I changed my mind. I love BlogThis. I would trust my life with BlogThis. Or at the very least I would trust my blog with it.

Soupsaw made a blog entry about anger. It got me to thinking and I wanted to make an entry about my thoughts, but I don't actually feel like it right now. I will do it later. Sunday, Sunday, someday.

I should go back to collecting songs that remind me of my childhood.

BlogThis, I distrust you.

Today the Eugene temperature thingy said 100 degrees. I feel betrayed. Okay, not that betrayed.

I went shopping for Saren's birthday today. I bought her in-line skates! Heeeeeeheheheheheee! I also bought her three books that are somewhere between your easy reader and your bigger chapter books like The Phantom Tollbooth, Harriet the Spy, or The Mouse and the Motorcycle. To go with them, I got her a bookmark with Dorothy and Toto on it. Harper got her a birthday Barbie.

Shhh.

I checked out how much it might cost to rent a truck to move from Vegas to Eugene and the figure that came up was more than I thought it would be. At first that discouraged me, but after thinking about it some more and doing some figurin', I realized that it's not all that bad. Now I'm back to excited mode. Hooray!

When we pack up our stuff and make the trip up to Eugene it will be the first time we will have ever set foot there. That's a little frightening, but I don't think we can possibly end up in a place that I like less than I like Las Vegas. Even if things don't work out and we face some kind of disaster that makes it impossible for us to live there, my first option won't be to come back here.

I'm hoping that we'll like it enough that we'll just want to stay put. Ever since I first moved out of my mother's house 8 years ago, I have always felt a sense of impermanance wherever it was that we (or I) lived. Like I didn't want to bother making things the way I wanted them because I didn't know if we would be moving in a year anyway. I'd really like to have a home that can be "ours." Someplace where I can paint the walls or create a garden or build a playhouse in the backyard or ...whatever. That would be nice.

On the other hand, I don't want to get the feeling of being too tied down. I've often thought that it would be really cool to buy an RV and travel the country for months or years or forever without having a homebase at all. Stupid conflicting desires.

The temerature was a lowly 96 degrees today so I decided to take the girls to the park. Saren decided she wanted to practice jumping off of the edge of the twirly slide and she did it pretty well at first. Then she decided to go a little higher and she fell hard on her right foot and the palms of her hands. I carried her all the way home and it's a good thing that we live right next to the park because I just about died carrying her all that way. I think she just strained or sprained or pained or some "ained" word it and that it will probably feel better by tomorrow. Or, you know, by now. She just ran into the kitchen and back but still limps when she remembers that she hurt herself.

You see? This is what happens when you go "outside."

Photo Friday ~ Mechanism

One of our fish died today. It's name was Reddy. Actually, it died yesterday and I put off doing anything about it because I wanted Saren to be able to participate in saying goodbye to it and I knew when I told her she would be rather upset. She's a very sensitive child.

So, we had a somber service by the toilet tonight. Saren is still in a state. I had her draw a picture of Reddy in remembrance because I thought it might help her to feel better.

Harper, on the other hand, just keeps laughing. Pat asked her if she was okay and she cheerfully responded "Yeah!" She kind of looked at him funny as if to say "Why in the world would I be upset?" I'm trying to remember if Saren was like this when she was Harper's age. I'm wondering if Harper will go through it too or if it's just an aspect of Saren's personality.

Anyway, rest in peace, Reddy.

Why is my joint achy? Must mean a storm's afoot.

So today Saren asked me what a hooker is. I told her it's a woman who gets all kissy-kissy with a man and he pays her to do it. She said "oh" and moved on to other topics. Perhaps I should have said "has sex with" instead of "gets all kissy-kissy", but I think I had a block in my brain that was saying she would ask me what sex was if I said that. And I think I may have already told her what sex is, but I have a feeling that she probably found it so uninteresting that she has forgotten by now. The last thing I want is for her to feel like sex is shameful or embarrassing, but sometimes it's difficult to work under pressure. Ah, well. There's always next time. At least I've said "vagina" to them often enough when they have asked about it that it no longer bothers me to say it.

