Stuff

I’m not actually a minimalist

Although I can see why someone might think otherwise, given my tendency to purge my belongings. But I’m not interested in owning just 10 or 20 items of clothes, you’ll never find just one pair of shoes in my closet or just one purse and I like art on my walls and color all around. But I detest clutter and disorganization. When things get cluttered and disorganized, then I feel out of control in my own home.

Kent and I send each other links to interesting articles all the time. This week I sent him an article by miss minimalist about the concept of of areté, a Greek word for excellence; I've translated that in my mind to the notion of quality over quantity in all your belongings.

He sent me an article by Marc Gunther that looked at something called the Veridian; this article took the last Veridian note and considered the relationship we have with our things and why that’s so. The two articles sparked a really good discussion yesterday, sort of a philosophy of belongings conversation.

(I will say that Marc Gunther is clearly very involved in the the green movement and I'm not, so I found the first few paragraphs fluffy and I didn't get interested until he moved on to talking about the article The Last Veridian—however he did a great job pulling out the good stuff from there. I tried to read the original article and had to stop.)

I dislike using the word mindful because it smacks of eastern mysticism which I do not believe in and don’t follow, not in yoga and not in anything, but the word sort of works here. Kent and I want to deliberately choose to own our possessions and neither of us wants them to own us.

When I settle for something and it’s not exactly what I really wanted and needed, then it becomes a source of frustration and clutter—like the near misses in my closet; they hang there mocking me. I’ve seen Kent go through the same thing when he’s gotten a tool for home repair and it wasn’t really the one he knew he needed but what he needed wasn’t available.

I foresee a new round of purging for us, using the four categories mentioned in the second article.

Book report

So the IFBC has finished one book, and we are busy reading the next. But I’m still thinking about our reviews and how we expressed our opinions—frankly I’m sitting here wondering how to go about saying what I liked and didn’t like without turning the discussion into a slam of someone else’s taste in books.

Let me explain.

I took a grad level essay writing class as an undergraduate, and I was one of maybe three undergrads in the class. The rest were all on the Ph.D. trail; most took the class for fun. We read several collections of essays, discussed the essays themselves thoroughly and also talked about the forms essays took. Don’t ask me to recall any of that, because I took the class 10 years ago and don’t remember.

What I do remember is that we wrote essays all the time and we all got reviewed at least once that semester by the class. Those reviews were brutal, but not for the reasons I expected. I thought we’d be critiquing the writing style and offering suggestions for improving the form of the essay but nope, that’s not what happened at all. Instead the class generally tore apart the idea of the essay and did so viciously. That seemed like dirty pool to me and really inappropriate but that’s what happened.

I’m not saying we tore apart Lemming personally over her book. But I think I need to find a better way to share what I liked and didn’t like without veering into something that may be interpreted as a personal slam.

Cats at play

I've been remiss with kitty videos lately. Enjoy!

Weeks from disaster

Have you ever watched the show Seconds from Disaster? This National Geographic show ran from 2004 to 2007 and analyzed everything that happened in selected disasters. The disasters ranged from natural disasters to oil rig explosions to train and plane crashes.

One that still haunts me was about a plane that crashed because the tail mechanism broke and put the flappers or whatever they are called into a position which forced the plane to nose dive straight down. The cockpit recordings are chilling as the pilot asks the co-pilot two or three times “Are we flying? Are we flying?” as they hurtle to the ocean below.

My job feels a little bit like that right now.

Due to the complete inability of Congress to pass a budget, the contract I work on full time will probably go away May 7. In the meantime, my company has pitched an intensive consulting effort to improve graduation rates at the programs we support. This is supposed to demonstrate how much they need the services we offer. Normally I’d be all for this project since organizational consulting is something I specialize in. But I don't have high hopes for a good outcome for the following reasons:

• The classes are approaching the halfway point--in other words, we can't change the selection process which is a big problem at a lot of programs
• 80% of the chosen programs cannot meet their graduation targets because they have already fallen below those levels. The best we can do is mitigate damage.
• I have no assigned resources to gather and analyze the data I need to create the get well plans
• The whole thing must be completed by May 6, and the programs don't graduate until various dates in June. So we won't even know if we did anything effective.
• I'm out all next week training another class which puts the timeline in jeopardy.

Much like the pilot in that doomed flight, I’ll be doing all the right things for this initiative and I, too, won't be flying.

Dear Wally,

When you close our bedroom door and THEN go open and close kitchen cabinets loudly, it's not nearly as effective as the other way around.

Love,

Your humans

The Seduction of Water

OK imaginary friends, it’s book report time.

I agree with Roger Ebert’s way of reviewing movies and think it works for books too—take the movie (book) at face value and compare it against what it’s trying to do. Don’t use an absolute scale in reviewing because that’s not fair to fluffy entertainment pieces or to the really dark, gloomy ones. So having said all that, here’s my take on Seduction.

I loved the opening of the book when Iris tells the story her mother told her. Did you ever see the movie The Princess Bride? Do you recall how you forgot that the grandfather was actually reading the story to the little boy, when you became fully immersed into the story? That’s what happened to me within a few pages of the fairy tale (and I’m not a huge fan of fantasy). In fact I had much the same jolt back to the reality of the novel when Iris returns to talking about current events as I did when in the movie, the boy interrupted his grandfather to ask if the book was a kissing book. So that was the initial hook for me and kept me from focusing on the stuff I didn’t like. Also I like mysteries.

I’m not sure what word to use but Iris’ frustration? pain? Whatever you want to call it, the way Iris felt about not knowing more about her mother or her mother’s family hooked me in as well. I have large gaps in my immediate family history due to divorce and other things. Now that entire branch of the family has died off (bio father’s side) so there are things I will just never know. And it does bother me, much as it seems to have bothered Iris.

Having said what I like, let me also list the dislikes—and I’ll be honest. I know at least a couple of these are more because I don’t understand why someone would think or feel the way Iris does.

• The ABD thing. Holy cow, get that sucker done. This is something I don’t understand in the least, not in the book and not in real life. If you have spent that much time and money pursuing your Ph.D. then finish the damn thing. I know, I know, my puny little thesis for my M.S. does not begin to compare and I’m sure I just don’t understand the stress. Even so, if Iris were a real life friend, I’d be doing my best to get her to finish it. 
• Fussing about the age difference between Iris and Aiden. Who. CARES. Again, I’ll own that’s probably a personal bias since I’m seven years older than Kent and neither of us seems to have ever given it a second thought.
• Aiden’s supposed angst over having done jail time. Honestly I think that was Carol Goodman’s angst, and it rang false for me coming from Aiden.
• Iris’ relationship with Jack. What a wretched, pathetic relationship. It’s like settling for frozen yogurt when what you want and need is full fat, full flavor, glorious ice cream.

All in all, though, I enjoyed the book. It made for a delightful retreat from reality and I’d give it a solid B.

Cat stays

And the rug goes. Cats > rug.

In other news, I’m going through my clothing remembering again that just because something is currently fashionable and I can pull it up over my butt doesn’t mean it’s all that flattering. Fat-bottomed girls (that would be me) generally don’t look good in the pencil leg pants. I don’t know what I was thinking . . .