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August Just Posts

Sep 102007

Welcome you all to our fabulous Just Post roundtable for August. Every month bloggers tell us about blog posts they read or wrote about social justice and Jen and Mad (and since this month also Hel and me) compile a list and post it together with a little introduction.

I’m still a little overwhelmed by the task to represent a whole continent though it’s a small one. I can need your help there. Since most of you can’t read German I have refrained of adding German blog posts to the list. But I plan to write about something I found in German blogs about social justice every month.

In one of my own recent posts I have boasted about the German health care system. Well, the story I read over at gedankenträger sounds quite different than that. While the German health care and social system is good, it is getting worse and worse. It is constantly being reformed and reformed with the goal of having it become more “cost-efficient”.

Moni who is writing at gedankenträger is a single mother parenting an autistic son. He just turned seven years old. After deciding to put him into school a year late because of his autism last year she had to find an appropriate school for this year. One where his needs can be met and also a school with additional daycare since primary school in Germany runs only in the mornings and she has to work for a living too. He went to preschool at a place specifically for autistic children. Since they have a school too that would have been the ideal place for him. Only it didn’t work out, obviously they preferred autistic children who speak and aren’t that complicated. Or something.

The red tape involved has been immense. None of the people she talked to communicated with each other and although she had tried finding a suitable school since the year before she didn’t know where he would go until almost the last moment. There are very inadequate resources for autistic children even in Berlin which is the biggest city in Germany. Finally she found a school for mental handicapped children that took him and was granted financing for a helper during school hours. But then she wasn’t (and her son needs to be supervised so he won’t run away on his own). And then, surprise, she was again but not as much as the first time.

I hope very much for her that his being in school will run smoother than the process of finding one. And that she will be able to have him adequately cared for while she is at work. If you want to read her story you can do so at “Schule: der Saga dritter Teil”. And you can see a picture of her son at his very first day of school at “big day“. (Her English is excellent by the way, so don’t hesitate to leave comments.)

For more cute pictures you can look at the “Faces of Autism“-flickr pool.

So, here is the list of Just Posts for August and the people who contributed. And you should definitely check out what Jen, Mad and Hel are writing about this month too.

The writers
Bon at Crib Chronicles with Blessings
Crazymumma with If I’m going to talk the talk…
Cecilieaux with blogging last word, who is anglo, people of 1066 and portal for billionaires
Jangari with more on squandered funds and stuart highway robbery
Maypole with false hope and i know what it means to love
Denguy with boyo man
Jen with what a long strange trip it’s been, national news and side by side
Alejna with some of my best friends are republicans
KC with colorless ii
NoMotherEarth with about a boy
Urban-Urchin with disposable people
Emily with miscarriage of justice
Kevin with Jena 6
MBT with things you get nekkid for
Vera with dominator tentacles
Packaging girlhood with increased suicide rates among teen girls
Lex with compassion
Kitchen Fire with postscript
Aliki with disparity
Gwen with feed your head
From the Front Lines with philanthropy thursday
Flutter with the morning commute and What Should Flutter Cook?
Stumbling and Mumbling with you know you’re a conservative when and the tangible harm of inequality
Izzy with forgive my bluntness but i hate george bush
11D with bob herbert morphs into david brooks
MOTR with enough
Janet with my grass roots are showing
Eden with some animals are more equal than others
Acukiki at Sticking to the Point with Follow Your Dreams
African Fragments with Sisters Can Do it For Themselves
Christine at Running on Empty When I Grow Up
Ewe with Baaaaad Party, Baaaaad Party and A Sunday Not-So-Funny…
Fortune and Glory with What fills us up makes us whole again and Today as I hold my head…
Gary with Homeless
Gettin’ it wrong with Twisty Slides, Twisted Logic and Olivia
Jen at One Plus Two with Teaching Fish to Swim, I Was Interviewed by National News, side by side and What a Long, Strange Trip Its Been
La vie en Rose with It’s the body…always the body
Latoya Peterson at Racialicious with 4th Generation Racist: Can you be anti racist if you’re anti-white?
Lia with Pensioned Serenity
Maddie at Persisting Stars with Someone with sky and birds in his heart
Nina Smith with Books Review: On My Own Two Feet
Open Synergy with Darwin’s Jihad-A Luta Continua
Snigdha Sen with Streets Are For Walking, Stop Stalking
Suzanne Reisman with The Real Story: Attack Of The Predatory Lenders On Single Women Homeowners
Susanne at creative.mother.thinking with Housework for Children and Being Sick Shouldn’t Make you Bankrupt
Thailand Gal with Katrina put me over the edge, Repeat ch-ch, repeat-ch-, and Your silence will not protect you
Tired Mommy with Learning what we live
The World’s Yours To Live!! with The World of Peace
Wayfayer Scientista with Seasonal Goodbyes and Working against cultural biogotry

