Holiday Juggling Squared Feeds A Writing Experiment

Oh I wish I had time to write the way I would like to write. The coming Holidays, my 21 year old's graduation from university, her birthday, my husband's 35 year old daughter, her husband who is adapting to have a prosthetic lower leg, and their twin 1 year old daughters, and her birthday all arrive within a few days of each other.

I am challenging myself to write through the frenzy of the next month. Writing provides comfort, entertainment, solace, political engagement, and occasionally income for me. I have always written on a keyboard. My first big purchase in life was when I was 16 and I purchased a professional office model Royal electric typewriter. Crisp, tidy, inviting words that I put on a page have been a near daily occurrence for decades of my life. I like to revise, edit, and hone each piece. Many, many times my creative thoughts and fingers are racing so very much faster than my internal editor can run.

Feel free to click and copy this graphic for your non-commercial blog!

Blogging, especially on a daily basis, requires a spontaneous, yet rigorous, process of writing to create a product. At least it does in my world where I don't have hour upon hour to spend crafting a final Blog product every day. Writing poetry, and writing, and rewriting papers and research reports were the mainstays of my "keyboarded" writing for ages, letter writing and journaling were the purview of pen-in-hand. Blogging combines these modes of writing that, for those of us who learned to compose on paper and then transcribe via a typewriter, come into being through different brain to hand, neural pathways and processes.

A further difference, for old fogey types' such as "Done Nesters," is that we would also nearly always do a complete rewrite as we retyped from penultimate draft to final copy. This is how we learned to create coherent pieces of writing. This differs from how the bloggers who learned to write on personal computers and laptops create their product. Most blogs also require a personality-infused style of writing that is somewhat at odds with the multiple edits and more formal style of writing that lots of 40-plus writers have as their default.

So, I am giving myself permission, in this coming month of tightly scheduled events and impromptu family activities, to write for two hours every morning. This will keep me sane. This also will require getting up at an absolutely ungodly hour and going to the gym, then writing from 7 until 9 a.m., and letting my family know that joint enterprise breakfasts will begin to be made by us as a group endeavor at 9 a.m. What this will also promote, at least that is my plan, is the honing of my quick write skills when time is crunched but there is a wealth of material from which to draw upon in those limited moments of writing time.

This wealth truly is a wealth that is made up of many rich blessings: my darling baby all grown up and moving away to go to grad school, twin one year old grand baby girls visiting our home for the first time, a son-in-law who is a wonderful writer and is adjusting amazingly well to a changed body after life-altering boating accident, and my wonderful step daughter who works in the New York publishing industry and has said she might be able to shop around my memoir about growing up in rural, bucolic isolation on one of the last truly old fashioned farms while surviving the rearing of a mother who today would be classified as suffering from the factitious disorder, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.  These are all very exciting elements in and pf themselves, let alone together!

I know my limiting and enabling constraints; I can churn out acceptable copy the first thing in the morning. Without fail this is when my best writing is done. While there is the occasional instance to prove my generalization wrong, the quality of my writing decreases with every passing hour of the day.  With so much that I want to capture there should not be any lack of subject or motivation, so I just have to stick to the schedule and work on what I guess I will think of as flow for lack of a better word.  Flow for me means combining the personal creativity of what I think of as journal and letter writing energy with the final draft polish and editing vibes that keyboarding provides for me. 

I will have an overflowing basket of observations, rituals, and discoveries to provide prompts and topics aplenty to feed my urges to communicate in writing, and I have the schedule in place to facilitate my best effort; so,  there is actually method to my seeming madness. Sometimes the busiest time is the best time to blend in a new ingredient, this time the combining of types of writing into my own style of blogging that captures the best features of both types.

Do you agree, or am I taking on too much?

I'm Going To Do It - Again!

This is scary.  Really scary.

I haven't had my hair colored in years.  I have so much white hair in the front, and it grows so fast, that I just could not keep up with it.  Roots always showed within a few days.   But this time I am going Bonnie Raitt and leaving the white in front.  I'm only 54 and I think my hair is making me look older than I am.  I have wrinkles and such but I have light fairly good skin that with continued weight loss (down 15 lbs from May) and slightly younger looking hair should take at least 5 years off my apparent age.  Or, that is what I'm telling myself!

Here I am now:

And another pic will be forthcoming tomorrow.

I am so not a Fashionista, but I have some vain tendencies that I have had to squelch in order to live according to my ecological and economic principles.   So this is disconcerting for me.  If you read this, tell me it is okay.  I'm serious, I have moral qualms about doing these kinds of things. 

The first hurdle I had to vault, many years ago, in my early 40s was even going to a hair salon or spa. I managed to get myself through the front door of a nice salon a little over ten years ago. 

Up until that time I had only been in a salon on a few occasions.  The first was when I got a pixie cut that was hideous.  It was way to short and sharp for someone with as long and sharp of features as I had, even in 5th grade.  The second was when I had my hair "set" for my eighth grade picture. Here is the picture - for the ages of me with the rest of my class - circa 1971.

Second row Second from right, the one with long dark hair.

The third was when a girlfriend in high school convinced me to get my hair cut for my senior picture at a mall salon in which her sister worked.   It turned out okay. Although my stoic midwestern ancestory is a bit too evident in the pic for me to want to track it down.  It was just between chin and shoulder length tapered a bit longer in the back than front and brushed under just a bit.  It was a long Page Boy.  No bangs. 

I have had problems whenever I strayed from my basic Cher Hair as I referred to the long, lustrous dark hair that I loved having most of my life. 

The next times were the last two hair professional hair cuts I had for the next two decades. 

Dorothy Hammill and her original Hamill Wedge. 

The first time, when I tried to have the cut from the senior pic  recreated and I ended up with a Dorothy Hamill haircut, aka the Hamill Wedge, that was almost as tragic on me as the pixie cut from 5th grade.  Thank heavens no images from that time remain.  That was the summer after high school graduation. 

Honey Huan from Doonesbury. 

The straw that broke the camel's back was when I was a sophomore at Purdue and some psycho stylist made me look like Honey Huan. My now Hubby still laughs and loves to recall the time went through my Vietnamese militant period as he calls it and I wore black work boots, denim overalls and had a hair cut that did look like Honey's.  However,  Honey is Chinese. 

I so hope tomorrow goes well.  I don't think I can stand another travesty of hairdom.  And after not going into a salon for decades, I had more than a bit of awkwardness at not knowing salon culture.  I felt like I was a foreigner in a strange land who speaks not a word of the language. 

This time I am more prepared for the culture immersion.  I am an anthropologist by training, I can do this.  I will never be able to replicate the favorite time and hair of my life when joy was everywhere and I really did not care how I looked -- but I think Momma and child both looked pretty happy.  

We will see if I can't find a new favorite for my I'm Done Nesting phase of my life.