creative.mother.thinking

explaining my life to strangers

meme

Blog me again!

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Like last year I won’t be attending the BlogHer-conference (Sniff!) but then I’m not entirely sure that I would want to spend my fortieth birthday traveling halfway around the world. Anyways, I will be staying right here. But this meme is also for people who don’t attend. (And Her Bad Mother said something about a list of people who aren’t going.)

This year the task was to write something in 10 seconds. (Very funny, isn’t it? They probably meant that it could be read in ten seconds. Yes, that’s it. Because no one who visits my blog has ever read something that took ten seconds or less either to write or to read.)

Here’s what I wrote on the BlogMe-Thread on BlogHer:

I’m a German music teacher from Germany. I’ll be turning forty on Friday which is one of the reasons why I won’t be going to BlogHer this year. The other is that I will have to teach my students how to sing, play the piano and guitar that day, and that BlogHer is on the wrong continent.

On my blog I’m writing about things like “how to be creative when you don’t have the time”, self-improvement, and occasionally you can hear me sing. I’m mother to a 4 1/2 year old son about whom I blog less than one might think. But I have taken up sewing. Sometimes I even post my to-do-lists.

Really, I should just have copied and pasted my blogger profile. Oh wait, I still can do that:

I’m a piano and singing teacher in midlife crisis. I’m mother to a 4-year-old son, and wife to a wonderful musician who’s teaching electric guitar and bass. Read the chronicles of my attempt to better myself and to be more creative.

Ten seconds… Hahahaha! I hope you all have a fabulous time at the conference.

blogme2007

I’m a rocking girl blogger

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Well, who would have thought. I already knew that I am a blogger and I’m quite sure about the girl, ahem, woman part, but rockin’? Me? Thank you very much Hel. Usually I think of myself as more of a jazz person, but then, who doesn’t want to rock.

So I tried to find out where this button came from since I was a little uncomfortable with a button that was just for telling other (female) bloggers, “You rock!” and then have them tag five others until every single female blogger in the world carries the same badge. Not that they shouldn’t.

This button doesn’t come with a handy link like the Thinking Blogger Award that links it back to its original creator, but maybe it should. I spend an hour or two yesterday clicking from post to post, and I found out where it began: It all started with a post called “Why not start something?” by Roberta Ferguson. She wrote:

I’m starting something today, right here, right now. You get to be in on it. It’ll be fun and it will build us a community of one sort: girl bloggers. Or, better yet, “Rockin’ Girl Bloggers”. How do you like that?

As an aside, I also saw just now that she has a music blog, and on that I found a blog called “A Singer’s Life” complete with a Singer’s Blog Carnival. How cool is that? I have been looking for musician bloggers for ages.

So the “Rockin’ Girl Blogger” button is for women and empowerment. So all is good. By the way it was totally meant to be stolen right from the start. I’m still a bit reluctant about stealing memes (or am I?) but Hel totally did the right thing. Because this badge is meant to be stolen. And if you don’t like it in pink because that clashes with your blog, or if you are not considering yourself to be a girl, you might want to look at what Jess did to the badge:


While this award is about power to women bloggers, I don’t feel particularly powerful at the moment. I’m spread a little thin (nice euphemism, isn’t it?) and am longing for summer vacation which still is three weeks away. And I don’t even like summer vacation! So, every time I don’t feel especially powerful I have to remember that the number of dear readers I have now would have made me all giggling with joy just a short year ago. And that there were quite a few people writing and thinking about pink shoes last month because I wrote about it.

So I’m going to tag a blogger or two. Just so they can feel a bit more powerful and part of a blogging community. Because there is such a thing. It is a little weird, it is self-chosen and in flux but it is a community. If you doubt it, just have a look at the Just Post roundtable.

justpostjune2007

Most of my favorite bloggers already are the proud owner of a rocking girl blogger award (and anyone who isn’t, feel free to grab it and make it your own), so I’m going to give one to:

No need to know how, who has all of three blog posts up until now. I found her blog through a comment she left on Christine Kane’s blog. I’m really looking forward to hear more of her.

Then I’m giving one to Sofia of Sofia says. She has about half a dozen blogs or so, but she either doesn’t do memes or she doesn’t get tagged, I don’t know which. (And we’ll find out soon enough.) She’s one of the few bloggers I have met in real life. (Actually I’m going to meet her just tomorrow.)

Then there’s Joanna of Joanna Bags. She already has six blog posts out. She makes gorgeous bags and I found her through the u-handbag flickr-pool. (And if you only remotely like purses I recommend to take a look at the pool too.

