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.

Reschooling: women vs. men, etc.

Today I am taking a little happiness in the fact that I did really well on my first organic chemistry exam. The professor is intense, the class itself is intense (clicker education), the material is not so easy to grasp sometimes and can require understanding of a lot of abstract concepts. I'm sure relative to material to come, this is just baby stuff but it doesn't seem that way now. The victory feels very good, but I have no time to bask in it - I have a paper to write, an exam to prepare for and a lot more work to do for everything. It is very, very strange to be working hard as a student at my age and have my family too. I hope I will always have my family.

It occurred to me the other day that I am one of about three older women in the chemistry class, but there are no older men. Come to think of it, there have not been any older men in any of my science classes. There are some in my statistics course, but not the science classes. Hm. I'm wondering why. And it is interesting that several people I have met already have bachelor's degrees and are working to become additionally educated to develop their careers. The formula is definitely bachelor's degree and a lot of hard work + integration with the working world. That last component is what I never really obtained after getting my degree eons ago. If I had it to do over, I would have crafted my education in a way that the endpoint was more integrated with the outside world, pointing to some professional path with a network instead of ripping away from it all and moving back to Oregon from Illinois. Or I would have built it and finished it here in Oregon in the first place.

I must be getting a little better.

I'm actually thinking about knitting something for the first time in almost a year. The other day I was excited about making a nice dinner for the family. This sounds trite, but enjoying normal things has not been the standard fare for a long time. My dad died after a prolonged illness, both my dogs died, and I gave away my pet chickens all within a few months. My children are growing up and I'm facing a huge job of trying to build a new life. But it is good, very good to think about knitting again and actually be thinking it seems kind of... special. I will celebrate the end of my term by knitting a Christmas gift for my sister, and a neckwarmer for myself.

Something a little funny.

I'm thankful that it is summer.

Warm weather is something I appreciate. I am a thin person and cold sears through me easily, so the heat of summer is something I welcome. I'm thankful for it. I'm thankful that I have a reliable car at this time, and that my family is healthy. That is no small point of gratitude. We have a home, enough food to eat. With summer here, our windows are open, and every morning when I wake up at dawn, I try to focus on things I'm thankful for. But there is something different here now. There is often a silence that almost sounds like pressure, like a vacuum unless birds are singing, and birds, with the exception of crows, have been uncommonly absent. It was a silent morning today, a vacuum of silence, until I got out of bed. That is when the crows began to caw and have been doing so since. I will often see 4 to 10 crows in one neighbor's yard, eating their bird food. I have seen up to 40 or so high in the fir trees, flying between roosts. I think the issue of crows is not exclusive to the area around our home though. I see and hear them on the campus where I am attending classes several miles away. Last night a headline caught my eye. Apparently there is a problem with crows in the Seattle area too, and a University of Washington professor decided to study the crows' ability to recognize human faces and found that they actively do so. Here is the link to the story. Their intelligence has not been disputed, but the question I am not hearing is Why Are There So Many Of Them Now? And what can we do about it? Gone are the days when the songs of the birds were consistently varied and by August I could hear plenty of bugs buzzing, humming, generally making their insectoid noises. This year, however, there is very little of that. I haven't seen any real butterflies, almost no dragonflies, virtually no regular flies, very few bees and almost no wasps. Ants are around though. I think they'll be around long after humans are gone, provided there is land for them.

A new road.

I have now completed my first week as a full-time student. It is quite an adjustment. I am not the only student who is older, but I am probably one of the two oldest. One younger woman in my class has two bachelor's degrees, Journalism and French, and is preparing to head into a more practical direction. These are the realities of the Old US College System. To encourage a person to head into a major that has no practical place in society should probably be accompanied by significant advising and assistance to the student to dovetail them into the working world.

I am still watching the economy but not as closely as I was. I am trying to focus on a positive future rather than the dire predictions of the day. In my state the unemployment rate is 12.4%, the second highest in the nation; Oregon used to be a progressive state with a good education system, but it has always had a precarious economy. I grew up here when the mills began to close, but I lived in a college town and lived in a neighborhood where everyone was college-bound; the timber industry and the economy didn't feel threatening then. Today of course, all that is different. One economist I follow is Diane Swonk. I do so because a) she is a woman; b) she is a mother; c) she is a successful economist and d) she is not freaking out about the economy. She grew up in Michigan while her father worked for the automobile industry and I heard a speech of hers once, decided she was more optimistic than some of the people whose opinions I had been reading and thought it was a good point of view to consider. Here is a link to her latest post, where she writes that recovery is painful. Yes, I can attest to that. I am trying to remain hopeful that this new trajectory of mine will come to fruition, that things will fall into place as I walk through this transition from being a full-time mother, graphic artist, child-care provider, elder-care provider, animal-lover and all that I have been over the last 10 years to working in a rewarding job doing meaningful work.