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.

awakening... after twenty-five years.

It's like I've had blankets ripped off me on a cold winter morning. Twenty-five years of my life has passed, and I am astonished that I threw away so much opportunity, so much of what I worked so hard to achieve for the first half of my life for the sake of my family life and children. I have Googled around to see if this situation is unique. I couldn't find much.

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.

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.

Spring.

At some point I'm hoping to recover enough to take some photos. My neighborhood has been besieged by crows, but the usual blossoms are back and looking nice. There is a sadness, a pathetic quality to the flowers this year, though. The crows have nudged out all the other lovely birds that used to come through here in the spring - nuthatches, chickadees, rufus-sided towhees, and I am sad for the beautiful morning songs of those birds of the past. Now it is "caw caw" for the most part. I can't help but think there are some eerie parallels between the expansion of the crow population and the changes to my personal life, the human population expansion, the economy on a larger scale, and of course climate change. Nothing is separate, the fabric of life seems to be very complex indeed.

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.

A long but compelling video about farming and oil.

Ah. So everybody is freaking out. It's not just me.

My husband dug up some of the back yard today, the boys helped and shoveled wheel barrows of mulch. Our neighborhood may be abandoned during the day, but my yard will be growing vegetables I guess. I'm not adept at vegetable gardening, but this year it is being asked of me.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123689292159011723.html?mod=loomia&loomia_si=t0:a16:g4:r3:c0:b0

There must be something better.

Today is a day when I am more seriously considering returning my youngest son back to public school, a school where there are bullies and a rougher population than the one I grew up with. We are so isolated, and I am not in a place to educate him like he needs, but we have no other alternative than the neighborhood school. I flashed back on memories about my own school experiences when my husband mentioned to me today that another stellar student from my alma mater won the Intel Science Talent Search. My high school was/is an excellent one, but the local system here is quite mediocre and we don't have the resources to enrich our childrens' education much more than the basics. Yesterday my older son won 5th place in the district spelling bee, and I am proud of him, but there are no funds to send anyone to the state level. I am trying to be thankful for what we do have.

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?

crows

It's been a long time since my last post. Since that time much that has changed in my little view. Winter has been long and my vision for beauty has been undeniably affected. As of November, my paradigm of safety, having grown up in 20th century US, has insulated me deeply from the basic struggles of humanity since its beginning. Food. Shelter. Water. Safety. Those questions we have not had to ask about much here in the US, but very swiftly that seems to be changing.

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...

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!