We went to the library today and when I was perusing through the adult section I kept saying to myself, "Bleah, bleah, uninteresting, I don't think so," and I ended up with nothing from there. But then I went looking through the young adult and intermediate books and I picked up 3 books for myself, one to read to Saren, and Pat picked up one too. Maybe I should just go into that section exclusively.

We went out to eat and I decided that it would be a good idea for restaurants to have three different size choices for portions. A small, a medium, and a large. And that you should be able to ask for seconds. And that they should give all the leftovers to the homeless. I worked at a pizza place (for one week) that claimed that they gave all their pizzas that didn't get delivered for one reason or another to the homeless, but I never saw that happen. Of course, I was only there for one week. I also thought it would be an interesting thing to have a restaurant that didn't buy food from other sources. At least as much as it could manage to, I mean. It could have it's own garden and it could have chickens and I don't know what else. I think a place like that would be excellent.

I can't imagine why I forgot to mention this before, but Ishmael has a monkey. A gorilla, to be exact. The gorilla is the teacher. This bit of information may be something that was widely known anyway, but to be honest, we all know that the presence of a telepathic gorilla is an important thing for me to have forgotten to mention.

In other news, Saren has decided to have her 6th birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. I am not a big fan of Chuck E. Cheese, but I won't try to convince her to have it here instead, because Chuck E. Cheese does have a certain simplicity about it. Simplicity in that I won't have to make sure the house is scrupulously clean and I won't have to make a meal.

In other other news, it occurred to me yesterday that we may be able to move to Oregon in say, February instead of July of 2004. This is why Pat was giddy if you must know. And you must! I'm slightly perturbed because the apartment place that we talked to the most extensively said that if we were going to be unemployed, we would have to have 12,000 dollars in a bank account if we were to rent an apartment with a rent of $670 (that's three times the total amount of rent for a 6 month lease). Now that's possible, but it would take a lot longer time saving money than what we have planned. There was another apartment place I talked to that mentioned nothing of that sort so I still have hope. I'll just ignore the fact that the guy I was talking to sounded about 12 years old and I don't think he had any idea what I was talking about. Yay! Oregon! I think we'll work for the February date, but I won't change our official plans until I know it's going to happen in Feb for certain.

I want to do pilates but I'm worried that I just want to do them because I like the word "pilates."

Me and Ishmael

Here is what I imagine people do when they read me blathering on about Daniel Quinn and Ishmael and related topics. The reader (and here I am assuming a person who knows me) sighs heavily and shakes his or her head and says to him/herself "Tsk, tsk. Poor naive Stephanie. Taken in by some wacko, cultist, back-to-nature freak. I do wish she would stop going on about it." Keep in mind that this is what I imagine. It may or may not be the case. I have an overcritical imagination and whenever it finds occasion, it tells me how stupid I am. People who do not know me I imagine just saying, "Whatever" and moving on.

Previous to reading Ishmael, I would have called myself an environmentalist only if "environmentalist" means caring, but not caring enough to actually do anything about it. That sounds harsh. What I mean is, I was only dimly aware of the extent to which we are doing damage to our planet. Here is a quote I came upon recently: "We are so used to a constant trickle of bad news that the full enormity of our predicament escapes us." (I don't know who wrote it, but it came from here.) I think that hits on my awareness of environmental problems pretty well. I see reports all the time about how we are destroying the planet. I read about factory farming, I read about global warming, I read about how many acres of rainforest disappear every day, I read about polluted water-- all this stuff comes into my awareness as a steady trickle. I used to greet it with a certain sadness, but also a feeling of well, what can I do about that? or there's something wrong with human beings and all this is sad but inevitable. Or I would wonder if what was being said was even true or not or if it was as bad as it was being made out to be. And then I would push it away and not think about it anymore.

Reading Ishmael and some of the other things I have recently read changed me in that first it changed my awareness of the problem. It made me aware that yes, there is a problem and yes, it is worse than all the small bits that you allowed into your (meaning my) conciousness one at a time would have led you (meaning me) to believe. They did it not by laying out all the bad news in one place for me to see (although there was some of that) because I was aware of it all before anyway. Just not in a cohesive way. Instead they did it by getting me to see what lies underneath the problems. For me, being able to see the underlying structure made it possible to see the problem as a whole and to be rather dismayed and horrified.

