My Week in Review: A Thought-scape

I can hardly believe the extent to which this Practicum deal-eo has worn me out. It was three days in Gardendale, which meant just over an hour's drive each way over the course of three days, and last night after sticking my children in their beds, I was done. This morning I still feel the effects.

So what happened this week?

I spent a lot of money. I drove through heavy rains such that all I could see in front of me was the next car, and the white lines rushing past between us. I learned from the lady sitting behind me in lecture that the best way to teach my three year old beginning reading might be to spend ten to fifteen minutes with him on starfall.com every day. I did this with Parker without intentionality. Isaac has not gotten similar treatment.

I have no expectation of Isaac being an early reader, but right now he seems interested, and we certainly need some little something to do together on a regular basis. I firmly believe that children learn to read at their own pace. Some will latch onto in early; others will drift into it late, and that is okay.

The point is that I don't know about Isaac whether he will learn to read the same way Parker did or not. He may. He may not. This is an opportunity to learn something more about my child, if I can somehow pay attention. What may I learn about each of my children today?

On Wednesday afternoon someone said to always examine your expectations with your children. There are certain things they need to accomplish in the course of the school year. We mean for them to master a few particular skills, and we shouldn't be in a rush to move on to the next things before they master them.

You know this is an issue in my own life. I'm always, and I mean always, in such a hurry to move on to the next book that I often rush through the one I am reading right now. It's as though time were the enemy, and not a good gift from our good God. I'm reading Eugene Peterson right now, who is teaching me at present that time is part of God's good creation.

And I have rambled, but you see the inter-connectivity here. This is one of the things this Classical Conversations curriculum emphasizes, and one of the things I like about it. It is a true description of reality that we have been trained to miss. Math and science are not only related to each other, they are related to literature as well. The book I am reading this morning isn't an isolated work; it is related to a conversation that has been going on since creation. Not only that, but I find that two books I am reading right now, chosen independently, are about the exact same set of ideas discussed in very different ways. One reinforces the other even if only by contrast.

Um, I guess I'd better stop now.

Exposure and Overexposure in the Realm of Ideas

It's Wednesday night. I am so tired. New thought for the day: according to this classical model of education the idea seems to be that three exposures to new material makes it graspable. So does that mean that I should read every book three times? Because one of my great struggles with reading remains: I read a book, I love a book, but a month later I may not be able to tell you what the book was about. I also have a difficult time summarizing content for the sake of discussion, which is a major disadvantage when you want to get a third person's input.

Michael suggests that I should simply take good notes on first reading. He has a point.

I have this notebook I started using for note-taking a while back. I used it for a good while with a certain success. These pages, they were filled from margin to margin with thoughts, extrapolations, quotations. I stopped doing that after a while, but the time has probably come to resume  it.

I'm reading a book right now, a book that frustrates me. I'm not certain the author has engaged her ideas with enough depth. Michael says to me, maybe you need to examine these ideas, do your own research, develop an outline based on this other author's work, and use it as the basis for your own book. Address the problem directly. It's a good idea. Welcome to the rest of my life.

I don't know. Can I develop the mental discipline to do such a thing?

That Old Joke About Making Assumptions--the Clean Version

We went out of town this past weekend. So early Saturday morning I'm in the kitchen washing dishes and I suddenly realize that I forgot to ask my husband whether his parents knew when we were coming. I assumed that when he communicated to me that we were going, he had communicated it to them as well.

An assumption. They tell you never to make them.

Only, usually when you make an assumption, you don't actually think it through. Assumptions go unexamined almost by definition, don't they? It's only after the fact that you realize an assumption has been made, and even then only if your assumption has been proven false.

As it turns out this time he did remember to tell them. True story.

On Levi Weaver and Supporting the Music

Levi Weaver. He came to town last year and played a house show at my friends house right around the corner from me. This was the second live show I had attended in a matter of weeks, after many, many years of a current music-less existence. And this from the girl who used to have a CD going in her room ALL THE TIME.

