Those little wow moments

I think I had a revelation this morning.

The last few months, heck maybe even the last year, have been full of excitement and challenges. These events leave me minimal time for anything. I've forgotten my hobbies. I have no idea how to do anything fun. I also have lost the art of deeper introspection.

Now that I have graduated, I still have excitement and changes, but my daughter is home from school for summer vacation so this forces me to slow down and do the housework I've neglected for eons. This also gives me time to think.

Today's nugget:
My husband and I have discussed for about 9 months now the possibility of me returning to full-time professional work. The ends haven't met in a long time, and the finances have reached the point now where the car payment comes out of the grocery budget every month. Or, shall I say, the car payment consumes the whole grocery budget. Earning this new degree was to facilitate potential career change and give me a chance to recover from life as it used to be.

That's simply put.

My daughter is older now. She was four when I returned to school. I needed a flexible work schedule when she was home, in half-day kindergarten and in the early days of her academic career.

I spent four years as a college student, while serving on boards and working part-time. I thought, when my daughter was young, that I would use that time to promote my writing to publishers, editors and agents. But I didn't. I did earn a bachelor's degree. Why did I spend so much time on a bachelor's degree? If I spent the same amount of effort on promoting myself, I probably would have built some sort of fledgling career by now.

Do I not want it? And the answer is...

I don't know. My behavior suggests that I have no interest in a career as a creative writer. I think that's because I don't like the uncertainty. I have spent too much time being poor. I don't like the life of a freelancer, especially tracking everything for my taxes. I don't like not knowing how much money will come in or when it will arrive.

Writing has always given me solace and comfort. Maybe by trying to sell it, I'm sacrificing the element of my writing that provided me with escape and comfort and replacing it with the stress of using something I love with so very much of my soul as the means of my survival. That's ALWAYS why I resist the life of being a writer first.

Part of me also needs to be more than a writer. What makes writing so fun and interesting to me is that I can use what I learn and share it with other people. I can learn about haute couture or dance moves or even political circumstances and pull other people into that universe.

I want a master's degree some day and I know I could get into several MFA programs without an issue, but I resist. Instead I dream of a master's in international journalism, or international development, or foreign service... But then when I contemplate my Ph.D. I dream of history and Johns Hopkins because of my interest in post colonial Algeria-France relations.

And the MFA is on the list. It's just not the top of the list. Weird for a writer, isn't it?

Right now, I want to feed the family. I want to grow as a person. I want to do good. I want to help make a better world.

Fiction will remain my stress relief.

I need to see what I can do in this world, before I can help my fictional people make their mark.

Change is hard

Let's face it. Change is hard. I have challenged myself to write more, blog more, and eat better and I'm pretty hit or miss on all of them. Two weeks ago I had my thesis defense. It went well. Despite a rapid start. The nerves kicked in and I covered the first half of the presentation really quickly. The final is handed in to the appropriate people. I hope the paperwork is, too.

I've been working a lot of hours at Target, fulfilling my volunteer commitments and making no headway in finding a job or cleaning the house.

Then I got an email that an NGO in Washington DC wanted to interview me for a communications director position. And less than 48 hours after that interview, they requested a second one. That one is scheduled for the 28th. Road trip!

I am exhausted from everything I have had going on. Graduation is a week away. My birthday is Monday. Now a road trip?

I'm excited and trembling, so coupling this with the exhaustion makes me want to flop in bed and twitch.

Truth be told, I'm TERRIFIED of getting a job almost as much as I am terrified to continue in my current lifestyle. Getting a job means returning to a 40-hour work week. Returning to my status of primary wage earner. Sacrificing my freedom. Work stress. Suits. Potentially moving. But there... there is a BIG word...

Moving.

This could move me forward and I don't mean leaving this house for another one. I have loved these last few years. But my daughter is getting bigger and doesn't need me as much anymore. Not as much as I need her. So, I have earned this new degree and now it's time to build the me that goes with it. But holy cow!

Rebuilding me?!?!?

This is hard stuff.

Defense of my undergraduate thesis tomorrow

My goal has been to practice my honors thesis presentation once a day for the last week. I have not hit that mark. I have missed two days. Today I'm supposed to practice it twice, since tomorrow is *the big day.* I practiced it one and a half times and recorded it via Keynote and exported it as a QuickTime iPod movie.

I also exported it as a small web movie, but the file size ended up being 500 MB vs. the 25 MB of this one. 

