The Lovely Mix of Old & New

I confess a wicked love for old typewriters. I received my first typewriter as an eighth grade graduation gift from my mother, who thought of the practical uses, that I would use it for all my papers in high school. I did. But I also spent most my free time - when I wasn't in dance classes or rehearsals or reading British novels - sitting on my bedroom floor and typing poems and stories and journal entries and who knows what all else. When I was angry at my parents ( a good chunk of the time like most 15 year olds) I typed list after list of things I hated, things I wouldn't do to my own children (which would be interesting to see now that I am a parent),  the qualities I wanted to have when I was a parent. When I was exhausted from venting and ranting, I'd type a list of the things I loved and was grateful for. It was one of my better self-devised coping mechanisms. There's something gratifying and satisfying about the click-tap-taping sound of typewriter keys. Something about it always makes me feel better.

So being from Portland, where DIY and hacking are both long standing lifestyle choices, it's hard not to love this anachronistic steampunkish mix of old typewriter and Apple computer. When I saw it this morning on NPR's website, I instantly swooned. If I had a home, maybe an office with an old oak desk that would go with my old oak library chair I picked up at a yard sale for $3, then maybe I'd recreate the above.

         Somewhere along the line I loaned my typewriter to a friend, and I never got it back. I still miss it. Even though it's too heavy to put in my suitcase as we travel from place to place as we find a home. Of course now, I want a Olivetti Underwood Manual Typewriter. They sound delightful.

Veteran's Day

Yes, I respect veterans. Yes, I support the troops and think they should be honored when they come home - especially since over 500,000 troops have come home with some form of depression or PTSD. (Personally, I think the lives and mental health of our citizens is too high a price to pay for the wars they are currently fighting.)

That said, Veteran's Day is my least favorite holiday. I find myself sad and snarky. 

And Veteran's Day is one of those holidays you have to be on good behavior, that while you do have the freedom of speech, if you use it on this day, people frown when they look in your general direction. People like spending the day waving flags and thanking veterans for defending our freedoms and democracy. It's not a good day to point out that the notion of "defending our freedoms and democracy" is a cultural myth. That actually, last time I checked, our democracy was not on the endangered species list. That not since the war with England has a single US soldier died for our freedoms or democracy. 

I spend the day wondering, what if we honored education as much as we honored the military?  The immediate answer, of course, is that people would have education enough to know that not a single US soldier has died defending our freedoms since the war with England. 

But really, what if we valued education as much as the military? What if we valued the lives of our citizens to such a degree that we were unwilling to send them into wars (legal or illegal) to have them killed or come home with mental illnesses?  

 What if we honored education (and I mean actual education, not the training that comes out of standardized test constructed curriculum), critical thinking and constructive problem solving skills that we found a way to resolve conflicts that didn't require the military? We attempt to raise our children with the notion that they need to talk - not fist fight - their way through their differences. What if the government was the one who set the example? 

(This is one of my childhood scars, my claws come out at the first sign of the "do as I say not as I do" child raising mentality.)

And, as the old bumper sticker says, what if we valued and funded education to such a degree that it was the military that had to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber?

What if we lived in a world where all countries' military existed to feed citizens, disaster relief and things that forwarded life? What if we saw ourselves as citizens of the Earth, not a country, region, city, race or gang to defend? 

You may say I'm a dreamer; my husband calls me a socialist. I don't think I'm the only one in the marriage. When critics accuse Obama of European-izing the country, we 're both yelling at the radio, "Good!" And anyway, even if I am a dreamer, as John Lennon says, I'm not the only one.

What if we created new conversations for what's possible for humanity? Wouldn't that be worth a holiday?

(Thank you Jerah Marquardt for inspiration)

 

 

Tempering Tantrums

When my son was 18 months old, friends, family members, and other well-meaning people warned us about the tantrums to come and the Terrible Twos. Still enraptured in my son’s perfection, I said, “I hate that term: The Terrible Twos. It labels kids without even giving them a chance. It’s like labeling inner city black kids as troubled or delinquent when they haven’t done anything wrong.”

