Pretti Good Trouble

"How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all."

— W.G. Sebald

More rain, same as before

It's a good day. 

The rain has come, and my head feels all muzzy, but the wind has stopped howling in its efforts to tear the bricks off the building, and the temperature is no longer trying to freeze us all in place.

School is good, and work is a circus like normal.

I have tea and marmalade toast and all is well.

<3

Pardon our French

As a rule, if you have to use French words for something, I don’t like it. —- Alfred T. Pennyworth

Error Message Overlords

I am anxious about the state of the thesis; the truth is that I haven't had the presence of mind to craft it as a whole. Like me, the writing has been a kaleidoscopic undulation, a tumble of fractured pieces through darkness and light. The thesis requires a minimum of 80 pages, and as of today, I have a month to put any sort of finality into the final rough draft.

I haven't transcribed anything from the notebooks in over a year.

I have no idea what goes where.
Every time I think about writing more or assembling what I have, I feel like a Slinky tossed down the stairs.

The world spins away from me into that moment of indecision, a shutter-snap sliver of time when I can't decide if I'm going to have a panic attack or be buried by claustrophobia.

When the claustrophobia attacks first started to join the panic party back in August, I felt defeated, as though my schoolyard-brawl partner hired a street-thug to join the fight. But I've learned to make use of this indecision point; it's an escape hatch if I can reach through the fear. This usually looks like me standing up and walking, even if just a few steps. Frequently I end up removing a jacket or a sweatshirt in the process, though I never remember taking off my clothes. Today it looks like walking into the bathroom and dropping the stopper into the tub drain, turning on the taps. A pregnant dollop of lavender soap swan-dives into the steam. Bubbles sketch an arc toward the shallow end. 

I  wade through the emotional mess that keeps me from looking at the writing situation, scoping out the extent of how deeply in toxic waste I am, how far I am from where I need to be, measuring the spread of the disaster zone. I open the cloud drive on my phone and select the files, memoir pieces that have made it to digital to date.

I've turned into some sober, female, wifeless version of Trumbo, legs stretched out in the enameled cast iron as I let the jumble in my mind settle. Bubbles help. Confession: I have written most of my thesis on my phone. Being able to create, edit, send, and print files from my phone while in the tub is proof that God loves me and wants me to be happy.

 I select files to send to the printer and began breathing as the pages spit out in the other room, each one taking me a single step closer to the goal post. It matters less that you were first or eighty-first in this marathon; it matters that you crossed the finish line. The printer hums and I set the phone aside, laying my care and fear down with it, just for now. The water is my favorite temperature, almost too hot to bear.

I close my eyes and hope that I have at least 65 pages waiting for me.

The printer sends an error to my phone, annoying me from my reverie. I don't bother to read it. I pull the stopper from the drain and dry off, figuring that there is a jam in the feed, the bane of all printing jobs, an irritation so common in the twentieth-century office-life as to be cliche. I start the kettle as I dry off. My hair smells of lavender as I squeeze water from the damp ends into the towel.

The battery of green lights at the printer confuses me -- nothing indicates at first glance where the jam might be. I pick up my phone to read. "Reload Letter Paper." On autopilot, I walk tot he filing cabinet to comply with my commands from the Error Message Overlord, towel wrapped around me and feet still plumply damp on the hallway carpet. (Remember back when we used to tell computers what to do? That was a neat time.) The file cabinet drawer closes with a click-thump that will always sound satisfying and I carry the new paper toward the printer.

Then the meaning of the message hit me: the printer ran out of paper.

 I had a hundred sheets or more in the tray. The pages are double-sided.

I have at least 200 pages already written.

My smile spreads across my face and into my hands as I fill the printer tray. The last of the water drains from the tub, the gurgle in the pipes a frolic of bass notes to join my laughter in the empty apartment. My fears are ridiculous.

Everything's going to be fine.

Knitting things, now with pets.

Ursula K. LeGuin

Marian Wood Kolisch/ursulakleguin.com

What?

I just heard that Ursula K. LeGuin died.

Wow.

