Follow-through follow-up

Just a brief post to follow up on yesterday's post about unfinished projects and my chronic lack of follow-through.

The Rubbermaid filing boxes are no longer in my office. It was not the two minute job I had imagined, because of course the garage stuff has been breeding again. I think the Christmas ornaments have been getting it on with the old Burning Man costumes, but whoever has been going at it, the stuff has expanded to fill the space that used to house the Rubbermaid filing boxes.

So you'll never guess what I did.

In my garage, there is a certain shelf. A high shelf, requiring not just a step-stool, but an actual ladder. As if that is not bad enough, the shelf can only be reached if I back my beloved minivan out of the garage, and then close the garage door. This is the shelf where things go to die. On that shelf, placed there when we moved into this house 6 years ago and not touched since, were two boxes. Two boxes labeled (I wish I were kidding about this): "Blankets/comforters to be cleaned."

Two big boxes of blankets... with cat puke or yard sale dirt or beach sand or some other substance on them that required laundering. For 6 years. Sigh.

But sigh no more! Because those boxes are now in the middle of my garage, and I brought the first batch down to the laundry room for washing. No, I didn't wash them yet, because of course the load of towels that is currently in the washing machine has been there for 2 days and has acquired the stink, so those are being washed again. But the first batch of blankets is next!

The blanket boxes freed up plenty of space for the filing bins, and then some. Score one for Unfinished Project Fridays!

Screen time limiting biz-nitches can bite me

Every time I hear a mom say the words “screen time,” part of me rolls my eyes, and another part of me cringes in shame. Oh no, I think to myself, how virtuous of a screen time limit do they have in their house? 2 hours? An hour?! And then I think, please don’t let them ask me please don’t let them ask me please don’t let them ask me.

Because the answer is, a lot. Some days, none at all. Some days, hours. It’s seasonal of course. Just like my red wine intake, it creeps up as temperatures drop and tapers when the sunshine beckons. But even on nice days, we often have a good amount of screen time. [Note: for those of you who are thinking, “What the hell is ‘screen time?’” the answer is that it is an annoying phrase meaning the combined amount of time a kid is in front of a screen of any kind—TV, video game, computer, Leapster, etc.]

But here’s what I have to say about it. Screen time is awesome. Yesterday afternoon, we were out front weeding the garden. Well, I was weeding. They were alternating between squirting each other with the hose and using my spare trowels to redistribute the dirt and mulch in the garden. My daughter suddenly calls out in delight, “Mommy, look, it’s a dragonfly!” I look up, thinking, what are the odds? But yes, it was a dragonfly, or at least looked like one to my entomologically inexpert eye. You know where she learned that? That’s right. TV. And that diminutive frenemy to all moms, Dora, has taught my kids more words in Spanish than I even know. Dora’s slightly less annoying cousin has them correcting me when I imprecisely call something a parrot. “Mommy, that’s a macaw.” And even the less educational Bubble Guppies have something to teach my kids. Thanks to that show, they learned to hit the crash cymbal at the end of a run of drumming, and then say, “I totally rock!” I mean, come on. That’s awesome. It never would have occurred to me to teach them that.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m good with putting some logical limits on TV-watching. At this point, after being played in our house for the 3,267th time, Cars the movie no longer has any redeeming educational value. But let’s say we’ve turned off the TV, are my kids really not allowed to go screw around on the computer? They’re not even four, and they’re more comfortable with a mouse in their hands than a crayon. They can type their names, play games on Nick Jr.’s website, and independently navigate YouTube. (Side note: It’s incredible how quickly one can navigate from funny and cute Mario Brothers videos to violent or disturbingly sexual Mario Brothers videos with lots of swearing. Do not let your children independently navigate YouTube. Just a little piece of advice from me to you.) Anyway, my point is that in the world they will live in, they will need these skills. Well, probably not the mouse, but they are both also shockingly adept at working my Droid phone. They took to the scroll and zoom gestures much faster than I did. They could probably kick my butt at Angry Birds if I let them play it, which I don’t. Not because of screen time, but because I don’t want to be constantly looking for my phone in the cracks of the sectional.