I was going to say secondly, but sadly, I don't have a secondly.

I have been feeling rather dismayed also by my lack of ability to "be the message." Whenever I write about it, I invariably feel like I'm not articulating it very well. Maybe it's that there is too much. Maybe it's that I don't understand it like the back of my hand and that's the level of understanding that one has to have to convey it in the correct manner.

I feel very strongly though that "being the message" is incredibly important. Quinn points out that nothing is ever going to change until people have changed minds. So when people come to him and say, "I've read your books and they changed my life, but now what do I do??," he always says that the most important thing you can do is tell 100 people what you have learned and that they can tell 100 people and that in this way, there will be changed minds. (Side note: I always feel uncomfortable saying "Quinn says this... and Quinn says that..." because that does, indeed, sound cultish. But I certainly didn't say it, so I see no way around it at this point.) I think this is what I was getting at when I was talking about things like recycling and buying organic and free-range and reduce-reuse-recycle all being well and good, but ultimately not being enough. I could stop eating meat or I could start buying only humanely treated meat (and I may be moving toward those decisions soon) but my doing that is not going to put any kind of dent in the meat industry and the way they do business. Realistically, it would take an enormous amount of people doing the same thing to have any kind of impact. And looking at the culture we live in, I just don't see that happening any time soon. But if an enormous amount of people changed their minds, now that might be something to see. And to change people's minds, it is necessary to change the way they perceive things. To open their eyes. I think Ishmael and some of the other books I have mentioned can do that for some people (I say some because obviously it won't resonate with everyone).

So, I'll stop going on (for now) and just say Read Ishmael. If you do have reservations about Daniel Quinn, trust me when I say that even if you don't agree with everything he says, he will offer you a different way of looking at things. Now I'm worrying that I've been too commanding. Instead I'll say I urge you to read Ishmael or you should strongly consider reading Ishmael. Or maybe you'd like this book?

Oh, one other thing. Ishmael is not all doom and gloom. It's actually a very hopeful book in that it says, "Look, it doesn't have to be this way. There's a way out of this that doesn't have to end in catastrophe. And it doesn't have to be painful either. You don't have to go backwards, you just need to go in a different direction."

That's all. If you don't want to read Ishmael I'm not going to come to your house and tape your eyes open and tie you to a chair and force you to read it*, I just wanted to silence that supercritical voice in my head by making sure that you knew that I wasn't naively falling for some crackpot's spiel.

*unless you want me to

Photo Friday ~ Identity

Sometimes, I find myself endlessly amusing.

If blogger says it is saving your post, why doesn't it actually save your post? Did they put it somewhere I can't find it? Were they just lying to me? I can believe that.

Anyway (trying to reconstruct), I don't want to bore you with my corporeal complaints, but not only can I not hear out of my left ear still (though it doesn't hurt anymore thankfully), but my neck is all stiff and painful due to sleeping on it wrong. What is with me lately? I'm old. I'm old like mold.

Saren is watching The Wizard of Oz for the second time. She has postively fallen in love with it. I'm not sure that she would have sat through the first few black and white minutes if she didn't know that the tape came from Annika. I may not be giving her enough credit though.

As for my gimmick, I was thinking that it would probably be better to do 12 hours rather than 24. I would never last 24 anyway. What I was thinking was that it could be a from-waking-to-sleeping type thing. There was a photo project in May called Mayday where people took photos of their day every hour from waking to sleeping and I was thinking we could do the same thing only with words and not pictures. As for what words, that would be completely up to the blog author. It could be what's happening during the day, it could be random bits of nonsense, it could be a series of funny things, or a story, or a poem, or whatever. It would all be on the same day though and eveyone would be doing it the same day. I'll post more on this as I think of more.