It was good. He was able to do a lot of sound manipulation right there in my friend's living room, which was cool. He writes his own stuff, which is also cool. Other than a few tracks on grooveshark.com, this was my first exposure to his music.

In some ways I am cautious about devoting myself to new music. Once upon a time my brother made the mistake of saying that I had good taste in music, that I managed to find the good stuff in a sea of mediocrity. It was a mistake because since then I have become paranoid about my own musical taste. Is this one good enough for me to say I like it?

I think so. I like it. I really do. Levi offers his music for free from time to time, so I have gradually been able to access most of it, even with my seriously miniscule music budget. I haven't been able to support his career the way I would prefer to. Levi has a family to provide for, and I affirm that musicians need to be supported for their work as much as any other skilled and talented traditionally employed person does. Otherwise, how can they possibly continue to produce it? And I want so badly for the music to be made.

One of the things I like about Levi is the fact that he is transparent about what he does. Not long ago he was involved in an IndieGoGo campaign for a movie project that would document his life on the road and directly address the difference between success and fame. He spent time on his blog talking about exactly how any money that was raised would be used, which I thought was cool, because I had a lot of questions in that regard.  Preeminent among those was, How are you going to make this work?

Well, I was very happy last week to find that Levi Weaver has addressed some of my questions in two blog posts he has written from the road. The first one, "On David Lowery and Stealing Music," addresses ethical reasons why stealing music is wrong. I freely admit to you my ignorance. I don't know who David Lowery is. I also don't understand how anyone can argue that stealing music does not harm to those producing the music, particularly those who are doing it independently. The Chaffers used to put these clever notices on their CDs, such as "This is an independent record. Unauthorized duplication of this recording means we have trouble putting food on the table, and is also against the law." (don chaffer + waterdeep, 'whole 'nother deal')

He then balances this post with another one that arrived in my reader last week, "Part Two: Why I Believe in Free Music." I'll tell you the truth, this other side of the issue really encouraged me when I read it yesterday. I've wondered how the whole giving-away-your-stuff-freely deal ever translates into revenue. Yes, I am currently emotionally invested in Levi Weaver's success, but I have no money. I am emotionally invested in my friend, John Kelley's success as an artist, but I have no money. Same is true for Greenhorn Gardening. I try to promote these guys as often as I can, but I have only limited access to their intended audience.

And of course I am emotionally invested in the success of Dog Fight: Starship Editon. This is the product that will or will not land food on my own table.

So (I suggest you) read Levi's blog posts. While you're on his website, listen to the music. You can stream it easily and immediately. It's good stuff.

Why Is It So Hard to Really Say What We Mean?

It's difficult in two senses, and I expect these will come up again in a later post, but for now I'll tell you that one of those senses involves a certain fear-factor.

So, guys, I just wrote something that was a little heated, and probably controversial, and I'm not sure I'm ready to expose it to the vast world of the internet just yet. Sometimes the internet really depresses me, because while there are a lot of things that are great about it, it is certainly not a safe and friendly place. My husband would tell me, "If you don't want to get into a fight, then don't publish." The thing is, if you aren't prepared to get into a fight, can you really ever afford to publish anything?

You ask your innocent question on Facebook, and then are shocked when your so-called "friends" don't react as warmly as (or maybe even react more warmly than) you anticipated. I've seen ugly responses to blog posts and YouTube videos. Am I prepared to receive them? Honey, when you tell the truth you have to be prepared. And to tell you the absolute truth, I am not so prepared.

Do I want people to read my blog or don't I? You know guys, sometimes I really don't know the answer to that. What was I writing about this morning? Um, postmodernism. You read that correctly and now I'm embarrassed. Surely postmodernism is safely theoretical? Well no, actually it isn't. It creeps into everything we think and say and do. As does it's predecessor, modernism.

Is this a spiritual issue? Why, yes to that one too. It most certainly is.

