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Archives for November 2010

pockets of knowledge

November 17, 2010 by Susanne 2 Comments

In my daily life I don’t really think about these things but sometimes something comes up and then I find that there are all these little pouches of knowledge sitting in my brain unused. I know I have read about this phenomenon on somebody’s blog that there are all these things you learned about at some point in your life and now they just sit there like boxes in the attic.

Last week I went to a meeting. I have recently joined a group of women who meet every five or six weeks to talk about gender and giftedness, and last week the topic was ‘jealousy’. And the woman who started this group had prepared a nice little paper, and on that paper there was something about tsav. Now I know that most of you will never have heard that word before, but I had, and I read the paper, somewhat distracted while thinking about what I wanted to order once the waiter came around, I read that and thought, “Wait a minute, that’s not what tsav is.” Tsav, by the way is a term that refers to a form of witchcraft and comes from a language spoken in the Cameroon Grassland. I wrote a paper on it back in the days when I still studied cultural anthropology at university. We went on, talking about jealousy in ourselves, and others and as a cultural phenomenon, and I found myself – as usual – talking, and talking, and talking, and I wondered why I was going all expert on this, again, and one or two days later the answer popped into my head in the middle of the night. I did, because I was the one with the special interest in psychology and sociology for years, and those women were working in science, or law, or architecture. That was why I kept thinking, “But why don’t they know how that works?” They didn’t, and they couldn’t.

I don’t go around reading books on sociology, psychology, or anthropology these days, but there still is a place in my brain where all these theories live, I only had forgotten about them. They are a bit dusty, they don’t get much use but they are still there.

Then the other day a student of mine asked something about music notation, I don’t remember what, and all of a sudden he got the twenty-minute lecture about how music notation evolved since the 9th century. Oops. I tried to keep it as interesting as possible but still, that was the result of having studied musicology at an institute that specialized in medieval music. (And for those of you trying to get all that university study straight, I studied music education with a minor in musicology, and cultural anthropology.)

And then, yet another day about a month ago, somehow, I was talking to somebody about knitting – I do that all the time – and some time later I found that I had talked for fifteen minutes without stopping about sheep. My friend was polite enough to say that he really had learned a lot about sheep that night. The thing was that we were in a group of people and one of us had bread rare sheep in the past so she had a lot to say as well.

And then, last week again, my husband and I talked about the part of Germany where I come from, and that part has been known for its linen in former centuries, and all of a sudden I found myself explaining how to prepare nettle for spinning.

Now, it’s not unusual for me these days to speak about fiber as you know, because I spend quite a but of my time thinking about it and working with it, and most of my students get an impromptu spinning demonstration at one point. After all the spinning wheel is sitting right there, but those psychological, and sociological things? I keep forgetting that they are there. Like my dissertation, I wrote about learning theories in music for ten years, and of course that’s not something I talk about a lot in daily life, but then sometimes, usually at parties I find myself standing there, talking to someone, and it all comes back.

The weird thing for me is not that all of that stuff is still there if a bit rusty or vague for lack of use but the weird thing is that there are these things I spent years of my life with, and now they are totally unimportant and gone.

And the weirdest thing of all is the jazz standards. I used to sing mostly jazz, and when you’re a jazz musician you spend a lot of time learning a set of standard tunes. Like when you’re studying jazz at the conservatory here you have to know about 150 tunes by heart. I never knew that many but still I knew quite a few. I don’t sing jazz anymore these days, and I don’t listen to jazz mostly but then I go to a concert, or I watch something on TV, or I sit in a bar, and there’s music in the background, and I think, “I know this tune. I used to now all the lyrics.” and then I have to sit and listen and think until I know the name of the song. And then I remember all those songs buried in my memory. And I wonder why I never sing them again. And I wonder if I could maybe just say that I’m a jazz singer again, get a piano player and a band, get up on stage, and with a minimum of preparation just sing for hours. I might.

And then I feel really weird because it’s like I’m cut off from my past. All these things that I started and then left behind, I don’t really know what to do with them. They do come together in a way, but they can’t all be present all the time. That has always been a problem for me, both the reason why there are so may areas of interest in my life, and why I am not really an expert in anything, or a master piano player. I keep fluttering from subject to subject. I sit in a jazz concert and long for something more avantgarde, I sit in an avantgarde concert and long for something a bit more groovy, I listen to rock and long for something a bit more edgy, I don’t know.