The readers
Jess
Thordora
Cecilieaux
Chani
Alejna
KC
Christine
Catherine
Aliki
Sarah
Karen
Mad
Jen
Hel
Susanne
Sober Briquette

Children and Responsibility

just post, life, parenting 18 Responses »

Jul 302007

This time I don’t want to talk about the responsibility that comes with having children. I want to talk about the responsibilities our children have. Or maybe should have.

For the past year or so my son has been really moody. Sometimes aggressive, sometimes depressed a little. We were fighting so much that we asked the preschool to switch from him going only in the afternoon to almost the whole day. (Yeah, that’s right, I put my son in daycare because we (him and me) were fighting so much.) When I approached his teacher, telling about my difficulties and the constant power struggle in our house, she said that she didn’t see any of it in school. And that maybe it had to do with him being around adults all the time. At home he is always the weak one, the little one, and the one who isn’t allowed to decide on his own. So I’ve been thinking about ways to make him feel more independent.

The other thing I have been thinking constantly about is how many of my students seem to be incapable – and unwilling – of doing anything on their own. It often seems to me that their parents still hold their hands at an age where they should be almost grown-up. And I think that this makes the students (and maybe the parents too) unhappier and doesn’t help building self-esteem

So maybe our children need more responsibility. I’m not talking about child labour here. I’m talking about having to stand up for the consequences of their own actions. Since most of my students come from rather privileged families, I have seen children sent to boarding school when they were about to fail a grade. I have seen parents doing homework, I have seen parents making up for everything their children screw up. Lost a coat? You get a new one. Forgot your homework? Your mother’s doing it. Have to go anywhere? Your parents are driving you everywhere you want. Even in the middle of the night. You don’t know what to do after high school? Well, just sit around at home moping until you find out.

They have nice parents, do they? (Of course, not all parents and students are alike. I do have students who have to be quite self-sufficient too.) But I can’t shake the feeling that these young adults have the deep feeling that they are really dependent on their parents. And that they won’t know what to do when on their own.

While responsibility might be a burden, eventually each and every one of us has to take responsibility for himself and his life. Well, there even might come a time where our children will have to be responsible for their children or, gasp, even us, their parents. With responsibility comes a sense of accomplishment and capability too. It’s not all bad though there are a lot of young adults out there who shy away from it. Who never learned it.

Young adults who grew up thinking that it was their parents they were doing their homework for. Interestingly they started failing school the minute they were old enough to realize that their parents don’t have any real power over them. When I had talked to those parents earlier and said, “Well, let him go to school without his homework then.” The parents had answered, “But then he will have bad grades!” Yeah, he will. Maybe that’ll teach him to do his homework.

I’m not talking about not helping. I’m the first one to explain something for the umpteenth time, to say, “Maybe you should try this.” But today my son refused to get dressed and then had a tantrum about his breakfast (“What do you want for breakfast, müsli or bread?”, “Müsli.”, “Are you sure?”, “Yes, Müsli.” – “Here’s your müsli.”, “But I dooon’t WAAANT MÜÜSLIIII!!!). So I told him if he didn’t get dressed he could walk to preschool naked. Then he dressed. And then we left for preschool. No breakfast. For him that is.

But I’m still behind what I thought I would be doing before I had a child. Back then I thought that a four year-old should be able to dress himself, pick up his toys, and help with housework. Very funny. Right now my son’s responsibilities are: dress and undress himself, know when to use the toilet, and unpack his backpack. Sometimes, very rarely I ask him to put his plate on top of the dishwasher after meals. One reason for this is that housework around here mostly happens when he is at preschool, but maybe we should change that.