So let me just quickly tell you the name of my favorite book on the subject, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church by James K.A. Smith. I've recently discovered through other written contexts that I don't necessarily follow Smith's political reasoning, but I love his Christian analysis of postmodernism. Smith is a man who doesn't separate his faith from his study of philosophy, and I believe he manages very well to integrate the two. It's worth reading. I think that Smith demystifies the theory, boils it down to its most basic assumptions, and shows very clearly that at its root postmodernism is not antagonistic to a holistic Christian worldview. In fact, it can be mobilized in favor of kerygmatic theology, as Smith might say. Don't let that big Greek-derived word scare you. It simply refers to the gospel that is preached.

Read it. It's a good book, and much more easily accessible than trying to read Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault directly.

Wrapping Up a Pretty Decent Week of Writing

I'll save my more intensive blog postings for during the week. Since all of a sudden I've started writing again, and who knows how long it will last, I feel the need to pace myself, and not throw it all at you in one swoop before it disappears. Maybe it (this ability to write) will disappear and maybe it won't. I make no promises.

Highlights of my week:

• Writing again. Suddenly I'm feeling sort of creative, and this is a good feeling.
• Time with friends. We've had a rather social week this week in the Fox household. This is good for me. I even managed to give the toilet a good scrubbing in anticipation of having guests in my home. My children got to have fun with friends too this week.
• I found some more good books that I am now dying to read.
• I think I am in the midst of learning something about putting people ahead of all those practical considerations that are not necessarily life-affirming. 
• I acquired some new houseplants unexpectedly this week. I have hope that I will water them on a regular basis and not half killed them as I have some of my other houseplants.
• I read a good, though sometimes a little threatening, and not wholly unproblematic book called The Feminine Soul, by Janet Davis. In fact, I think that combination often makes for a very good book.

Lowlights?

• I've experienced some discouragement and anxiety this week. What I told Michael earlier is that I feel I am supposed to be operating out of grace and wisdom, but instead I have been operating out of discouragement, and a perceived inability to cope with normal daily life. I tend to feel kind of small and overwhelmed. I don't like being accused of being a perfectionist. I'm not. I want balance. I don't want to be good at everything. I want to be good at a few things. I don't want to run my house like a machine. I want to run it like a refuge. 
• Um, all the baby stuff came back from the friend who had borrowed it, and I had just started to make some progress in weeding unused items out of some of the nooks and crannies of our small house. I haven't been able to figure out what to do with those items yet.
• We spent some money I didn't want to, and did spend some money that I didn't. Often these choices are the right ones, but they still cost me something in terms of a certain mental dissonance.
• The coffee beans I've been grinding are past their prime, but I'm not in a position to throw them away and open a new, unexpired bag just yet. I hope that by the time I do, my other stock will not have already expired. We're coming up on August more quickly than expected.

Yesterday I told my husband, "I need a frozen yogurt, a beer, and a good cup of coffee. Do you have any of those things hidden away in your office somewhere?" I'm afraid for a moment he may have thought I was serious. I really did want those things, but I didn't actually expect him to supply them.

You know what, it kind of helps me to write all this out. So that's cool. Have a good weekend!

Keeping Commitments

I was reading Stephen Covey's classic personal management text, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a while back. I got a few chapters in, but then had to put the book on hold, as evidenced by the fact that it has sat on my reading shelf for three or four months now (see Goodreads sidebar). Let it be known, I am not currently reading this book, not studying it or anything, but I think it is a very good book, and I will get back to it eventually. Even soon, maybe.

One of the excellent points that Covey makes is that we need to become people who are able to keep our commitments. I know that this is easier for some than it is for others. I find a great desire in myself to make commitments and to keep them, but I still often fall down on the job. Covey says the place to start is with making commitments to yourself. Practice them over an extended period. His is a how-to book after all.

So I had this great idea. I wrote myself up a personal commitments list and posted it right next to my desk. And earlier, last month maybe, I promised to share my list with you. So here goes:

Note: This is a longer list than is perhaps advisable for starters. A friend of ours read the Scripture out in small group one night, and it stuck with me.

Kelly's Commitments (A Checklist)

Behold, I go forward, but He is not there,

And backward, but I cannot perceive Him;

When He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him;

He turns on the right, I cannot see Him.