My husband once said that our task for the middle years is to bring everything together we started in our youth. We thought about what I had done so far, and he came up with the idea of music theater with fiber performance art. It didn’t seem very realistic.

Do you have forgotten pockets of knowledge as well?

Filed Under: life

mindful use of the internet

November 13, 2010 by Susanne Leave a Comment

Like many of you I spend quite a bit of time on the internet. I do it for pleasure mainly, and it is a good thing. But then I find that I often spend so much time there that I neglect my real life, and that projects I have been wanting to finish don’t get finished, and there are piles of dirty dishes, and I don’t go to bed on time, and that’s is not good at all. The internet like TV these days never sleeps, it’s always there, and I found myself checking e-mail every other minute, even in the middle of the night. Because there’s WIFI, and there’s the iPod, and so I can check e-mails and read blogs whenever, and wherever I want. I might have to stand in a corner of the master bedroom to do it but still. Even my son knows that when he wants to find me, go and check my computer.

I knew there was a problem there, and so we put a timer on our router. No WIFI between 11 pm and 8am. No checking e-mail before breakfast. What good does it do anyway. I remember one night I went to check my e-mail one more time before going to sleep and what I got was notice by a student that he wanted to quit. I got so upset that I dropped my iPod on the floor and the display cracked. My work and the rest of my life is quite tangled together, and no person in her right mind would want to check work e-mail at midnight. I also find that I’m much more productive in my writing if I’m not connected to the internet at the same time. Which is why I do quite a bit of that either in bed or in the kitchen where the neighbor’s WIFI is so strong that my own signal can’t get through.

Then I read “The Power of Less”. There wasn’t something in there I had never heard before but it was helpful in a few ways. And it got me thinking about how I use the computer and the internet again. And you know what I did? I disabled WIFI in the house altogether. My husband and I both have an ethernet connection at our desks. I have a laptop so I can use that to write wherever I want but when I want internet I have to go to my desk.

I also limit the checking of e-mails to three to five times a day. When I check e-mail I do it when I have time to answer e-mails as well, I check, I react to most of the e-mails that come in and then I close my internet program. My computer used to be turned on all day long. If I ran errands it would sit on my desk back home on stand-by. I no longer do that. There are a couple of times a day that I surf the net, and I still spend a lot of time there but I usually don’t go in blindly clicking right and left but I ask myself, “What do I want to do here? How long will I do it?” and then occasionally I’ll look up from my monitor and ask myself if there’s something else I should be doing instead.

The thing is, instead of feeling deprived by this I feel much better. I enjoy reading blogs more, not less, and I found that the computer on stand-by had a bit of a pull on me all the time. Like a party going on in the adjacent room. I feel as if there are a few less things to do, a few less things wanting my attention. No WIFI, and a different attitude towards the net has really made me happier.

The one thing that has dropped by in this is twitter. Twitter is really made for sitting in front of the computer mindlessly hitting refresh. I still read there, and post but very rarely. I often just open it to see how certain people are doing. If you send me a direct message on twitter it will reach me nonetheless because I get notified by e-mail. But other than that there’s just a little bit less chatter in my head. And I love it that way.

Filed Under: life

It’s NaNoWriMo and I’m way behind

November 9, 2010 by Susanne 2 Comments

Interestingly this year I’m more behind on my NaNoWriMo word count than I have ever been. As far as I remember, at least. As every year I had wanted to do something about 2,500 words a day for the first week because it was fall break, and I thought I might be able to. True to me, though, what I did was barely meet the official 1,667 words a day goal for three days in a row, and then (bad move) skip a day because I was so tired, and there was so much going on. During a day where I didn’t have to teach, mind you. But then that was the day we took pictures for my husband’s new band, and we have been continuing the cleaning frenzy. At least my husband has, and I have helped him. On the bright side my son’s room is now both tidy and clean, all his stuffed animals have been washed, and the floor is completely empty. As in “just go in there and vacuum”-empty. We’re very pleased.

On Friday I got some news about a person I like very much that left me not much in the mood for anything. Since brooding doesn’t really help with anything, and there’s nothing I can do, I went out and met a few friends in the evening as planned but I only wrote 545 words. Saturday was about the same amount as crazy for the same reason but I did some writing. On Sunday I did meet my quota, well, daily quota despite spending the afternoon going to the pool with my son. So that was quite alright.