Gimmick

Now I know I'm not Pat, but I had a thought for a bloggy gimmick. And, to be fair, it wasn't really my thought, it was something that already existed and I want to adapt it. I recently came upon the term "blog-a-thon". This is apparantly a thing where a blogger or bloggers will blog every hour (or other period of time) for 24 hours straight. They get sponsors just like in other types of a-thons and then they donate the money to a charity.

I don't think the whole sponsoring and charity thing would work for myself or anyone else who wanted to do this, though. That's something more geared toward people who get hundreds of hits on their blogs each day.

Without that though, I still think it would be something interesting. I don't know if I would be willing to do it for 24 hours though. It also would be infinitely more interesting if more people than I were to do it as well, on the same day and at the same times. I realize that this is asking a lot because people have work and things (mysterious things) that they do that may require them to be away from their computers. However, I thought I would throw the idea out there to see what kind of feedback I could get. I also know that not as many people read my blog as read Pat's blog, so maybe I'll cajole him into suggesting the idea on his blog as well.

Even if nobody wants to do it with me, I may do it myself one of these days.

Unfortunately, the ear problems have not gone away. In fact, I had an added bonus of weakness and nausea all day! Yay! I'm feeling better now than I did this morning though, so I think I'll be feeling 100% (heheheheheeeheeehe) by the day after tomorrow, if not tomorrow.

On top of my feeling like crap all day, today Pat had to go to work in the morning, and then he went to a training thing after that, and then he got home and was all tired and took a nap, so this whole day has seemed like a waste.

This Part of the Entry is about Harry Potter

Take that! It's not spoilery though. I was just wondering what it is that makes Harry Potter so damned appealing to so many people. It's got the hero myth thing down, yes, but beyond that? Is it just the perfect combination of likeable characters, good writing style, and all the paraphenilia of magic? Every single time I read a Harry Potter book, I find myself completely unwilling to put the book down and part with that world, even for small breaks. Then, when I am finished I always feel this empty space. I've never read any other series of books that kept me hooked in quite the same way. Or perhaps I have. Who knows with my memory?

So my ear hurts even worse today. I tried eating pizza, drinking Pepsi, and taking a nap in an attempt to cure myself and it even seemed to be working for a short time, but now I am, alas, again in great pain. I'm contemplating going to the doctorb. If I contemplate long enough, that might make the pain go away.

More crap about jobs. (So I can be twinsies with bettie.) I started reading My Ishmael today (and I've got an IshCon ad up there now-- hehehehee) and he mentioned again how one can tell that they are among members of our culture (quote about the word "culture" forthcoming). If the food is under lock and key, you are among members of our culture. Somewhere along the line, somebody decided it would be a good idea to hide the food away from ourselves and then devise a system in which we toil to get it back. Which is a kind of strange idea if you think about it. But we all accept this system as inevitable.

I would say that most people (definitely not all, but most) would not do their job if they were not being paid for it. It's like one of the quotes I put up a while back from Derrick Jensen ~ "Grades, as is true once again for wages in later life, are an implicit acknowledgement that the process of schooling is insufficiently rewarding on its own grounds for people to participate in of their own volition." I would rather have some kind of work where the rewards were internal, rather than just external. Now, external rewards would be a nice addition considering the reality of life is that we do have this strange system in which, to survive, cash is a necessary item.

Side note: It's raining. There is thunder and lightning and clouds and junk. It's beautiful. The girls are running in it. Pat just went out to join them. I'll be back in a minute. ..... Okay, back. I love the smell of rain. However, true to most Las Vegas thunderstorms it stopped minutes after starting. Las Vegas is retarded.

Anyhoo-- here are some things that I thought of to do myself that might generate some small amount of income: writing, making cloth dolls and selling them at farmer's markets and stuff, making other things that I haven't thought of yet and doing the same thing with them, buying used children's clothing at yard sales for very little money and selling them on an internet used clothing store (of my own) or e-bay or in an actual storefront, selling some photography freelance (this would require better equipment than I have), portrait photography in a non-studio setting (same as the other), and I don't know what else. I really like the idea of having more than one method of bringing in money though. Like a bunch of small things as opposed to one great big crappy full-time job. All that stuff is just brainstorming. I don't plan on doing it all. Or all at once, anyway.

