creative.mother.thinking

explaining my life to strangers

Archives for July 2008

And then my laptop went “poof” and died

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Well, not really “poof” more like, “This is odd, why is nothing happening, oops I can’t eject this audio CD, why can’t I quit this application, I’ll just shut it down and restart, now it’s only blinking, weird”. And then I went onto my husband’s computer and tried everything the support site suggested, and it didn’t work, and then I re-awakened my old computer, and was happy that at least I can go online, and then I thought that the warranty on my laptop had just ended four days ago but on further research found out that really it was four days plus a year ago which didn’t make me feel better much.

And then I decided not to worry about it any more, and then, in the night, I woke up and thought of data that I didn’t have any backup of, like all my e-mail from the past two months or so. On the other hand, now that I’m thinking a bit more clearly, there might even be a DVD in the basement with a more recent backup, who knows.

So, today in the morning, instead of working out and doing the grocery shopping I dressed up as a geek (jeans in very, very hot weather with a black tee that says, “There are only 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don’t.”, and glasses, and very comfortable sandals because it was way too hot for sneakers) and took the train to the next computer shop.

Since I had dressed with care, and, also very carefully, didn’t mention that I’m a musician the service person there seemed to take me reasonable serious despite me being a woman and all. Then he started the laptop, started the laptop with the alt-key pressed, started the laptop with command-alt-P-R pressed, and then started the laptop with the trackpad key pressed to which I said, “I already tried that. And that. Yeah, that too.” Unfortunately he had the same results as me. Now my laptop will be sent to Berlin, and you can please all send positive vibes to her for a speedy and easy recovery.

On the upside, I did get half a preemie sock knit on the train ride, and my Ashford spindle and roving arrived today. On the downside this reminds me very much of the black summer of 2007 when my husband’s computer broke, and we spent all of our summer break waiting for it to function again so that he could record music. On the other upside I didn’t plan to record that much, and apart from the maybe lost e-mail and the fact that my iPod doesn’t speak to my old computer (and most of the family pictures for the past two months) I’m good, computerwise.

And summer break starts the day after tomorrow. I have mixed feelings about that but, of course, this year everything will be different. I will be structured! Meals will be had at regular times! There will be family fun! The weather will be better than last year! I will get tons of stuff done!

You know, I have inbuilt optimism.

So I turned 41

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last Sunday. It’s funny, and I’ve heard others who had the same experience that after the long anticipation of turning 40 last year the actual event seemed quite anti-climatic. It felt like something just clicked into place. And so the 41 felt uneventful too.

Which is good. These days I like uneventful. So, on Sunday I got up after having slept enough, made breakfast, and we had the traditional “Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte”. Well, apart from my husband who has turned out to be lactose-intolerant so he had lactose-free homemade cherry pie. We had a really nice relaxed Sunday, smoked salmon for lunch, and went out to a new Indian restaurant for dinner.

In fact the day was so relaxed that I spent hours on the computer, gazing longingly at spinning wheels. Because that’s entirely reasonable, a) to start spinning when you’re life is already bursting with things that you love to do, and b) decide on which spinning wheel you want to buy on looks alone even when you don’t have any intention of buying one. At least I didn’t have that intention until after I had looked at spinning wheels for a couple of hours. Ahem.

I also did spend a bit of time with my family. And I thought about the fact that the kind of birthday I had this year would have felt like a disappointment to me just a couple of years ago. I would have wanted to have a big party. I would have wanted to be treated like a queen for the day. But then I changed a bit and for now it feels better this way.

I did get presents though. I like presents. But I always feel a bit self-conscious writing about them in my blog. I fell like I’m bragging but then it’s just that they make me smile. Even though most of them haven’t arrived yet.

My son got me some flowers from the garden which my mother-in-law arranged into a very nice little bouquet. (He told me that he chose to give me flowers because it was less work than drawing a picture…)

My husband got me a very nice surprise:

It’s a Vietnamese cookbook that has a lot of marvelous pictures, recipes, and essays about Vietnamese culture, and history. I have been reading and looking through it daily since I got it. I remember telling my husband that I wanted a Chinese cookbook some time ago but I forgot all about it. He went to the bookstore, and this book was much more appealing than the Chinese ones. Well, as far as I have had the chance to try it I really love Vietnamese food.

My sister got me a very considerate Wollmeise gift certificate.

