I feel guilty, but then again, I don’t.  After having tried to get my head around writing the photography pages I wanted to make for almost two weeks, I finally had enough pieces together to actually have a go at writing them.  I admit, I’ve only finished two of the pages–Photography and Inspiration and So You Thought Porn Was Bad…– but I have a good start on the next one and all my information gathered for the last one.  I even managed to work in a piece of flash fiction for Chuck Wendig’s The Present Tense challenge.

Not too bad for an afternoon/evening of pantsing it (in the writing sense, not this way).

Of course, that means that I don’t have much to say in this post except note the progress I’ve made for my Telling Tales 2012 check-in.  (Well, technically I have plenty I could say, but none of it has anything to do with the Telling Tales challenge.  Nor would any of it make much sense at the moment.   Suffice it to say that after I finish this set of photography-related posts, I will have enough to keep me plenty busy enough.)

Childhood Treasures

Actually I can’t make any great claims to progress on the challenge.  My husband has taken a few extra nights lately reading the bedtime stories to our boodle boy, and for several of the nights our son has chosen poems and not the longer stories for his bedtime selections.  Add to that our all being sick, I count every step I made as progress.  So when I read two more Grimm’s fairy tales from my unabridged version and found a wonderful piece of flash fiction from the comments on Chuck Wendig’s Photo challenge last week, I intend to count them.  Maybe not as complete works, but certainly three more short works toward my end goal.

My own piece for the photo-challenge I posted by mistake at my process blog Many Worlds From Many Minds.  I’d meant to post it here as I had last week.

And rather than give away the actual story that I’m counting as part of my Mix n’ Match, I’ll just send you to Intellectual Blathering for a delightful short by Jennifer L. Davis.

And an almost shameless plug for my longtime friend, Shan Jeniah Burton and her first flash fiction piece: My Very First Fash Fiction Challenge.  It’s hard to try new things.  I know that very well.

Today I’m mostly in the mood to talk about books.   I just started one you see–Knees Up, Mother Earth by Robert Rankin.  I’m not sure why…I think it was because it was the only thing on my immediate shelves that called itself fiction, at least without me having to get out the key for my paperback collection.  (I use and old VHS tape cabinet for most of my paperbacks; CDs go in the doors; it’s an odd system, but it works for me).  I don’t have a lot of fiction anymore.  When we moved to our present house, I weeded down my book collection to my few favorites and the books I assumed I would need for research.  I thought I would use the local library more than I have.  I used University of Albany‘s library and the Albany Public Library regularly when I lived there.  It didn’t work out, and that’s a long story in itself.  Suffice it to say, I understand the passion books can incite in one, but a librarian should be more welcoming of the idea that people may want to actually taken them off your shelves and look at them; and the library should be open more hours than two days a week for three hours in the afternoon (that actually has changed in the ten years we’ve been here, but habits have become what they are, and I tend to get my books from other places now).

I have even started (but haven’t gotten too far) in a movie, courtesy of a friend on Facebook who is something of a film buff.  In posting youtube clips of songs he liked, he posted Take On Me by a-ha.   My friend also posted info about the French movie it was based on called Orpheé by Jean Cocteau.  Though last week you could watch it in ten parts on Youtube, complete with subtitles, it has been pulled from the site now.  I have to say, I’m not inspired to spend the over $50 US dollars to get myself a used copy of the movie(s…  there are three of them) just to watch it once.  So now I am searching again for something new to add to my 50/50/Me  movie selections.  If you have a suggestion that has really delighted or inspired you, please feel free to suggest it.  I’m not good at this sort of thing, as you can see.

As I noted last week, I have decided to take on a new reading challenge as well. Called the Telling Tales Reading Challenge 2012, it involves the reading of fairy tales and myths (including modern translations/versions of them).  Good for me that I have a five year-old son…and equally good that I committed myself to reading 50 novel length books by the end of the year (including short story compilations).  Since I’d like to explore further than just the books I’ll be sharing with Marcus, I have elected to join for the Mix n Match at 25 novels.  The rules are flexible enough that I shouldn’t have too much trouble making that work.