Another thing that is unappealing about jobs for me is that you're (or I would be anyway) invariably working for someone else. I mean, all your efforts and toil pretty much go to benefit the people above you and a company. That's what I like about the idea of tribal businesses. The efforts of the people involved benefit the people involved, and indirectly they benefit the company.

This entry is really rambly and doesn't make as much sense as I wanted it to. Must be the ear talking. I forgot to put in the "culture" quote. I'll do it later.

Oh boy. My ear hurts again. Must. Kill. Ear.

Since Pat talked about dreams in his blog, I feel obligated to mention that I dreamed about oslowe. We were junior high school kids and we had just gotten out of school and went to hang out at the local junior high school kid hang out, which was a used music store. The phone rang and all of the employees were absent so oslowe decided to answer the phone and help the person on the other end. Then I looked around and saw that there were all of these espresso/ice cream machine stations against the wall and all the kids were making espresso/ice cream treats for themselves. Then I was trying to find Tom Waits CDs. The end.

It's really very hot. We went out to eat some lunch and stop by the post office and every time I got out of the car, I could actually feel my feet burning. Like, about to burst into flames burning. We have more to do, but we wisely decided to come back home and wait until it gets dark to go outside again. I told the girls they could go out and play and it might be okay in the shade of the tree, but they decided after about 2 minutes out there that it was too hot.

Also, Oregon called me today. It said, "What the hell do you want with us?!" I told it to hold it's pants on and I would let it know later.

Okay, I just spent about two hours rebuilding my template because I failed to take Beth's advice and make a copy of it. I had been having trouble publishing anything and when I went to look at my template, I found that the reason was that my entire template had disappeared. A problem that happened not once, but twice to my dear husband. But did I make a copy of my template? No. Because I suck.

All should be well now. Uh.... I hope. I haven't actually looked yet. I think I got everything back to how it was before.

test

A joke from Harper (I think she made it up especially for Jupe):

Knock, knock
Who's there?
Hair
Hair, who?
What the hell?! We have hair!

Also, I think I am having ear problems again.

I put a set of blog links on the right and re-added all the blogs I had there before, figuring you wouldn't mind being there again. If that's not the case, let me know and I will remove it.

I am feeling quite a lot better and I am finding myself with much to say, but my thoughts are all incoherent and disorganized. I will try my best though and let it take as long as it takes.

Firstly, I want to relate a little tidbit that my half-asleep mind presented me with this morning before I was fully awake. With regards to sex and our culture, these sentences popped into my mind: We're such prudes! When you think about it, there isn't anything as old-fashioned and quaint as sex. But we act as if it were our own invention, and a naughty one at that. It's a little fuzzy about the edges, but for a thought that came to me while I was asleep, I rather like it.

Secondly a list of the books that I have just finished reading: Ishmael ~ Daniel Quinn, The Story of B ~ Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization ~ Daniel Quinn, and A Language Older Than Words ~ Derrick Jensen. I put them here because in reading them I feel that I have been changed. Have you ever come to a point in your life where you felt you were at a crossroads? Like from that point on you would be going in a different direction, following a new path? I'm not sure if it was having read the books alone that did it for me or if I was just "ready". More likely than not, it was a combination of the two. Books are powerful things and I can't deny that these four books have done something important for me. Right now, I'm just trying to figure out what it all means for me personally. What exactly is the direction I'll be going? What exactly does this new path look like?

A Language Older Than Words was the most devastating of the books that I just read. I finished it yesterday. In it, Derrick Jensen gives more examples than I care to think about that illustrate the many ways in which our culture (civilization) is fucked up. And that is part of the problem: "more... than I care to think about". Of course I knew that there were horrible things in the world before I read this book, but I didn't want to think about them. It's a defense mechanism. It keeps us sane. But the more I read in these books, the more I became convinced that these horrible things are symptoms of something larger. And that we are headed for a huge crash. Daniel Quinn likens civilization to a guy who wants to fly who has built a machine and jumped off of a cliff with it. But he has not built his flying machine in accordance with the laws of gravity and even though he is still in the air, he is going to crash soon. In the beginning, he said, "Look at me! I'm flying!" But the closer he comes to the ground, the more it becomes apparant that he needs to pay attention to the fact that it is looming ever closer. But he still insists, "No, see? I'm still in the air. Everything is going fine! I just need to make a few minor adjustments." Civilization is a failed experiment. Sure, it's been around for ten thousand years, but in terms of human history, that's just a blip. You can agree or disagree that cicilization is a failed experiment. I can't put all the information that caused me to believe it here in this blog, the important thing to note here is that I agree with it. And that it changed me.

