...well, maybe. Here's an entry from my other blog. Some people liked it.
| The key to happiness... |
| |
| ... is not tying your hopes for fulfillment to something that's out of your control. Of course, in a sense everything is out of your control--you could lose your home or your family to any number of terrible events, the fear of which we suppress in order to function. But what I mean is, don't make your happiness depend on something that, while it's out of YOUR control, is within the control of other people. Such as: editors, publishers, admissions officers, hiring committees, and all other finicky and fallible gatekeepers of institutions and industries. This is the darker side of that happy advice to "follow your dream," and it's something I've taken a long time learning. I've had plenty of lessons, though. My sister is one example: she wanted to be a doctor. She worked hard, followed her dream, and lo and behold she achieved it. She now has all the tangible and intangible rewards that go with successfully following a dream that's universally approved and applauded. But the whole thing could have crumbled if not for one acceptance letter from one medical school. Even before it came, I thought about the power of that letter: that such a cold, flimsy thing could dissolve a dream or make it real. Meanwhile, thinking I was saving myself a lot of heartache in comparison to what my sister went through, I decided to go to graduate school. Turns out I was a complete noodlehead. After jumping through all the hoops and finally getting my PhD, I faced a dismal job market, with hundreds of over-qualified candidates for every part-time, temporary, non-tenure track position at Podunk U. So I said, forget it! and left academe altogether. This was actually not a hard a decision to make, as I'd already begun to feel I wasn't suited to the scholarly life. A few years later, I had a regular job--the kind I'd spent my entire academic career avoiding--and was actually pretty happy with it. I was a bit bored, though, so I started to write. Soon I got totally caught up in writing fiction and decided that this was my true calling and had to be my career. I put my all into it, writing, revising, going to conferences, contacting editors, agents, publishers. Practically everything I did met with sincere praise and kind rejection--over and over, close but no cigar. After four or five years this got to be a real drag...and once again, I had to learn how stupid it was to give powerful strangers power over my happiness. Last year I went to a conference for mystery writers and readers. I was newly self-published and hoped to learn a few things--and I did. Over and over I heard stories of persistent writers who didn't give up and were finally published. "Never give up," people kept telling me. But at the same time I was hearing other things: anxiety over sales, books going out of print, authors marketing their books so hard they never had time to write, editors pressuring them to write what would sell. And I began to think that maybe success is not really success. I was told that it usually takes seven books for a mystery author to get established with the public. I had written two, and had ideas for a third... but did I really want to write a book a year, with the same protagonist in the same setting, for five more years? The answer was no. Well, I think I finally get it now. I don't regret what I've done--the thesis, the degree, the books--but I've stopped measuring my worth by things like acceptance letters, job offers, and publication contracts. Joseph Campbell said, "Follow your bliss," and to me that seems like better advice than "follow your dream." Because if you follow your dream, you need to make sure there's room in it for failure: that is, failure in the sense of not meeting the world's expectations or definition of success. It might turn out that your dream and your bliss don't coincide. Dreams are something always out of reach; they bump up against reality and get bruised. But happiness is simply there. If you can find it where you are--in what you're doing and not what you're striving for, for its own sake and not for anyone's approval--you'll have stopped following your dream and started living your bliss. |
I have a new one in a secret place... well, actually it's http://blockhead.journalspace.com but anyway, though I'd come back here and see what was up. Apparently my blog is still getting hits even though I never update it. This I do not understand... except that it must be people looking for some other kind of blockhead. I think there's a band, maybe many...
Anyway, here's something I posted recently at journalspace:
Our Stupid Shower
The other day my mom referred to our little house as "a handyman's dream," and at first I was kind of annoyed, but I have to admit she's right. It's not as if it was in top condition when we bought it, and during the years that we were poor (ie, before hubby's business started making money, and after I decided I wasn't going to work full time anymore because I wanted to Be a Writer) we've let so many things go! And now the Bear stands ready to destroy any improvements we make and it seems silly to get, say, new carpet before he's potty-trained.
But anyway. One of the things we really need to take care of is our stupid shower. Or rather, it's not the shower that's stupid, but us, because we kept trying to fix it on the cheap, and of course nothing we did (or paid annoying not-very-handy handymen to do) worked. It's the main bathroom shower-tub, which we use instead of the teeny shower in the teeny master bath because in that one you bonk your elbows on the faucet handles. Well, in this main shower, first the cold water handle went, then the one in the middle that switches between the showerhead and the tub faucet. For a long time we used vice-grips to turn them, then Roo stole the vice-grips and squirreled them away somewhere. Now we use a great big rusty old pliers, which at least are too big for him to hide. So when you're ready for your shower the thing to do is use the pliers to turn on a bit of cold, then add the hot and wait til it's just right. But then when you use the pliers to turn on the shower, it might turn out that the pressure isn't right, or you misjudged on the amount of cold, so you have to ply the pliers again. (As a conservation-minded Californian, I used to turn the water off while I used the soap, but it's way too much trouble these days.) Then when you're through you use the pliers to turn the showerhead off FIRST, to make sure it's all the way off, otherwise when you go to clean the tub or draw a bath for Roo, the water comes pouring out on your head.
