Archive for December, 2009

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December 27, 2009

The Monster Year-End Wrap Up & New Year’s Goals Post

It’s that time of year again, when I feel like I’ve got one foot planted in the previous year and one foot reaching towards the next, and there’s nothing but rushing water below me.  It’s comforting to know that we’re all straddling the same two ice floes and many of us are spending the last few days of 2009 reflecting. In that vein, before I do a bit of my own reflecting, I’d like to highlight some of the blog posts that I’ve found to be especially helpful in my thinking:

  • Joy at What I Weigh Today suggested that resolutions should reflect what we want more of in our lives, rather than less.
  • Andrea at Superhero Designs offered a end-of-year completion ritual, to put a seal on the year before staring the new one.
  • Julochka at Moments of Perfect Clarity summarized her year by reading through her blog posts and pulling the threads of her year together for her readers.
  • Jennifer Lee at wishstudio lists a variety of ways to commemorate the year.

I’m sure as we get closer to the new year, there will be more posts that shine a new light on my year’s end thinking. But I thought it important to mark what I’m thinking now.  During this week of convalescence , I’ve been thinking a lot about what I achieved (and didn’t achieve) last year and what I hope for 2010.

I don’t know if 2009 turned out the way I thought it would.  While it’s hard for me to tell from this vantage point, I think this may be the year that I can point to as a time of refocusing and re-evaluating. At the beginning of the year, I chose the word “essential” as part of the One Little Word practice. That word forced me to make a lot of choices about how I spend my time.  I ended up slashing and burning, removing the things that felt more like chores and less like essential responsibilities. I also bought and saved less things, which was liberating.

Thanks to that slash-and-burn, I’ve undergone a big transition in 2009.  Obviously, I transitioned from my old blog (9 to 5 Poet) to this new blog.  More significantly, I’ve moved from thinking of myself as a poet who has to work as a teacher to an educator engaged in her work who is also a poet/artist on the side. For me, this was the most difficult transition. It’s an enormous (but I think necessary) transition in my identity. I found myself asking, if I’m not a poet first, am I still a writer? Am I still a writer if I’m not writing that often? Despite these questions, I’m learning that if I take away the goal of publishing a book of poetry and replace it with living an engaged and creative life, then I am widening both my creative life and my work life.

Of course, I also transitioned back to being a student, this time as a graduate student in leadership studies. I’ve really enjoyed the way that my first class inspired me, but schooling is a significant time commitment. I have to remember that even though classes are every other weekend, the reading and papers need attention every single day.

As I integrate these shifts into my life in 2010, I’m left wondering what kind of creative life I want to lead. The danger is that I often neglect my creative life for other easier stress breaking pursuits.  To be blunt, after working a long day in the office or writing a 10-page paper, I would much rather plop my butt on the couch and surf channels than make a collage or write a poem.  While there will always be a place for my precious precious television, I think I need to re-evaluate how much time I spend in front of the flickering screen.

With that in mind, I’ve chosen “resource” as my One Little Word for 2010. (Ali hasn’t posted her 2010 One Little Word blog post yet, but I’ll link back once she does.) Now that I have  pared down my life to the essentials and kicked out much of the clutter, I want to focus on feeding the essentials with my collective resources of free time, creative energy, and money.  These resources are finite and I want to ensure that I am using them wisely. When using these resources this year, I’d like to ask myself:

  • Am I spending time in a way that feeds my creativity? If not, am I spending my time in an essential activity?
  • Am I using my creative energy to write and create when I can? If not, am I consciously finding ways to re-energize creatively?
  • Am I supporting other artists and small/local/ethical/sustainable businesses with my money?