Children of his age that are visiting Montessori school already learn how to cook a little, they brush their hair, they brush their teeth and they know how to sweep the floor and cut vegetables. They certainly have to pick up their toys.

So I’m thinking about which responsibilities to introduce next. I don’t want to end up with a boy who’s 16 and who comes home, drops his shoes in the middle of the floor, slumps into the next chair and says, “I need something to eat.” And who then expects me to cook something for him. I definitely don’t want him to grow into a man who says that housework is for women. A man who never will move out because he doesn’t want to be without room service and clean laundry.

I’d like to raise my son with the knowledge that actions have consequences and that he will have to face them on his own someday.

So, what are your children responsible for?

Why it was right not to buy pink shoes for my son

fashion, gender, just post, parenting 38 Responses »

May 282007

You might recall that my son had wanted pink sandals some time ago. And I decided not to buy them and to convince him that blue-beige ones are much better. And I felt rotten for it. And angry. Why can’t my son have pink shoes if he likes them? Why do I have to fear that he will be made fun of? To compensate I bought him pink socks. With horses. And hearts. He loved them. He couldn’t wait to wear them to preschool. But, alas, they had to be washed first. So he had to wait for three long days.

He dressed up with his cute socks and jeans and his new sandals. He told me, “But you will have to buy a pink t-shirt to go with them, you know. I have to have a pink t-shirt.” Okay.

He went to preschool. When I asked him in the evening, he told me that everybody loved his pink socks. That he really needed a pink tee. Have you ever tried to find a pink t-shirt without ruffles or something? Just a plain t-shirt. Not too girlish? Not too expensive, too, since I didn’t know how long he would like to wear it. What I saw in the department store made me glad to have a boy. There was not one t-shirt that I liked. (And I remembered why I keep buying my son’s clothes out of a cataloge. It’s not only the girl’s clothes that are ugly.) So I tried the second hand store. And found a pink t-shirt like this for 2 €:

Of course this had to be washed too so he couldn’t wear it the day after I bought it. But he had his socks. The next day we arrived at preschool, late as often, and a little girl sat down beside him. She told her mother, “The boy is wearing girlie socks.” And he showed her, proudly. In the evening he was very sad to learn that his socks had to be washed since they were very, very dirty. A few days later I told him they were ready to be worn again and that he could wear his new pink tee with it. He had loved the tee when I showed it to him. Then he said, “No, I don’t want to wear the socks or the t-shirt to preschool.” “Why?” “L. and F. made fun of me.” It turned out that a couple of kids had laughed at him because of the socks. And that everybody had been talking about it for days. Obviously a boy wearing pink socks is a very hot topic for preschoolers.

And that was it. He didn’t even want to wear the t-shirt or the socks on weekends. They are tainted with the laughter of his peers.

This makes me sad. I’m even sadder because I saw it coming. Of course I could have prevented this but then I thought, “Maybe it’s not that bad.” And that everybody should be able to wear the color he or she likes. I’m still angry that I’m living in a society where people can’t wear the colors they like. Not even when they are only four years old. I knew that preschoolers and kindergarteners are highly conventional. You can’t really blame them, they learn their values from the adults around them. Women do housework, men can work with computers, women are bad at math, men can’t sew, women always want to be pretty, men don’t care how they look, blablabla. As if there were no individuality.

Or am I the only one who thinks that gender inequality is creeping back?

(Edited to add: Since there were so many comments on this post where people felt sad for my son I wrote yet another post on this to round it all up: Pink – the third)

Blog Party! Blog Party!

creativity, just post, music, projects 6 Responses »

May 102007

I know it’s only Thursday, but since Thursday’s the new Friday and since we can have a party whenever we want (even wearing pajamas and no make-up) I’d like to make this party-time. So, imagine decorations, champagne, paper hats if you’re so inclined, and delicious food of course.

I’m inviting you first, to have a look at the Just Post-roundtable:

As every month, Jen and Mad sent out for posts about social justice. And they’re well worth the read.

But the main topic of this gathering is the unveiling of a brand new blog. A brand new type of blog at that. Interested?