Using our  evening bedtime ritual for the past week, I’ve shared some un-bowdlerized Grimm’s Fairy Tales as well as couple Native American legends…  Most are small enough, given that the print is small and they don’t have pictures that we should be able to cover two, maybe three a day.  Marcus certainly seemed to enjoy these as much or more than a lot of his regular books.

Image via Wikipedia

Of course, I will be supplementing my 50/50/Me to complete the rest.  It’s also part “writing research”.  With so many people in ROW80 talking about the Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell and trading links to various  writing sites that dissect and study Campbell’s work and observations, I thought it might be good to see this “journey” in practice.  Not that all the dissections are good ones….   I can understand that.  Writing isn’t a pattern for most people, even those who outline compulsively.  But the stories that stand the test of centuries of retelling…  There is something interesting to be said for exploring that pattern in its most basic form–as the stories themselves.

So, I will keep you all up to date as I progress along my own “Reader’s Journey”.  Have a great week!

Related articles

• “Every myth is psychologically symbolic” (gointothestory.blcklst.com)
• Fairy Tales as Guides to Self-Undertanding (meggella.com)
• Archive for The plot Thickens (Mwahahaha) (jordanmccollum.com)

Recently I’ve become more “interactive” rather than “reactive” to the online community. Though it’s at the moment taking up more of my time than I like, I’m sure that with practice and some better tools (after many had suggested it, I did install Tweetdeck the other day, TY Kristen Lamb), with some trimming and pruning, with some creativity and work, not only will this all work, but it will work well.

Until then, I’m a little down and out of late.

He's becoming braver, at least for me

The weather outside right now is lovely but so frigid that I am extra inspired to stay put and not do much.  It makes being the “crazy cat lady” on my road useful.  No matter what, I know there is a furry half-feral outside the back door twice a day depending on me for a supplement to his hunting efforts.  And probably more, though at the moment, I’m afraid they are being chased away by our neighbor’s little yap dogs (I’m not categorically against dogs; I am against unattended dogs that try to intimidate my son in his own yard–especially as it keeps Marcus from wanting to play outside).

There have been some wonderful things going on of late.  Through the ROW80 community of writers, I have found some amazing blogs online as well as challenge upon challenge to tickle my adventurous streak.  Today, thanks Alberta at Alberta Reads, I now know about the Telling Tales Challenge 2012.  It looks deliciously tasty, and I will be signing up this evening.  Yep, another challenge…  But I can do this with my other challenges; it merely focuses my choices for the 50/50/Me a bit more.

And through the ROW80 blog hop, little delights that have always attracted me seem to be appearing out of the woodwork saying “Look!  See how awesome this is?”

This week’s best example is the pieces I found on Ryukyu Glass

Simple but lovely

Why did this interest me?  Why do people find anything interesting? I’ve always loved glass, stained glass, colored glass, patterns of light and color…  One of my favorite places to go is the Corning Glass museum. It’s one of the reasons I love going into churches, especially old churches with huge stained glass rosettes. Even old abandoned churches (some people who know me would say especially old abandoned churches) where the glass is gone and all remains is a wooden outline draw me to them.  I look at these old beauties and wonder what the design looked like, how they had been removed… did the colorful shards tinkle down like a cascade of  gems one day?  Was the window sold off to a collector, to another church?  Is it still there, hidden from the rest of the world?  And why?

Stories abound!

Really.  Stories DO abound.  Another result of the extra blogging was the added inspiration to try out some flash fiction pieces.  To people who do these regularly, it probably seems silly to say that trying something like this scared the heck out of me.  But something clicked this week and I not only tried one, I went for a second one this morning.

The first I found through

Originally, there were three smaller pieces vying for the spotlight today, but checking into Facebook one of my fellow ROWers, Sharon Howard, posted her piece for another ROWer L.s.Engler’s Five Minute Flash Fiction Challenge.  And, I succumbed to the “shiny factor” and tried it.  The piece actually took 5min 30s, and it’s raw, but it’s a start.