More than any other single writer or sole voice, she has been my guide through in so many ways, beginning with coming to Taoism through her interpretation of the Tao Te Ching and continuing through her latest work, No Time to Spare. I first read her work in my early adulthood, finding her through the Earthsea ​​​​​​​trilogy, as so many did. In my case I came to it after looking for a grown up version of A Wrinkle in Time. By the time I got to her essays and the Tao, she had become a meaningful presence in the navigation of my daily world. She enriched me and her words enabled me to live a life of increased meaning, deepening my understanding of the Spirit and my Self. The lessons she revealed in print have allowed me a place from which to view myself as whole, and from there to be able to navigate the broken path that I walk each day.

Fare the well, my dear. You will be deeply and powerfully missed.

recent events

The boys seem to have been out of school the past two weeks more than they have been in it. Between dental appointments and weather closings, this has been the strangest back-to-school month I think I have ever seen. On the positive side, we love our new family dentists. Dr. Mills specializes in children's dentistry, and the boys can't say enough wonderful things about her and her staff. Given that they used to lose sleep before seeing a dentist before meeting Dr. Mills, I think this is simply marvelous. Yesterday school started at the scheduled time for the first time all week. Of course, we ended up needing to take Ethan to have his hand x-rayed just to verify that Tuesday's fall wasn't any more serious than soft-tissue damage. Ethan and David went to an immediate care clinic in Salem together, and made the best of it, enjoying a late lunch at Five Guys before trucking back up the mountain to school. For his part, Ethan was a real trooper through the whole thing. David rescheduled his own appointment and does indeed have a serious sinus infection that has decided to make itself known in his lungs as well. He felt horrible this morning, and I'm keeping my ear out for pneumonia, which aside from being A Really Scary Thing to me, is also pretty serious. Between school weirdness, weather, dental and doctor appointments, David and I do somehow manage to show up to our jobs on occasion, mostly through tag team efforts¹. My job is going quite well, and I’m enjoying adding additional products to my testing responsibilities. I’ve just been ‘officially’ given my second piece of software to manage and I’m enjoying figuring out how it all fits together. It has a quite intricate interface, with multiple drop-in components, each with their own configuration, so I certainly haven’t any lack of intellectual work in front of me. And, as always with software, there is a release deadline sitting right on top of another build, so the pace isn’t anything to sneeze at, either. David has likewise seen his lab get into some serious R&D stuff, so the schedule there is tight and demanding and weird as only a biological lab would be. On this upside, they are doing some cool development stuff, and chatting about work is far from the typical ‘how was your day’ fare. We are also enjoying our time at home, weirdly scheduled though it might be. This past weekend we took yet another trip to Floyd, this time with the boys, and visited School House fabrics (which the boys tolerated), the general store (which the boys loved) and a custom woodworker’s storefront. We had dinner at the Mexican restaurant and ended up poking around in the clothes store, where I picked up a new pair of pants and a sweater than I just fell in love with. We ended up designing ever-so-many things, and it was a nice outing, all told. Sunday we had plans aplenty from which to choose: we ended up scrapping them all, staying inside and making a carrot cake. How yummy and cozy was that? The boys are looking forward to more snow, as the recent acquisition of snow-discs had them howling with glee on Thursday and Friday as they turned the driveway into a slalom course. David took the tractor and scraped the snow into banks around trees and at the end of the driveway, and I swear they would have stayed out until hypothermia set in if we hadn’t tempted them back with warm food and hot chocolate. At home we are watching netflix and library selections, with a few randomly selected episodes of Firefly just for fun. David and I watched Babel (not so great: quite dislocated and dislocating, perhaps by design) and The Devil Wears Prada (wonderful and funny). From the library the whole family watched Holes (outrageously funny and cute), The River Wild (a touching and exciting tale) and The Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys (serious and thought-provoking, despite the humor; an entry on the Must See List). Those are all on their way back, and I'm looking forward to our next installment this weekend. 1. More than ever, this month I feel as though we are the Wonder Twins, assessing the latest split-second development, declaring "Form of. . a taxi!”" and dashing out the door in our various directions.