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a journal |
 This book is intended as a place to blog about my life and things I'm interested in and answers to prompts from various blog prompt sites here on WDC, including "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  and "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" I'm not sure yet what it'll turn into, but I'm going to have fun figuring it out. |
| If in the event of your own demise, have you considered what happens to your writing here on WDC? Does your family know how to access it? Or would you rather they not see your writing? I know I keep saying I'll get around to it. I have thought about it, especially because my parents have been talking about wills and things like that, which makes me kind of consider the future as well. My family knows about my account here, but I have never shared my passwords with them. There are some things I’m not sure I’d want my mother to read, but I would probably leave my passwords to one of my sisters if something happened to me so that they could contact the people here in the event of my death. I have never used this password with any other site, nor have I shared it with anyone. My mother knows about online communities and the desire to have closure. She participates in a couple forums through ravelry and has lots of online friends through an MMORPG, so I could probably trust her with the information. It’s just, I’m not sure she should read some of my stories, which she might take as her when they aren’t meant to, if that makes sense. She already does that, in some ways. I don’t know. But I do know that when I get around to writing a will, which won’t be for a while as I have very few assets and no dependants, I’ll include instructions about my online presence. |
| Prompt: What do your think of cardboard boxes, their uses, or abuses? And what memories they may contain, if any? Well, one thing I can tell you, my life fits fairly neatly in thirty-seven cardboard boxes. Over twenty of those boxes contain books. That doesn’t include clothing and furniture, of course. I still have boxes stacked across one wall of my room. I should get around to opening them, I guess. It’s hard to get the motivation to do so until I need a box somewhere else or if I miss a specific book. That’s why I recently unpacked all my paperback boxes. I was looking for a specific book in a series, and I didn’t find it until the next to last box. At that point, I figured I may as well open the last and call it a night. I remember as a child, we used to have big boxes of diapers (I’ve mentioned before that I’m oldest of six) in various sizes depending on how old the kid in question was. I used to be able to climb into the biggest box and push myself down the stairs in a kind of primitive sled. My sister (the next youngest—so she was probably about six at the time) was so skinny and flexible that she could contort herself into the baby box. We have picture evidence because my mother was the kind of person who always picked embarrassing photos to blackmail us later. I’ve moved a lot in my life, so I’ve spent a lot of time packing and unpacking cardboard boxes. They’re useful. I once spent a semester using one as a shelf/bed table (tipped over on its side) because the apartment we were in didn’t have a shelf or a table in the bedroom, and I had books. I like books. They’re much more interesting than cardboard boxes that merely hold books for later. |
| Prompt: What is the most peculiar sight you have ever seen in your hometown, where you now live, or in a place where you traveled to? Please, describe it in detail. Hmmm. This is a difficult one because I’m not good with superlatives. It’s almost as bad as favorite. So, the most peculiar sight I’ve seen changes depending on where I am and what I mean by weird at the moment. One thing—and it was more a heard of than seen thing—was I used to live in PG county Maryland, where the national Agricultural Research Center lives. And in that august institution (which is criss-crossed by names like “Soil Conservation Road”) there are cows with holes in their sides so that the researchers can glimpse the insides of their stomachs. I never went there on a field trip, but I heard about it, and it always struck me as an odd thing to do, and potentially harmful to the cows. Another weird animal story—when I was in England (and we drove through northern Wales) we would periodically see sheep in fields on either side of the road. Sheep painted florescent pink and blue in one streak as though they were punk sheep rebelling against life. I know, there’s probably a good reason for it having to do with marking sheep that have gotten medication or that belong to certain individuals . . . but it was strange to my American city girl eyes. But the first thing that came to mind was something that I noticed when my sister and I were wandering ebay one day. Which isn’t exactly a place, but I spend a lot of time on the internet . . . so . . . well, I don’t know how we got there, but somehow we found a whole section full of clothes for lawn geese. Not lawn geese. Clothes for them. As though there wasn’t a need to sell a goose to sit on a lawn, because everyone already had one, but there was a need for clothes for it. There were pages and pages worth of lawn geese clothing. I’m not sure my sister and I have ever laughed so much. |