See, after all this talk about blogging and bloggers and such in my house, my husband got interested and started reading. And then he thought, “Why don’t I do something like that?” and so he started his first blog. It is a new type of blog because it is a music blog. A mlog one could say. Every week or so he records something and then posts it on his blog. With beautiful pictures. Sometimes there even are words. He isn’t posting songs though, he is posting improvisations. Just him and an electric guitar, no overdubs, only occasionally a little cutting. He tries to play in the state of flow so they have a meditative aspect, but they’re not often sounding meditative. Or what one thinks of as meditative.

I told you that he had abandoned the thought of making a new CD for now, even though he has spent about two years in preparation for it. Getting the sounds and the equipment, which for electric guitar is inextricably linked, just right. But making CDs on top of everything else, as a “hobby” so to say (as much as I despise that word when used in relation to making music) is a little too much. So I’m very, very happy to announce it here. I hope you hop over and listen to what he plays. For months now I’ve only heard these beautiful improvisations through the wall. Glimpsing only part of it. Now I have the chance, as you have, to hear some of it fully.

Here it comes, the big official unveiling of “psychedelic zen guitar“:

My husband told me that his blogging goal for the next months is to get two comments…

Here, let me get you another (virtual) glass of champagne, click on the image above, set back and enjoy.

(Really, I’d serve you real champagne but you’d have to come over to my place.)

Technorati Tags: guitar, psychedelic zen guitar, zen

Just Post for March

just post 26 Responses »

Mar 312007

This is my post in the Just Post roundtable series. I have installed the button in my sidebar but it won’t function until March 10th or so. Right now you’re not too late to join us. If you’re interested, click on the button below.

When I was pregnant with my son the pregnancy was deemed high-risk. And do you know why? Because of the simple fact that I got pregnant in the year that I turned 35. Thirty-five. Had I been pregnant one year earlier it wouldn’t have been considered risky at all.

So what? Because everything went well. But I didn’t know that when my doctor advised me to get an amniocentesis. Because you know older women have a higher risk of having a handicapped child. (By the way, after my first post about “handicapped” people I realized that the term is not political correct. I’m sorry but I don’t know what to write instead. “Special needs” seems a little ridiculous.)

To me this decision was a no-brainer. Have my belly punctured with a needle? To find out more about my baby? Are you nuts?

Apparently the rest of the world thought I was the nutty one. Everybody had an opinion on this. Of course I should do it. What if I had a handicapped child? Indeed, what if? I knew that I would have kept the baby anyway. And what if the amnio hurt the baby? I’ll give you the math: the risk of having a baby with a chromosome defect for women age 35 to 37 is 1.6%. The risk of losing the baby through the amnio is about 1%. (It is less than 1% if made by a specialist.) In my world that means that the risk of having a baby with a chromosome defect is only slightly more probable than losing the baby through the amnio.

But that’s not all. A factor to be considered is also what one would do if the baby were “defective”. (And this is why I think that this is a social issue not only a personal story.) If there had been anything wrong with my baby there would have been considerable pressure not to have it. I think that knowing that one will have a special needs child is stressful enough without people telling you that you’re doing a disservice to society by having it. If I had gotten pregnant just a couple of months earlier no one would have tried to persuade me to be punctured by needles. (Sorry, but this picture was just horrible to me and still is.)

What I did do was let them make a very big and detailed ultrasound. I was okay with that because I knew that it wouldn’t hurt my baby. And I knew that I would have kept it anyway. Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally pro-choice, only my own baby already was a human being to me when it was just a tiny clump of cells.

While I was making that decision I met with the overpowering opinion of almost everyone I met (apart from one friend) that if the baby were handicapped his life wouldn’t be worth living. That it would be better off not to be born. And of course that handicapped people are expensive.

I was flabbergasted. You know, most people aren’t born handicapped. There are only a few things that can be seen in pre-natal diagnostics. And what if something went wrong when it was born and it ended up with spasticity? What if it had a rare gene defect like muscular dystrophy that you won’t see until a few years later? What if my baby were already a toddler and then almost drowned or had an accident and ended up different than before? Would those same people think his life not worth living then? I don’t think they would tell me though, even if they thought so.

As I have told before there are a lot of people who secretly think that handicapped people should be put away so that they don’t bother the others. And that surely there shouldn’t be money spend on their education since there isn’t enough for us normal people anyway. This makes me very, very angry.