The wall that had once fallen clear and clean, now hung fell white, blue, red and brown with trapped silt and debris…  dead.  What insanity made us come here today?  This glacial mass wasn’t pretty–it was intimidating.

But the kids wanted to climb the waterfall, and this was the time to do it.  Climbing water.  I’d laughed when I’d first heard the idea.  I should have guessed that our young children, the oldest just over ten, inspired by the world and not yet defeated by its reality would find a way.  I had demurred when they’d suggested this chilly hike, saying that if it’s ice, does that really count as water?  But my son, and Dee’s pair too, would not be deterred.

So here were were…  slipping and sliding in the not-quite frozen muck, wondering if we’d finally hit that rock that in warmer climes we’d know was ready to just slide down into the creek below us.

“Mom!  See, it’s not all ice!” shouted Dee’s son.    And, with careful preparation, the three young people, set down their packs on the smooth ice-filled pool that had circled the pond.  They suited up in their safety gear with more ease and familiarity than their mothers.

Dee glanced over to me with a red-cheeked smile. “I told you they would find a way, sis.”

So there you are.  Flash fiction number one.  Not sure if it’s good enough as it is, or if I’d like to develop it further.

The next piece is much smaller and more focused.  The rules are here at Chuck Wendig’s TerribleMinds blog.

When Kat cornered me in the pantry clutching armloads of seeds to my chest, she screeched for help.  Thoughts of my wife and hungry children at home drove me and, unable to see better odds for escape, I darted between Kat’s legs as fast as–THUNK!  Seeds flew from my cheeks as I felt something tear and then pain rising up from my back foot, but I didn’t stop running until I reached the comforting darkness of home.

Between these two pieces, I feel a sense of having done something toward my writing goals.  And the Five Minute piece had an added bonus of being so free form.  I can’t say I’m suddenly all psyched up to write more, but I’m willing to try again.

Links that inspired me:

Firstly, for the joy they brought, let me thank Viansa Blake for directing me first to Celine Shinbutsu’s page were I found this nifty little post on Ryukyu glass.  And not knowing what it was, I searched, spent some time here admiring the photos…  The rest is history!

Another very cool blog by Warren Stokes
Wonderful art work (I confess, I’m a BIG fan of mazes and similar puzzles, and these are superb.)

And this was just funny…
http://grantbarrett.com/hey-girl-words-of-the-year-2

And lastly:

May I thank and welcome my fellow bloggers who braved my sometimes discordant thoughts and clicked the “Follow” button to spend this time with me: Sharon Howard, Raelyn Barclay, and Robert Green.

Have a wonderful Martin Luther King Day.  Have a wonderful weekend as well.

Short post here.  Just stopped in to say, that some of the things that were really making it difficult to maintain this blog have been bright back into the light, and in doing so, made me realize how much less they bothered me now.  For example: this post, which was my very first one here, somehow caused a lot of grief and heartache at the time.  I actually hid the post for well over a year, intending to someday go back to it.  Since procrastination didn’t help motivate me, Fate decided to act up and take a hand.

I think when we first start a new process–any new process, be it blogging or parenting or schooling or even collecting cat fur–we are fragile.  We feel the need to assure the world of the wisdom of our choices.  Instead of just living (them) as best we can and letting our success (or failures and experience) speak for us, we speak more adamantly of how right this thing we are doing is for us.  We often point out our early successes to others (those tricky achievements on the learning curve where every single thing seems to just work out right: there are no headaches or car repairs or grumpy tellers at the bank) as the reason that this thing isn’t just right for us… but that “Hey, you should do it too!”

We’re basically idiots.  I don’t mean that in a bad way either.

I was reading a post the other day about a mother’s dislike for the colloquial use of “retarded”.  I understand what she means.  In reading the comments though, I also had to agree with the commenter who said that calling people who use the word “‘retarded’ to mean ‘stupid’ were idiots” showed a touch of hypocrisy on the part of the blog writer.  A big comment debate, of course, ensued with most people arguing that “idiot” wasn’t a medical diagnosis.  Problem is…it used to be.