Well, it's all a giant pain in the arse, so when life settles down in the year 2020 or so, we'll tear out the whole damn thing and put in a fancy whirlpool bath!
Fascinating, eh?
Hey, Ali, thanks for your comment! I do hope to go on with the Blockhead Blog--it seems to be working tonight at least. The alternatives are not that great, and I would miss everybody I've met out here in the Bravelands.
Well, let's see... news since I last posted... RID on Amazon, etc--but I still have to get the cover pic and info over to them. Hope that's not too bug-filled. Anyway, that stuff happened on Tuesday. Before that, the big news--and something that will actually affect my daily life a lot more than the Amazon thing (unfortunately!) is that Roo has abruptly decided not to nap. Nope, ain't gonna do it, nohow, no more, Mama. This as you might be able to tell, makes me a bit loopy. The other thing is, I've started to get kind of interested in working with clay, something I haven't done since I was a kid. And, yes... it started with me playing with Roo's Play-doh. Then I found out about these newfangled polymer clays that you can bake in the oven... but what I ended up buying was an "air-dry" clay that just dries hard without firing. I hope to work with this stuff for awhile and maybe take a class next year. We'll see how it goes... but so far I find it much more relaxing than painting.
And finally, with the advent of the new Napless Roo, I think I am going to have to wimp out on Juvenile Hall reading. I feel sorta guilty, but oh well. Mom gave me a good talking to about that. ("You young people today expect too much of yourselves!") Anyway, we're going to finish A Study in Scarlet over the next couple weeks and then I will say goodbye. It's just too hard to drag myself out of the house in the evenings! I hope they find someone to take my place soon... they should get lots of publicity when the new Hall opens, so that should help. Anyway, that's what I'm telling myself.
OK, enough for tonight!
Just checking one more time to see if this works...
Okay, looks like it did... this once. NOW what should I do? I'd just about gotten ready to give up on Bravenet. Support couldn't figure out my problem; suggested I try another browser, but I dunno. This is the only site I'm having problems with. Anyway, I don't know if this edit will post or not. Well, in case it does: BIG NEWS! RESULTING IN DEATH is finally available at all your favorite online bookstores! So get your hineys over there and buy a copy!!!
And on that note of Blatant Self-Promotion, I will stop and see if this makes it to my page.
Today I was able to sit down with my son and share with him one of the great works of modern literature, a classic story with themes as universal as they are profound.
I'm speaking, of course, of Alona Frankel's ONCE UPON A POTTY.
This timeless tale of a boy and his bowels is told from the point of view of his mother: "Hello. I am Joshua's mother. I'd like to tell you about Joshua and his new potty." The authoritative voice of mother-as-narrator hints at the story to come: a small boy's rite of passage, a comng-of-age that is not without its costs. We are first introduced to Joshua by way of the physical body, a body deconstructed through the labelling of its parts: "A mouth to talk with and eat with/Hands for playing/A pee-pee for making Wee-Wee..." Confronted with the as yet unknowable Potty, Joshua, despite being a walking catalogue of Benthian "purpose," attempts to assert his humanity through his curiosity and imaginative vision: "Was it a flower pot? ... Was it a milk bowl for the cat?" This vision, however, is repeatedly quashed: "No, it wasn't a flower pot ... No, it wasn't a milk bowl for the cat."
Joshua ultimately, tragically, becomes a prisoner of his potty, forced into long periods of unhealthy inactivity: "He sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat..," thus becoming complicit in the narrow circumscription of his own creative output: "and when he got up and looked into his potty he saw all of his Wee-Wee and Poo-Poo RIGHT INSIDE IT!" (original emphasis). The tragedy is that Joshua now completely identifies with the forces of his own oppression: "Joshua was very happy and proud and came to show me his full potty..."
In the final, heartrending scene, Joshua bids farewell to his childhood--"'Bye-bye, Wee-Wee, Bye-Bye, Poo-Poo,'"--taking his place in the ranks of regimented, repressed civilization. "And now he likes his potty even more and uses it" we are told, in words that toll with the bleak certainty of human fate, "every time."
I know the Roo Bear is still a bit young to appreciate the nuances of this great story, but I hope he will learn something from being exposed to it early!
ha ha! Got out the brushes this morning for the first time in oh, about two months. Made one stroke on the picture of Roo and decided I could not paint this picture. There is no way. So I set it aside and just started messing around with some cheap canvas boards. Ended up with 3 pictures--a flower, a toy, and a mess. But it was fun! I think I will take inspiration from kids for painting. Thick, pure colors. Who cares if it looks like anything? Just have fun.
This pulled up an odd memory of being a little kid--maybe 6,7?--solemnly informing my mom that I would now have to start drawing the same things over again, as I had already drawn everything.
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