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Greetings from Gaia

10 Sunday May 2020

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To save you from having to read the preceding post (although feel free): I opted to use part of my stimulus $$ to replace my old computer Merlin with new baby Gaia, and had to clone his hard drive in preparation. And cue diabolical laughter . . . now!

Merlin died. As in before Gaia arrived. As in the day after I did the clone. Those of us who don’t believe in coincidence are all nodding our heads.

It took Gaia a week to traverse 45 minutes worth of Colorado, which I spent trying really hard not to curse at Amazon and the USPS. Meanwhile, I was propped up in my tiny studio on my tablet, which has 2/3 the memory of my phone. (Literally. 2GB. I don’t know how the little darlin’ crosses the street by itself.) Had to Zoom through my phone for audio. It was . . . stressful, and I credit Insight Timer with teaching me that I could meditate on my own terms, because this week, already in quarantine, could have been Really Bad.

But she came! At last! Made in Germany, according to the sticker–am I alone in thinking this a bit odd? I must be; Lord knows das Deutsch have mastered engineering from cars to pencil sharpeners. She wasn’t *quite* the computer I thought I bought–lots of space for an additional couple of drives. If I’d known this, I wouldn’t have bothered with the cloning or the hasty cloud backup I’d also done . . . right before Merlin dropped deader than Jacob Marley. Let’s hear it for paranoia and ignorance!

Her HDMI port isn’t connected to anything (what the sheep??) so the monitor is on VGA, but these are first-world problems. Gaia is fast and silent, a veritable ninja compared to the lumbering Merlin. Of course, all my cookies are gone, but seeing as I also had my debit card expire last month, I have to re-enter a lot of data everywhere as it is. Moving on.

So I plugged in the external drive and . . . nothing. Downloaded the software. Nothing. My son tried, and discovered that a-a-a-all the data was gone. Poof. We still don’t know what happened. If I hadn’t been a canny old person with no trust in technology, having known technology when it was still teething, and thus backed up my essential data onto Google Drive, all my writing would be GONE. I would probably be in the hospital if that had happened, because I’ve been loosey-goosey about backups.

Currently I am still moving into Gaia, and enjoying such fluff as being able to greenscreen in Zoom at last. Merlin’s hard drive is plugged into my son’s machine because we want to troubleshoot a bit, but it’s not talking to anybody right now. We’re waiting for the geek to advise us as to the next step.

Oh yeah, the casual games: Had to re-download and restart them. Not so bad; I guess the journey is worth more than I had credited.

That Time When the Weeks Disappeared

28 Saturday Mar 2020

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“One day here is just like the others,” I wrote to my daughter, whom I was trying to invite for dinner. And truly, I feel as if I have fallen into an early agricultural sort of rhythm here: I have a task list, for which I am grateful, and a good bit of almost entirely unstructured time, for which I’m trying to be grateful. The temporal pillars of my life have crumbled, and I admit to sometimes feeling as if I am now drowning in the unchecked sands of Time.

I’m something of a worker bee, getting my strongest pieces of validation from job activities, and I can have little spasms of workaholism. My daughter has ordered me to take time off when I have it, but somehow things are different now.

I’m having the hardest time remembering the day of the week. I spent part of Tuesday morning prepping for a Zoom group I was facilitating–on Wednesday. Moreover, I have realized that the days of the week came with feelings, feelings I no longer have.

For example, I was supposed to be happy it’s Friday, because it’s my break from my challenging Wednesday–Thursday bloc. But Wednesday didn’t happen (no work, no daughter, no actual physical choir with all that deep breathing), so the only fallout from the resulting Thursday fatigue (still got to bed late, thanks to a Zoom meetup) was getting a sleep hygiene lecture from my therapist.

I made my own appointment calendar this year. I drew careful lines separating the days, and now all that ink is being erased in realtime, as one day fades into the next. I’m all about going with the flow, but something about that feels scary: What would happen if I just did what I felt like whenever I felt like it? For a lot of people, I daresay that would be a healthy and stress-free option, but I don’t work that way. It probably has something to do with being INTJ.

Something inside me says enough is enough, and I need to put myself on another schedule, one which embraces the home time and the weirdness and the whole schmeer that we’re floating in right now. (I have ADHD, and we do much better on a schedule, which helps fill in for our vacationing executive functions.) Right now I need to try to focus on intentionality, it being Lent, which is for me a time to do that anyway. A Lent with a very different sort of Easter at the end! I just hope I remember it’s Sunday when it gets here.

