My sincere apologies; somehow sometimes posts I have scheduled turn into drafts that won't post, seemingly at random. I will try to double check them more often, I promise.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
Urgent: Must Win Bread
So now that we are married, I am feeling this sudden urgent need to get stable. I want to create a plan, a situation, that will give us at least 5 years of stability, rather than 6 months or 1 year. I have spent this week obsessing about where to move to and how to make the income we will need to raise our kids.
This is, I know, premature. We are not even pregnant yet. But we are trying, the prenatal supplements and nutrition are in place, and at this point it is a matter of time as we wait for the next ovulation. Translated, this means that I have taken all the action steps I can (or that my plan allows at this point in time) towards babies, therefore, I am fixated on the next items on the list.
I would like to say that I find it amusing/interesting/ironic that I am having such a stereotypically masculine response, worrying about the bread-winning. I would like to add the caveat that I am also terrified of committing to 5 year stability, even though I have been decently stable in my current situation for the last 4 years or so. The difference is that I could have left or changed things at any time. I have the trappings of 1 year stability, I have just extended their contracts. Signing a 5 year contract (so to speak, and this is getting almost ponderously metaphorical) seems as daunting as it does necessary.
I have been fixating on the possibility of opening a thrift store as a way to generate stable income and family-friendly scheduling. For two days, I ran through all the reasons I could think of for why a thrift store could be a really awesome thing. Finally, I decided to get serious about it and sat down to write lists. I started with the Why This Is a Good Idea list, and then went from there. Five or six lists later, I wrote the Assumptions I am Making list, and it burst my bubble. Too many assumptions, one or two of them deal-breakers if things don't work out that way. I am not willing to work 70 hour workweeks to have my own business/thrift store. Instead, I want to dabble in it (I can concede 30-40 hours/week) and have it be successful enough that I don't have to do more. NOT the most viable plan right now.
Once I realized that, I started to panic. I don't have a good enough plan, nothing is figured out enough for my comfort, what am I going to do? I decided the best thing was to pull the plug and turn off my brain. Once I got it out of its feedback loop, I could look at the bigger picture. To that end, I went to the library and checked out my maximum allowable number of books, almost all mental-bubblegum novels. I will spend the weekend reading fun romps that don't even leave footprints in the sand of my mind, and then check back in with everything next week.
This is, I know, premature. We are not even pregnant yet. But we are trying, the prenatal supplements and nutrition are in place, and at this point it is a matter of time as we wait for the next ovulation. Translated, this means that I have taken all the action steps I can (or that my plan allows at this point in time) towards babies, therefore, I am fixated on the next items on the list.
I would like to say that I find it amusing/interesting/ironic that I am having such a stereotypically masculine response, worrying about the bread-winning. I would like to add the caveat that I am also terrified of committing to 5 year stability, even though I have been decently stable in my current situation for the last 4 years or so. The difference is that I could have left or changed things at any time. I have the trappings of 1 year stability, I have just extended their contracts. Signing a 5 year contract (so to speak, and this is getting almost ponderously metaphorical) seems as daunting as it does necessary.
I have been fixating on the possibility of opening a thrift store as a way to generate stable income and family-friendly scheduling. For two days, I ran through all the reasons I could think of for why a thrift store could be a really awesome thing. Finally, I decided to get serious about it and sat down to write lists. I started with the Why This Is a Good Idea list, and then went from there. Five or six lists later, I wrote the Assumptions I am Making list, and it burst my bubble. Too many assumptions, one or two of them deal-breakers if things don't work out that way. I am not willing to work 70 hour workweeks to have my own business/thrift store. Instead, I want to dabble in it (I can concede 30-40 hours/week) and have it be successful enough that I don't have to do more. NOT the most viable plan right now.
Once I realized that, I started to panic. I don't have a good enough plan, nothing is figured out enough for my comfort, what am I going to do? I decided the best thing was to pull the plug and turn off my brain. Once I got it out of its feedback loop, I could look at the bigger picture. To that end, I went to the library and checked out my maximum allowable number of books, almost all mental-bubblegum novels. I will spend the weekend reading fun romps that don't even leave footprints in the sand of my mind, and then check back in with everything next week.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Every Project Has Its Marshmallow
In yet another fabulously stimulating TED talk (about 7 min), Tom Wujec details a team building exercise where groups of people are challenged to build the tallest structures they can out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, tape, string, and a single marshmallow that has to go on top. He says that most teams spend time planning, jockeying for power in the group, building the structure, and then at the last moment they put the marshmallow on top, only to have the weight of the marshmallow cause their structure to collapse.