| Prompt: What do you consider "trouble", and how do you stay out of it? With great skillful skill and with great speedy speed. Well, maybe not. First off, I don’t necessarily stay out of trouble. I am willing to get into sticky situations if that’s where my conscience leads me without counting the cost. But let’s go back. Trouble is negative consequences of actions. For example, my four year old nephew Eddie is always getting into trouble. He’s not a mean child, he’s just curious and sneaky and more willing to ask forgiveness than ask permission and be denied. He is constantly getting into things and getting out of things and running down the road on his own because he can open doors and doesn’t understand that fences around the yard are there for his safety and not for climbing practice. So, the minute he chooses to step outside of the boundaries that his parents have set (for his own protection, mind you, even though he’s young enough that he doesn’t understand that fully) he is in trouble. Trouble can also catch up to a person. For example, when I was in college, I got nervous one night as I walked home from school at about midnight down dark streets (I’d been at the library studying and lived about four blocks from campus) because that kind of behavior is asking for trouble. I swore then that I’d always use lighted pathways if I was going home late at night. I’ve also done stupid things that could have landed me in trouble. For example, one time as I walked home from the grocery store (again, college student—it was only about six blocks from my apartment and I needed food) some guy in a pickup truck stopped beside me as I walked and offered to drive me and my five bags home. I didn’t know him. I got in the pickup anyway. After, I started thinking about what I’d just done . . . well, that’s another thing I don’t do anymore. So, I try to stay out of situations that could lead to trouble and follow my own rules to keep out of trouble, but I am not afraid of negative consequences of my actions if I do something I feel was the right thing to do. So, in that way I court trouble. There’s just too many ways I use the word to say I stay out of it. |
| If you could undo ONE thing you did in the last year, what would it be and why? I don’t know. I won’t say I have no regrets. I do have them. But a lot of the decisions I’ve made in the past year have been good ones. I finished school—graduated with my MFA in creative writing last year. I defended my thesis last March and graduated in August. I passed my ninth anniversary of diagnosis. I turned forty one. Neither of those things could I change even though I wouldn’t mind. I think the only real thing I would change is I would have been more proactive more quickly about trying to find a new job. I still don’t have one, and that means it’s been a long time to be out of work. I’ve been more active on that front recently, but I’m starting at a disadvantage because I haven’t been trying sooner. But that’s still a minor thing. I’m mostly content with how I’ve lived this past year. I wouldn’t change much. |
| Prompt: What makes us emotionally dependent on people or anything else? And do you think a person might have emotional dependencies with or without being conscious of them? This question makes me think about that song about people needing people being lucky. The word dependency makes me automatically cringe a bit, but I think there are differences between unhealthy emotional dependencies, and healthy ones. I am emotionally dependent on my family. Not that I need to talk to them all the time or make them give their input on everything I do, but I do feel better and more stable knowing that they are in the world and thinking about me. And I am happy to provide that stability to my family in their turn. There isn’t any uneven distribution of emotional power in the relationship. We sometimes need more, we sometimes can give more, and that’s just how things are. In a relationship, a certain amount of emotional dependency can be good—although I would add that unhealthy relationships generally involve unequal distribution of emotional dependency. In other words, when someone is more emotionally invested than their partner, and either one of the two takes advantage of the fact, this is unhealthy. There are exceptions to this, of course. In a parent/child relationship, the child needs a lot and the parent gives a lot, and that is still healthy as long as the parent is working constantly at training the child to be more independent. It’s easier to see in intellectual and social spheres, but the emotional sphere also needs training for a child to become an adult. I think that a person can have emotional dependencies without being conscious of them. A lot of us are not as emotionally aware as we are socially or intellectually. We feel things, but we don’t pause and analyze why. This can be frustrating in some cases. |
| Prompt: Is opportunity something that happens or comes to you on its own or is it something you can create for yourself? If both, which one applies more to your life? I don’t like either/or questions. Too often, the answer is yes (or no)—and I think that’s the case here. Yes. Opportunity happens. It comes to you on its own. It is created as you act to obtain it. I’m not sure that we can divorce those strands of human experience—the actions of the people around us and happenstance which offers opportunities through the movements of the world around us occur—but also, our own actions affect the shape of the world to provide opportunities. So, it’s not a simple question. None of us live in a vacuum. We all shape opportunities and are shaped by others actions which provide opportunity. Also, consider that opportunity is a strange word to use—the choices that we make, the decision points in life which are where the seeds of opportunity occur are not necessarily always beneficent. Just as often, an opportunity arises for something to happen in our life that leads to sorrow or heartache or pain as arises opportunity for fortune. So, my answer is both, and that I can’t find it inside me to differentiate between those two originations of opportunity. I live in a world where I make choices, but those choices are always influenced (and influence) the choices of the people around me, and I believe in free will too much to deny that both of those impulses have created places for me to go, opportunities for good or ill in my life. |
