simple, complicated, ordinary

Goodness, it has been a while, hasn't it?

LIfe continues in its usual way, with some breaks in routine; there was Thanksgiving, of course, and my family travelled to visit friends and eat large quantities of food and then come home again replete and tired and glad to be back. The air stayed terrible here until the morning we left to travel, but it has been very nice since we've been home, and this week has been a lovely mix of rain and dry -- mostly rain, which I prefer, although I know my children are tired of having to play indoors at school. Living in a place that is in constant danger of drought and the fires that result from it, however, I am delighted to breathe damp clean air and smell the ground soaking up the water and see everything brown start to slowly change. I miss the traditional seasons very much, but I am more and more able to take joy in what this place has to offer.

I have been reading -- it just occurs to me it is Wednesday, I can (and shall) make a reading Wednesday post and be on trend. But yes, reading, and listening to music, and running errands and playing with my children and supervising homework and so forth. I have made five boxes of too-small clothes and shoes and unwanted books and toys to donate, which I hope to do tomorrow, and I cleaned off the incredibly messy table which serves as my desk, so rather than toppling piles the surface now has a single layer of things I ought to be taking care of. I really need more shelving in my room, or to use the shelving I have differently, as there are empty shelves downstairs and up here I have full shelves, books stacked on the floor, and nowhere to put oversized items like my growing collection of adult colouring books and magazines I am saving for collaging and so forth.

Speaking of collaging, my lovely daughter invited me to join her in making a 'magazine' -- which she does by collaging on printer paper, adding captions, and then stapling the results together. I did, and enjoyed myself immensely; she is old enough now that she is happy for me to do my own pages beside her, rather than being a constantly attentive audience to her every motion, and it was simple to let her see what I was doing and admire her own work. It very much fed that hungry place in me that wants to create, and was so easy, and I am thinking about it; perhaps I simply need to play in that way, with glue and paper and words, and not worry so much about making something that is 'real' or that I can show other people... it is still complicated in my mind, because the hunger to be seen ebbs and flows, and when it is high tide with it I want to make things people will look at, but then it recedes again and I think, well, that is a lot of fuss, and about what? I am trying to keep listening (difficult when busy but easy the day after a busy day -- like just now, yesterday I did not sit down until afternoon, what with one thing and another, but now it is quiet and I can hear myself more clearly), and to observe and learn, to be curious rather than judgemental.

I have watched more of The Lost Village and it went from being subtle and ambiguous and eerie to over-the-top and ridiculous and campy, so I am not able to recommend it but I am amused by what it is, and may finish it off tonight, depending on my spouse, who has a bad cold and might want to sleep early. Which would be wise for me as well, I am not getting much sleep this week -- a lot of 5am waking to worry about things I haven't done yet -- but we will see.

Reading Wednesday

Recently Finished:
As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem -- A literary science fiction novel about instantiated Lacanian theory, I think, except I have not read enough Lacan to be certain. It was very strange and satisfying in that way of something I do not really understand that I am certain has actual meaning; I did not enjoy it in most of the usual ways I enjoy novels, but I feel like I stretched something in my mind while reading it. This was my first Lethem, and I will look for more.

The Cranes Dance by Meg Howrey -- A first-person novel about a ballet dancer in New York, young but not so young as she once was, damaged and funny and struggling. I loved everything about it, almost inexplicably; some of it is that Kate's humour is very much mine, and some of it is that I just love books which go into detail about the work of doing art -- there is a lot in here about rehearsal and gesturing and the actual ballets and I could probably have read Howrey's cynical/loving descriptions of ballet plots for an entire book.

Reading Now:

Far Afield by Shane Mitchell, about travelling to fairly remote places, getting to know people there, and eating the food. There are beautiful photographs and some of the recipes look tempting.

D. E. Stevenson's Miss Buncle Married which... well, I remembered that I did not really like Stevenson very much, but I couldn't think of why, and now I am starting to remember -- she is just so ridiculous about other human beings. Is it because she keeps dipping into farce rather than realistic fiction? Is it because she really does think that perfect women are 'nature's fools' who are oblivious to all social undercurrents but wins everyone over by her implacable ignorance because they are just So Very Nice? I am enjoying it enough to keep reading it but I don't know that I will read any more.

Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong is poetry, and thus far mostly not the sort of poetry I like, but I am going on with it slowly, trying to figure out what it is I think. I wish I knew how to characterise the sort of poetry I do like; there ought to be an Every Noise at Once for poets, where one can type in the poet's name and get a list of their genres and then click through on the genres and find other similar poets -- but of course poetry is not such a mass thing that there are granular sub-genres like music.

Next Up:

Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote by Janet Theophano -- a book on paper, so I must get it read so it can go back to the library!

A Traveller in Time by Allison Uttley, which I have owned forever and am finally going to read properly.


I am not certain I will continue doing posts like this on Wednesdays -- it feels so artificial -- but I have given it a try at the least.

new rhythms and routines and the acknowledgement of desire

I often feel like I do not want anything in particular, beyond local changes of state -- I want to eat when I am hungry, I want to sleep when tired, I want to do something more fun than whatever it is I am currently doing, I want to get a particular nagging task done, I want to finish a book or watch another episode of Terrace House -- but I do not have any concrete long-term goals. More abstract ones, certainly, I want to be present with my family and watch my children grow and be a good parent to them and so forth, but not things I can point at and say: I set out to do this thing, and look, I have done it.

Which might, I think, be where some of the art angst comes from. Or perhaps not, but it is worth checking out.

The thing is, as I realised a few days ago, other people in the system (often teenagers) have plenty of concrete, definable goals we could be working towards, but I (and others, but this is my space, so I will focus on myself) often squash them. There are any number of languages people would like to improve our basic knowledge of, there are small-scale cleaning and organising projects, there is the desire to improve/upgrade our clothing, to become better at cooking and baking, etc etc etc -- all very doable, really, if only we did not come down on them and keep them from starting.

And why do I do this thing? I know exactly, but can I put it into words before I must leave to get the children? One part of being multiple is that I will suddenly be filled with the urge to, say, learn Japanese, and I will recognise that it is not coming from me-myself but from someone else in the system and yet the urge is there and very strong, and so I facilitate it, and we (pressed on by whoever is passionate) start spending time on Japanese language apps, gaining new vocabularly and trying to at long last manage katakana --

Until, suddenly, whoever it was is not as present/available/passionate, and then the urge is gone, and since it is not my (or another adult's) very own project, there is not the necessary persistence to keep going without the passion behind it, and we quit practising, and it falls by the wayside for a few weeks or months until suddenly the desire is there again. And the feeling of all of this, the starting and stopping, the passion and then the almost-forgetting, is really not very pleasant, so lately when there is the urge to study a language or something like, I simply refuse to allow it until it goes away again, since I know it won't go anywhere. (It is not that I am queen of the system or anything, by any means, we are a cooperative and it bears saying, there is not a 'real person' for whom the rest of us are 'alternate personalities' or anything like -- we are just here, many of us, and we do our best to share. But people do have differing amounts of weight to throw around, often correlated with life experience, and I am one of the people with much system weight, so I am entirely capable of squashing people's desires without even really consciously deciding to do so.) But of course, it only fails to go forward because we do not persist in it.

On the whole we work together exceptionally well, I think, for such a variety of people, but in this thing I think we might improve. The feeling of desire is lovely, but I am good at persistence without desire, or else my children would not always have clean clothes and such; it is not as though I constantly feel a passionate urge to do laundry, I just do what must be done. And so it really ought to be with something like learning a language, but for some reason the connection has not been here, and then I think, well, there is nothing I/we want to do/learn/make. Fiddlesticks. It is hard to pick because there are so many, but that is never going to be untrue, so --

I am picking a thing, which is to study our Japanese, since a) we are variously fond of anime and manga and Japanese reality shows and dramas and music and also the actual high culture, not that I am likely to ever be able to read Makura no Soshi in the original Classical Japanese, and b) due to a year of study several decades ago we can already read hiragana and have some vocabularly and grammar. I have the Drops app, to finally learn katakana and begin improving vocabulary, and I can go from there -- I am not certain it will get me grammar, but I will tackle that when we come to it. There is Duolingo too, I suppose, but for the moment here I will commit in public to doing Drops every possible day (there will inevitably be some missed) for the next week, and then on Thursday next (after Girl Scouts) I will report back on how it has gone and if I wanted to add Duolingo. If we make it a routine, then it will begin to happen, and perhaps in a few years I might even take the basic level of the JLPT, because far from being without desire, I am ridiculously ambitious when I allow myself to admit it.