This exercise demonstrates the hidden assumptions of any project, and all projects, he says, have their marshmallow. Interestingly, it is also the kindergartners who excel at this exercise more than most, and the MBAs who do the worst. The kindergartners do well because they use trial and error, including the marshmallow the entire time, rather than only designing one structure that creates a crisis when it fails at the last minute.
In my own projects, I have noticed that I will plan it out, spend a lot of time designing and planning and breaking things down into steps, and then there will be that nagging sense of something else, something I am missing. Now I have a name for it: The Marshmallow. I have had more projects become frustrations if not failures or fiascos because of those damned Marshmallows.
More importantly, though, I now have a plan for how to deal with the Marshmallow. Iteration. Do it, and then do it again, and keep doing it, all the way through completion, and learn from what does not work. At the end of 2008, I looked back on my year and dubbed it the Year of the Failures. (It was not crushing. In fact, realizing it helped me to understand my intense feelings of frustration at the time.) And if 2008 was about failure, then 2009 was the Year of the Fiascoes. (Forget failure, I was operating on a much grander scale!)
Now, with the Marshmallow Paradigm, these were not Failures and Fiascoes. They were Iterations. And the thing with Iterations is, the learning curve can be nice and steep and eventually lead somewhere. That's what I'm talking about.
This exercise demonstrates the hidden assumptions of any project, and all projects, he says, have their marshmallow. Interestingly, it is also the kindergartners who excel at this exercise more than most, and the MBAs who do the worst. The kindergartners do well because they use trial and error, including the marshmallow the entire time, rather than only designing one structure that creates a crisis when it fails at the last minute.
In my own projects, I have noticed that I will plan it out, spend a lot of time designing and planning and breaking things down into steps, and then there will be that nagging sense of something else, something I am missing. Now I have a name for it: The Marshmallow. I have had more projects become frustrations if not failures or fiascos because of those damned Marshmallows.
More importantly, though, I now have a plan for how to deal with the Marshmallow. Iteration. Do it, and then do it again, and keep doing it, all the way through completion, and learn from what does not work. At the end of 2008, I looked back on my year and dubbed it the Year of the Failures. (It was not crushing. In fact, realizing it helped me to understand my intense feelings of frustration at the time.) And if 2008 was about failure, then 2009 was the Year of the Fiascoes. (Forget failure, I was operating on a much grander scale!)
Now, with the Marshmallow Paradigm, these were not Failures and Fiascoes. They were Iterations. And the thing with Iterations is, the learning curve can be nice and steep and eventually lead somewhere. That's what I'm talking about.
Monday, May 10, 2010
A Wedding Day Nashville Will Remember
I have a friend who is also getting married this year (October), and we have been bonding over our shared wedding stress. Her wedding is a much bigger affair than we had planned, with a rather private ceremony somewhere between Nashville and East Tennessee, and then a reception in her hometown in East TN and a reception in Nashville. We both began our planning as of the new year, though I had 4 months and she had 10 months until the big day.
I shared my story of the wedding festivities ultimately being canceled ("imagine if your mom called you at 9 am on your wedding day to say you were going to have to call the whole thing off") and vented about how frustrated and overwhelmed I felt over a reschedule. In turn, she confessed to being envious that I had my Ordeal over with, and then later went on to say that really, she would feel quite relieved to be in my place. She added a story of family drama involving Irish hot-headedness around who played what music at the wedding.
I find all this interesting. First of all, why is she having such an involved wedding if it doesn't feel good to her? And secondly, it changes some of my feelings about the "tragedy" of the whole thing. I am quite happy that we are married now. Very happy, with the honeymooner's endorphins to prove it. I think I must have regained some of my innate optimism and hopefulness in the last week.
Enough so that I went to talk to the lady in charge of the picnic shelter reservations today. She is happy to refund our money since we were so obviously flooded out, but also rescheduled us for June. She said that if it was still stinky from the flooding and stranded fish and we didn't want the reschedule after all, she was happy to just refund everything, let her know. And then my partner and I went to Scarlett Begonia, our favorite little fair trade import boutique in town, and they recognized us and asked if we'd had the wedding yet, and we said it had been flooded out, and they were so sorry.
I told them all that I've just chosen to think of it this way: Nashville will never forget our wedding day.
I shared my story of the wedding festivities ultimately being canceled ("imagine if your mom called you at 9 am on your wedding day to say you were going to have to call the whole thing off") and vented about how frustrated and overwhelmed I felt over a reschedule. In turn, she confessed to being envious that I had my Ordeal over with, and then later went on to say that really, she would feel quite relieved to be in my place. She added a story of family drama involving Irish hot-headedness around who played what music at the wedding.