Like I said, the important thing now is that I figure out what it all means in terms of my life. Daniel Quinn talks in Beyond Civilization about "walking away". He mentions various cultures that walked away from civilization. The one he talks about most often is the Mayan civilization, but he also mentions the Anasazi and some others that I can't remember off the top of my head. They tried totalitarian agriculture, it led to a hierarchical civilized society, and when they discovered they didn't like it, they simply walked away. They could do that because they lacked the meme that says "Stick with this way of life at all costs. There is only one way to live and this is it." We don't lack that meme. That's why even when we have revolutions that originate in the very bottom level of civilization, we never really end up with any different kind of system. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." We operating on the assumption that this is the only way to live. But there's nothing in this world that says we need to stick with this way of life. We know that there are other ways of living because humans lived for millions of years without hurtling themselves toward extinction, and because there still exist today groups of people who live a different way. There's also nothing in this world that says that we need to go back to living in huts and hunting and gathering. There are different ways of living, and if we want to survive we're going to have to figure out what they are.

In a way, we as a family have already made a decision to walk away. From some of it anyway. We've decided against sending our kids to school. There are a million different reasons for this, which I won't go into at the moment. Suffice it to say that as time goes on, I become less and less willing to (grudgingly) accept that compulsory schooling has its merits too. Reading these books has helped strengthen my resolve. If we can manage to leave the wage economy, that will be another way to walk away. Daniel Quinn talks about tribal businesses in Beyond Civilization. Tribal businesses are businesses that support the members of the business. They are generally small and non-hierarchical and they revolve around something that all the people working at them find worthy of doing. This whole idea is one I find very intriguing and I'll be looking into it further.

There are other things that can be done, but unless they are done on a much larger scale than they are done at the present moment, I truly think they aren't very useful in the long run. Things like eating vegan, recycling, being less of a consumer, etc. etc. I'm not saying that these things are not important and I'm not saying that I'm not considering them for myself, I'm just saying that in and of themselves, they are like band-aids applied to gaping wounds. Doing those things are more a way of making a statement for yourself and for the people around you. Important, yes. But they don't change the underlying mythology that we live by.

And that brings me to why I can no longer go along with my own mythology. The one I have been operating on for my whole life: the world is full of horrible things and horrible people, but there are also just as many wonderful, beautiful people and things, and if you are to stay sane and happy, you need to not dwell on the bad. While that may be true, I don't know whether I (or maybe we) have the luxury of ignoring it anymore. I am more and more certain that we are reaching the crashing point of our doomed flight, and I am more and more convinced that if there is to be any kind of change at all (and if we are to survive, there absolutely must), that it will come with a jolt. That it won't be easy. Are all transformations necessarily violent? I don't know. I just can't see us changing without some kind of external or internal ...something. I don't know. Not making myself terribly clear in this particular paragraph.

Well, that's about all I think I can handle in one entry. I'll close up with some quotes from the Derrick Jensen book. These are just a few things that happened to resonate with me, and here is as good a place as any to put them before I return the book to the library.

Grades, as is true once again for wages in later life, are an implicit acknowledgement that the process of schooling is insufficiently rewarding on its own grounds for people to participate in of their own volition.

So long as we keep ourselves busy removing spindles from our kingdom and building dams to block rivers, taking notes in boring classes and counting hours in tedious wrokdays, there is no fear of us becoming wild. Nor, and this is much the same thing, is there any fear of us becoming who we are.