My kids get plenty of exercise. We go outside whenever we can, even in the snow when it totally sucks and it takes an hour to get them ready for 30 minutes outside. When it’s rainy for a few days, we’ll put on music and dance ourselves silly in the living room, or put on boots and raincoats and go stomp in puddles. Or sometimes they’ll just start running around and around in circles for no reason. It’s all good. And we get plenty of parent-kid time—gardening, playing soccer outside, making music, doing art, or even snuggling in front of the awful horrible TV. I agree that kids shouldn’t spend their entire day glued to the TV, computer, and Wii. But if those activities are interspersed with independent quiet play, some physical activity, and lots of good family time, I think it’s OK, and maybe even more than OK. I know that my kids, since giving up their naps, need some down-time in the afternoon. They need to lie on the couch and veg out. Mommy needs some down-time too, to fold laundry or start dinner or write a blog about how TV is awesome. And it is. TV is awesome.

Unfinished project Thursdays

I have a little problem. It’s the kind of thing that I should mention when a potential employer asks for my biggest weakness. Instead of pathetically trying to frame one of my strengths as a weakness, I should say this: I apparently have a complete and utter lack of follow-through. Yup.

Here are some of the projects that are currently hanging out waiting to be finished:

Nakashima-inspired table for the foyer. I have the design in my head. I have the walnut plywood. I have the big beautiful slab of natural-edge walnut for the top. I have removed the bark, filled the big knot in the wood, and sanded it to a fairly smooth but not-quite-smooth-enough finish. This has all been leaning up against a cabinet in the garage for more than a year.

Pillows for the living room. I have the pillow forms. I have the fabric. They have been sitting on the chair in my master bathroom for about 9 months.

Putting together John’s new-to-us desk. It’s in place, but not screwed together. It has been that way for about 6 months. Bonus though, because now we decided his new office will be in a different room, so we would have had to take it apart again anyway. Sometimes procrastination works in your favor. This is a bad lesson to learn.

The great shredding and filing project of 2010. Last year, I went through John’s filing cabinet and Rubbermaid filing bins and touched every single piece of paper in them. There was stuff from the 70’s. I found his ex-wife’s dissertation. I found dry cleaning receipts from the 1980’s that he has been carting around for three decades. Almost everything from 2003 and earlier was recycled or shredded. It was exhilarating. Nothing feels as good as shredding stuff and getting it out of your life forever. I made new file folders. I filed everything—new stuff in the filing cabinet, old stuff in the file boxes. And then haven’t filed a single piece of paper since. I also have not yet put the file boxes back in the garage. They have been living in the office, serving as a horizontal surface to pile crap on for probably about 6 months.

Kiddos’ bedding. I have the fabric and the measurements. I already made their duvets and pillowcases. I just need to make the bedskirts. The bedskirt fabric has been sitting on top of my jewelry armoire for about a year. I hope they don’t outgrow their toddler beds before I get around to it, because I was really hoping to get a great photo of their two fabulous coordinating beds when I finished.

My novel. Words written so far: 65,000. Words written in the past few months: 0.

This is not my to-do list I’m giving you. This is the list of things that are indefinitely stalled. The Nakashima table project originally stalled because winter hit (no, not this past winter, the winter before) and it got too cold to work on it outside. But it’s warm now. So any day... I’ll be out there sanding and cutting and ordering the mid-century turned wood legs... any day now...

Here’s the thing. I have loads of energy at the start of something new. Like *cough* this blog. It’s new, and shiny, and distracting. It’s a project. I love projects. I have been feeling the need for a new project, and this blog is less expensive than the runner up, which was guitar lessons. (No, I do not currently own a guitar.) But come on, wouldn’t it be cool to play the guitar? And wouldn’t that guest room look so much better with a headboard? And wouldn’t it be amazing to write a novel and get it published? And won’t that Nakashima table look fabulous in my foyer? And wouldn’t it be so f-ing cool if this blog eventually monetized or I got some awesome paid writing gig from it? Yeah, that stuff would all be super badass. You know what ingredient is missing from all of those plans? Follow-through.