I find all this interesting. First of all, why is she having such an involved wedding if it doesn't feel good to her? And secondly, it changes some of my feelings about the "tragedy" of the whole thing. I am quite happy that we are married now. Very happy, with the honeymooner's endorphins to prove it. I think I must have regained some of my innate optimism and hopefulness in the last week.
Enough so that I went to talk to the lady in charge of the picnic shelter reservations today. She is happy to refund our money since we were so obviously flooded out, but also rescheduled us for June. She said that if it was still stinky from the flooding and stranded fish and we didn't want the reschedule after all, she was happy to just refund everything, let her know. And then my partner and I went to Scarlett Begonia, our favorite little fair trade import boutique in town, and they recognized us and asked if we'd had the wedding yet, and we said it had been flooded out, and they were so sorry.
I told them all that I've just chosen to think of it this way: Nashville will never forget our wedding day.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Story is Powerful Enough to Transform
The power of story is amazing to me. I have been upset about the way the wedding turned out: that it wasn't what I had envisioned, that everything will now need to be rescheduled, feeling disappointed, and just having trouble getting over the magical snap-back of having put so much into its manifestation only to have it not work.
But when I sat down to write the previous blog post, it came out different. Instead of angst, out came a story that made things okay. Instead of all the worries and complaints and emotional bruises that I had been nursing for a few days, I wrote a story about miracles. And that story, summed up by the title Doomed with a Chance of Miracles, changed my story about the wedding. It took some of those seeds of hope that I was afraid to sprout and sent them shooting up into beanstalks of story and truth.
Slowly, the wedding is changing in my head. I hardly lament the original dream anymore, but spend more time beginning to ponder the implications of what we learned for our married life together. I know I was highly emotional, but now that emotion is beginning to flow into perspective like chiaroscuro, highlighting, dramatizing, and creating intriguing mystery to run throughout our lives together.
I have learned from one of my housemates that stories have a life of their own. I am often annoyed at how events and facts warp inside his gravitational field, becoming new things that say sometimes nice (and sometimes highly unflattering) things about those of us in his life. Corrections for factuality are never welcomed, because the story has been woven around the truth he wants to think.
In this case, though, I think the story came first, and wrapped within it like a present was the truth I needed. Now, instead of the false bravado of jokes, I can have an easy peace with the story of our wedding day. It feels...warm. And now we can move on to the next step of figuring out what on earth to do about rescheduling.
But when I sat down to write the previous blog post, it came out different. Instead of angst, out came a story that made things okay. Instead of all the worries and complaints and emotional bruises that I had been nursing for a few days, I wrote a story about miracles. And that story, summed up by the title Doomed with a Chance of Miracles, changed my story about the wedding. It took some of those seeds of hope that I was afraid to sprout and sent them shooting up into beanstalks of story and truth.
Slowly, the wedding is changing in my head. I hardly lament the original dream anymore, but spend more time beginning to ponder the implications of what we learned for our married life together. I know I was highly emotional, but now that emotion is beginning to flow into perspective like chiaroscuro, highlighting, dramatizing, and creating intriguing mystery to run throughout our lives together.
I have learned from one of my housemates that stories have a life of their own. I am often annoyed at how events and facts warp inside his gravitational field, becoming new things that say sometimes nice (and sometimes highly unflattering) things about those of us in his life. Corrections for factuality are never welcomed, because the story has been woven around the truth he wants to think.
In this case, though, I think the story came first, and wrapped within it like a present was the truth I needed. Now, instead of the false bravado of jokes, I can have an easy peace with the story of our wedding day. It feels...warm. And now we can move on to the next step of figuring out what on earth to do about rescheduling.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
The Wedding: Doomed with a chance of Miracles
Well, a piece of the Apocalypse came to the wedding. Give me a few more (days, weeks, months) and I will consider it to be a grand thing. They are now calling it a Millennial Flood, something that only happens once in a 1,000 years.
I had had this vision, though, of what the wedding would be. Of us standing together in the green of the park, in our beautiful silks, with crowns of ivy and flowers on our heads. We would be surrounded by so many of our closest friends and family who would bless and support us, and there would be sunshine making everything sparkle.
Instead, there was a lush rain cascading down and we had a small ritual with a last-minute volunteer priestess held inside, with a little over a dozen of our nearest and dearest. It was a morning of panic that followed an entire day of increasing panic as we first changed to a drier venue, then canceled the festivities completely for fear of everyone's safety.
Shortly after we canceled everything, the first miracle happened. My sister the chef (whom we had been desperately trying to reach by phone and were worried about) came charging in the back door under a little pink Dora the Explorer umbrella, clutching well-wrapped bundles to her chest. A few trips in and out of the rain, and then she shed her soaked hoodie and set to work assembling the cake anyway. And my gods, what a work of art! Four tiers of raspberry lemon dacquoise, piped with whipped cream, topped with fresh blackberries, carmelized lemon wheels, and fresh mint leaves. Also, a small army of from-scratch chocolate-covered cherry mice, complete with slivered almond ears.