This one is from the same book, but originates with Joseph Campbell.
For those in whom the local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work--or, if working, produce deviant effects--there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for 'meaning.'

In closing, I just wanted to let people know that I am thankful for the responses made to my last entry. I do often feel like I am alienating people when I talk about stuff like this, and unschooling as well. I worry about people taking what I say to be an affront to their way of life (which it is in a way), but in the end, I guess what it comes down to is that this is my blog and I can only be me. There isn't any point in watering down my thoughts to make sure that I don't make anybody mad or sad or irritated. I am truly grateful for the fantastic people I have met (and have not yet met) through this strange medium we call internet and I am glad of your support.

It is my opinion that people will eventually find myself and my husband too depressing to continue to read our blogs.

I went onto the WD and answered a Matt Boq to try to cheer myself up. It only took a few minutes though, and rather than cheering me up, it just distracted me for a short while. Maybe Matt should make a longer boq. Maybe everyone should cater to my needs. It's a good idea. I can't seem to find any flaws in it.

I think I will talk about jobs because I have been meaning to, but haven't been able to find myself able to put into words what I have been thinking about.

The longest I have ever had a real job was one full year. I have had... *takes a few moments to count on her fingers and toes*... 16 jobs in my life. I think. My first job I got when I was 17, so I would say in the 12 years since then I have spent roughly half or more of that time unemployed.

Up until very recently I thought that there was something terribly, terribly wrong with me because of this. I mean, after all, what is life supposed to be about? You go to school, you get a job, you work till you (maybe) can retire, you go to Florida, you die, right? Maybe not so simplified. But people who don't have jobs are burdens on society. They are useless. They are not pulling their weight. Something like that.

But every job I ever had, I hated. Maybe partly because all the jobs I've ever had have been bottom-rung type jobs. Presumably the more power you have in your job, the better life is. But, truthfully, imagining myself in any of the places I worked, but in a higher-up type postion, seemed completely unappealing to me as well. Truthfully, there is not a single "regular" job I can think of that I can imagine myself enjoying.

The last job I had was at a library, shelving books. Most of the other people who had my job were students or semi-retired people. It was totally not demanding, it was totally not stressful, the people were nice, I did what I did better than many of the other people in my bottom-rung position and was told so, I only worked 12 hours a week, and still-- I could not stand being there. Other people have jobs and while they may not feel particularly fulfilled, still they go and they work and they "grin and bear it", or perhaps even find it mildly enjoyable. So what was wrong with me? Why did I have such a hard time doing what other people do as a matter of course?

I still don't know why that is, but I have figured something important out. There isn't anything wrong with me, there's something wrong with us. With our culture. How did we get to the point where we think that selling away our lives (40 to 60 hours a week, plus traffic time, plus recuperating time, plus god knows what else) is living?

For me, I have somewhat of an "out". I can be a stay-at-home mom and that is becoming more and more accetable in this culture (and I'm glad of it). I'm now comfortable with myself being a stay-at-home mom. It has always been fulfilling, but I no longer feel guilty for not bringing in a second income, however small it may be. But, more and more, I am becoming resentful of the fact that Pat has to go out five days a week (sometimes six) to a place he would definitely not go to if he were not being paid. I miss him. The girls miss him. And I'm not saying I need to be around him 24 hours a day, but I would feel so much better about being apart from him if he was doing something that he was enjoying for its own sake.

I just finished reading Unjobbing and I am starting to sort of get an inkling as to how we can live without either one of us having a regular job, but it's definitely not something that's going to happen overnight. I think we (our family) are at the beginning of a new path though, and that's good. It helps with the despair, it does.

It's too hot. It's 113 degrees outside. Normally I only know these things in a purely intellectual way because I try to never go out into the non-air-conditioned world, but today it's starting to feel stuffy and yucky here inside my so-called sanctuary.

Also, I need new glasses and I think that Saren might need glasses soon as well.

Soooooooooooooooo. I haven't felt much like writing lately. The stuff I have been reading lately has been... depressing. I've been feeling vaguely disgruntled and somewhat unattached.