Last year, I chose the word and three small goals.  The word, for me, was a driving force and the goals were less central. After reviewing my goals, I found that I actually did pretty well. While I didn’t write 3 poems a month (or even come close), I did shift my eating habits quite considerably to veggies/fruits/whole grains, and I think I tried to be kinder to myself. (That’s a really more of a life goal.) Since I would like to use the same format, here are my goals for 2010:

  1. Spend at least one hour per week on a non-work/non-school creative project. Rather than focusing on the product this year (3 poems – random number), I’ve picked a finite (and small) amount of time to build from. But it’s an easily obtainable and easy to track goal.I’d like to note that this number is a minimum, not a maximum.  As another note, blogging and tweeting does not count. I use my blogging and tweeting primarily to track my process and chronicle my creative interests.
  2. Track my creative pursuits on a weekly basis. I found that I was most successful in changing my eating habits once I began accurately tracking what I ate. I could look back at the day and say yes, I did eat at least 5 fruits of veggies today, but oops, I didn’t have any dairy. Once I began that habit, I was able to notice my eating trends and make significant and positive changes.
  3. Reconnect to my body. Thanks to my very unexpected year of knee injury, I feel I’ve disconnected from my body. Of course, almost anyone would check out physically if they’ve had a traumatic knee injury, followed by a major knee surgery, and had to wear 3 different knee braces within 6 months.  But I think that these traumas have exacerbated my tendencies to be more intellectual than physical. So, as my body heals and gets stronger, I want to engage in the things that remind me that I have a body that enjoys moving.

There it is – 2010 will be my Year of Resources.  I’m hoping that I can keep this focus and my goals up front. But I also know that the real work happens when I forget them, at least a little bit, and begin evolving on my own.  It’ll be interesting to stand back here at the same time next year and see how focusing on my resources changed me.

Posted in Accountability, Resources | 6 Comments »

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December 25, 2009

During the Snowstorm

Here in Minneapolis, we are on Day 2 of the Great Christmas Snowstorm of ’09. This 15-20 inch storm will surely rival the Great Halloween Snowstorm of ’93, which happened a year before I moved here.  Since it’s snowy, slushy, and generally inhospitable to walking on crutches outside, we stayed inside today.

Lucky for me, my honey bought me a great Christmas gift – rub-on decals. He found me a really cute set of decals made by Third Drawer Down, which he purchased at one of our favorite shops in Minneapolis, ROBOTlove. The decals included the lovely girl you see above at the desk (I just had to use her) as well as more animals, more books, and small school supplies.

As soon as I saw the decals, I wanted to try them out, so I created a new journal cover, pictured above.  The handwritten caption, which is practically illegible in this picture reads “Today, she thought it best to stay inside.” I’ve been journal-less for several months, ever since one of my lovely cats puked all over my last journal. This is the first time I’ve felt like creating a new journal, so it was darn lucky that I had an extra blank journal lying around for the occasion.

After this first use, I am totally in love with decals.  They’re amazingly easy to transfer and they create images that I would never be able to draw by hand in a million years.  While I used these decals on paper, they can be transferred to almost any material. I can’t decide what else I’ll use these for, but I’m sure I’ll think of something. My hubby says that they have a wide variety of these decals at ROBOTlove, so once it dries up outside, I’m heading down there to find some more fun.

I hope your Christmas allowed you some creative fun time too!

Posted in Art, Filling My Well | Comments Off

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December 24, 2009

On Clutter & George Clooney

Yesterday, my husband and I were able to venture out to the real world to see a movie.  Despite all of the hype surrounding Avatar, we chose to see Up in the Air. We made the right choice.

Good movies (to me) are the ones that make me reflect upon my life. They make me ask: Have I made the right choice or right choices? Am I living my life in the right way? In Up in the Air, the main character (played by George Clooney) espouses a pretty simple, business-speak philosophy: What’s in your backpack? He sees all of us as turtles, carrying every thing we’ve ever owned, every person we ever care for, on our backs. All of these things slow us down, holds us back from our real lives that are always just beyond our reach.  Of course, as the movie progresses, he is able to distinguish between the unneccessary things that hold us back and the necessary things that make our lives worth living.