In Which Our Highly Trained and Educated Heroine Uses Her Mad Skills

25 Thursday Apr 2019

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I’ve been noticing over the past several months that the helping profession is disproportionately filled with women. If I thought about it at all, I figured that it was connected with our socialization as nurturers—and that it was probably also spurred by the low pay/hard work equation which keeps women trapped as sub-par wage earners, despite our often heading single-income households.


I recently attended a training on motivational interviewing (where there were 13 women and two men), and my fellow students voiced my own tendency to want to FIX IT. (This in MI is bad.) I joked that MI was going to be a hard sell, because everybody in that room got there because they were fixers. On the job, we’re so often—possibly even usually—faced with a crisis, small or large, that demands immediate action: fixing.

However, this very morning I was given a small—a very small—crisis, and instead of getting all Socratic with my recoveree as I should probably have done, I . . . fixed it. And then after a few moments, I had to stop myself from further inserting myself into my recoveree’s issues. “Stop being a mommy,” I scolded myself. And then it hit me: Women—fixers—helping professionals—mommies.

How many of us still carry things like emergency bandaids?


In fact, I suspect that helping profess—ah, hell, call us what we are: fixers. I suspect that fixers are in a way uber-Moms, regardless of our gender. We’re the people other moms call for a consult, or would if we were better able to listen and less willing to roll up our sleeves with a savage grin and fix the hell out of the thing. This is obviously a social problem, which is counter-productive to our own self-care. Fixers (and for this I mean women) are probably short on friends of the galpal, chillaxing with the homeys variety. And that can only add to our stress, which ironically makes us poorer at what we do.


It’s all very well to tell us to listen more than we speak. That just makes most of us give ourselves a smug little pat on the back, because we do listen—it’s just that at the end we tend to give out a well-reasoned solution to the issue. Fixed! Check! Pleased to be of service, ma’am!


I’ve gotten to the point of keeping silence because once you take my fixing away, I don’t know what to say half the time. I just crack out one of my large supply of listening noises (got ‘em for every occasion) and hope my conversational partner will comply by continuing her flow of words. I’m glad to be learning techniques for what can be thought of as stealth fixing fu: I need them for me.

Please Nominate Tribe of Tiger!

28 Wednesday Feb 2018

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If you like me, my writing, or even the abstract cause of Good Writing in general, please consider this!

Because I won NaNoWriMo last year, I got the chance to have an actual human being at Kindle look at my book and give me editorial feedback. To get this, I had to enter Tribe of Tiger (the most recent kitty book) in their Kindle Scout reader nomination program, and that’s why I’m pestering you today: PLEASE, go to this link and nominate my book. It’s just a few clicks. All told, it took my sister less than three minutes, and that was with me on the phone as she did it, which slowed things down.

Here’s the link. It includes the first two and a half chapters of the story–enjoy! (Story reading optional; you can download it onto your Kindle.)

There is a chance that this may actually get me professionally e-published, with an advance ($$$!) and everything. I’m crossing my crossable digits.

 

Looking for a Word

03 Saturday Feb 2018

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(Just skim the two paragraphs of techie art neep if you’re not interested in paint. The essay proper begins below them.)

I just participated in a month-long journal challenge with a group of women artists, and Got Religion–I discovered a new medium! It’s Japanese watercolor, often called “gansai tambi” as that’s the ad blurb used by the manufacturer to describe them.  (It literally means something like “vibrant aesthetic.”) I majored in what I suppose I must now call Western watercolor in college, making full sheet (22×30″) color field paintings (think Rothko, only busier) and thinking I was having the time of my life. Then fast forward thirty years and here’s this stuff that made me squee when I unpacked it. (Disclosure: I had a $50 gift card from doing a survey, and went on Amazon. The 36 pan set, three water brushes, and another six-pan set of metallics left a buck and change on the card; YMMV.)

Part of my honeymoon joy is being forced once again to learn what stuff does–the great thing about the big abstracts I did as a kid is that it showed me pretty much every trick Western watercolor and its French cousin, gouache have up their sleeves. It’s a little like gouache, a little like either sort of tempera in consistency, and behaves on paper like nothing else I’ve found. The pigment is crazy thick and you need a lot of water to make it behave like . . . watercolor. Sigh . . .