The second miracle was my family. They live on the other side of town, and there did not seem to be any way for them to make it. And yet, as my other sister had come up with her boyfriend in his giant truck with a cab and a half, they decided to give it a go. As they had no power, I looked up the live Google traffic maps and made a couple of route suggestions, since the interstates were closed due to flooding. I know that when I called to check on them at one point, they were diverting into a Kroger parking lot to avoid water crossing the road. When I asked Dad about the trip, he replied in those understated tones that really meant, "It was harrowing." But they made it. And then my other sister popped back in with her whole family, so that all my immediate family was there, in addition to my household (there are 6 of us), my friend/former housemate/flower lady/priestess, a good friend and her baby who stayed with us for the floods, and a nearby friend/neighbor.
The third miracle was a little thing, but not so little. I had been praying and sending intent and energy and affirmations and everything I had into having the rain stop around 1:00, in time for the wedding, just take a little break, I said, and I asked for a ray of sunshine. Just one little ray. When I figured out that the park was flooded and it was a lost cause on the weather, I pulled my intentions back and said, "Do what you will." There was a whole other line of storms slated to come through in the afternoon, but they never did. The rain slacked off in the early afternoon of the wedding and never really started again. And after our, well, wedding night that was really afternoon, I woke up to the whole world having turned golden. The sun was setting, and though it didn't break through the clouds, it was one of the most beautiful, magical golden glows ever, setting off the lush wet green of the trees. Luminous. Everything was luminous. And I knew--it was as close to my ray of sunshine as Goddess could give me.
I had had this vision, though, of what the wedding would be. Of us standing together in the green of the park, in our beautiful silks, with crowns of ivy and flowers on our heads. We would be surrounded by so many of our closest friends and family who would bless and support us, and there would be sunshine making everything sparkle.
Instead, there was a lush rain cascading down and we had a small ritual with a last-minute volunteer priestess held inside, with a little over a dozen of our nearest and dearest. It was a morning of panic that followed an entire day of increasing panic as we first changed to a drier venue, then canceled the festivities completely for fear of everyone's safety.
Shortly after we canceled everything, the first miracle happened. My sister the chef (whom we had been desperately trying to reach by phone and were worried about) came charging in the back door under a little pink Dora the Explorer umbrella, clutching well-wrapped bundles to her chest. A few trips in and out of the rain, and then she shed her soaked hoodie and set to work assembling the cake anyway. And my gods, what a work of art! Four tiers of raspberry lemon dacquoise, piped with whipped cream, topped with fresh blackberries, carmelized lemon wheels, and fresh mint leaves. Also, a small army of from-scratch chocolate-covered cherry mice, complete with slivered almond ears.
The second miracle was my family. They live on the other side of town, and there did not seem to be any way for them to make it. And yet, as my other sister had come up with her boyfriend in his giant truck with a cab and a half, they decided to give it a go. As they had no power, I looked up the live Google traffic maps and made a couple of route suggestions, since the interstates were closed due to flooding. I know that when I called to check on them at one point, they were diverting into a Kroger parking lot to avoid water crossing the road. When I asked Dad about the trip, he replied in those understated tones that really meant, "It was harrowing." But they made it. And then my other sister popped back in with her whole family, so that all my immediate family was there, in addition to my household (there are 6 of us), my friend/former housemate/flower lady/priestess, a good friend and her baby who stayed with us for the floods, and a nearby friend/neighbor.
The third miracle was a little thing, but not so little. I had been praying and sending intent and energy and affirmations and everything I had into having the rain stop around 1:00, in time for the wedding, just take a little break, I said, and I asked for a ray of sunshine. Just one little ray. When I figured out that the park was flooded and it was a lost cause on the weather, I pulled my intentions back and said, "Do what you will." There was a whole other line of storms slated to come through in the afternoon, but they never did. The rain slacked off in the early afternoon of the wedding and never really started again. And after our, well, wedding night that was really afternoon, I woke up to the whole world having turned golden. The sun was setting, and though it didn't break through the clouds, it was one of the most beautiful, magical golden glows ever, setting off the lush wet green of the trees. Luminous. Everything was luminous. And I knew--it was as close to my ray of sunshine as Goddess could give me.
Monday, May 3, 2010
In the Woods, No 'Puters Allowed
We be mucking about in the woods today, no post for you. We will return to our regularly scheduled bloggage when I can feel my toes again....
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