Now I have to go and teach another student so I leave it at three. I would have loved to give an award to every single blogger on my blogroll but then I would have had to spend three days writing about them all and you would have had to spend hours reading about them and that’s a little too much.

You know you all rock…

Four things meme

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I’m always so happy when I get tagged for something. I suppose this has to do with not being tagged very often. Chani just wrote about the problem that tagging people for memes always leaves someone out. I’m undecided about this. I think you can try all you might but there will always be somebody who feels left out. I know that there are many bloggers out there more popular than me. Of course, bloggers who are read and loved by many do get tagged more often. I don’t think that takes anything away from me. In fact I’m really happy to have a circle of readers who come back. Even though I’m posting infrequently. And if you like a meme, well, do what I usually do – steal it. Though there has been talk that one can go blind when tagging oneself, I doubt it very much. (And I wanted to link to that but it seems to have been at an incarnation of sober briquette’s blog that’s lost to the world. I appreciate it very much that she has named her new archives “I shall not delete” in this new blog-incarnation. I had pondered to backup for her.) At least I’m only extremely short-sighted. (And Chani’s eyesight has been improving lately.)

So, enough for the mangled introduction in which I make fun of my friends. (Sorry, De.). The lovely and extremely flexible (she’s a yoga teacher, what did you think?) Liv of “madness, madness I say!”has tagged me for the four things meme. Off we go:

Four Jobs I’ve Had
1) I worked in a bakery. I was selling bread and buns and cake.
2) I worked in a company that prints labels. I was the one entering all the data into the computer. By hand. I’m really fast at typing numbers.
3) For one year I worked as an assistant at the institute of music education at Munich university. I pretended to work on an encyclopedia of music educators while writing my dissertation.
4) I was a music teacher teaching grades 7 to 12 at a school with mostly disabled students.

Four Movies I Can Watch Over & Over
1) L.A. Story
2) Jumping Jack Flash
3) The Fifth Element
4) all Star Trek Movies with Data

Four Places I’ve Lived
1) Bielefeld
2) Bünde
3) München
4) the place near Munich where I live now. Its name starts with G.

Four Places I’ve Vacationed
(only four?)
1) Ubatuba, Brasil
2) Madeira
3) Tuscany, Italy
4) Germany, all over the place

Four of My Favorite Dishes
1) Green Beans Stew (Grüne-Bohnen-Eintopf) Though I have to say my stew doesn’t look like the one in the picture at all.
2) Garlic Lime Chicken (there is the recipe when you scroll down a little, it’s in English) with broccoli and rice
3) Spaghetti Bolognese cooked by my husband
4) Chicken saté

Four Sites I Visit Daily
You know I have a really long blogroll over there, and there are other blogs that I read too. I won’t pick one over the other though. So, here’s my list:
1) statcounter
2) bloglines
3) psychedelic zen guitar (Well, I’m the tech person for this site… Also, very good music. And pretty pictures.)
4.) Script Frenzy so I can enter my word count (8,524 so far).

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now
Do I really have to be somewhere else? I’m quite content here in my home in my room with the prospect of a little guitar playing and maybe an episode of “Buffy” while knitting in the future. And then bed… So, if I must:
1.) At the Osteria Italiana in Munich. I may well have eaten the best food in my life there.
2.) At a workshop about tarot cards.
3.) A singing workshop with Bobby McFerrin and Voicestra
4.) At Blogher-Conference

You know, there are a million beautiful places in the world, but the best view doesn’t help if I’m bored, or sick or if my spirit has left. Being at the beach and soaking in the sun is nice for about a day or two. While there are a few cities I’d like to visit sometimes, like Paris or San Francisco, I can as well go out of the house, walk for about five minutes and be on the fields and among the trees. It’s very beautiful there. I could take a train for half an hour and have five beautiful lakes to choose from. Or I could take another train for about ninety minutes and climb the Alps. Or take the first train back for about half an hour again and be in one of the biggest and most beautiful cities in Germany.

So, now for the tagging. First, I don’t want to exclude anybody. Consider yourself tagged. Also, since I am a little behind with the blog reading I don’t really know who has done this or not. But I’d really like to hear De‘s answers to this. When she can spare the time. The last I heard she was buying paint too. And crazymumma’s answers. And now I’d like to go and watch my DVD. Oh, and if you don’t have a blog and want to answer these questions? Do it in the comments. I love comments. Or send me an e-mail.