| Prompt: What is your personal definition of progress? This isn’t a word that I think very much about, but I think the working definition I’d come up with is growth or movement. Preferably the measurable kind, although that is questionable. For example, I knit, and one of the shawls that I made was a circular shawl. Each row at the end was progress, around a circle over seven hundred stitches long and adding less than a millimeter to the diameter to the shawl—but that was still progress, even though it was hard to measure by the eye or when showing to friends and fellow knitters. This is the same kind of progress that can be measured in the growth of a tree, although I wouldn’t necessarily consider that as progress, simply because it is not conscious. I think the most important thing to remember about progress—even when it’s on a story that progressed as I cut page after page in process of revision, getting shorter all the time, implies getting better, and that implies growth in the sense of conscious effort in learning and knowledge. |
| Do you write with music playing in the background? If so what kind of music inspires you? Feel free to share a song with us. If you don't why not? I don’t tend to write while playing music, mostly because it distracts me. I wander off thinking about the words or the melody or the bass line and forget that it’s about the writing in the first place. If I ever do write while listening, it has to be something without words. Classical works. I’ve written to Saints Saens before and Ravel and Beethoven and Chopin and Mozart. Mozart tends to be too regular—I get distracted. I tend not to listen to jazz because it annoys me after I listen for a while. This song’s short (well, short for writing music, which should last for as long as I need to write) but I enjoy it—the violins and the quickness of it makes my fingers move faster, which is important for a writing piece. I also find it complicated emotionally which means I don’t get too moody as I write. |
| Prompt: A Colorful Way of Living Write anything you want about this. My life is grey today. Not just the streak in my hair just above my right eye, but in general, which is kind of annoying because the sky was clear and the day was warm, but I was grey, and it was because I’m tired. That’s what happens when you accidentally take too much insulin before bed (correction, sigh) and wake up at three o’clock in the morning (I suddenly have an old song in my head) sweaty and heart-racing and low. I ate a handful of jellybeans without really thinking about it (we’re talking all of the black ones in the bag because in my lack of brainfood brought on by the low, I needed those to go away so I could eat a jelly bean that actually didn’t taste like licorice. sigh) and then tested at 50 (which is low, if you don’t know) so I ate some more. The next ones are the green and orange ones, which I don’t really like, so that I can leave the yellow and pink and red and white ones for a treat. Whoa—here’s another way my life is about colors. Then I went downstairs and munched some more and drank water so that the adrenaline would go away. Waking in a low is kind of like waking from a nightmare. All adrenaline response as your body tries to correct what’s wrong by making you scared. Finally, I went to sleep again at three thirty. And then I had to get up at six thirty to go to work—as a volunteer receptionist. I need a real job desperately. And when I got up, I was high—like in the two hundred sixty range. So I took lots of insulin (this is called yo-yoing, and is not as fun as it sounds, when you go down and eat too much and go up and over correct and go down again . . .) waited for half an hour and then ate breakfast. So, I’m going to work, and feeling kind of green and pale (reaction after a low is kind of like a hangover—or so I hear. I’ve not had one of my own to compare it to) so I’m feeling sick and headachy and I have to be nice and polite to people on the phone and coming into the office so I basically bury myself in a book (and finish it) and knit a bit and then my shift is done, and my ride forgets me, so I’m late getting home and lunch (midmorning, I was still at 233, but by the time I get home for lunch, I’m at a more reasonable 130) and I have to turn around right away even though I want a nap so that I can go back for a meeting in the afternoon (it’s a crafter’s meeting, sitting around knitting together—fun, but I wanted sleep) Food is so much more trouble than it’s worth. So, now, I’m finished for the day, my blood sugar is stable at 100, and I want to sleep because I’m still feeling grey and green and hungover and headachy, and I really want another jelly bean because I’ve been talking about them and I shouldn’t because I have more self control then that and besides, I don’t want to run into the same series of issues tomorrow, because it will make me feel like swearing (yet another colorful way to live) and I don’t do that, so it all bottles up inside me and I start ranting about blood sugar in response to a perfectly innocuous prompt that I wouldn’t do this to if I hadn’t have lived the past nineteen or so hours the way I did. |
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