My parents and my mother-in-law contributed to the things I had wanted, with my parent’s present I ordered an array of pressure feet for my sewing machine (a walking foot! a button food! an overlock foot! an invisible zipper foot! (For those of you who can’t get that excited about sewing machine accessories that isn’t an invisible foot which would be impossible to keep track of but a foot for putting zippers into garments so that you don’t see the zipper all sticking out.))

In anticipation of my mother-in-laws gift I had ordered two drop spindles and some fiber, and now she has been so generous that I may even place yet another order with u-handbag and get myself a Sofia pattern. (And the Weekender bag pattern, and interfacing, and handles, and, and, and – I better put a stop to this immediately. First I’ll sew what’s already here taking up dresser space. Then I’ll place an order.)

I’m really most excited about the drop spindles because after resisting for months and restraining myself I finally gave in and allowed myself to try spinning again. And I ordered a wooden spindle for starting out again because I’ll certainly drop it a lot, and a very, very pretty one that’s very lightweight because I remember that when I first spun more than twenty years ago I was totally disappointed because I couldn’t spin finer yarn (and that was before I discovered lace knitting). Nowadays I know that the spindle I had was too heavy for that.

I can’t show you pictures of these though since they haven’t arrived yet. So, now I’m waiting for the packages… Instead I’ll show you how I look at 41:

How old where you when you found out there were comic books for adults?

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When I was a child and spending all my allowance on comic books and candy there weren’t any comic books for adults. And if there had been any there certainly weren’t any in the town I grew up in.

I thought about this yesterday when a student of mine told me about the reading night they are having at elementary school. All the students come to the school in the evening, loaded with sleeping bags, food, and books. They spend the night and have breakfast together. We didn’t have reading night either when I was a child but then nobody would have wanted me to read even more than I did. (I regularly set my alarm for 5.30 in the morning and read until I had to get up at 7.00. Until a neighbor told my mother that my light was on every morning. After that I read by natural light. Guess why I’m wearing these glasses nowadays…) It was more like, “Put down your book, go out and play. The sun is shining!” I still hear that a lot, I wonder why.

That student of mine talked about the books he planned on taking, namely a few Donald Duck books. I find that that and Mickey Mouse are the books everybody thinks of as comic books. If somebody is really sophisticated he might even have heard about Asterix. Wile for me there is a) DC super hero comics, the comics of my youth (in addition to Donald Duck and Asterix of course, and the Peanuts that my father brought from Canada from which I learned English), and b) graphic novels with all kinds of authors and stories.

When my student told me about his choice of reading material I marveled at a teacher who counts comic books as reading because I will never forget my teacher in 9th grade who told us to bring in comics, and then, when I unearthed my 2 kilo (that’s almost 5 lbs.) stack of – of course – all different comic books, fully prepared to give a full, detailed report and each and any of them, their pros and cons, and different levels of complexity or lack thereof, he wiped it all away with a “This is all trivial and not for people who read real books.” I’ll probably never forgive him, or maybe I should because he’s the one missing out. And, only for the record, I was the one who had done all the required reading for all classes before it was required by just browsing through the very small town library and reading everything that struck my fancy. From Sophocles and Aristophanes to Philipp K. Dick.

So, yesterday I took my student over to the bookcase where my comics and graphic novels live and showed him what I have. (That bookcase was the one that had another student exclaiming, “Have you read all these books????” which left me quite confused because she was looking at the comics and magazines and self-help books while the real books live in another room in three bookcases of their own. And of course there still are boxed up books in the attic. And if I owned every book that I ever read we’d either need a really big house or we’d suffocate in here under an avalanche of books.) My student (the one who was looking at my comics) was fascinated. And then, after showing him Flash, and Green Lantern, and a bit of Batman, and such I found myself saying, “That is a really good Batman comic but it’s not for children.” “Oh, you should be at least a teenager to read this.” over and over. (I better say here that I don’t own any x-rated graphic whatevers, they just aren’t suitable for an 8-year-old.)

He tried to convince me to lend him some but I won’t. And now I’m wondering how the tale of these comics will sound to his parents and peers, and how it must feel to be introduced to the possibility of graphic novels by your piano teacher.

Getting off auto-pilot

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I actually might make this into my goal for the near future. I spend a lot of time dreaming and thinking while going about my day. I’m absent-minded and side-tracked. And I’m very reluctant to give that up.

