Chinese Food sounds good today.

It's Christmas Day, and to all who are embracing this as their Big Holiday, I wish you a very good one. We have a tree and the boys have had gifts from Santa and family members, and they seem very happy with their day. For them, it is their Big Holiday. It is funny how my sons still want to believe in Santa so badly, and are willing to suspend all disbelief for the sake of the fun despite the fact that they are not young children anymore.

There is something about wading through a holiday based on religious beliefs that are different than my own that makes me feel like having Chinese food. We rolled down the road to four different restaurants finding three open and decided on a buffet. I missed freshly cooked food but it was still nice to have some sweet and sour something. Really wanted that today. It was interesting to see who else was patronizing the place on Christmas afternoon.

Paradigm shifts, coming up for air.

Again and again I am confronting the profound effects of the paradigm shift that began for me over a year ago. So much has happened since then. My father died, both my children returned to public school (we homeschooled for a good while), I returned to school, the economy crashed and I faced a very difficult personal task of trying to figure out how to create a strategy for the future. Today, unlike a year ago, I see my life as finite every day. Today I think in terms of probabilities all the time, no guarantees. I am also focused on personal goals that I held early on in my life; I've compared them to where I am now and am trying to reconcile the difference, which is vast. I am fortunate, extremely fortunate, to have the privilege of trying to pull myself toward a trajectory that is meaningful to me and to have the support of my family while I do so.

Monday I took all three of my course finals for Fall term. My grade for organic chem just came in and I can see I did well on exam, so I am sipping from that sweet victory cup today. I feel fortunate again, but wow did I work for that grade. I do not recall ever having to work quite so hard in a class. This was difficult in terms of sheer volume of information to understand together with a huge amount of work we had to produce. We had intensive labs, write-ups, loads of homework, quizzes, midterm exams and a research project including a poster and presentation. My other finals went fine too, I'm pretty sure - Cell Biology and Statistics. I cannot sit back now that the exams are over though. No way. I have a strategy to follow, and it involves dedication beyond a final exam.

Maybe it's just me, but the explosion of the blogosphere and discussion boards seems to have faded quite a bit from where it was 5 years ago. With the advent of Facebook and Twitter, blogs like this, journal-style, are perhaps too time-intensive for many people to read. How handy is it to read something more than a sentence or two long when you're reading it off your handheld device? I think a lot of people prefer the friendship network idea too, with a public display of their friend collection and one-off comments about their moment. Not much depth there IMO. Meaning is something I have been looking for, and I'm not finding it on Twitter or Facebook, but that is not to say I don't read entries there.

I'm hesitant to delete this blog because I guess I still have hope that a single voice can still be important, can have some kind of effect, can provoke thought or provide comfort or something, even if it is from a middle-aged woman fighting for purpose and meaning for the rest of her life, in the midst of a national economic and global ecological shift.