Anyway, I whacked out a basic image to use as the Tribe of Tiger cover and came back to the computer because the sun was in my eyes. I noticed, almost as a by-the-way, that I was ecstatic. It was very much a body feeling–a combination of terrific sex, a filling breakfast, and a satisfactory trip to the loo. Oh, and the best coffee. I feel this way every time I make art I’m pleased with, and even when I’m depressed, it makes me feel at least some better, at the very least while I’m making something.

I thought to myself, “Weird. I guess sex is the closest many people get to ecstasy.” Maybe joy too. I don’t know how that makes me feel. Am I right? If so, am I being kind of snobby to feel a bit sorry for them? Or is this more about me being abnormally unimpressed with sex?

Don’t get me wrong–I’ve had some great sex. It just doesn’t hit the same spots as, say, the smell of oil paint, which makes me tremble and moan. I have similar reactions to music I like, which is to say, much of it, but maybe particularly early music (think Byrd and Tallis).

As for writing, the feeling is more subdued, possibly because I’m not getting as much sensory input, and it’s more draining. But I still come away from good sessions feeling like this is why I’ve been put on earth.

So what do y’all think? Especially other creatives–is it better than sex? Is it ecstasy? Or do we need a new word?

Journalish Entry

27 Saturday Jan 2018

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inky hand

Who’s procrastinating? I am! I am!

My still foggy brain figured out how to add the photo and still have text next to it; faithful readers with sharp memories will notice this as a new skill. Yay me!

I’ve been depressed for most of the past two months–Christmas cheered me up, which makes me feel shallow and trite, but there it is. (Can a person be trite? Sure they can. We’ve all been trapped at that business dinner.) It’s not that I spend hours gloomily musing on Being and Nothingness, it’s more that I don’t know what to do. (As in, read a book or play a game. As far as Being and Nothingness goes . . . ) Worse, once I figure it out (if I do), I spend seemingly hours getting it done because I am far more easily distracted than usual. This is a common symptom of depression, but I have ADHD, so who can tell?

I am open to suggestions. I can’t take meds, because I either have a weird reaction to them, or they might make me manic. (Trust me–or trust those who’ve been close to me–you don’t want to see me manic. I don’t do anything amusing like start new religious movements, but I do end up in the hospital. Pity. Being manic feels great! Which is why it’s so hard to treat.) I am working my WRAP plan. But here’s the hell of it: If I am trying my best, if I am doing something borderline productive (like blogging), it means I’m having a good day. If I’m having a bad day, I can’t even focus on a video game. Arrghh.

In other news: Although I have been faithful to my protein shake breakfast, to the point where it now feels normal, I’ve only lost about five pounds. I had it pushed a little lower, but the holidays snuck two pounds back on. Sigh. (This matters because I am due for bariatric surgery this spring, and I must lose 16 pounds so they can maneuver around my massive fatty liver, cuddled around my stomach like a protective bloat of tick.) However, I have dropped my application off at the Y, and the guy who Does That will come back from vacation any day now. Sigh. Seeing as I don’t get a surgery date until I see their shrink (March) I have some time. It’s only 11 pounds, right?

Tribe of Tiger (this year’s NaNo and the third in the kitty series–Eureka, published here, is in the same world but is not strictly canon) is SO close to being finished it’s a bit scary. I’m at the point where the next two or three paragraphs will wrap up the main action. There must be a name for this feeling that I should kill somebody off for it to be good art!

I’ve been doing more visual art lately–got involved with an art journal challenge. Seeing as I wimped out on Inktober, I would have been more reluctant, but, golly mo, my daughter makes those blank books! So I begged one that had some invisible flaw, and have been having a great time. Sure, I’m behind, but it’s an improvement over Inktober’s 12-day performance. (To be fair, what slowed me down then was lack of scanner access; I learned from this mistake and have been doing just fine snapping pix from my phone.)

OKCupid (deliberately not linked because drive-bys) used to do this thing where they made you pick three words to describe yourself. So I guess right now they’re fat, depressed, and creative. I could do worse.

Turning the Pages

26 Wednesday Jul 2017

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I think it was my “year off” getting my knees replaced that did it. The tiny Kindle was a sanity-saver (and a hats-off to Project Gutenberg, while we’re on the topic) and I got disconnected from paper books. But then, I haven’t been a big consumer of even paper books since the dissertation. My recovery from that segued into a depressive episode, and when I emerged, I was in a life where I’d read/reread most of my books. (I view libraries as evil guilt-producing crackmasters, and have been known to brag about my current immaculate relationship with Cambridge Public the way people in recovery show off their five-year chips.)

