Need for affiliation February 3, 2009

Over the past days I’ve been pondering my ennui, plumbing for patterns that keep me entrenched in a day-to-day lethargy that is, frankly, boring me to death. I’m tired of the internet (no offense!), I’m tired of hedging my bets and keeping all the doors open, I’m tired of gathering information. I’m in a rut of making myself very informed and poised to take action when the right opportunity comes along.

Something I’m realizing is that I spend too much time in isolation. There are often people around, but not interacting in any meaningful way. At my job I have almost total autonomy over how I spend my time. Outside of my paid work, I’m writing a book — another isolated venture.

I don’t think it will solve all the issues I have with my day-to-day existence, but I think if I had more meaningful, sustained collaborative engagement I would be a lot happier.

So the question arises: how to create more collaboration? It is relatively easy at my workplace to set up one-off collaborative mini-projects, like a co-facilitated workshop or event, but that isn’t going to satisfy. I need to find a way to establish a long-term joint project. I would like to do some joint visioning and planning. I think if I can get my workplace to be a more collaborative experience for me, I will be more fueled to work alone on my book.

Other ideas I’m having for collaboration:

• volunteering one day a week in a collaborative environment relating to socially-engaged arts
• starting up some sort of monthly collaborative community gathering (salons; art-making/zine-making sessions; whatever)
• joining a theatre company (if anyone will have me) or a choir (but it has to be really special, because I’m not really a typical choir-music-type)

I was also thinking of starting some sort of theatre-based project at work — faculty development through forum theatre (it’s been done before!). I don’t know that I feel confident enough that I have the skills I need for that — but one thing I’m contemplating is exploring whether any profs in theatre at the university where I work have any interest in that area.

Reflections on a scary and uncertain future (and I’m not even talking about global warming or regional conflict) January 5, 2009

Today we leave Norway, to return Summer 2010 for our next visit. Departures are always a little stressful. My partner B. will be sad, and so will her parents. There’s a bittersweet quality to leaving, especially this time, because in many ways B. would like to stay.

B. and I have ongoing discussions about moving to Bergen. When we made the move to Vancouver in 2005, after I completed my PhD and she finished her masters, we had a five-year plan (which did not involve constructing factories or farms, or killing anyone) to stay in Vancouver and then (potentially) try out living in Norway. Actually the plan was to re-assess after about four years in Vancouver, and decide whether we want to move to Bergen after the fifth year.

Well, this coming summer will be our four-year anniversary of living in Vancouver. And it is already clear how this assessment is shaping up: B. wants to move to Norway. I don’t.

Don’t get me wrong: it is beautiful here, B.’s family is very loving and accepting (and very excited about our potential move here), the quality of life in most respects is amazing. A minimum of five weeks vacation per year, mandated by the government. Good salaries. Bergen is said to be one of the prettiest cities in the world. People get to do lots of the things they love, like fishing, sailing, kayaking, hiking in the mountains.B.’s parents live right on a fjord. I mean, right on the fjord. Like, it is in their backyard.

B. standing behind her parents' house looking out to the fjord.

But it is hard for me to visualize myself here. Actually, I don’t want to. I grew up moving internationally, and I know what that’s about, and that isn’t what I want for my adult life. I don’t want to derail my career as an educational developer working on diversity and inclusion issues in the university classroom. I don’t really want to live life in a foreign language–though I’m not afraid to learn Norwegian. I don’t want to live in a city that doesn’t have neighborhoods with distinct character. I don’t want to live in a place that doesn’t have a visible and thriving counterculture of social justice and environmental activists and artists (and maybe Bergen does, but I haven’t found much evidence yet, though I know the music scene is alive here, and not just Norwegian death metal, either). I don’t want to make my life in a place where hardly anyone seems to have thought about race and racism, where I have hardly met anyone who has ongoing self-awareness of their own privilege (or if they do, they don’t talk about it). I don’t want to live in a city that doesn’t have literary events on a regular basis, even in a language not my own. I don’t want to live in a country where no one knows what to do with a vegetarian; even the Chinese restaurant had only three items without meat in them (one was called “Vegetarian” with no other description).

It’s funny; one aspect of my book is about how children are affected when they are exposed to a diversity of lifestyle and political values that differ from their own family’s values. For example, a peace activist, Democrat-voting family living in a small conservative town in Michigan, or an evangelical Christian libertarian-leaning family in Seattle. A book I read in 2008, Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort, is about how the United States is being gradually sorted into lifestyle value-based microcommunities that lack ideological diversity. In my book, I explore how that affects kids. But in my own life, I want the opportunity to stay snug in a leftie, alternative, activist, creative sort of microcosm. I want to live amongst people ‘not like me’ in terms of what they look like, where they come from and how they think about the world, but ‘like me’ in terms of what is important to them, and what kinds of liveliness they want around them. I’m aware of the acute contradiction there.