But He knows the way I take;

When He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold.

Job 23:8-10

• Review calendar and commitments checklist every morning to make sure I don't forget anything that's been scheduled.
• Track temperatures daily for NFP. (I have a chart I track this in.)
• Get up early every morning. Start the day off right by not sleeping through the best part of it.
• Shower at night to facilitate the morning's activities.
• Walk (or pursue some other form of exercise).
• Use leg-extensions as a warm-up before walking (or any other exertion, for that matter).
• Drink plenty of water.
• Read and/or study the Bible.
• Memorize entire book of James.
• Take Vitamins (including multi-vitamin, Ginko Biloba, and B-Complex). (Vitamins are on hold at the moment. Seemed like they were causing some problems.)
• Remember that sugar tastes good, but makes you feel bad. Avoid eating or drinking anything sugary until late in the day.
• Wear makeup and jewelry most days.
• Put clothes and jewelry away at night instead of leaving them out until morning. This includes hair ties.
• Remember that drinking too much alcohol at night makes it difficult to get up early in the morning.
• Actively pursue friendships and take responsibility for maintaining them. Don't rely on Facebook to do this for you.
• Leave kitchen counter, dining room table, and coffee table in the condition you wish to find them in the morning (i.e., reasonably clear and clean).
• Be quick to discipline the children before getting angry with them. By the time I am angry it is already too late to teach them anything good or true. Remember that anger produces fear, not obedience; anger produces rebellion, not steadfastness. Correction is not about retribution or revenge; it is about love. The children must be trained to obey us now, so that they will know how to obey God later.
• Keep up with the book keeping and prepare a quarterly profit/loss statement in April, July, October, and January. Do this so that tax time will be easier next year, and so that we will be better informed in order to make decisions about spending. 
  
  Some of these had fallen by the wayside recently, which is why I include that bit about reviewing the calendar and commitments daily. Actually, this morning I'd forgotten it was time to do a quarterly statement, so this little exercise in posting and revision has helped me in that regard as well.
  
  I think an important thing to remember about a set of commitments like this one is that these are fluid, and at times may require further revision. These are things I plan to do to make my life better, to make things run more smoothly, and to free up head space for other pursuits, and they will not be appropriate for every season in my life. I also believe on principle that it is wrong to enslave oneself to one's list. I've said before on Facebook, and will probably say again and again, that a to-do list, which is all this commitments list really is, is a tool that frees you. Preserve your adaptability. And drink your water.

I Suppose This Needs A Title: Happy Independence Day; Let Us Think About History for a Moment

I'm not much of one to write anything special for the holidays. In fact, the very thought causes me to freeze up. I thought about posting a regular old personal post this morning, but it didn't quite seem appropriate.

Instead, in honor of the Classical Conversations Practicum I shall be attending next week, I offer you this assignment from Leigh Bortins. I thought it was a perfectly lovely idea, because I'm a grammar nerd. I also don't mind telling you that I don't actually remember how to diagram a sentence. I appreciate the teaching link she provided, and I hope to check it out, if I can ever get all my work done. Everything seems to be piling up in the month of July.

Declare and Diagram: the first line of The Declaration of Independence. Reading just that first line makes me want to grab up one of our many copies of The Federalist Papers and set to reading. Yes, the language can sometimes be a little tricky to untangle in the 21st century, but it is rich and beautiful, and begs to be read aloud.

Psst: These are both the same link, so you don't have to click on both of them. You've been warned.

Adventures in Bread Making: The First Major Mind-Slip

I remember reading where Jill Cooper (www.livingonadime.com) said if you make a pie crust every day for a month, you'll become an expert crust maker because you'll make every mistake it is possible to make. I've been making bread daily for about three weeks now using an automatic bread machine, and for the first time this morning I neglected to put the dough hook back in the machine before adding my ingredients. The machine had been sitting for forty minutes before I realized, from another room, that the hook was missing. I then compounded the error by turning the machine off before dumping all of the sodden ingredients into a ceramic bowl. If I had taken the time to look at the machine first I would have seen that there was a pausing option.