I only listened to the first eight minutes or so before I got distracted by the idea of how could I upload this to friends far away. It's about 32 minutes long, which means if I STICK TO WHAT'S ON THE ACTUAL SLIDE versus going off script at will, I should nail the intended time frame.

My adviser has asked for 20-30 minutes. I have broken it down into five minutes on each of my chapters, plus a few minutes to explain the introduction and the nature of the project.

It gleams

The third in a challenge to post the first draft of my writing... blog entries on everyday items.

IT GLEAMS

My house is a cluttered disaster. With a child, a husband, three cats and a tortoise, it seems like it's impossible to keep stuff in its place. Last week, I spent two hours scrubbing our small downstairs bathroom. (And I only vacuumed the floor, didn't wash it.)

Today I thought I'd clean our main bathroom. My daughter is home from school so I encouraged her to help. She did the toilet and the sink. I did the tub and the tile. Neither was a small task. I rarely use chemicals to clean, relying instead on high percentage isopropyl alcohol, baking soda, and white vinegar. Child got some rags and headed to work on the toilet, while I embarked on my annual adventure with soap scum remover. My grout had some moldy spots, those little dark green, almost black polka dots between the 1950s pink tile.

My daughter wielded the toilet bowl brush like her trusty sword and plunged the bristles into the water and the baking soda. Then she poured the white vinegar in, giggling at the sizzle and foam. Meanwhile I stood on the side of the tub, surrounded by the bright pink light reflecting off my tile.

Last spring our shower wall failed and we took all these tiles outside, scraped them clean, dried them in the sun and reinstalled them. I think of this every time I am faced with these tiles in such a one-on-one manner.

Once we cleaned these key elements of the bathroom, they had that sparkly look. We put the stray objects away, remnants of how we passed our winter: NyQuil, anti-fungal cream from child's bout with ringworm, extra toothbrushes from the last dental visit and that random tube of lipstick that I'm not even sure who owns it.

Now, I really hate the idea of taking my shower. It'll get the bathroom dirty!

Homage to Erma B

This is the second entry in a blogging challenge where I have decided to write blog entries about the everyday, posting first drafts of my writing for all to see...

HOMAGE TO ERMA B

My mother-in-law thinks I have the potential to be the Erma Bombeck of my age. Comedy does seem to run rampant in my life, like the recent incident where I was asked to pick a roommate for an upcoming conference and given a list of men from whom to chose. Now I realize "Angel" can be a tad ambiguous, but "Renee" is more straightforward... As a newspaper reporter, my potential gender might have been an asset. My "Angel R. Ackerman" byline could have been a man or a woman.

In real life, the situations that arise due to this can be very inconvenient. I once had a medical claim for a gynecological exam rejected by my medical insurance carrier because they insisted I was male. I think, or at least I hope, my doctor would have noticed that during the exam.

I also have pets: an escaping tortoise and three cats, one of which is a 17-pound cat that's afraid of his shadow and another grouchy 13-year-old cat that last week decided to poop on the middle of the bathroom scale.

Since having a daughter, the opportunity for humor has multiplied exponentially. She was 8.5 ounces at birth but grew very slowly throughout her preschool years. She grew steadily, and on a curve that pleased our doctor. She ate like a horse. Despite this, she didn't hit those average weight charts until she turned four. Suddenly, at age 4, she reached average!

At age six, she got a fat letter from the school. It wasn't a full fat letter, it just said my daughter had an increased risk of becoming overweight later in life and that I had to show this letter to the pediatrician. Now my pediatrician is old school. He laughed when I showed him this letter. The nurse took my daughter to the scale and checked her. Apparently, she had grown two inches since the school weighed her. And the weight-- it was exactly the same. So she had gained weight in preparation for a growth spurt, which had increased her BMI.

She was not fat or even at risk of being overweight.

And if you think that's bad, you should hear what happened with the dog bite two weeks ago. But that's another story for another day because it's Easter and my family expects me downstairs any minute...

Challenge of the Ordinary

I'm still working on my honors thesis, getting ready to present at NCUR in a few weeks. Gulp. I'm occasionally working on my werewolf coming-of-age story as a stress relief. I just finished another GLVWG newsletter and I'm still applying for jobs.

Since the winter is slowly transforming into spring, many of my writer friends have found success with their New Year's goals. Fellow GLVWGer Linda Frindt has met her goal of blogging everyday, despite many personal challenges.

So, it makes me feel like a slacker. Even though I have everything in paragraph one going on, plus work, and family.