By then, I’d started writing, and I had this idea from some quote somewhere that the more I’d read, then the less I’d write–and I’d risk sounding derivative of the writer. So for quite a while, the most complex prose I had was my daughter’s subscription to Cosmopolitan. (Don’t knock it. It ‘splained how to keep my eye shadow out of the creases. I’m a little sad that my daughter traded up to National Geographic.)

I gradually began to read Victorians and mysteries (and have now discovered Victorian mysteries). But then I got a gig of reading and commenting on other people’s novels, so all of a sudden I was reading for a living. Very weird. Sometimes I get a manuscript that is slick clean classy content–and then I don’t, and have to force myself to sit my ass in the chair for five, ten, fifteen minutes as a whack. Mercifully, I read fast. And eventually, I got used to being a writer too. The whole thing made me pickier about what I’d read for fun.

However, my daughter and I always stop by our favorite bookstore when we’re out, and I pick something out with the best of intentions. It is added to the stack, but every so often one jumps into my purse if the Kindle is charging, or if it’s Neil Gaiman, apparently.

So, there I am with  Neverwhere in the waiting room. My shrink emerges and gushes over *book* reading, claiming that studies have shown there to be superior cognitive benefit from the physicality of the book. I must admit I recall little of the Kindle-corn I’ve been consuming all year, but had put that down to the quality of writing.

My books (Long Leggedy Beasties, Things that Go Bump in the Night, their forthcoming cousins) are non-physical. I’ve been trying not to feel bad about that. This doesn’t help. Sigh.

You’re reading from a screen right now–what do you think?

Listening to the Silence

23 Tuesday May 2017

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I have left my noisy urban home for a few days, and am now in a very quiet place. All I can hear other than my own little noises is the dripping of my friend’s cat bowl, which makes a teeny recycling fountain to keep the water fresher. Strange to tell, instead of being relaxing, all this stillness has done is underscore my own disquiet, which I tend to keep buried like a secret shame.

When I realized Things were burbling up from my inner cesspool, I opted to turn off Pandora and stay with the cat bowl and what I call “microcries:” bursts of blubbering that last about 15 to 30 seconds. It’s sort of like crying constipation–that’s all I can get out at a time, although I feel myself to be a very cistern of tears.

As previously noted, I’m a random crier at the best of times, and I’m getting closer to deciphering why, or at least a maybe-why. I think that when it’s triggered by something heartwarming, it’s because my heart is in reality feeling cold and lonely; if the trigger is heroism, I am afraid that I myself am weak and helpless.

I do many things. I sing, draw, make jewelry, mother, befriend, love. But I feel as tottery at most of it as I do when my physical therapist cajoles me into trying to stand on just my right leg. (Almost everybody is a little lopsided at this, but I’m a champ at lop.) The only thing I really have is the writing. The sheeping writing, which fails to make me any money or gain me any renown, and which will likely continue to fail to do either.

All I am is the writing. That’s what’s at the bottom, behind the tears, underneath the depression, and despite the failure.

During this quiet afternoon, I went to the extent of Asking for a Sign, first in what passes in me for silent meditation, and then just talking out loud. So many people tell confident stories of hearing a Voice, either from outside or within–why not me? Although my faith isn’t what I’d call strong, my belief in the possibility of a Higher Power is stronger than my fear that #45 will turn America into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and that’s something, isn’t it? But nobody came to my outreaching self-pity party, leaving me to confront what I have, what I know.

Perhaps all I’m really for is the writing. Maybe one or two people will be reached by the words that start at my core and ooze from my fingertips. They will laugh, cry, feel less alone or freakish; they will feel a kindred spirit. My fiction will keep them company for a bit.

What I hear, what I know, is just the writing. And sometimes it is barely enough, but it remains.

Tide Change

28 Tuesday Mar 2017

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Because I can’t meditate (I am a trauma survivor and get jumpy if I feel myself losing conscious control of my body), I had to find a way to dump stress after the New Year’s heart attack. So I cut back my hours at my day job down to one day a week, and that will stop in May. I will be picking up more editing work, and that will fill the financial gap, but belts will be tightened around here.

I made this decision about a couple of months ago, and have until now been too busy with the editing to do much else–somewhere along the line I acquired the Protestant Work Ethic, damn it to blazes. But now there’s a lull, it’s a gray Tuesday morning, and I’m here in my sweats debating getting another tea so I can finish this post in one sitting instead of going back to bed for a half hour: Now what?