I think I need to institute ”unfinished project Thursdays” or something. Once a week, I pick a project. ANY project. And make progress on it. Even a small amount. I remember at one point, my dissertation was a stalled project. One of my office-mates put up a sign in our office. It said, “What have you done TODAY to finish your dissertation?” Apparently I was not the only grad student capable of filling their entire day with e-mail, supervising research assistants, teaching, administrative minutiae, and screwing around on the internet. I have a PhD because of that sign. I wish I remembered which officemate put it up (Hey Saskia and Mikkel, if you’re reading this, please take credit if it was you. I owe you one slightly tarnished PhD. Luckily, you both already have one so you don’t need mine, because I don’t think they’re transferable.) Every day, because of that sign and its mercilessly mocking, I would spend 10 minutes doing one data analysis, or spend 30 minutes writing one paragraph. And then I would stop and go back to teaching undergrads or supervising Master’s students or going to symposium talks or screwing around on the internet. Because I could tell the sign, “Shut the hell up, you inanimate disposable object with the uncanny ability to fill me with self-loathing. I totally re-did that ANOVA with socio-economic status as a covariate. I can play minesweeper now if I want.” Now instead of minesweeper, it’s laundry. And instead of supervising students, it’s supervising three-year-olds. And instead of every day, it will just be one day a week. But things will eventually get finished if I do at least a little bit of work on them once a week.

Not Thursdays though, because that is preschool in the morning and ballet in the afternoon. Maybe Fridays. Tomorrow. Tomorrow is always a good day to start a new follow-through plan. Definitely tomorrow.

I'll show you mine...

So, it has been two-and-a-half weeks since I cleaned the house for that dinner party. The cleaning service hasn’t been here in over 5 weeks. And while it is lovely to be saving that money, here’s what happens when I know that I will never again have to straighten up the house so that someone else can clean it. It degenerates rapidly, shockingly rapidly, into its natural state of complete chaos and filth. Don’t believe me? I took pictures.

In my defense, I have been sick, and so have the kids (including the man-sized-kid). Also, nearly a month ago I started this blog thingie, and it has slightly cut into my prime 11pm-1am house cleaning time. Oh, and that whole exercise addiction is kind of messing with my crap-picking-up mojo. But yeah, there’s no excuse for what you are about to see.

We'll start small. Here is the "to be filed" pile... stacked up on an old cat bed... and reflected in the mirror my kids like to use to make out with their own reflections. Nice.



Here is my dresser. It houses a lovely glass-top humidor for my cigars, a beautifully carved box for my Tarot cards, an engagement photo and a photo of some amazing women in my life... ALL TOPPED WITH MASSIVE PILES OF CRAP!



This next one is not exactly my fault. Except inasmuch as it's my house, so everything is my fault. We asked the cleaning service not to clean our desks in the office, because they were moving our very important and organized papers and whatnot. (More on that in a moment). They took that to mean not to clean anything at desk level and above. So now we have cobwebs festooning the top half of the room.



And, um, speaking of our desks. This one might be the most embarrassing of all, because truthfully, this is not temporary. My desk actually always looks like this. I am generally a neat person, but... yeah... no... this is my work process. Wait, I can't post this picture. OK, I'm posting it. This is where the magic happens, my friends. This is where the words are born. This is what I'm looking at right now.



Apparently this clutter problem is genetic. Here is the kiddos' bathtub. I have a couple of plastic frog thingamahoozits on the wall for storing their bath toys. They prefer them like this.



Speaking of my twin chaos-monsters, I bought a lovely Ikea wall unit with lots of bins, and made (with my own two hands) three benches with storage baskets underneath to neatly contain all of their toys in a civilized fashion. Yeah, again, they apparently prefer the playroom to look like this. (P.S. The snake, while realistic, is not real.)



