January 6th, 2009
It was the most universally deplored and the most universally engaged in practice among the girls in elementary school, the subtle put down of yourself, knowing your friends would rush in with denials (except of course when they didn’t, the dull silence a painful one, only marginally better than being called (contemptuously or pityingly or […]
Read the rest...July 4th, 2008
I am done with self-improvement.
Of course, the marketing forces telling me how many things are wrong with me, and all the things I need to buy in order to at least pass as ok are perhaps more intimidating and pervasive than King George and all of his Red-coats. Those marketing forces wouldn’t have a foothold, […]
July 2nd, 2008
It’s request week here at Oleoptene, apparently.
You want a Prague birth story?
I have given birth three times since then so that first time feels less coherently narrative like, and more an impression, the longest, greyest day… The one thing I remember clearly was what it was to finally and for the first time hold my […]
June 25th, 2008
Driving in Portland, I occasionally glimpse a steep, hill-side narrow street with tall buildings, and, as intriguing as it looks, I don’t turn down it because this way it can remain in my imagination a portal to similar streets I walked a decade ago in Prague. I look for strings of continuity to the person […]
June 22nd, 2008
Jenny of Jenzai Studio and my real life bff tagged me with the six word memoir meme. Thus –
Here are the rules:
1. Write the title to your own memoir using 6 words.
2. Post it on your blog.
3. Link to the person who tagged you.
4. Tag 5 more blogs.
I won’t cheat and use the one I […]
June 16th, 2008
Mother’s Day, it turns out, is relatively simple for me. A well-deserved nod to the noble sacrifice, the giving over of identity, the universality of being the bearer of life. Then Father’s Day comes. Raven has taken Xander to a birthday party this afternoon — the mother of the birthday boy apologized to me, “I’m […]
June 13th, 2008
Ellipses are the opposite of an exclamation point for me, a tentative trailing off…
Right? Annoyance at myself to sound so adolescent girl insecure, asking for approval and validation, so unwilling to assert myself.
I notice I am writing in my own private journals with too many of these trailings off, and suspect that it is psychologically […]
June 5th, 2008
Truth time: I don’t like the blog entry I published yesterday. I slept badly wondering if I had gotten too far from my own belief in kindness, in looking for the best in everyone, which it turns out, isn’t for the just the moral in some Disney movie I’d let my kids watch, or something […]
June 4th, 2008
I do not fancy myself a book critic, really, being much more interested in writing than in writing about somebody else’s writing, and having a predisposition to look for the best in everything and everyone. But having now devoured more parenting memoirs than is good for a girl, I think the world should benefit from […]
May 28th, 2008
I wonder if falling into formulas of writing doesn’t turn into a kind of block? I start feeling like a parody of myself. Something cute the kids said or did, some piece on NPR, and its application to my life, earnest self-examination, pat little summarization. And when I write about something like the Suzuki […]
May 26th, 2008
It’s probably clear that being part of my kids music education is a big part of my life, it gets a substantial part of my time each day and I put a lot of time into thinking about it. And most people would probably nod and agree “Yeah, music education is great for kids” and […]
It’s that conundrum, how do you sum yourself up concisely for the random, bored web surfer? You don’t really care what I do, or where I live… at least these things don’t set me apart much from the millions of other people on the internet. That is, I “stay at home” with my four sons in Portland, Oregon, and write earnestly about the things I think, identifying as a Bahá’í, a feminist, a St. John’s alumna (though I graduated from the University of New Mexico) and recovering philosophy student, a Suzuki parent, a reader… Is any of that really who I am? How about the list of random factoids?