At the beginning of the movie, I admired this character’s portability. Everything he needed in life could be fit into a business travel wheel bag. He packed it with precision and care. He carried it everywhere.  I have always longed to be that light, to be the person who can distill my life to its essentials.

In actuality, I am a hoarder.  Not reality-tv-series level or anything, but I like to collect stuff. It shows in my life. My purse or bag is always crammed with receipts that I no longer need, silverware,  random items I may or may not use in my travels.  My home is no better. I collect books like they’re going out of style, I have piles of paperwork I mean to file (but forget to) lying on my desk. I have mementos, half-finished projects, and candles I rarely light littered throughout our condo. My half of the bedroom closet is a scary, haphazard sort of place.  I’ve always wondered what would happen if I just got rid of it all, burned it up as Clooney’s character suggests in the movie, and start over.  What would I keep?

Of course, we learn that Clooney’s character packed too light, that he leaves too much behind. He cuts out the crap, the bulky collections, the non-essentials, but he also cuts out the people he wants to love. I have zero desire to cut people from my life, even on my most introverted days.

I have to believe that there’s some sort of middle ground between saving and discarding that I haven’t found yet. I  know that I connect the things in my life to memories of my past experiences and my identity.  Take my book collection, for instance. (Don’t really. You can’t have it.)  It’s always expanding and contracting.  Every time we try to sell off some of our books, I try to imagine what my “finished library” would look like, what it would say about my reading tastes and personal past. Instead, the library is always in progress, always a reflection of the things I’m reading and thinking about now and in a vague back then. We have a finite space (our 900 square foot condo) in which we can only store so many books, contain only some of the symbols of our interests.

I’ve been thinking about this dilemma all morning. Not just about my books, but about all of my living spaces, physical and emotional. What are the things that I want to retain, that reflect who I am right now?  What are the things I can shed, without judgement or regret, the things that are no longer me? Of the things that I keep, how do I want to keep them, so that they are displayed with care and precision? These are the questions that are, for me, the hardest to answer.

Posted in Knowing Myself, Literature, Movies, Pop Culture | Comments Off

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December 22, 2009

Learning to Manage Your Pageantry

What You Should Know About Managing Pageantry

(Types of Pageantry)

Pageantry is a sensation that hurts. Pageantry
can last less than 3 to 6 months

(acute) last a long time (chronic)
or be severe and intense (breakthrough).

Pageantry can come and go
with injury
recovery
and/or illness.

(Your Right to Pageantry Management)

All patients have the right
to have their pageantry managed.
Proper treatment of pageantry is necessary
for you to achieve the best results.

If you don’t think your pageantry
is being treated well, please tell

your nurse or doctor. He or she
will talk with you
about your pageantry and your pageantry
management needs.

(The Pageantry Scale)

Using a number scale to rate your pageantry
will help the health care team members
know how severe
your pageantry is.

At the hospital, your health care team members
may ask you to rate your pageantry
on a scale, with:

0 meaning no pageantry
4 meaning moderate pageantry
6 meaning severe pageantry
10 meaning the worst pageantry

(Your Role in Managing Pageantry)

Since you are the only person who knows
where and how severe your pageantry is,
you have an important part
in managing your pageantry.

If you have pageantry, tell your nurse or doctor.

****

When I got to the hospital on Friday, they handed me a flurry of brochures and forms. Of course, I was too nervous to read them all, but one title stood out to me. “Pain is a sensation that hurts.” When I read the tag line, I thought: No shit.  After surgery, I’ve found that definition to be very helpful.  When you have a surgery that basically rearranges one part of your body, you experience a lot of different sensations.  Not all of them hurt.

For the past few days, I’ve been able to use that definition to check in with myself. Is this a pain-sensation or just a sensation? Some of them have been just sensations, but others have definitely fallen into the pain-sensation category. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve had relatively few strong pain-sensations.

This morning, I decided to hunt for that brochure and turn it into a poem, because it’s helped me to focus on something other than the various sensations I’ve experienced.  After finding the brochure online, I decided to do an S+7-styleexperiment.

