Friday, December 25, 2009
Chinese Food sounds good today.
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.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Paradigm shifts, coming up for air.
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.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Reschooling: women vs. men, etc.
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.
Friday, October 23, 2009
I must be getting a little better.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
I'm thankful that it is summer.
Friday, June 26, 2009
A new road.
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.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
awakening... after twenty-five years.
The other day I saw a spider swinging down from the light in the hall. I grabbed the thread and lowered the spider into the toilet. It wadded up into a ball, then began to swim, desperate to get out, unwilling to stop trying but unable to get traction on anything, not even the porcelain. I saw myself in that spider and decided to let it go. It scuttled off to a place behind the toilet and I haven't seen it since.
It's hard not to look back on my life and dwell on all the choices I could have made differently. Really hard. And I worry about my children. I will always worry about them.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Ten crows hiding
There really has been an invasion of crows here. I googled it and what has transpired here with the influx of crows has gone down in many other smaller cities like mine. They apparently prefer smaller cities, especially near a river. The river? Right next to downtown.
Further parallels: got a notice from my son's school that this neighborhood that has become so vacant and haunted is now plagued by some gang activity. Do I wish we could flee? Yes. Right now. And to turn back the clock which I cannot seem to do. During the day when I am home and not volunteering for the food bank (depressing) or at the job center (depressing), I sit by my woodstove thankful for the heat, thankful for my internet connection, sometimes I listen to the radio also very depressing. Neil Conan of TOTN is so cock-sure of himself, it's too much for me. And TV? Forget it. The joy of what this place had the first three years of our lives here is gone. An era of guinea pigs, preschool and dogs. Hope for my kids' safety and futures has diminished profoundly. Suddenly I am useless to my community except to care some for my children who don't need me as much anyway. There is a horrible sense of abandonment by a world that I thought I lived in. It's gone gone gone. I knew. KNEW when we bought this place that the sign at the top of the street that reads, "Dead End" was prophetic.
A view of my neighbor's house across the street:
Creative work has evaded me severely. I am not driven to do it, cannot seem to find the peace that I need to do it. I cannot knit. Instead I am shocked by my ill-preparedness to face a rugged world, far more rugged than I ever realized it is, and I am terrified for my sons' safety and well-being. I am not finding any pathway back in to the workforce, and the few moments I've had as opportunities have met with a degree of mockery in one case, pity in another. I never thought of myself as being an older worker before, but apparently, obviously now, I am. Having spent time as an artist without substantial financial backing elsewhere was a mistake. Basking in the aesthetic beauty and meaning of what I could see? Foolish. I should have been working my way up in public or healthcare administration or something. Taking my kids out of the schools here and schooling them myself was also a mistake. I should have gone back to work/school and put them into private schools. Or let them sink/swim before the gangs moved in. I am not bilingual, and because I am not, I have another serious blow to my reentry into the workforce.
I'm working on six months of this realization that the world has changed and I have been left behind. I could use a really good adviser, somebody to mentor me back into the workforce. I was so foolish not to be building a significant network all this time. I let my significant other and my own denial prevent me from embracing the world as it IS instead of basking in chickens and dogs and innocence that is transient and often trashed sooner than we would like. I'd run to Canada or Vermont or some place like that if I could.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Spring.
I've been trying to look for work. It's been an ordeal, sending my son back to school after homeschooling, then staring at my real position in the face of the job market today. My perspective about our futures has changed drastically and I am constantly concerned about the well-being of my children and about the security of my husband's job. Yesterday Oregon's unemployment rate skyrocketed to 12.1%, the highest in the nation thus far. Trouble is, all my relatives live here. My old Bachelor's degree isn't worth much, honors schmonors, and I'm kicking myself for not having chosen something more practical to study and to have been building a secure career all these years. But kicking myself is something I'm trying not to do so much because it is so devastating I end up losing entire days just filled with dread and self loathing unable to get off the couch. I have started to volunteer at the local food bank operative center, so there's that. It does help to get out and learn some new things, be around different people. I read though that people in my demographic group (middle-aged SAHMs trying to return to work) are not likely to find work, having been out of the major part of the work force for so long. Can you say sitting duck? Yet with all this, my attitude is improving a little. A little. I'm getting more energy to look daily for work online and at times make myself get out. It may be the spring sunshine and longer days that are helping things along that way - I'll accept that.
We've lost both of our Saint Bernards this year. Our younger Saint, Mika, ate something that poisoned her last week when she was out running in the cemetery. She's run out there for 3 years now, but this time somebody put something out there that she ate (she ate everything) and it killed her. She was not an easy dog to have, but I appreciated having her around for safety, and she was company during the day. I will always miss the charm of our Boris though. He will forever have a place in my heart.