            “You’ll see.” They said. I, of course, hate it when people say this too. It makes me feel like I’m being talked down to.

            When my sister said that she preferred the term “The Terrific Twos,” because it’s a terrific age and it’s terrifically hard, I agreed with her. I thought it was dead on.

           

Now that my son is two, we’re getting a few tantrums in between all his Terrific Two-ness. One day this week, I served up my husband’s and my lunch in the kitchen and took our plates to the table. My son grabbed his plate off his shelf and threw himself on the floor face down waving his empty plate around and kicking his legs in traditional temper tantrum style as he shouted, “food!” Because my son is a grazer, my husband and I feed him off our plates, so I said to my son, “the food is on the table. Let’s go to the table.”

            He wanted no part of it. More plate waving. More crying. More kicking.

            I looked at him. I asked, “Did you want me to serve your plate the way I did Mommy and Daddy’s?”

            The plate waving, kicking, and crying stopped. He picked himself up from the floor.

            “Yes.”  He said.

            At the table, my husband said, “I don’t know if we should give in to his tantrums. He might think that’s how he gets what he wants.”

            “I don’t think he’s throwing a tantrum to get something or to be difficult or manipulative. I think he’s frustrated because he hasn’t figured out how to ask for what he wants. As soon I guess what he wants to say, the tantrum is over.”

            “I can see that.” My husband said. Then we did as we often do in such situations: we scrolled through the ways our friends and family members parented in such situations. We consulted our examples.

Our options spanned the parenting spectrum. We had friends who when their children threw tantrums, they locked them in the garage, friends who held and rocked their child through the tantrum, others who said, “Throw your tantrum. When you’re done and need me, I’m on the couch.” We had friends who just walked away and ignored the tantrum all together. I have an uncle who when my cousins threw a tantrum, he’d throw an even bigger tantrum to show them how it was done.

But none of these examples fit us. We’re more the type to lock ourselves in the garage if we feel challenged by our child’s tantrum. I maintained that when he’s not sick, hungry or tired, our son’s tantrums are because he’s frustrated he can’t make himself understood, not because he’s trying to be difficult.

In the end, we decided not to follow any of the examples of the people we knew. We decided that in such situations, we should treat our son how we want him to treat other people who are upset, We decided his tantrums could be an opportunity to teach him empathy and compassion, that generally when people are upset, they just want to feel heard.

The next morning, my son woke up at 6am and asked to watch TV.

            “No,” I said.

            His tantrum began.

            “You want to watch TV?”

            “Yes.”  He said.

            “But I don’t want to watch TV first thing in the morning.”

            His tantrum continued.

            “Are you angry and frustrated because you can’t have what you want?” I asked him.

            “Yes,” he said.

            “That’s fair. Can we play trains instead?”

            “Yes.”

            Back in the land of the Terrific Twos, we played trains.

How I Spend November

November, as those close to me know, is National Novel Writing Month. Silly to call it National, as it now exists all over the world, but when it started in San Francisco in 1999 with 21 people the global part seemed far fetched. The gist of it is, as Chris Baty says, to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Baty started it for the simple reason that people always say they want to write a novel (people always say they want to do something) but that they had to wait to retire/the kids to leave home/win the lottery/their vacation time or whatever blah de blah blah excuse (because people always have something that keeps them from doing something).

Chris Baty said bullshit to all you people and your excuses. You need a deadline. And you need a crazy unreasonable deadline. What works about 50,000 words in 30 days is that if you are any kind of normal person with a life it's still a bit of a stretch to write 1667 words a day. Consequently, it means that mean-spirited discouraging editor voice in your head has to turn off and go away so that you can write. Actually, it's not even writing. It's typing. Typing with a purpose.

Why did I start spending my Novembers typing like a crazy person?