So, why should I? Well, because it might be the one thing that can save me. I’m still a bit down, I’m feeling over-whelmed, and confused. These days that seems to be my natural state of mind. Especially the part about being confused. Some of it is hormonal (always, these days) some is the beauty that’s July, the last month before summer break with all the parties, events, barbecues, and social gatherings, because everything has to happen before August.

If I could get off auto-pilot and into the present moment I might feel calmer ad more at peace. Also I’d have more energy. I know that when I’m really in the moment all those worries, and fears, and unfinished things to do become a sort of background noise. They are less important and less overwhelming. And that often means that I’m getting more done, that I’m staying focused when actually doing something, and am able to follow things through.

I’m reluctant because I am afraid I’ll lose something crucial when giving up all this living in my head. Daydreaming is nice. Writing blog posts in my head while doing the dishes makes my life seem less mundane.

But in the end I’m fooling myself. When I’m blogging in my head while doing the dishes, I’ll be surfing the net while blogging, and knitting in my head while surfing the net, and so on, and so forth. In the end I will have missed most of my life because I wasn’t present to savour it.

So, that’s what I will be practicing for the next weeks at least. Doing the dishes while doing the dishes, blogging while blogging, be with my family while being with my family. And I’ll keep in mind the piano students of mine who say, “But I have been playing the piano for a whole year! Why am I still not brilliant?”. Because some things take a while.

It will be an interesting and unusual experience for sure.

Nothing happening, really

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I just spent fifteen minutes on my computer, changing the color scheme of my blog. You might not notice all the work I put into it because just when I had it all set, and when I looked at it in its neutral, white, readable, not candy-colored glory I decided to change it back to the same colors it had before.

In a way that’s very typical of the things I’m doing these days. I agonize about the color scheme, I imagine people being put off by it, resorting to reading it in a feed reader because all the pastels are hurting their eyes, or deciding they don’t like the blog at all because of all these colors, and pictures, and on top of that flash ads. Hrmph. And knitting content, or not enough knitting content, and silly fictional stories, and not enough posts about my son, and being a parent, and whatever.

So for now I declare that I won’t bother with the theme, and color scheme of my blog any further until I either a) have the urge to make a new header picture, or b) about 50 people tell me that they hate it and that it takes forever to load. Which it does. Thanks to the tasty flash animation. Sorry.

I’m feeling a bit down, nothing unusual, it has been raining, and raining, and raining, I have a cold that’s getting better very slowly, my son is cranky and has a cold too, and my period came about every three weeks for the last two months which is a) too much information, I know, and b) highly unusual. I went to see my doctor because of this, and she told me very kindly that this isn’t unusual at my age. I’m taking some herbal medicine and vitamins and hope for the best.

My son is a bit unhappy and therefore quite cranky. His best friend will start elementary school in September and he is already very sad about it. Which he then expresses by telling that he doesn’t want to play with his friend anyway. And for every day that they play happily at kindergarten there’s another one where they are telling each other that they are not each other’s friends anymore. Consequently my son has been either very clingy with me or acting up. Usually he’s clingy when we have to part, or when I can’t spend time with him, and then he shuns me when there would be time for us to be together. Fun!

All that together with the traditional “fight about getting up”, “fight about getting dressed”, “fight about eating breakfast”, and “fight to get out the door on time”, in the morning, and the equally traditional “fight about eating dinner”, “fight about getting into pajamas”, “fight about brushing teeth”, “fight about how long to read before bed”, “fight about when mother can leave child’s bedroom”, “fight about how long mother has to stay in the adjacent room”, and “fight about whether child has to stay in bed”, and “fight about whether child has to sleep at all”, and, finally, “fight about how often child can get up after sleeping time before mother totally loses it”.

I know, I’m the adult, I should be able to stay calm, and patient, and nice through all of this but, well, it’s not easy. If he hadn’t been sick this week I’d told him to just stay up as long as he wants to, I don’t care. Somehow he has to understand that sleep is not some cruelty that I force upon him but something very much in his own interest.

I started this blog post just before lunch, and now I’m while I’m waiting for my last student who obviously doesn’t come life looks a bit brighter. My dear husband is vacuuming in the background, for which I’m very, very grateful. (He just asked why I’m the one blogging, and he’s the one doing housework. It could be the other way around. Seems I’m a mean chauvinist pig. (I dusted! And did the grocery shopping! And I’ll upgrade his blog on the weekend!)

