creative.mother.thinking

explaining my life to strangers

Susanne

How much journaling is too much?

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I have been reading “The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Size” by Julia Cameron. I like the book very much. If you have read this blog for any time at all you know how much “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” changed my life. And since I love writing the idea to “write myself right-size” holds a lot of appeal for me.

So far I only read the book once, and – I’m sad to tell you – reading the book doesn’t really change much. I will have to change my behavior. Again. But that’s not what I want to write about today. I want to write about one of the first tools that she gives you, right after the Morning Pages and Daily walks, both things I have been doing almost daily for the past nine years. That tool is that you keep a food journal. It is for recording what you eat, and when, and how you feel, and sometimes for writing instead of eating.

I have found myself strangely reluctant to start this food journal despite the fact that I already bought one, and have been carrying it around in my purse for the past week, and despite the fact that I think it’s a great idea, and will help me a lot, and despite the fact that I unearthed food journals that I kept in 2001 and 2003 and found them very interesting to read. Or I might say insightful and a little disturbing. So, despite all this I was reluctant and kept telling myself I’ll start the journal tomorrow, or maybe next week, or maybe in September.

Then I thought about that for a bit because that’s what I do, I sit there and think, and I found that my reluctance partly stemmed from the multitude of journals that I’m keeping. I can scarcely look anywhere without stumbling over a journal of mine, and journaling already consumes quite a bit of my time. This is what I have so far:

  1. Morning Pages journal (That’s three pages written by hand every day)
  2. Practice journal (A notebook where I write down when I play music, what I played, and sometimes how I felt, or ideas for songs)
  3. Quicken (In theory I record every cent earned and spent. In real life I have a high stack of bank statement and receipts sitting on my desk waiting to be recorded. I haven’t done that for about six weeks already.)
  4. A gratitude journal (Every evening I sit down and write down five things I am grateful for.)
  5. A general notebook (Filled with bits and pieces, phone numbers, ideas for blog posts, stories, notes on PTA meetings, everything.)
  6. My “notebook” on ravelry (All the details of everything I have knitted since last summer.)
  7. Flylady control journal (In theory this is where I keep track of housework and such, in real life I haven’t opened it for ages and, instead, transferred all the really important reminders to my PDA’s to-do list.)
  8. And, not the least of them, this here blog.

So, self-improvement is a nice goal but right now I’m not sure if maybe I’m trying a bit too hard. Also who wants to keep a special nice journal just to record things like “Ate a whole bag of potato chips, and two candy bars because I was angry. Afterwards I felt bloated and still angry. Waited for fifteen minutes and ate a whole bag of gummy bears.”

I know there are people who change their behavior in order to not have to write down things like that. I also know that there are people who cheat when keeping a food journal. There also are people who are too lazy to get out the notebook for a handful of almonds and so they don’t eat the almonds. I’m not one of them. In the past I have written down minute detail of everything I ate and why and how I felt afterwards but it never kept me from eating still more even when I wasn’t hungry at all.

On good days I think about all these notebooks and journals as my legacy and hope that some future scholar will gain insight in the everyday life of our times (though that insight might be a bit warped). On bad days I imagine my poor son reading hundreds and hundreds of pages that his parents wrote. Every single day recorded. Poor thing. I better tell him that he can give that all away without ever looking at it.

So. Do you keep journals? Food journals? Do you think it will help?

(And, on a completely unrelated note, please remember to send me posts you read or wrote for the Just Post roundtable until August 7th. If you haven’t heard about that yet, just click on one of the little birds down on the right sidebar.)

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?