Finally, my friends, I will leave you with a view under my sofa table. This sofa table is the first thing you see upon walking into my house. It is from one of my favorite furniture stores, Room and Board, and is a token example of real furniture (that is to say, the back is made of actual wood, not cardboard - whoa). When the sun comes in through our full-lite double front doors in the late afternoon, it perfectly illuminates... the utterly disgusting dust and filth underneath this sofa table. Et voila.



So everyone... all of you wonderful people who have only seen my house in relative neat mode... I mean, yeah, sometimes I still apologize for the mess, but I let you come over, so you know I at least wiped the cat hair tumbleweeds out of the corners and made sure you could actually cut a path to the bathroom... next time I tell you I can't host playgroup because my house is a disaster area, now maybe you'll believe me. Everyone else, the few of you who have seen my house looking like this, all I can say is that I must really love you.

Hippies are a bummer

Not 1960’s hippies. I mean modern-day hippies. I guess you could call them progressives. They would probably call themselves “conscious humans” or something like that. People for whom organic is good, local organic is better, and really you should just be growing your own produce in your back yard. You know, hippies.

There was this guy in my college dorm freshman year. At our end-of-year dorm awards, he won by virtue of a write-in category. He was dubbed “most self-righteous.” I’ve actually mentioned him in a blog before, years ago (on myspace—that’s how many years ago we’re talking about… whoa, 2006, I just went back and checked). Anyway, Mr. Brett Hall Self-Righteous 1991-1992 was a proselytizing vegan, and used Dr. Bronner’s soap in the shower, when he showered at all, which was not very frequently because of water conservation. He didn’t use deodorant either. He was pretty much a skinny smelly bummer. I wasn’t a hippie yet at that point. I recycled and stuff, and I listened to The Smiths “Meat is Murder” CD, but it hadn’t really occurred to me yet that maybe meat was murder. Because mmmmm… bacon… yummy.

During my 10-year stint in the San Francisco area, I had a brief tango with vegetarianism and a much longer period as a non-mammal-eater (that was ultimately doomed from the start because mmmmm… bacon… yummy). I was never really a hippie by San Francisco standards, but by the standards back east, I definitely qualified. I picked up all sorts of fantastic politically correct affectations, like saying “go forward” when giving directions at an intersection rather than “go straight.” I gave up use of the word “lame” because it might be offensive to those with physical mobility handicaps. I learned a few different systems of invented gender-neutral pronouns (sie, hir, etc.), and learned how to gracefully and without embarrassment ask someone what gender pronoun they preferred when it was not immediately obvious. I knew which fish species were absolute no-nos because of overfishing, and I remember when the grape boycott ended. Grape boycotts are sort of the epitome of bummer, although that Target boycott last year was even worse.

It’s been six years or so now living on the east coast, and a lot of my hippie ways have survived. I think about my footprint, and try to reduce and re-use where possible. I use canvas grocery bags. I carpool when I can. When I talk to my kids about love and marriage, I always leave same-sex relationships in the mix as an option. I compost. I try to buy local. I care about fair trade.

But even though I still sort of self-identify as a hippie, they’re just really a bummer sometimes. Like when you just saw Avatar in 3D and you were totally swept up in the shiny pretty movie magic, and then some hippie starts talking about the “white savior” thing and how the movie was racist. And you’re like CRAP! Because of course they’re right, and now you can’t not see it. And like when you’re feeling all patriotic and caught in a groundswell, and then people start talking about how we’re celebrating violence and death, and more than ten of your hippie friends on facebook have posted that “Hate cannot drive out hate” MLK quote. Sigh. Bummer!

What is really a bummer is that they are totally right. The hippies are always right. God, it’s so annoying. I know, hippies. I know I should eat kale. It’s, like, sooooo good for you. But kale chips DO NOT taste like potato chips. They taste like crunchy kale. And tofu is just not as delicious as a bacon cheeseburger on a white flour non-whole-grain bun. And I’m sorry, hippies. I have tried. But I can’t stop drinking Diet Coke.