Maybe it will turn out okay. The thing that worries me is that I am using a wheat bread recipe, and the wheat cycle just sits there for the first half hour of running, and then it combo mixes and bakes for another four hours (!). Is my yeast, now untimely mixed with warm water, going to go crazy before the mixing cycle begins? I don't know what that half hour of sitting is for, or why the bread rises so much the first time before being pounded down by the second kneading cycle. Some reading on the matter is required. It would be good to know these things, and perhaps one of you can explain them to me, even if only for the sake of my children knowing something about food that may come in handy some day.

Idioms are fun

My husband brought this one up last week, and I believe I have related it before:

I once worked in a lighting store. I had the most fun there either finding the needed parts for the electricians who came in every day or helping the stylish consumer find just the right lampshade for a lamp they already owned. As far as lampshades went, it was fun to find just the right size, shape, and proportion to suit the lines of a shapely lamp.

We had shelves devoted to lampshades, and there was one particular shade that had been there for some time. It had a small card attached to it that proclaimed the shade to be "One of a kind." I took a liking to that lampshade and told my husband, "You know that's code don't you? It means, 'This is one ugly lampshade.'"

I bought it. It looked terrific on a lamp we had inherited from my father-in-law's college days.

But the curious thing about that little card was curious only to me. This, too, I explained to Michael later.

"You know what 'one of a kind' actually means? Think about it. Re-imagined literally wouldn't 'one of a kind' mean that the item so marked is merely one of a particular kind? So basically what they are saying is, 'Hey, look: This is a lampshade!'"

Idioms are fun.

A Reading Ramble and Reigning it In

Is it possible for me to slow it all down, to read fewer books, to sink right into them? I don't know if it is possible. I find that I am very impatient. I find that it isn't enough for me to be actively reading five different books at one time. There's always the urge to add in just one more.

Yesterday I wanted to read Kierkegaard. Why? Because someone somewhere said something that sounded something like something that he once wrote, and that made me hunger for Kierkegaard.

The day before I was reminded of all these people I wanted to study: Chesterton, McDonald, Lewis. If you know much about C.S. Lewis you get the idea. All these guys wrote all these books and they are deep. Why reminded? Because I read Walter Hooper's introduction to Lewis's published poems. Hooper writes that many of Lewis's prose works began their life in verse, and I went "Whoah. There is so much of this man I still don't know." He wasn't a great poet, at least that's what I've been told, but he had a passion for narrative poetry I knew nothing about. That got me thinking of all these men whose writings I dearly want to know.

There's always a flood of books to read; I've written of this before, but it remains, there is always a flood, and time is short and attentions are divided, and this is why I cannot settle down into reading only one book at a time.

But then this morning I read an interview WC Banfield did with Bobby McFerrin at the end of McFerrin's year and a half sabbatical. It was a true sabbatical for him, a year and a half away from the work and the worry and the world, and he said he needed to sit and think and hear. He said he needed to figure out why he was doing what he was doing, whether he was being nourished by his work or being merely drained by it. I think this is something for us all to consider, though even the most nourishing work cannot be consistently nourishing.

Last month I read Richard Foster's latest book on meditative prayer. In one chapter he spoke of the difficulty of presence. I know that when I sit quietly my thoughts are always going somewhere very far away. It may be plans or questions or analyses, those strivings to make sense of your own life, and these are so distracting. These many multitudinous thoughts are a distraction. Sometimes you need to sit and be, and this is such a challenge for us. Sometimes when we are sitting quietly we want so desperately for God to speak that we interrupt Him and interrupt ourselves. We guess at what He might be saying so that it becomes impossible to hear.

God sends me books, and I am constantly amazed at the interconnectedness I find among them. Books are good. They can be very good. But they run riot in my life, and can verge on becoming interruption instead of life imparting force. Actually, I kinda like the interruption.