And to go further back in history, it simply meant “ignorant, uneducated person“.  The newer definition of a “stupid or foolish person” almost seems like we are (slightly) turning back the calendars at least if you ignore the fact that that is the second use, not the first.  The first, the common use, is labeled offensive and actually reads as:

1.usually offensive: a person affected with extreme mental retardation

Just to make it clear…  I’m using definition two (–actually I am using the original definition, but…).  And I am applying to myself as well as anyone else.  There is a reason newbies sometimes have trouble in online forums (granted, this problem is becoming less common, both as people are by and large becoming more tech savvy and as there is more available help out there).  When we are new and excited by all the great things we’ve discovered…we do a horrible thing: We try to share.  And share.  And share….

Eventually we get to a different place in our lives.  I’m starting to get there.  Starting…

And on that note, and in a spirit of complete disclosure….  I leave you with two idiots (myself and an old friend) with a webcam.

SOMETHING made Laurie laugh

I am going to burst!

Laurie has wings!

Kiss Kiss

Look Mom, it's a diseased ilk!

I want a place that doesn’t involve “me” so much as them, even if “they” are an extension of me.

So this page is going to close, at least temporarily, maybe forever.  I will be moving my fiction over to my other WordPress blog: Many Worlds From Many Minds.  I will continue to explore the writing process and how it affects me personally on my Blogspot page.

I do hope you will follow me there and that I can offer you an interesting assortment of diversions when you do.

It’s not as simple as throwing a few descriptive terms into the pot and stirring; I know that much. In this recipe everyone has his or her own specialty, a seasoning blend that stands out, marking one as a true “master of the craft”.

Problem is…it gives everyone who tries it indigestion.

This is the first in what may be a series of posts on paths: the ones we choose and the ones we end up on despite all our intentions.  Nothing here is meant as a criticism to those who were involved in deciding my own path and/or helped direct me to where I am now.  If anything, it’s a living testimony that the things that often seem so very terrible when they occur are the exact things we need.

And it’s my own odd way of thanking my parents and others for pissing me off enough, for loving me enough–for being there–when I needed them whether I wanted them there or not.

This week I’ll start in the most general terms about one of my favorite pastimes: procrastination.  But first a little introduction to the inspiration behind this post:

I have a friend, dear to me, who is presently going through a difficult situation. Out of respect for him, I’ll call him X. Last week X and I had some time to talk about what has been happening. Most things fell in the “not good” range, he did mention meeting someone that he’d been able to connect with on a personal level. I was glad for this as I’m an incurable romantic who wants everyone I care about happily involved with the person or passion that fulfills them best. I was NOT so happy with his little tease of “And she’s smart—smarter than you.”

Ah, the Rabid Beast of Ego rises and ravages all it see.  (Hopefully by making these posts I am able to quell its fury AND inspire with some methods to put it in its place.)

I don’t like feeling stupid.  I was raised to believe that unless I was “THE SMART ONE” then there was something wrong with me.  Now I’m mature enough to know that a LOT of kids hear those infamous words from their parents:

“What’s wrong with you? You’re supposed to be smarter than that.”

“Why I am wasting my energy on your idiocy?

“I refuse to listen to someone so stupid.”

As for X’s teasing… It made me realize that old wounds I’d believed  healed were still festering under the surface, the biggest being the belief that I should be at minimum as “smart” as almost everyone., if not smarter.  (After all, I had all the test scores, I had the early academics and literacy…I even had the social awkwardness because I would rather read the encyclopedia than play with kids my age.*) It’s more insidious than one might realize. And I suspect it also causes more people to give up and stop trying to achieve the impossible standards of others than any other factor.

*[If I were a kid now I’d probably be diagnosed as having Asperger’s, since those tests they use for screening potential Autism Spectrum Disorder patients always place me in the spectrum. But at 41 years old, I don’t see the purpose in getting a real diagnosis. It can’t undo the past, and I don’t see how it can affect the future much.]

TL:DR – I don’t take well to being called “average”, but I should have been sooner…far sooner.