As a writer, I don’t want to live somewhere where a language barrier will prevent me from creating community with other writers. Even once I learn the langauge, I’m not going to write in Norwegian. I’m not going to be able to offer meaningful feedback on language use to other writers writing in Norwegian, not for many years. And because I won’t have the capacity to reciprocate, I won’t have other writers around me to offer me meaningful input on my work. The internet is great, but it really isn’t the same as being surrounded by living breathing community.

So, there it is. And what does it mean for my relationship with B.?

We don’t know. For now we’re just going to follow our plan of looking toward 2010/2011 as a moving time. I want to place my first book with a publisher before I move anywhere, and my goal is to make that happen in 2010, so 2011 is a more realistic time for a move. And then?

My greatest fear is that I will move here with B. and that I will be miserable (no job, no friends, no life) and she will thrive, and after two years–our ‘trial period’–I will not want to stay, and she will not want to lose me, but be unwilling to leave. And I will have to start my life over again, by myself this time, the world wide open to me with no plan and no safety net and no home base. At this point that is distinctly unappealing. Actually, terrifying.

Maybe I’ll feel differently about the idea of moving to Norway by the time 2011 rolls around. If I don’t, maybe I’ll move farther east, to Toronto or Boston, and B. will go to Bergen, and we’ll see how that flies. I really have no idea.

Taking stock of 2008, contemplating 2009 December 31, 2008

It’s New Years Eve today, and I’m just realizing that I haven’t yet taken stock of my year; all I’ve been doing is trying to ignore the little voice in my head that chirps, “Are you going to make any resolutions (and fail to keep them)?” Maybe taking stock of 2008 will empower me to look at 2009…

This year I actually reached some milestones, in terms of projects accomplished or well-begun (for my differentiation of project- and practice-orientation, see here):

• In my ‘day job’ — which is not just a day job, but a career path in educational development — I completed a two-year project pulling together a resource for higher education instructors to foster global citizenship in teaching and learning. I was the “editor,” which involved mentoring, delegating, writing, editing, and working through a publication process. I learned so much, and I’m pretty proud of the 100-page book we created.
• In the same job, I created a partnership with UNICEF Canada and thus ended a long hunt for funds to actually design and print the book.
• I completed the year-long creative writing program, The Writer’s Studio (I still need to take a few short courses to get the certificate).
• I found the voice of my book (potential titles: Homefront OR The War in the Nest) and have written four chapters.
• I am actually succeeding at finding ‘conservative’ families for my book! I interviewed two military families in December, and have one more in the wings, to be completed in January.

These all feel like major successes.

On the front of practices, I have also had a few successes:

• I designated August my yoga marathon month, and actually did practice yoga at my yoga studio every day that I was in town; I think that means 23 days — I knew but I no longer remember. The irony is that after August I went for at least two months without practicing yoga at all. And now I have gone back to yoga, though only to a sporadic once-a-week-or-so.
• I started a “Learn to Run 10k” running program in something like October, and it has been amazing. There were two weeks in a row in which I only did two of the three runs — my enthusiasm was flagging — but other than that I’ve been really committed. So far the longest run I’ve done is running 8 minutes, walking 1 minute, repeat 7 times. I should be in week 11, but I twisted my ankle — re-sprained an old injury — in the middle of a beautiful run through a forest (run 3 of week 10), so I have been set back. Still, I am going to wait out the injury this week and hopefully be ready to run again next week.
• Regular flossing! After spending the past 33 or so years as someone who flossed after eating corn on the cob and the night before going to the dentist, I actually developed a flossing habit! It wasn’t even difficult. What made the difference? I don’t know, maybe an increase in vanity? Encouragement from my dentist (yes, the one from the TV show!)? My partner’s enthusiasm at flossing (her own teeth, not mine)? Whatever it was, now I floss about 5-6 days a week.

I also made many, many attempts at establishing practices that didn’t stick, foremost in writing and healthy eating. I’m not terribly concerned about the writing practice at the moment, because I have still succeeded to write by establishing deadlines for myself — though the two weeks that I maintained a daily writing practice were incredible, and the pieces I worked on then were the keys that unlocked the book I’m writing, so there’s the advertisement for a daily writing practice.