But then I found that going to the pool had been a very bad idea, especially with the sore throat I already had Sunday morning because then I got sick, and since yesterday I’ve been having a nasty cold. Nasty enough that I would stay home sick if I weren’t self-employed. My life being what it is I shuffle through the day barely able to think through all the snot. At least today is a light teaching day, and I intend to spend as much of it in bed as I can.

So, instead of having written 15,003 words so far as I should, or even more as I usually do, I have a meager 10,515 words so far. I’m also – nothing unusual about that – not happy with my story at all. I know from experience that only time can tell if it’s really that awful or not. I can worry about that later, once I have written it.

Since I’m feeling really bad, and am falling almost 5,000 words short, of course I thought about quitting. Nothing unusual about that as well, usually it happens somewhere in week two or three, and most often repeatedly thinking about giving up leads me to throw in a few monster writing sessions and finish early. But this year, of course again, I am so far behind, surely there will be no way to finish this without superhuman powers. Right?

Well, I just put my current number of words into my NaNoWriMo profile, and there’s a stats page telling me that if I manage to write 1,818 words a day until the end of November I will be able to finish anyway. 1,818! I know that’s a lot of words but that’s only about 150 more words per day than I would have to write if I weren’t behind.

You know what that means? That means, the thing that seems so overwhelming right now, that feels like I could never do it because I fell behind, that thing is no way near as big as I thought. Silly me.

And what do we learn from all this?

Do the math before succumbing to drama. Also, don’t throw the towel when you still have two thirds of the time before you.

Now I’m back to the keyboard for real writing. The day isn’t over yet.

Filed Under: NaNoWriMo, writing

Handgemacht – Folge 6: Strickgenuss

November 5, 2010 by Susanne 2 Comments

http://creativemother.de/audio/Handgemacht6.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Viel Altes und auch etwas Neues, dieses Mal denke ich darüber nach, was Strickgenuss ausmacht.

Ferner wurden erwähnt:

  • Virtual SOAR
  • Judith MacKenzie McCuin und “The Intentional Spinner“
  • NaNoWriMo
  • NaKniSweMo
  • Von meinen Projekten: Devon in Teal, die handgesponnenen Socken, Ebony Turtleneck und Maplewings.
  • Neu angefangen: Handspun Vine Yoke Cardigan, Silky Green, Cool Leaves Mittens, nochmal Ebony Turtleneck (Ich gebe nicht auf!), Babysocken.
  • Alle UFOs sind FOs: Toasty Pumpkin, Alien Algae, Psychedelic Liesl und Damson in Plum
  • Frau Schlamusers Kommentar zu den sinnlichen Strickern
  • Yarngasm
  • Dornröschenwolle.

Außerdem ist mir dieses Mal beim Anhören das erste Mal aufgefallen, dass mein Podcast zischelt. Es gibt so einen hochfrequenten Nachhall, der daher kommt, dass mein Kopfhörer nicht ganz dicht ist und das Mikrophon mich von dort zusätzlich aufnimmt. Tut mir sehr leid, dass ist mir vorher nie aufgefallen. Ich dachte, ich hätte einen geschlossenen Kopfhörer, aber nein. Nächstes Mal nehme ich den wirklich geschlossenen Kopfhörer von meinem Mann, dann dürfte das nicht mehr vorkommen.

Filed Under: crafts, knitting, Podcast

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Handgemacht mit iTunes abonnieren

Subscribe to know when Susanne’s next book comes out

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Manic Writing & Such

500words-150w

Archives

Categories

  • birthday letter (3)
  • blogging about blogging (21)
  • blogher (1)
  • changing habits (53)
  • crafts (55)
  • creativity (37)
  • daily journal (1,045)
  • family (20)
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  • green living (8)
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  • hear me sing (7)
  • just post (28)
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  • project 365 (14)
  • projects (35)
  • Projekt "Farbe bekennen" (14)
  • reading (9)
  • Rhiannon (5)
  • script frenzy (2)
  • self-help (40)
  • sewing (7)
  • spinning (31)
  • story of the month (13)
  • travel (12)
  • Uncategorized (62)
  • week in review (23)
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  • wordless wednesday (9)
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