I think I handled the initial incident with grace–for me. I shrugged and said something along the lines of “Possibly, but just because she has more degrees only means she’s better educated, not necessarily smarter.”

Later I pounced–the old wound burned (and I haven’t enough discipline to ignore a threat tothe very basis of my self-image). Inspired by an article that debated the actual value of a college education posted by another long time friend on her Facebook page, I:

• did a half-hearted search for a definition of “smart” which mostly included looking up the Wikipedia entry on Intelligence Quotient (not to be confused with this awesome band)
• pointed out that, despite my lack of a  university degree, I was happily married to an amazing man, that I had a great family, and was doing things I truly loved with my life
• that a lot of “smarter” [read: better educated] people were simply more ambitious (and more likely to have huge debts and ulcers, though I didn’t say that)
• and that at the time college was an “option” for me (it wasn’t…it was a requirement enforced with the same vehemence as The Draft was in World War I England—but that is fodder for another post someday) I was neither emotionally mature nor financially capable of benefiting from the experience

And I flung all that at my poor friend’s inbox when I really should have been working on Swan Song. It wasn’t a complete loss of course. In this cathartic bout of procrastination, I also found, in addition to learning the details about the Flynn effect on IQ (something I’d known of but hadn’t fully read up on), what differentiated Taylorism from Fordism (which concept was which isn’t vital for the story I was working on, but the distinctions were interesting), and finished looking up information on a book, a huge disappointment called The Intellectual Devotional: American History, I had idly picked up in Barnes and Noble the day I was meeting with X.

Really, having someone poke a stick in your sore spots is a procrastinator’s dream. It offers just the right amount of:

• passion (”I’ll show them!”),
• curiosity (”How can I show them?”),
• healing (”Ah, I FOUND IT!”),
• relaxation (”Because I am choosing to do this, it isn’t work.”),
• and ire (”Great, I HAVE to deal with this now before it continues…and I have so many other things to do, I’m damned well going to fix this now and forever.” caveat: that doesn’t work, btw, as witnessed by this post, because I wouldn’t be writing this if it was. However this post is also proof that I have finally chosen to Use It as this article suggests.)

In the end, it is what it is.  I I didn’t get any real work done on my manuscript due to X’s teasing, so I would call this one of the better ingredients in the recipe for underachievement.

I just lost a whole paragraph of typing because of a weird keyboard/key-shift combo and being distracted.  I wonder sometimes when I think about all the changes we’ve made in writing: computers as opposed to typewriters or a simple pen and paper combo.  While it could be annoying to have a page covered in correction fluid or the ubiquitous single-line, at least nothing was lost until the writer actually left his or her work.  Now we can lose anything with a simple mistaken keystroke.

Hmm, that sounds far more self-pitying than I meant it to be.  I wasn’t that upset, just intrigued at how tenuous we have made our lives.  And since I write stories that involve races with extremely varied lifespans, the way that societies interact with their impending futures has always interested me.  For example, I wonder sometimes if our changes in architecture, from grand temples and funerary sites of older (some say more religious and spiritual) times to the cookie-cutter wood-framed edifices and the bland brick block office parks (easily made, easily broken down) of today, might suggest an awareness on our parts that we have no sense of permanence anymore.  (I have noticed that cultures that hold less of a “death to eternal life in Heaven/Hell” perspective and more of “rebirth into another form” one also tend to be the ones that use materials such as wood, grass, bamboo, even mud, over stone or concrete.)

I sense society is in flux.

It makes perfect sense to me.  I’m always in flux, living my days in between one distraction and another.  Today it was once again starting this blog.  Back when I started it, I wasn’t sure what I really wanted it for (and even when I thought I knew, it didn’t stay on course due to tangents).  To a point, I still don’t know.  I know that I cannot blog daily.  It’s not my thing.  Every week is the course I’m going to try, though more as one week I’ll post here, then on the next week I’ll post on my alternate page Many Worlds Made by Many Minds and then back again to here.  Hopefully that will be comfortable enough to allow me to find my pace…and wite something I feel is really worth sharing with the world.

