a cloud of words, like this one for the blog, where the words I use most frequently are the largest, so I could cringe in horror at the size of “maybe” “like” “seemed” “very” “really”"maybe” “still” “something” “anything.” Is the steering away from unqualified declaratives a symptom, or a courtesy, is it a philosophy, a hesitancy to stake a...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 13, 2008 | 18 comments

Almost Famous

One of the unexpected side benefits of friendship with Jenny was that when we lived in Dallas, whenever her sister-in-law, Libby, a gifted photographer, came into town from Seattle, she’d take pictures of the kids. She took pictures shortly after Søren was born,and again after Rainer was born, and while the photos she’s taken remain among my favorites I have, I also have to note that I love her way of interacting with the kids, the way she makes the photo session fun and teases them into doing just waht she wants them to. So when she announced in her blog that she was coming to Portland I immediately called to ask if she would make time in her schedule to come do pictures with us again. She’s posted some of the results right here in her blog....

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 8, 2008 | 4 comments