Because that indicates that this is something that can’t happen to us. That if your child is deemed healthy and “normal” you’re destined for the happily-every-after-ending to your life. When your mother was punctured and diagnosed then nothing can ever happen to you. Nobody will ever have an accident, nobody will catch a disease, nobody will ever be old an feeble. Of course you will go through life with a right to stay youthful and strong and healthy. And then maybe die in your sleep at age 101.

I have the feeling that all this fuss about pre-natal diagnostics (and from what I hear German’s pregnant women are more thoroughly diagnosed than US ones.) is so that everybody has a feeling of being insured against, well, life.

Addendum: I just saw Jenn Satterwhite’s post on “Teaching understanding of disabilites in elementary school” on BlogHer and wanted to point you towards it.

Technorati Tags: handicap, just post, medicine, motherhood

A year and more than a hundred posts

just post 10 Responses »

Feb 102007

I missed my hundredth post. Well, didn’t miss it as such but I didn’t know that it was No. 100 while I wrote it. But then there are posts in this blog that really don’t count like the one that’s the oldest in the archive (and still in German). That was neither my first post nor the day that marked the birth of this blog for me. I opened my blogger account in May 2005. My husband wanted a website and I said, “Well, but you have to have something that makes people coming back, like news or a blog. Like Neil Gaiman has.” He asked me how to do it, I didn’t know, mumbled something about blogger, and maybe free service, went to my computer, set up an account, wrote something about the weather and my son disclosing the name of the town where I live, went back, opened another account for him, said, “Look here’s your account, this is your password and if you have time I’ll show you how to enter new posts.” That was it.

If you’re interested, his blog is still there, though his website has its own news-page. (And it’s about as easy as entering Fort Knox to post something there, it needs me, my list of passwords and three different account or user names to enter anything. It’s done best with phone assistance by our friend who programmed the whole thing.) Oh, and the whole thing is in German. I still have to translate everything into English and then have our friend do whatever he does to create new pages…

But back to this blog. There was that stray entry in August 2005, and then silence. Think of it as the gestation period of this blog. Nine months of expecting. Then I decided to make the switch to English and this marks what I count as my first official post: language switch. Since then I found a lot of blogs not dull at all. In fact I found so many that I can’t read them all if I want to do something else in my life than reading blogs. The first glimpse of what a community there was, I had when I joined blogher. Back then this blog was still called “Diapers and Music”. I started blogging away enthusiastically and then stopped to think about who on earth would want to read this. As those of you with blogs of your own know it is a bit of work. And I wanted to be read, otherwise I could have stayed with my paper journal.

When I started telling friends about the blog just to gain a handful of readers another problem emerged: most of them wouldn’t read something in English. But then, most people browsing the blogher blogrolls wouldn’t read something in German. Dilemma. I solved it in true Susanne-fashion, I did both. The twin to this blog, its German mirror was born 8 days later: “Windeln und Musik“. As of December 1, 2006 diapers vanished from my life. I renamed the blog. It’s very hard to come up with something that works in German and in English. My husband suggested “Reflexionen aus einem beschädigten Leben”, “Reflections from a damaged life”, which sounds great but a little too pessimistic for my taste. Even if it has something to do with Theodor W. Adorno. (It’s the subtitle of his “Minima Moralia“.) My life doesn’t feel that damaged though.

So I changed the name to “creative.mother.thinking”. Creativity and parenting are the cornerstones of this blog and obviously I’m always writing about what I’m thinking. I’m not that sure about the dots any more. Maybe they are silly. Preposterous. Do you think I should get rid of them? Name it “creative mother thinking”? Maybe I should.

Anyway. It’s been a year. A year of blogging, a year of walking through my day mentally composing blog entries all the time and actually writing about every third of them. For months I felt lonely with my blog. I had about 3 readers, well, 3 hits a day and 95% of people stayed only one second or less. I have spent more time on this blog than I ever thought possible, I have translated every post bar one, and have contemplated giving it up for the sake of my music about every other month.