On that note, I leave you with a song my son’s playing this morning put into my head:  BusyBusyBusy by Sandra Boynton  It isn’t exactly a description of my life (though it does seem like it sometimes), but there are those days….  And the frantic combination of the lyrics and music in this song certainly can give rise to feelings of being busier than one truly is.

Today I can say “yes” I actually made my word count for National Novel Writing Month and also still managed some random journal entries, note taking, even reading and life.   In fact, life found many ways of distracting me from the 50,000 word goal, and without an insane push, I wouldn’t have made it (though now, I am ready for that 30,000 word weekend that Dee posted on Facebook last year since I manged 12,000 last Tuesday to make my NaNoWriMo goal).  But the pressure was good for me because it finally forced my internal editor to take a (mini-)vacation.  This is something I’d never quite achieved with things such as  my handwritten work or  my 750words.com writings.  I did let go more or less with 750 Words (though in a different manner, since they were most often me ranting into the keyboard –not all that useful for my novel writing), but it wasn’t the same.

I used my laptop for this November’s excursion into the depths of my story, an added challenge that actually made the finally victory all the more real.  I’ve never been all that comfortable with this keyboard (as much as I love my old clicky key I’m not even that comfortable with that or my hunting and pecking style of typing –over 50 words a minute, but a very choppy “two steps forward and two steps back” style of typing).  I used it anyway.  I don’t like the way the laptop rises up instantly and doesn’t have a nice slope; I don’t like the “hot spot” under my left wrist where the network adapter and so many other parts seem to be baking; and I don’t like not having my numeric keypad as a separate and distinct entity from the rest of the crammed together keys–one that does not require me to use a special function key and thus force me to often hit that dreaded “Windows” key.  (I have a keyboard remapping program that Dan sent me, but it’s been waiting patiently in my inbox until I had finished November and had done some recovery.  Maybe that will be the mission for today after I finish this writing.)  I still used it and I made myself adjust to it.  And….

All of this probably means nothing to most people, but to me, this was BIG!  I had discovered, or rather REcovered, my notebook as a writing tool, as something to bring with me to places like Panera and others and to type away in abandon at.  Because I was so very awkward in my typing on this keyboard, and so much life (and writer’s block) seemed to be conspiring against me during this Novel Writing month, I had to force myself to let go in a way that I hadn’t been able to do in far too long.  I didn’t stop over every spelling error and typo.  I didn’t worry if the sentences were cohesive and flowed neatly.  I wrote a lot of dreck and a lot of “in the character’s head” nonsense, nonsense that I would never dream of trying to publish, but allowed me to better understand and visualize the person I had chosen to tell this story.  And to my surprise I learned something nothing just about her but myself.  I choose Atyr well; she definitely has a real and important story to tell and she is not at all the person I thought she was.  She’s both stronger and weaker than I knew she was.  Her life is so very alien that often the biggest problem we had in transposing her story was that I didn’t have an adequate vocabulary to relate her experiences, and neither did she.  I don’t speak in religious terms…I’m a spiritual person, but not a religious one.  She is very religious, a zealot in many ways and the world she inhabits is one that I could not even image myself spending time in, except as a spectator.  Indeed, I watch her as she moves through her life with the same uneasy awe that I have when I look a the great cathedrals of Europe and the destruction of homes in Palestine.  She scares me with her intensity.

She scares me because she is inside me.

But this strong feeling, this passion and this reality is something I would have never found if I had not been forced to let her out.  She’s strong, but she’s patient.  To her, the “day” will come when she needs to do her greatest task and then she will be done, and like any young woman she doesn’t want to die yet.  So she never felt a desire to force her voice forward.  If anything, she’s always been one to subdue her own needs and desires for those of the Higher Cause.  And since she is only a part of me, only one character of many, she was beginning to hide in the background, the Mouse that had become her nickname, content to let others stand in the sunlight and be noticed–not that their stories are any more or less important or interesting than hers, but they certainly were more available.

Or were, until now.  And for that and so many other things, I am delighted to say that I spent a month of madness trying to write a novel.  And I’m even more proud to say I finished and made myself finish.

YES!