Above my desk is a copy of a Batman meme: It is the crisp and elegant Batman from The Animated Series, pointing his finger at me. The caption reads, “Quit Procrastinating/Work on Your Art.” I’ve put in a decent word count recently–finished the sequel to Long Leggedy Beasties!–and so this Lent I decided to do an hour a day working at visual art. Like most of my Lenten disciplines through the years, it’s most conspicuous for its omission. I did complete the T-shirt design needed for the day job, but that was because I had an external deadline. Other than that–

–I’m blocked. You don’t know how happy I am that I’m at least finding words to put on this screen. I started a weird little story about an autistic girl on a bus, who has just met a mage and his familiar, although she doesn’t know it yet–and I’m stuck. I listened to my beta reader and tore out half of Max’s sequel because I sorta went off topic and threw in the kitchen sink (an age-drenched failing of my work in all media), and now am doing the stare–write a sentence–stare–write three more–stare–wander off method, known to writers everywhere. And don’t get me started on Damascus. I’m just glad I have a solid beta reader to point out the screamingly obvious. Sigh.

I also have to self-pub Max and get him out of my system. I tried finding an agent for him, and nobody bit past the can-I-see-three-pages stage, and those were the agents, I discovered, who reply to all queries that way. (I wish they would just put that in their requirements; it would save a lot of raised hopes.) At least a few people have read Beasties and been kind enough to compliment me on it, so this way Max will get his chance to do some people-pleasing.

I just wish I didn’t feel that doing so means I’m a failure. The market has changed, that’s all, and the good thing that it brings is that some people will read my stuff. Maybe not as many as would if I had a big publisher doing advertising and whatnot, but some.

So much for going back to bed. The 18-pound cat is stretched out on its bottom half and she has a stronger character than I do in terms of my getting up the gumption to remove my loving pet who just wants to be near me. Time to soldier on, watch closely, and try to see what life is saying to me.

I Wanna Be Sedated

23 Saturday Jul 2016

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In a little over two weeks, I have the second surgery. The stress has been driving me nuts; I doubt it’s a coincidence that my blood sugar has catapulted to over 200. I have another week of work, my insurance still hasn’t cleared my root canal with my dentist, the housing lady still hasn’t gotten back to me to acknowledge that we need to meet to renegotiate rent because now we will all be living on my disability, Long-Leggedy Beasties is being steadfastly ignored, sob–and my rewrite of the very first book–the trilogy–is like rolling in a huge wad of flypaper: Just as soon as I free one piece, something else gets stuck. I even had to dive in and do a nip and tuck on Max, because he will now chronologically come first in the series.

But the most irritating part of my life is that I can’t seem to sleep well. There are three big basic types of insomnia: difficulty in getting to sleep, staying asleep, and waking up too early. I have all three.

Worst of all, I have something called Restless Legs Syndrome, where just when I’m about to drift off, this electric impulse shoots through my body and I have to move my legs and sometimes my arms. The med my long-suffering shrink suggested (Mirapex, or pramipexole) doesn’t seem to be working. I went off my anticoagulant so I could try a dose of an NSAID. Nada. What did work was Percocet (courtesy of dentist above), and can’t you just hear the threatening chord of music there?

Luckily, I’m not stupid, having just had to wean myself off oxycodone for Knee #1, so I’ve just happened to take the one. (Dental tip: Take the antibiotics, stupid. They cool down a “hot” tooth and are a far more effective way of dealing with the pain than narcs. Who cares if it messes with your GI tract for a few days? Eat some yogurt, and stop whinging. Oh, and take all the antibiotics, which is your way of keeping resistant bugs from spreading.) But, ooh, that night of uninterrupted sleep was nice!

So I’m dealing with my surgery anxiety in the possibly unhealthy way of looking forward to the drugs.

The down side of the narcs, though, is that for some reason they slow my creative processes down to a crawl. (Picture Flash the sloth at the Zootopia DMV.) Don’t expect much from me while I’m on them. Coloring is a lot of work; I just hope I can find something good on Netflix, having exhausted NCIS at last. And then there’s the pain they’re treating. Not kidney stones or bad cramp pain, just a gnawing sort of ache and the discomfort of your leg having not enough space to accommodate all the swelling your body wants to do. Le sigh.

But at least I’ll sleep.