Where I have really not managed to make a practice stick is in healthy eating, and it shows! I have gained over 30 pounds in 2008 — how is that even possible?! — through yo-yo eating habits, cycling through bouts of very healthy eating and bouts of sugar binges. I’m feeling a little helpless around establishing habits of eating that are good for me, even though it is actually quite simple, as Michael Pollan says: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (and I’d add: Almost no refined sugars.)

I am of two minds when it comes to making New Year’s resolutions. I certainly have the ‘personal productivity’ impulses of making lists, setting goals, blah, blah. I am easily seduced by the idea of fresh starts, a clean slate of shiny new intentions. On the other hand, I feel burnt by failures to establish practices, and of course we all know that the vast majority of people do not keep their New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t like setting myself up for disappointment; who does?

Still, I’m intrigued by the idea of establishing new habits. I made two moves this week towards setting resolutions and establishing new habits.

I contacted Gretchen Rubin, who writes the blog The Happiness Project. Gretchen spent 2008 experimenting with happiness, following every guideline, suggestion, research finding that points towards increasing happiness, and she is writing a memoir about it. Gretchen also has a resolution chart, inspired by Ben Franklin, and she is willing to share her list if you email her; this is what I did. I was curious to see what her resolution chart looks like, and I was surprised to see a long long list of resolutions that change every month. Gretchen evaluates herself on all the resolutions every day, which also surprised me: those are a lot of things to try to work on daily, and many people writing about resolutions and self-control suggestion not making too many resolutions. Hmm. I haven’t emailed Gretchen back to ask about that, but I’m contemplating whether to make my own resolution chart. I think that if I were to work on healthy eating habits, I would have to break up my resolutions into really really small steps. For instance, if I wrote “Avoid sugar,” with the way things are going right now, I would have a really difficult time not having a string of sad-looking crosses representing my failure to avoid all sugar each day. Instead, I might have a resolution like, “Resist at least one sugary treat,” and that way if I succeeded once in the day at walking away from unhealthy food, I would succeed! The next month, I could step up to “Resist two sugary treats.” Hmm, I’m actually kind of excited by this idea. Maybe I’ll try it. Thanks, Gretchen!

The other approach I was interested in taking is Leo Babauta’s Power of Less. Leo writes the blogs Zen Habits and Write to Done, both of which I follow, and he has a new book out. He’s doing a bunch of things along with the release of his book, and one is the Power of Less New Year’s Challenge, which aims to help one create a new habit over the month of January. I was intending to do this, but I wonder whether the format really works for the habits I thought I would work on. The idea is to practice the habit for only 10 minutes each day, and then log about it in the forum. I had thought my new habits would be: eat sitting; eat slowly; eat three meals a day (no more, no less). None of those are only-10-minutes-a-day sorts of things. I suppose I could time myself for 10 minutes while eating slowly and intentionally, and then just let myself eat ‘normally’ the rest of the day. That might be the thing to do. I have some decisions to make in the next 24 hours!

Stay tuned; I will announce my resolutions (or lack thereof) in the next post.

On being vs. not being a mother November 28, 2008

I’m writing a book about mothers and children and ideology and communities and political development. All these things. I find the writing process torturous and wonderful and boring and fun and everything else you might imagine, but right now I’m feeling really inspired by a book that I’m reading: The Maternal is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change, edited by Shari MacDonald Strong.

The book is a series of essays, by and large written by fairly well-known women, like Anna Quindlen, Cindy Sheehan, Nancy Pelosi, Benazir Bhutto, etc. My favorite essays are the ones where mothers and children are in dialogue, where the women are negotiating what to say to simple questions with complicated answers. Like the white American woman living in India whose daughter asks her whether she is truly the most beautiful girl in the world. Since so many of the Indian people she meets pinch her cheeks and tell her that.

I think my favorite story so far, and I’m about half-way through the book, is by Nina Gaby, whose name is unfamiliar to me. She writes about going to a Vermont synagogue with her somewhat sullen 13-year old daughter. At the end of the piece, the daughter, now 16, writes an essay for a Rotary Club award, but won’t show her parents and doesn’t allow them to come to the reading of the essays. All she will tell them is that she’s writing about the Four-Way Test, “a famous schema that the Rotarians use to evaluate ethical decision-making.” She comes home and tells her parents that her friend won, and she placed second:

“Her cell phone rings, and she drops her essay notes on the table before running off. My husband grabs the paper.

“Will you look at this?” He holds up her still-childish scrawl.