I actually work better with a sense of a deadline.  From what I’ve read, a lot of people work well this way (these nifty writing sites use the technique:  NaNo, ScriptFrenzy) .  Deadlines and expectations add to one’s priorities (and allow one to learn what really matters to him/her).  A deadline also give a sense of completion, whereas a project such as a novel can seem ongoing with its many revisions and submissions.

But take an article or an assignment and go past the deadline?  For good or ill, the deadline is gone.  (Yes, I know that deadlines aren’t always craved into the bedrock of the earth for all time.)  Yes, there might be a sense of success or failure for making the date or for missing it, but there is always another assignment out there.  And someone out there is probably doing work on the same topic you are….  So you miss a by-line.  Someone else gets one.  And the world moves on.

So I haven’t been moving too fast on the idea of writing clip-sized pieces.  While I do read a lot of articles and snapshots, I read them with the goal of learning that little extra that will add some depth to the characters, worlds, and scenes in my fiction.  Alien worlds are both becoming more, and less, alien from our own.  Often I find it easier to suspend my own disbelief in a story the bigger the “bug” eyes that are in it.

(The newest version of Battlestar Galactica with its reworking of the Cylons plays on this well.  And it’s cool to see stories that are getting into my head finally in the same way that Dr. Who always did by having aliens who are human…and not.  I want to write the types of fiction I enjoy watching and reading.  Doesn’t everyone?)

So last night and this morning I took a stroll around the web after one of those ever present Examiner.com advertisements showed up on my Facebook screen.  I tend to not click the “Like” button or the little X in the corner of the advertisement without at least Googling it.  Some sites I’ve been pleasantly surprised by, and it costs me very little save a few moments of time to make a more informed decision.

As some have already written, using Examiner.com is little better than blogging.  There might be some money involved, but as you are also giving up your rights to to your work, it didn’t seem to be much to recommend it to me.  Not for the momentary glory of saying I’d gotten a by-line.

However, in reading some of these reviews, I found a few bloggers posting their own suggestions of sites they liked.  Associated Content was discussed several times (including this lovely note here by Anne Wayman which she also follows up on through her blogs).  I was intrigued enough to at least peek at the site.  Figuring that one’s blog is hardly a private project (though WordPress has some lovely privacy features built in that I have been using for some time), I started to reconsider my view on the issue.  Why not be paid to write things like this?

Well, it all comes down to Rights:

1. In Associated Content’s Master License Agreement read section 2a. Exclusive License
2. Read the Terms of Use (carefully), particularly section 4. Rights You Grant to AC

Still not completely discouraged, as many said AC paid well enough for their articles and knowing that some articles aren’t worth saving for another day, I decided to at least sign up.  If I never made a dime or even glanced at the assignments page, signing up at least game me comment rights to other people’s articles.  Since this really wasn’t about the money (yet), I chose “to learn something” as my reason for signing up.

It took me to the assignments page immediately.

The assignment list was short: 13 possible pieces, with several based on last week’s episode of American Idol performances and two on Steampunk designing

Since podcasts and videos would require more equipment than I have at the moment, I was able to eliminate five potential pieces immediately.  Then, as I haven’t actually seen a single episode of American Couch Potato, I was able to eliminate six more.  The other two pieces on Steampunk certainly had my interest, but as I’m just a Steampunk voyeur, I had to just sigh and close the page wistfully.

I did however take a moment to peek at one of the American Idol performer via Youtube.  Mr. Michael Lynche during a March performance

Not too bad, but really, not my thing.

But it might be just right for Marcus…..

It comes down to trusting instincts.  It’s harder than it should be.  To trust comes hard enough for me.  I have trouble trusting myself, let alone most others.  The world seems so very big to me; I seem so very small…  It’s silly really.  I am really that small.  The world doesn’t care one toot about me.  Hooray for me!

I’m starting to see this as a good thing.

Bear with me.  My joy probably seems strange, but it’s real.

It comes from accepting that no one really should care about me either.  Nor should I care about them.  I can choose to care.  Others can choose to care.  Making such a choice gives me something, fulfilling me and my needs, gratifying my own self-interests.  Enlightened self-interest makes the world go around, so to speak.