In the Spring of 2005, I was finishing up graduate school. In graduate school, while I loved my classes, loved that I had found a way to legitimate spending my Sundays in bed with 19th century British novels and a cup of coffee, and loved (most) my professors, I also struggled a bit. I struggled with that bitchy competitive at all costs mentality (having had papers and ideas stolen). I struggled with who you have to be in academe, that you have to fit into a kind of cookie cutter, and by the end of my program, I realized I didn't fit into that cookie cutter. And when I tried to fit myself into that cookie cutter, I got sick. I had more health issues in my years of graduate school than I had ever had before. I talked about all these things with a glorious adviser as I finished my program. She said, "You know you have brilliant ideas, but your problem is you're just so creative. Your problem is you're just in the wrong program. You should have been across the hall in the MFA creative nonfiction program."

She didn't say such things lightly. She spent most the time I knew her trying to convince MFA'ers to switch sides to the MA program. She told not just one person who wrote to quit. But I left her office with my pen in my hand and thinking, well, then, I should write.

I walked down the hallway and continued thinking, huh, well then. I want to write a book. But writing a book is daunting. You have to be smart sounding for at least 200 pages. I walked into the copy room to check my mailbox before leaving, and ran into a couple of friends of mine who were talking about a writer in the MFA program who had just had her collection of short stories published. But, they said in hushed voices, the stories weren't very good.

All the stories you hear of good writers not getting published, I continually find it baffling when mediocre and even bad writers get published. I asked, well how on earth did she get it published?
My friend said, "They're compelling stories."

I went home thinking of this and that night sat in my bathtub, saying to myself, okay, I can write a book, but I need a compelling idea, because I can write a bad book if the idea is compelling. Then my idea literally fell on my head. In the bathtub. Completely out of no where.

I finished graduate school, moved to Colorado to be with my not-yet husband, went to Africa with not-yet husband, got married, and started researching my idea. In November, I wrote my first 50,000 word draft. Of course I still procrastinated and wrote the last 30,000 words in the last three days (I didn't have a child then). But you write 30,000 words in 3 days - well, you can imagine the typos and the paragraphs without a stitch of punctuation.

I did what you do in such situations: I gave it to my parents, the people who are supposed to love me no matter what even if I write 50,000 words of crap.

I still haven't revised it. Turns out I find revising more daunting than actually writing. Turns out writing is the easy part. And actually, while I still love the idea and can even see the future movie of my book in my mind, I'm not there yet. I'm still simmering on it. In 2006 & 2007, I tried to use the November Novel writing as a outlet for revising and failed miserably. In 2008, I had a baby the week before November started, so I felt justified in taking the month off - and even if I wanted to write, in labor I pinched nerves in my upper arms that left my wrists paralyzed for six weeks. I couldn't even put on my glasses let alone hold a pen.

In 2009, we went to Singapore. In my suitcase, I had a good chunk of my research books and my revision attempts, but instead I started a new novel in November. Not even halfway through the month, I decided I hated that idea and ended up writing a collection of short stories that I've spent the last year revising.

Just before coming home from Bali, I started to realize what was missing from my novel, what I needed to do in order to fix it. I'm a firm believer in simmering and I've since learned that I'm in good company. I met an author who had a story in the Best American Short Stories and she spent five years writing, simmering, revising, simmering some more. Now I think the writing process is similar to parenting, in that when you follow your story or your child's lead, it goes far easier than trying to force your agenda.

This year I have a brand new idea. I'm writing that. Husband still wants me to revise and finish the old one. Of course I will. But not this month. This month I'm typing my 50,000 words while trying to keep up on all the other things I want to be doing and writing. This year - last year too - the writing isn't even about the writing anymore. It's just for the tradition of it. That in five years, we've lived in four cities, and still haven't for sure decided on where to live. How I spend November is the one count on-able thing in my yearly calendar. It's how I cope with all the other change constantly happening in the rest of my life, that no matter where we are, I am getting up at 4am and stealing Saturdays for myself and writing. Typing.