I’ve been interviewed!

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I’m all excited because I’ve always dreamed about this. Well, okay, I really was interviewed once in real life at one of our worse performances of Brazilian music but that was real lame, and I’m still not sure if that was a real newspaper person since there never was anything in the paper afterwards. I think she pulled a joke on me especially since she asked me for an autograph. (That had been my first and maybe only autograph ever. See, how famous I am? That comes from performing only in your house. Without an audience.) At least I could have pretended to be interviewed with a real microphone since I have a couple of those.

So, this interview was hosted by Beck of “Frog and Toad are still Friends” who was so kind to send me a bundle of questions over when I screamed “Me too, I wanna be interviewed, pretty please, me too!” in her comments. She also was interviewed (obviously this is a meme) and here’s the link to her answers. When I put myself forward like this I didn’t realize that this was a meme, and since I have been waiting for almost a week before answering the questions, you probably all have done this anyway. If not I’ll send questions to the first five people who write a comment that they want me to. But I warn you it’ll take me awhile for sure.

So, here at last the interview:

1. If you could have one person you’ve lost touch with call you up and invite you to dinner, who would you want it to be?
Argh. I’m really not sure. There are a lot of people I have lost touch with over the years. I could choose someone really nice who obviously isn’t mad at me, a friend of mine in college days. He is a cello player, he was the only one of my male friends who ever called me again after I got married and the reason we lost touch is the time-and-energy-factor only since he sent me and e-mail just three months ago (but hasn’t written since).

I could choose someone whom I haven’t seen for ages like my best friend in elementary school. As I said, there are a lot of options. I’d probably vote for meeting a friend of mine from the German equivalent of high school who decided to move away and see the world for a time, and then never wrote again. I’m thinking about her often and the last time I met another friend of hers (in 1992) he hadn’t heard of her either.

2. Which actress – past or present- should play you in the movie version of your life?
First of all I don’t really think there should be a movie version of my life since the book would be so much better anyway. Second, I don’t know actresses at all. But then, since the actress doesn’t have to look like me because the movie wouldn’t look like my life anyway, I could choose someone really beautiful like Audrey Hepburn or Alyson Hannigan. (Feel free to point me towards actresses who look like me.) But then in a movie version anything could be changed. Maybe I’d end up a blonde anorexic actress or something.

3. What one thing about you has changed the most since childhood?
Um, my first impulse – doubtless prompted by the word anorexic in the last paragraph – was to say my weight. But that’s not important. I’ve become happy, calm and much more patient. (And of course that’s only one thing.)

4. If you could keep only one book that you currently own, which one would you pick?
After thinking that if I could only keep one it wouldn’t matter anyhow and just leave me pen and paper I’d say “Gaudy Night” by Dorothy L. Sayers. Though it would be really cruel to leave me without books. Really cruel. This book is the one that I come back to again and again ever since I was a teenager and read it for the first time in an abridged German version. After re-reading it once or twice a year since then I realized just a couple of weeks ago that this book has shaped a lot of my opinions about the world. And only when I went to look up when I had bought it in English did I realize that I don’t own it in English and have read in an abridged version for years.

Of course one would think that a heavy book like the bible would be a good idea but I think after a while every book would seem stale.

5. Which one thing gives you the most comfort?
Faith and hope (and yes, that is one thing too). If we’re speaking about more tangible things I’d say my bed.

Phew. Thank you Beck for making me think real hard.

Thinking Blogger Award

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I won, I won! Well, to be precise I got tagged by De. The Thinking Blogger Award got me thinking for a couple of days. First, I didn’t really got how it works and then I had to think of whom to tag. And then, thanks to the research power of a librarian I actually was pointed to the origin of the Thinking Blogger Award at the Thinking Blog. And as one might guess from the new and improved title of my blog I’m all for the thinking.

A little light thinking always makes my day though I reserve the heavy thinking for Sundays and professionals. It was easy to come up with a list of bloggers that I wanted to give the award to but then I found each one of them already got one: De, Jen, Mad, Chani, Her Bad Mother and Beck. And I didn’t really know if I wanted to tag bloggers who think or bloggers who make me think. Then I briefly considered tagging the whole of my blogroll including the blogs that I read which are not on the blogroll. Then I shut down for a day or two (My motto at the moment is “Relax and Refocus”, and I’ll tell you why in a day or two. Promise.)