What does this have to do with trust, or my friend’s note?

Well, I was considering why I keep trying to stay in touch with this friend of mine, even though we are so often at odds.  And the only answer that ever really comes to mind is that I really trust her.  She may piss me off, she may bore me, she may be off on another planet somewhere (figurative speaking — sort of), but barring some stupid crap in high school that all kids try to pull, she’s always done her best to keep her word.  And since I’m a stickler for justified faith ;-D , I like that in a person.

So, when my friend was having troubles with someone in her family — someone that she should be able to trust and feel secure around — because of her choices as a mother,  it brought to mind some similar issue I am having with my own mother.  And how I feel about my own mother….  (this is where instinct come in).

I don’t really like my mother.  My mom is a very standoff-ish type, with strong views on things that she isn’t afraid to forcefeed to you (for your own good of course) if she feels the situation deserves it, but mostly she would rather make faces and scoffing and grunting noises (somehow that just feels so much better to write than “shows her disdain“).  But she is my mother.  And despite the unease she inspires in me, years of reinforcement makes me continue to try to build our relationship.

I say “try” here.  Truth is–I have to try to do it.  Otherwise, I tend to just forget she’s still alive.

I don’t forget my father.  For all my father’s flaws, I knew what to expect from him.  He terrified me, but if I ever needed help from him, he was right there fumbling alongside me (or at least offering advice over the phone).  With my father, I always had a sense that he wanted to do the right thing and the best thing, even if he didn’t know often what it was.  And oddly enough, I always knew I mattered to my father.  Or maybe it isn’t all that odd.  All the pictures of my childhood show Dad carrying me on his shoulders.

Or it could be that I’m a mother myself now and I see things in my own mother’s behavior that I’m afraid of in mine.

This is, after all the woman that chase away the horrid “lactation consultant” that I was given at the hospital, when both my son and I were so very frustrated by the “expert’s” poking and prodding and hovering.  My mom was at that point in time my greatest savior, and I was amazed by how she stepped forward and protected us.  Both Dan and I were too tired and emotionally battered by the whole experience (I swear, four full runs of Pitocin should earn a woman an Olympic medal, and her partner a bronze).  Nothing had gone the way we’d wanted, except that we had this beautiful little boy to care for, and this so called expert who had never nursed (let alone have a child) was giving me a guilt trip because she’d never dealt with size J-cups before….

For a time Mom and I were close, but….  maybe there was more unease there than I knew?  maybe because my son hadn’t had the emotional flash of joy and relief that I had he was better able to sense what I’d always felt before about Mom?  Whatever the cause, Marcus was never comfortable around my mother.  Yet, I still felt I should make sure they spent time together.  I tried to bring him to meet with her–he cried a lot whenever she was around.  I tried to let her touch him–he cried more, and I felt queasy.

Only a few months later…  my three month old son, my little snuggle boy….  At one of those little lunch meetings that were usually the only place I felt comfortable meeting Mom with Marcus, we were saying good-bye’s in the parking lot.  I was just getting ready to put Marcus in his car seat, and my mom asked if she could hold him for a moment.  He didn’t want to go and squawked to high heaven.  And after a few seconds, only a few seconds, of “oh, come now, let Grandma hug you” and “Shush“, she slapped him.  I was staggered.  I was horrified.

And worse yet, I knew in my gut that this was wrong, and all I was able to do was take him from her and set him in his carseat….  Heck, I didn’t even cuddle him, stunned little thing.  All I could think of was that I needed to get away from her, and the fastest way to do that was get him buckled in and say “Good-bye.”  I don’t remember exactly what I said.  I know it was along the lines of “I’ve really got to go.  I’ll talk to you later.”  No scolds, no accusations…  I didn’t really know what to say.

So, instincts….  I should learn to trust them more.  But even more than that, I want to write this because there is a woman who I’ve never doubted was a safe person to leave my son with, who in some ways, I trust even more than myself at times with him…

I wanted to write it for a friend.