What if Bush had Used the Four-Point Plan Before Invading Iraq?

It is the title of her essay. Below it are the points of the test:

Is it the TRUTH?
Is it FAIR to all concerned?
Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?”

Perhaps this little excerpt lacks enough context for you to feel it, but I get little shivers from that. And that makes me think about how I am so strongly affected by the stories of children becoming political, of children growing into the adults who will shape the future of society and the health of the planet. I am intellectually engaged by the stories, but also deeply moved. And yet, I am someone who has decided not to have my own children, not because of concerns around overpopulation, or because I don’t want to sacrifice my body to child-bearing (there are ways around that), but because I don’t want to sacrifice my freedom to child-rearing.

I’ve lived in communal houses with parents and children, and I have seen the joys and the struggles. My friend T. maintains that I can’t possibly understand the power of love between a parent and child, and she’s right, but I’ve decided that I’m willing to give that up, not experience that particular power in my lifetime. I still get joy from my close relationships with other people’s children, and if it can’t ever be the same, well, I’m OK with that.

Reading stories about children and mothers, though, and feeling the shivers travel down my spine like the slick dart of an eel through murky waters, I do wonder how someone who loves children as I do has become someone who at the same time embraces the sweet pleasures of a child-free adulthood.

The trappings of a writer on a rainy day November 28, 2008

Today is one of those days where the world looks like it was designed for nothing more than rain. The sky is milky grey and the outlines of roofs are softened and muted. I can’t see the rain from my window but I can hear it; the sound is a thrumming murmur of white noise.

I am delaying, delaying this morning. I have a tendency to do this when I know that getting up means moving towards doing things that I don’t want to do. Today those things include:

• running — which I’m putting off until tomorrow when B. will do it together with me.
• preparing a plan and materials for a workshop I will facilitate on Monday at my job.
• writing up an information packet for families who might be interested in being interviewed for the book I’m writing.
• printing out directions to Whidbey Island, figuring out if I can order a PZM flat microphone from Amazon and get it delivered to A.’s house in Anacortes, reserving a rental car and buying insurance.

This Sunday I will attend a church service in a small navy town in Washington State. It is the first Sunday of Advent, apparently: the hanging of the greens. Ergo, it is a good day to try and meet young families. I want to interview kids and parents in conservative families that support the war in Iraq. So far the few people who have contacted me have pretty much not supported the war. We’ll see what I find; I’m hopeful that I’ll meet some potential interviewees on Sunday. And I’ll get to learn what the hanging of the greens is. I keep visualizing children draping wilted leaves of swiss chard on a Christmas tree. I don’t think that will be it, quite.

On Saturday night last weekend I placed an order for moo cards. I have an unrealistic fantasy that they will arrive today, just in time for my outing to the church this weekend. They are my writer’s business cards, which is pretty exciting, to have business cards that identify me as a writer, and they are moo cards, which is exciting in itself. Moo cards come in a packet of 100, and each individual card can have a different image on the back. I flip-flopped all day on Saturday between ordering a set with all sorts of cool/cute/beautiful images created by designers on the moo site and ordering a set with a photo of myself on the back. I thought it would actually be practical to have a photo of myself on the cards. No one would ever look at the card and go, “Hum, I wonder where I got this and who the heck I got it from…” Which, I have to admit, is what happens to me with most of the cards I am given. I suppose it would be smart for me to annotate the business cards people give me on the back, so that I can remember who they were when I find the card later in a purse or on the corner of my desk or worst, in the bottom of a drawer that I haven’t opened for two months.

Anyhow, my point: it would be pragmatic, and in some way sort of cool, to have my photo on the back of my moo card. But… ehhhh…. I imagined myself giving the moo cards out. With a photo of myself on the back. And I suddenly felt embarrassed, imagining myself meeting some writer, we have a neat little chat, connect around our writing, and then at the end of the conversation I pull out my moo cards and hand one to the other writer…

“Oh, what’s this?” The writer is looking at the little moo card with a photo of me on it. Actually, the writer is just looking at the photo of me, as if I have just given him or her a small photo of myself as a keepsake.

“Oh, uh, it’s my business card. On the other side.”

The writer turns over the moo card.

“Oh! I see.” He or she nods. “Cute. Well, thanks. Nice talking to you.”

No, no, no. I can’t live with that scenario dwelling in my imagination every time I consider handing someone a card. I want to love my moo cards. So I ordered a set using designs available on the website. I can’t wait for them to arrive! Then I’ll be a real writer! Heh.