So, I was looking for bloggers who think (or whom I think to be thinking), whom I read and who don’t have a Thinking Blogger Award yet. And then it hit me! They don’t have to be bloggers who read my blog! I might have to tag them by e-mail but that made the whole task much easier. So I’m giving a Thinking Blogger Award to (drum roll please!):

Christine Kane, who always makes me think. Her blog is what mine wants to be when it grows up minus the animals and plus the child. Okay, maybe I’ll have a cat someday.

Jory DesJardins who writes deep and insightful posts and is living proof that a blog doesn’t need to be updated ten times a day to be extraordinary.

Frau Kaltmamsell who is one of the few German bloggers whose blog I genuinely like and who is thinking about everything that comes her way, be it food, people or poker. (Mostly people of course.) And who is living proof that even blogs which are updated a couple of times a day can be thoughtful.

Lia, also living in Germany but not German who tends to write short observational posts. She writes that her blog is meant to be like overheard pieces of conversation…

And Nneka who is writing about spirituality applied to life (and who’s on the “meditation diet” too).

Writing this post was really hard. For one I’m sick and my brain is only barely functional, but for two I had a hard time leaving people out. On the other hand (there’s always another hand for me, isn’t it?) this is a chain-letter-like meme so eventually everybody will get included.

Now I have to decide whether to write e-mails informing those five bloggers or just waiting for them to find me through backlinks. What would you do?

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another meme

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Ha, I really got tagged this time. Granted, asking somebody “And whom do you tag?” is about as subtle as jumping up and down, frantically waving and yelling “Pick me! Pick me!” on top of you lungs, but still, officially and personally tagged for the first time. Oh, by Meno. Why couldn’t I have reacted to a meme where you don’t have to think, like that itunes-meme I was thinking of stealing. So, questions and answers (and no multiple choice)

1. If you had to choose one vice in exclusion of all others, what would it be?
I didn’t know you get to choose the vices. I’d say over-indulgence. But I could have said beer. But that’s not a vice. Isn’t it?

2. If you could change one specific thing about the world, what would it be?
I would give all people complete awareness and enlightenment. But I think it doesn’t work that way.

3. Name the cartoon character you identify with the most.
Cartoon character? As in animated? I’ll copy this one from Meno and say Daria. I haven’t watched the show on a regular basis, but I liked her a lot.

4. If you could live one day in your life over again, which day would it be?
Well, only if you force me to. Maybe May 1st, 1994, when after our second date, my husband-to-be and I realized that we’d be staying together. It was spring, we went to the station hand in hand, and sat down on a bench looking at green and yellow fields and trees. Sigh. Though I don’t know, I spent the rest of the day working on my dissertation.

5. If you could go back in history and spend a day with one person, who would it be?
A writer I would have loved to meet, but who probably wouldn’t have been that interested in meeting me, would be Carolyn Heilbrun.

6. What is one thing you lost, sold, or threw away that you wish you had back?
Um. No regrets. New things are always so much more exciting.

7. What is your one most important contribution to this world?
Teaching people they can be creative, and that there is another lifestyle apart from being a “muggle”.

8. What is your one hidden talent that nearly no one knows about?
If I have one, it is hidden to me too. Though I may have a very hidden talent for drawing. I never draw, so I’m not good at it, but when I concentrate, sometimes one glances a sparkle of talent, inherited from my father and grandfather.

9. What is your most cherished possession?
This means things, doesn’t it? My piano. Though my computer comes in a close second. I have lived without computer and without piano. Without piano was worse. But then, why should I have to choose? (And if I only had the money, I’d buy a new piano in a split-second.)

10. What one person influenced your life the most when growing up?
Obviously my mother. (If Meno finds that exorcist, send her over to my place too, please.) Second, maybe Dorothy L. Sayers.

(I know it said one person, I’m not stupid, I have listened, but almost everybody is highly influenced by her mother. To say otherwise would be lying. But my mother is not the person that shaped my thinking much.)

11. What word describes you better than any other?
Confused? I’ll settle for complex. Ah, no, now I got it: woman.

Phew, describing a person with one word. I’m certainly not a one-word-person. Even when people are asking me for my sign I’ll say, “Leo with ascendent Sagittarius, but I’m not that fiery, because I have that Saturn on my moon in Aries, and then there’s this whole bunch of planets on top of my horoscope with all that scorpionic and plutonic influence, but my family is very fishy…”)

Okay, I’ve done it. That’s a tough one. So, anybody who wants to do this meme, feel tagged. I’m especially tagging De and Liv, who probably have better things to do with their time. (Psst, and if you’re to cool for memes? Just ignore it.)