During the last months readers have gotten up, this blog’s technocrati ranking has gotten up to 147,303 and I feel like I’m part of a community. I have found friends like De and Liv, and I even was part of a big blogger wedding for social justice. I found out that writing is more precious to me than I though and embarked on NaNoWriMo. Through which I found friends who live a little closer to me. So, yes, as much as I doubted it as first, blogging really is a social activity. It took me from sitting in my house in suburbia feeling lonely and disconnected to sitting in my house in suburbia feeling part of a community filled with friends. Sometimes I even get out and meet them in person. Mostly I don’t. One of the reasons being that I can’t just take a plane and travel halfway around the world. But then nowadays the world comes to me through my little computer screen.

And to complete all this I have to say that I started yet another thing I don’t have time or energy for. When I did NaNo I thought to myself, “Why isn’t there such a thing for songwriters?” Well, surprise, there is: FAWM. As in February album writing month. 14 songs in 28 days. I plan to fail spectacular since a) I signed up one week late, b) I have written all of three or four songs in all my life, c) I don’t even had the time to translate my last blog post for the whole week, and d) I just have to make rest and sleep a priority right now because otherwise I’ll keel over. Nonetheless I signed up and wrote almost a whole song during the last week. It only needs some lyrics thrown at its bridge…

And don’t forget to check out the Just Post posts:

Technorati Tags: blogger, blogging, just post

handicapped

just post 12 Responses »

Jan 312007

January is almost over and I still have to write my social issue post. I promised, so I deliver. When I was a child and young adult there just were no handicapped people visible. The only one I knew was my cousin. She had a hole in her heart and when the doctors operated to fix that they found out that everything was connected to the wrong place and so they had to leave it open. She always had a very bluish tinge and her left arm was paralyzed. We didn’t meet often, she was about five years older than I and there was only one year when we visited each other and talked. I never understood why my mother always whispered when talking about her. To me she was my cousin. Different yes, but then everybody is, in a way. Nobody told me that she had been living on supposedly borrowed time since birth. When she died at the age of 30 she had lived far longer than expected.

Apart from that I was one of those people who shy away from people in wheelchairs on the subway thinking, “I hope he doesn’t ask me to help him, I hope he doesn’t ask me.” And then I was unemployed after my last ever office job, knowing I’d never work in a place like that again, looking for a job in my own field. I was so desperate I even considered teaching. With hindsight I say that was the best move I ever made, but then it seemed terrifying. A friend of mine worked as a music teacher for grades 7 to 12 in a private school. She got pregnant and looked for somebody doing her job while she was on maternity leave. I really needed a job, but teaching? In a school? And in a private school with 60% of physically handicapped students? “But what shall I do?” I asked, “I don’t know how to help them. I never had anything to do with handicapped people.” She told me not to worry. Those people were very used to tell others how to help them. They do it all the time.

It’s a very small school, only 14 students per class. And I taught music there and found out that I love teaching music but that I am no longer able to work in a hierarchic system. Some of the students I liked and some I didn’t like. It is a marvelous school. they have helpers for those of the students who can’t do things on their own like eat, go to the bathroom or write. We had students with all kinds of handicaps from all over the country. Suddenly I found out that even Germany where there are many regulations and everything has to have access for wheelchairs is not as friendly as I thought.

Daily contact with people with muscular dystrophy, spasticity, paraplegia, osteogenesis imperfecta, spina bifida, and whatever changed my attitude a little. The first time I heard a fellow teacher saying, “Oh, he’s only a paraplegic, he can do everything on his own.” I was a little speechless. But compared to others… Nowadays when I meet somebody in a wheelchair in the subway I can see, if he’s a paraplegic, basketball-playing in a sports-wheelchair who is perfectly capable of maneuvering his wheelchair up the escalator, and probably stronger than me or if it’s somebody who’d like to have a little help pushing the button that opens the door.

And I found out that handicap or not, we all are just people. Not knowing how one can help certainly is no excuse for looking away. If you were handicapped like, let’s say, you broke your foot and are on crutches, or you broke both feet and are in a wheelchair, would you find it acceptable if people looked away because they were afraid of doing something wrong when helping? Would you find it acceptable for people to rush past you not helping you to maneuver your wheelchair out of the subway? Would you like to stay at home always, because you can’t drive a car or push a grocery cart on your own?