I have a nice little blog post that I wrote into my notebook more than a week ago while waiting for the train at midnight. I thought that would be the next one to post but then I’d have to type it into the computer. It’s not that I’m completely disorganized. The notebook has been sitting next to the computer for that past week.

I’m still doing more thinking about all the things I should be doing right now and will have to do until the end of the year than actual doing the things I should do. I can tell you that’s really exhausting. I don’t know if I’ll ever learn it. Doing the things one after the other really needs much less energy. I have been making progress, some things have moved and are looking better but I’m still at the point where every heap of stuff that gets done reveals another heap underneath.

This weekend at least we’ll be home, no parties, no visits, well, almost no visits, no vacuuming or dusting or grocery shopping, I bet I can do everything on my list and start a few new projects.

What do you think?

Story of the Month: Twice as much ain’t twice as good

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It’s not really about food.

“I wish I could eat like you. I’d have no problems losing weight.” Pia says to me at lunch. Then she looks at my tummy. Well, if I always ate like I do at work I’d have no problems losing weight either. I pick at my salad, limp and soggy, drenched in that kind of dressing you only get at restaurants. White and milky with a taste like starch.

The afternoon at work seems to pass backwards. On top of everybody working as if in slow motion I have to sit through one of these meetings which are held solely because my boss likes to hear himself talk. Also, it’s good to make him feel in charge.

I’m hungry. I’m always hungry. In the afternoon Pia brings a big tray of gummi bears. I never eat sweets at work. There’s no point.

Just when I’m about to leave the phone rings, and I have to deal with my boss yet again. Obviously he feels that I’m not enough of a team player. Ugh. It seems that somebody accused me of pushing too hard. Brain-dead snails, the whole lot of them.

Finally, I’m out. Today I’ll take good care of myself. I’ll take a nice bath, steam some dumb vegetables, and go for a walk later. It will make me feel great.

I’m hungry. My feet walk to the grocery store out of their own accord. I’ll just get a bit of chocolate. I had a bad day, I deserve a little treat. Just one or two pieces after dinner. There it is. Chocolate. Mmm. Home.

Finally there. I kick off my heels, get out of the constriction that’s the “power suit”, jacket with shoulder pads, short skirt, blouse that I can’t lift my arms in, pantyhose, underwire bra. Finally able to inhale all the way again.

While dressing in yoga pants, a tee, a hoodie, and two pairs of soft socks, I put the Red Hot Chili Peppers on. Loud. That’s better.

I’m beat. Open the fridge, get a cold beer. Fetch a glass. Unpack the chocolate, potato chips, gummi bears, and licorice. Pour the beer. Put everything on a tray together with my novel. I sit down in bed with my tray, and the remote control. Finally, I can relax.

I open the bag of potato chips first. They smell delicious, I put them in my mouth, and they crackle as I bite down. I’ll only eat a few, and then I’ll put the bag away. Spicy, crunchy, garlicky, hot. Just a few more, just a few. Now a sip of beer. A bit of licorice interspersed with the gummi bears. Chips, beer, gummi bears, licorice.

I start reading. The next time I look up the chips are gone. Oh no. I did it again.
I’m feeling bad. Bloated. Fat. Unworthy. I finish the chocolate. Whatever. I get up and fetch another beer.

It’s not my fault, food is the only thing I have. It’s my security blanket, my comfort. It’s like a cave. I dig myself in, and then I close the door. And I’m safe.

The taste, the texture, the feeling of being full.

It’s my drug of choice. It makes life bearable. It isn’t really important which food it is. It can be anything.

Of course, I’m not stupid. I know that it doesn’t really help. But I do feel better. At least for the moment.

That feeling of the salt rush comes first. The blood races up into my head. Making me a bit breathless. Next comes the sugar high. My heart beating faster. All the while the fat makes me feel safe and warm. The beer like a clear mountain stream going down. It would all be fine if I could stop in time. Just a bit and then close the bags, and put it all away.

I totally lose control around food. There’s this vortex in my middle. It’s always hungry. It sucks me in, and it doesn’t let go.

Afterwards I feel bad. Fat. Bloated. Weak. Sick. But the vortex still isn’t satisfied. I’m still hungry. If I wait a bit I can finish off the second bag of potato chips. Maybe I should take up smoking. At least I wouldn’t get fat.

If only I could stop eating altogether.

This is sick. Why can’t I stop. Nobody’s force-feeding me. I know I can do it. Tomorrow I’ll eat nothing but salad and yoghurt all day.