Last year I wondered what would happen if I chose one book and really drank it in, reading it and it alone in all those available moments. I thought it would be Annie Dillard's The Living, and it's true that it would be a very good one to read in such a way. Since then I've probably read fifty books, so you can see how well that worked.

We wake up in the morning and we try it again, don't we? For me, cutting back on the number of books I read at one time would be a great discipline. To start a new book is an impulse, and one I only rarely deny. It is mostly a good impulse. Mostly.

Voice as Agency?

Every time I say I can't write right now, I feel like I'm whining, complaining...poor little me, I can't write. Maybe that's because I say it so often. Truth is, the ability to write comes and goes. I'll be "on" for a while...a whole month at a time, maybe. Sometimes even longer than that. And then the tap is turned, and even though there are thoughts, complaints, observations, clarities raging, there is no writing that can accommodate them. It isn't the thought that is lost. It is the voice. The thought is there, but the voice becomes choked into silence, and usually that silence comes because internal factors are in play. I think I've written here before about the idea that sickness sometimes indicates other, more secretive stresses, stresses you've kept hidden even from yourself. Maybe you get sick because you haven't been feeding your body properly, with rest and nourishment and exercise. Maybe you're sick because you're in conflict with your spouse and neither of you will unbend enough to retrieve your love and care for one another from the theoretical mist. Maybe you are sick because you want something specific from God that isn't as ultimately sustaining as what he has planned for you. I think my loss of voice is something similar to this. Or maybe I'm just tired. But I hope to retrieve my voice and soon.

My Writing Process

John Kelley asked me about my writing process this morning. My answer was that, um, I don't have one. Jim would tell me that I really ought to do something about that.

In the past I have had an idea, sat down, and written it, usually at 7:00 in the morning. The words just came more easily then. For a while I gave myself an hour every morning just to write. It was nice, but it never really progressed past process writing. None of that writing was ever published.

For a while I did some very intense note-taking, including a quantity of very careful Bible study. This generated a lot of writing as I riffed on things I was thinking in response to the text. None of that writing was ever published. Recently I have begun writing a comment, a blog post, anything really, over and over and over again, but nothing has come. Most of the time I've been stymied after about two sentences.

I surely would like to do some triage, figure out what the problem might be. I went on and on to my Dad the other day while we are at the pool, all of it concerning things I could be blogging about.

It still ain't happening.

Talk about being "long on diagnosis; short on cure." Except without the diagnosis part.

Morning Musings

Good morning, ya'll.  I'm waiting for the sun to come out this morning, so I can see what part of my yard lights up. My plan, conceived only moments ago, was to pay attention to the yard all day so I can figure out where the garden needs to go. You see, I only start thinking about the garden at the most awkward times of year. I begin to believe that if I wait to dig my garden until the proper moment, that moment will come and go with nothing having been done. I have to make what progress I can when I can. And learn from the results. I don't for one moment think that this approach would work for everyone.

Anyway, I've been watching and waiting since 5:30 this morning, and still the lite-brite patches of grass have not appeared, and I think, God, I'm ready today. So where's the light? Sometimes His only answer to a question like that is, "I love you." I don't know what He has planned for me today, but He does, so I'm just going to have to be okay with that.

My walking partner is soon to arrive.

Michael found an injured cat outside our home last night. We wait for its owner to open her door so we can together figure out what to do next.

God only knows what this day will hold.

The Never-Ending Quest for Routines That Work

The older I get, it seems, the more dependent on routines I become, and the longer it takes for me to recover when the routine becomes disrupted. In fact, I have a great deal of trouble settling into any kind of routine in the first place. Gotta do something about that.

There are responsibilities emerging in the coming year which will make routines more important than ever. The best thing I can do to prepare is to start working out my routines with determination, trying to build up that consistency of which I feel an ever-growing need. And yet I have to cultivate flexibility as well. There will always be distractions and disruptions. Always.

This week we had to leave town in the middle of the week. Two full days after arriving home, I feel un-ruddered. Just exactly how long is this routine-making going to take?

How about you? What kind of schedules or routines have you found to be most effective?