There’ll be a second part to this post, because again, I am under time restrictions here, but for today I have a task for you: when you’re out today, try to look out for people who might need a little help. Or even if they don’t need your help at all, just make eye contact, smile and treat others as equal human beings.

Thank you. End of sermon for today.

Technorati Tags: handicap, social justice

5 things you don’t know about me and just post

just post, meme 8 Responses »

Jan 102007

First of all, today is the day of the very first “just post” awards.

I had planned to write a beautiful post about handicapped people, but then life got in the way and you’ll have to wait for that one. Since the “just post”-award is still very young, there hasn’t been that much participation yet, but we’ll just promote it in the months to come. Oh, and this award was the result of the big fat social wedding of Jen and Mad. Since I’m really pressed for time today (and since I’ve really been wanting to do this for quite a time), I consider myself tagged with the “5 things you don’t know about me”-meme by Mir. (And when I say that you don’t know these things I’m thinking of people only knowing me through the blog, not of people like my sister, though she reads this too.)

I didn’t drink a single drop of alcohol until I was 19 years old. I even refused to sip on something for social reasons. To this day my mother still is shocked, when she sees me drinking a beer. As Mir told about herself, I also was the designated driver for years, and was proud of my high morale standard. I felt very superior to people behaving like a typical drunk. I have to say, though, that even when drunk I never behave like a typical drunk. Like my husband, I only react by first being a little bit louder, then a blurring of speech, and then becoming a little more quiet.
I smoked my very first cigarette when I was eight years old. Me and a couple of friends tried smoking behind a group of bushes in the woods. We felt really grown up and cool. Growing up in a smokers’ household, I neither had to cough or got sick. I held and lit the cigarette like I had done this my whole life. When later I tried to get more cigarettes by stealing a pack or two from my parents, I was found out. Thus ended my career as a smoker. I tried again four years later, but decided not to smoke. I never regretted it.
Every man I ever had sex with was a musician. At first I had a pattern of percussionist, bass player, percussionist, bass player, but then I wandered and dated a pianist and later a clarinet player. Also, I never know how you count it, when you’re having an affair with two men at once. (I had an “open relationship” with the first bass player. Well, I can say this does not work for me.) The last one was also a bass player whom I then married. End of dating history so far, but, I’m grateful to say, not of sex.
You know that when I studied music education my main instrument was – as it still is – voice, but what you don’t know is that my second instrument used to be drums. (Now you know how I met the percussionists.) People who haven’t seen me since that days still think of me as the drummer, but I haven’t touched drums since the end of our Brazilian band seven years ago. (Anyone interested in buying my congas?)
As I’m writing this, I’m depressed again. Not as in “not-functioning and nearly suicidal”-depressed, but as in “feeling as if there were a vortex inside of me sucking away most of my energy”-depressed. Since wondering if I maybe am slightly bipolar, I haven’t had another “episode”. Only things like PMS. Before Christmas my husband said he thought I might be in a “manic” state. Of course I wasn’t, I only had a lot to do. Um. And I didn’t feel like I was soaring high. I didn’t take on lots of new projects. Mild overdrive due to circumstances. But since we returned from my parents I have been glued to the computer, checking e-mail about every other second, reading blogs and waiting for the evening which I spent in front of TV. Then going to bed too late, of course. And repeat. With the firm intention to do better the next day. And repeat. After four days of this, it dawned on me that this was not normal. I was feeling depressed. On Sunday I thought I had come out of it. Only to realize today that I’m still in it. The problem is, in a way, that I don’t have times anymore where I declare myself sick despite a lack of symptoms and then spend days in bed. I’m no longer living alone, I have work to do, I have family. And I know that I don’t feel better, when I’m staying in bed. So I get up, I make breakfast, I do minimal household chores, I talk to my family, I even am happy at times, but there’s a part inside of me that has gone numb and wishes to stay that way. I know that eventually I will come out of it and that exercise, enough sleep, real food, cuddling and walks in the woods help. But I don’t know what’s happening. There are triggers, but there are no deep reasons. Weird.

So this is the reason, why I haven’t posted, why I’m sounding a little off.

So this month I’ll have to rely on others to change the world for the better. Please go and look at the just post awards. (And don’t worry about me, please.)

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