Once the amazon.com books came I took a break and jumped right into Harry Potter 5. I didn't come back up to breathe until I was done with it this afternoon. Unfortunately, now I have to wait another... what? 2 years? 3 years? before I know what happens to Harry Potter next. Hopefully, I will have forgotten everything I just read in a few months time and then I can read it all over again! Hooray for poor literary memory!

We saw Terminator 3 tonight. I found it ...sad.

I don't have a lot to say. The truth is I am still feeling rather unattached. Floaty, but in a heavy way. What the hell does that mean? I'm not sure.

I had a brief respite while I read Harry Potter and had a good date with my husband, but now ...

I don't know. Can't express it.

Guess who was playing at yesterday's 4th of July celebration? Go on. Guess.

It was MC Hammer! Heeeeeeeeeee.

No, really. You thought he was gone for good, but no. He's far too legit to quit.

Photo Friday ~ Solitude

I just finished re-reading the 4th Harry Potter book. And because of the stinking (I mean great!) holiday, I won't get the new one until Saturday. Or possibly Monday! I have such a horrible horrible memory for books that very many things at the end of Goblet of Fire came as a surprise to me even though I had read it before. If the new one doesn't get here by Monday, I may have to read it again just to refresh my memory. Yeep! I can't wait!

I am awfully tired. I think I ought to change my unky to reflect that.

Photo Friday ~ Angles

Next time, I'm going to do this in a more timely manner, I swear.

The Harper's Birthday Extravaganza Entry

After spending what seems like hours uploading pictures to yahoo picture albums, I don't really feel like talking about it much. A picture says several words or something.

Link!

And I am going to put before and after pics of the girls' hair on the 2 Girls blog, link to the right.

I killed my baby's hair.

Aaauuuuggghhhh. [/Charlie Brown] I cut Saren's bangs a couple of days ago with perfectly acceptable results. Since Harper's were looking rather shaggy as well, I decided to cut hers tonight before her birthday. Then I thought I might just trim her hair a bit because it has this wild part-curly/part-straight different layered thing going on. I thought I might be able to even it out a little bit. But let me tell you right now, a squirmy almost 3 year old, crazy hair, and a little trim just do not mix. I kept having to cut more and more because of unevenness. Now she has a pixie cut. And it's still not all that even. And all the baby curls are gone. I feel more intensely sad about this bit of lost hair than I ever have about other little milestones she's crossed. And God knows what Jupe's going to do to me. Especially when she finds out IplanoncuttingtheP@frotonightaswell.

I will post pictures later, but my state of mourning is far too deep to do so now.

I locked the freaking keys in the car. If I have to do anything out of the ordinary I run the risk of locking the keys in the car. This time I decided to put a gift for Saren into a gift bag before we went inside so she wouldn't see it. Naturally, I set the keys on the passenger seat before I started and naturally, I completely forgot I had done so until I went to the front door and found I didn't have the keys to open it. Luckily, Pat and Saren were there so we didn't end up locked out of the house as well.

Both Pat and I attempted to jimmy the lock with a wire coat hanger for quite some time. I gave up and called a locksmith to see how much it would cost if they came out to unlock it. ($35.00 by the way) I didn't have them come out though. I searched the web for information about how to jimmy a car door and found much nefarious information, but not what I was looking for, which was an illustration of the inside of a car door. After about 45 minutes of toil, Pat finally managed to open the passenger side door and he freed the erstwhile keys.

Woo-hoo! Pat's the man. The sexy, sexy man.

Saren is playing a CD that I think she got with a doll a long time ago. It is driving me crazy.

I spent some time today looking at Eugene apartments on Homesource.com. There were trees in all the pictures! Trees! Don't get me wrong, there are trees here. It's just that they are not supposed to be here. So there's usually not very many and they all look pretty embarrassed about it.

I bought some flowers at the grocery store today. About twenty minutes after I had put them in the vase, Saren had broken the top off of one of them. And there were only three to begin with. They are those really pretty daisies; one a deep red, one orangey, and one yellow. Saren broke the yellow one. Poor lowly yellow.

Oh good god, will somebody please shoot my CD player?!?