I love you, hippies. Because of you, I can get veggie burgers and fair trade chocolate and organic foods in all of the grocery stores near me. Because of you, wonderful hippies, even the generic cheap store brand milk doesn’t have weird hormones in it anymore, and reusable water bottles can be conveniently picked up at every single store in America from Old Navy to Toys R Us. Thank you, hippies. You are awesome. Keep doing what you’re doing. But please understand if, once in a while, I would love it if you would all just pipe down.

Patriotism. Whoa.

I don’t spend a lot of time waving American flags. I don’t dress in red, white, and blue on the 4th of July. I just take it as a day off and a good excuse to eat hot dogs, drink beer, and hang with my family. Country songs about military service sort of creep me out, because the people singing them usually didn’t serve in the military, so it just seems disingenuous and icky and kind of like they’re trying to make a buck off of someone else’s sacrifice. There are things about this country of ours that I love. There are things about this country of ours that I hate. I am a lefty kook who completely believes that protesting bad government decisions and policies is part of what makes this country a great one.

Last night, I felt a swell of patriotism and pride that was unexpected and amazing. When our elected leader—the man we as a country chose to put in power—stood up and made a distinction between a war on Al Qaeda and a war on Islam, I actually got teary-eyed. Cynical non-flag-waving me... I cried watching our president speak. Because he spoke for me, and this country elected him, and I truly never thought I would have a president who spoke for me like that. He made me cry with the words of the pledge of allegiance, for crying out loud. How is that even possible?

A mass-murdering terrorist is dead, and I’m glad. Our president announced it without a hint of cowboy machismo, while radiating patriotism and pride in this country from every fiber of his being. He announced a successful military operation that has been a long time coming, while simultaneously planting seeds of peace. I am beyond words, and I am never beyond words.

I am overwhelmed with unfamiliar emotion. If I had a little flag, I would totally wave it.

Like me, like me, please like me

I have been thrilled with the response to this blog so far. I didn’t know what to expect, but I have gotten heartfelt messages from a bunch of you saying that you relate to the things I am putting out there. I hope that by talking about stuff that is not always easy to talk about, we can all feel less alone and be more real with each other. I originally started the blog because of popular demand in response to my “funny catastrophe” posts on facebook, but it seems that the serious topics are the ones that are connecting in this medium. That’s fine with me, because the pressure to be funny on cue is incredibly difficult. I honestly don’t know how comedians do it. But I can be real on cue.

So now that I have spent a few weeks figuring out what I want to say, it’s time for me to start growing this blog to reach people who don’t already know and love me. So I made a facebook page for it. That way, if one of you posts a link to the blog on your facebook wall, friends who like it can also follow me on facebook. To those of you who have already posted links, I say thank you thank you thank you. You are inspiring me to move forward and make this blog more than just a place for me to get my writing ya-yas.

The process of creating the facebook page involved asking all of my friends to please “like me.” So yeah, that’s fun. As of this writing, 29 people like me. Of note, my husband does not yet like me. Neither do my brothers. Maybe if my husband believed that I didn’t move the new thermostat in my fit of cleaning for company, he would like me. But he does think I moved it, even though I TOTALLY DIDN’T. And even if I did, which I didn’t, it didn’t belong on the top of the entertainment center in the first place. Aaaanyway, asking people to like me is pretty much an action designed to make me as insane as possible. Self-promotion is already at odds with my natural tendency to self-deprecate, and then putting it in terms of “like” rather than a less loaded word like “follow” triggers all of my social weirdness.

Most people who have only known me for a few years are surprised to learn that I was super shy when I was younger, and that I still have a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of social anxiety. Among the other crap I learned in grad school, wire mothers and whatnot, I also learned how to fake social ease. I learned to schmooze and network and speak in public. But I still hate all of those things. I want to hide in the corner with the 3 people I already know and talk about easy things and be completely myself.

So now my challenge with this blog is to come out of that corner and be completely myself with everyone else. To be open and exposed in public, not knowing whether anyone will like it. Whether anyone will like ME. Here’s hoping I can at least get my husband on board.


P.S. If you haven’t already, please like me on facebook. Here ya go. Click “like” right here.