All this change has made me feel like I have a totally different life than the one I was leading even a year ago. It's because I do. Even in September. My kids feel the strain, and they don't like the crows, but I don't want to take hope away from them. I guess the thing to do is to be thankful for what we have today and remember that there have been times of peace and prosperity as well as angst and tragedy throughout history, but it just so happens that I was naive enough to believe so much in the security of our country that we were immune to it.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Ah. So everybody is freaking out. It's not just me.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123689292159011723.html?mod=loomia&loomia_si=t0:a16:g4:r3:c0:b0
Thursday, March 12, 2009
There must be something better.
Tonight I'm reading about trying to find my place. Evening is a friend to me, but then morning comes and once again I face the emptiness of the day. I must find a way to make life more meaningful, filled with kindness and less fear. I am a rare kind around here though - someone who is without a job over 18 and under 65, although unemployment in this county is over 10%. Somehow I must find my way. To focus on the Orlov predictions is just too nihilistic, even if it does seem true. Now I must get through the overwhelming view I've had lately of seeing people as an invasive species oblivious to our temporary state in our flesh-shells. Perhaps it is because of my lack of sense of connection with people?
Thursday, February 26, 2009
crows
With the shattering of my sense of invulnerability came a very long struggle to restore the sense of security I had prior to that. It has not come. Instead I have read increasingly worrisome information that gives me not peace but points me to a stronger conclusion that I have been right, that my sense of doom was not out of nowhere but based on a trajectory that began perhaps centuries ago but has escalated to not just a housing bubble bursting but others reaching their maximum as well, including a cultural bubble. In my search for debunking my thoughts, I ended up finding information that instead reinforced them. Each day I see unfolding more and more indicators that we are witnessing the collapse of this society as we have known it. I hope I am wrong, at least in the way that could create an enormous amount of suffering.
One blog I've been reading is by the author, Dmitry Orlov, who has studied the fall of society in Russia in the 1990's. His blog is called ClubOrlov. His conclusions about our current society's fate is based on what he knows about Russia's collapse, and of course we are in many ways quite different than they were then. It may be insufficient to compare us to what happened in Russia and Russia alone, since we have a completely different social system. I look out my window and see homes of neighbors who are quite comfortable keeping a wide berth around themselves, telephones and TVs going, church friends 7 days and 8 miles apart, but the reality of their environs, their neighbors, is not within their scope of communications or priorities. We are, by the nature of our communications and basis for our social fabric, much more at risk than Russians were in the 1990s for strife while we "adjust" to this economic climate. The observations he makes, while comparing even Paul Krugman's blog, seem to point to a very frightening and dismal outlook for our country at this time, and people seem very reluctant to speak of it or acknowledge it or prepare for it despite news rolling out daily of its profound implications for us all. We have become dependent on a system that is breaking down before our very eyes and quietly people remain in their own bubbles of denial until it directly effects them, it seems to me. When I studied psychology over 20 years ago, I learned of a phenomenon of perceived invulnerability that people like to keep in place to prevent themselves from feeling like a negative event could happen to them. Victim-blame it was called. Today it is the safety of the car and the couch perhaps?
Can communities come together and survive? Will helping out neighbors in trouble actually happen? It might happen for some, especially young adults who have resilience and have the physical capabilities of working hard and enduring uncomfortable elements. Even our local library has shut down community communications. Where there were bulletin boards covering the walls by the front doors are now acrylic-covered spaces reserved for messages paid for by commercial endeavors. I found this article among many others that describes how isolated Americans have become. How then, in a disaster, is the community to reach out to one another and form a functioning cooperative? We have become extraordinarily vulnerable, and most people are not staring at this reality in the face. We are trusting grocery stores to be stocked and that our dollar will buy said groceries, then retreating to our homes, numbing our awareness to our position.
What to do? I keep looking for answers to this question. I try not to panic but I have been at times. Buy rice. Not brown but white long grain (lasts longer). Real answers Orlov doesn't offer for individuals. He just spouts wider facts and observations and someone like me with two children and now only one dog and no pet birds who has been stripped of artistic inspiration, with a middle aged body and few connections is left not knowing how to proceed. Paradigm shifting. Crows are flying and landing in the trees around my home and perhaps, with every bailout dollar and plan for recovery, preparing to scavenge every last bit of wealth this country has except what a person can barter. How to proceed...
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Saint Bernards for SBRF
I haven't heard from Carol, but I am going ahead with this illustration because I told her I'd do it, and I need to tie up the obligations I've already put into place as a part of resolving my New Year's Resolutions. I spent some time on this today and have spent some in the past days too, trying to get a photo of Boris and Mika adapted so that they 're wearing party hats. I originally thought I'd try to do a woodblock print of them, but that seemed far too risky and involved for what this is - a volunteer project intended for printing up for people who want to gift a donation to the Rescue Foundation. Working on this today was good for me - it surprised me at how much stress I had built up about this project. It is not easy!