But I need to spend more time exercising my writer brain, if only as a way to sharpen the senses.

Now, with Easter coming, and my conference, I probably won't meet a goal of posting everyday. I have met my personal challenge of renewing my journaling habit.

I extend this as a next step: post a blog entry everyday, short, but developed, on something ordinary. Bring to it my writer's eye.

Today it's a toss up. My morning tea or my car.

Here's some words on my car, totally off the cuff and unedited. First draft.

BEAUTY THE NISSAN

A few months before my husband and I got married we bought our first new car, a 2000 Saturn SL2. The SL1 didn't have enough pep. The Pontiac Sunfire we drove had red dashboard lights that my husband said looked like staring into the fires of Hell. I don't remember what else we looked at, but the choice clearly came to the Saturn.

It had no fancy features. The SL1 we looked at had every special doo-dad. The SL2 didn't even have power windows. They had similar price tags. We took the SL2 for the bigger engine. $14,500 in August 1999.

We used that car to move (twice). We drove to Boston, to Niagara Falls, to Virginia, to North Carolina. We brought home our baby in that car. We piled our bikes into/onto that car and went for rides.

It blew a head gasket last August. Two weeks shy of having it 13 years. I'd been spending about $2,000 a year on car repairs for several years and had already spent my annual car repair budget when it happened. My husband and I discussed it and there was no way we were spending ANOTHER two thousand on an old car.

We started shopping for a new car, but we only had a day to make up our mind. And we saw the price tags on the new cars, close to 30K for a car we thought was comparable to our Saturn. We knew we couldn't spend that. We went to the used car section. At our budget, the salesman was showing us two-year old Hyundais. I had never been so disappointed.

Then, I saw her. She glistened in the sun, a beautiful dark red (my favorite color). A 2005 Nissan Altima with 24,000 miles. She had leather seats, a sun roof, even a six CD-changer. Using our monthly grocery budget as a guide of what we could afford, we bought her. We charged the $1,000 down payment, knowing my mother-in-law was giving us our Christmas present early.

My daughter named her Beauty. She had named the Saturn "Herbie." Yes, like the Love Bug. Even Herbie has a happy ending. My dad had him fixed and we sold him, making a $800 profit once we reimbursed my dad for repairs.

Beauty is fun to drive, but tomorrow we find out how fun. Even though we've owned her for almost six months, tomorrow she takes her first road trip.  

What I'm reading

I like history, and while I don't identify as a hardcore feminist scholar, I do identify as a feminist. I am also very interested in fashion. A couple years ago, my husband bought me a book at the Mary Meuser Memorial Library book fair, Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Feminism and Fashion by Linda M. Scott. I never got that far into it because it's a heavy book and school work interfered. I picked it up again yesterday.

Every time I pick it up, I am captivated. I didn't have much time yesterday to read, but I managed to finish 50 pages. It's a well-written, well-supported book and my lack of completing it is not the fault of the author.

I've also found several points in here I could add to my honor's thesis. The whole point of reading this book was that it had nothing to do with my honor's thesis.

FROM GOOGLE BOOKS:

"Linda M. Scott wants to put an end to the belief that American women have to wear a colorless, shapeless uniform to achieve liberation and equality.

A pointed attack on feminism's requisite style of dress, Fresh Lipstick argues that wearing high heels and using hair curlers does not deny you the right to seek advancement, empowerment, and equality. Scott asserts that judging someone on her fashion choices is as detrimental to advancement as judgments based on race, nationality, or social class. Fashion is an important mode of personal expression, not an indication of submission. She demonstrates that feminism's dogged reduction of fashion to sexual objectification has been motivated by a desire to control other women, not free them. This push for power has produced endless conflict from the movement's earliest days, hindering advances in women's rights by promoting exclusion. It is time for the "plain Jane" dress code of the revolution to be lifted, allowing all women to lead, even those wearing makeup and Manolos.

Marching through 150 years of American dress history, Scott rips down feminism's favorite positions on fashion-from the power of images to the purpose of makeup. The illustrative examples-from flappers to Twiggy to body-piercing-are often poignant, occasionally infuriating, but always illuminating and thought-provoking.

With Fresh Lipstick, Linda Scott gives women the ammunition to settle the fashion debate once and for all. She challenges feminists to move beyond appearances and to return their focus to the true mission of the movement: equality for all women everywhere."

http://books.google.com/books/about/Fresh_Lipstick.html?id=5pCy8-EitMgC