Whenever I do S+7, I love to cheat – because after all, it’s my poem.  To do S+7 traditionally, you replace all of the nouns in a found text with the noun seven spaces later in the dictionary. You create line breaks and then you have a poem.  In the poem above, I only replaced one noun. Since I didn’t like the noun seven spaces after pain, I chose to go seven spaces before.  Pain became pageantry.  I created line breaks, omitted some phrases and words, and there’s my poem.

I really love this word substitution.  It’s nothing short of magic to transform a distressing sensation in a particular part of the body into a spectacular display; pomp .

Posted in Body Awareness, Drafts, Poetry | Comments Off

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December 21, 2009

Things You Learn About Surgery

Things You Learn About Surgery

(in no particular order)

  1. The worst part of surgery is waiting for it to start, listening to your heart rate race in high-pitched beeps.
  2. Your orthopedic surgeon and your anesthesiologist will both confirm the part that they will operate on, label it with their initials.
  3. You will feel like a side of beef, divided for slaughter.
  4. Your husband will get nervous, wish he claimed parts for his own.
  5. When your surgeon’s initials are A-S-K, those letters will stare back at you, implore you to ask.
  6. The next worst part is everything that comes afterwards.
  7. When you’re in pain, everything feels like a poem.
  8. When you’re on pain medication, you will be too tired to write it.
  9. All of this time, you’ve taken the daily actions – walking, bathing, sleeping – for granted.
  10. After surgery, you will be distilled to the basics of existence, and they will be difficult.
  11. Everything will make you tired and hungry.
  12. You will discover your husband’s untapped reserves of love, patience and nurturing, if you’re lucky.
  13. You will feel like you are taking advantage.
  14. It’s still hard for you to be gentle with yourself, even after a trauma.
  15. You will swear to work on it, and then insist on doing everything for yourself.

****

I’ve been trying to write bits of this poem in the last few days, in moments of energy and lucidity, and then I take another nap.  When I woke up at 2 AM last night, I began composing it (again) in my head and I was finally awake enough to write it down.  I’m thinking that there’s more to come off of this surgery experience, but this is what I have for now.

Posted in Body Awareness, Drafts, Poetry | 2 Comments »

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December 17, 2009

On Preparing for the Unknown

Tomorrow’s my big day, my surgery day. As I predicted, the week has flown by much too quickly. In my spare moments, I’ve been simultaneously preparing for my convalescence and denying the need for it.  Since it’s been so difficult to determine what I’ll want to do and when I’ll want do it, I’ve been over-preparing. It is my nature, as a planner first.

Some of the things I’ve been preparing:

  • Final Day Activities - My surgery isn’t until the afternoon, but not late enough in the afternoon to do anything fun before hand. So, I’m going to mail off some Christmas presents to family and go to the DMV to update my driver’s license. I can’t eat all day before my surgery, which kind of sucks, so I’m going to find a nice late night happy hour tonight and then tomorrow pick up some post-surgery cupcakes as a treat. If I must have surgery (which I must), I’m going to at least have some buttercream waiting for me on the other side.
  • Reading material – I’m halfway through book 5 of the Jane Wheel mysteries and I’m hoping my school library has more.  I’ve purchased all but one of the Buffy Season 8 comics that I’ve missed while in grad school this fall.  I also have on my list a memoir of a curandera called Woman Who Glows in the Dark and several mysteries.
  • Viewing material – I recently completed my Buffy collection, so if I want I can re-watch those shows. I also have season 5 of Lost, and season 4 of Weeds.  I also learned that Hulu has movies that you can subscribe to, so I went a little hog-wild there.  I’ve set aside Taxi Driver, Cry Baby, Slacker, a Nelson Mandela documentary, Chaplin, Super Size Me, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and a couple more. I don’t know what I’ll want to watch out of these, but I like the diversity of options.

After all this preparing (and cleaning the condo to boot), there’s nothing left but the wait. My strategy for preparing for this surgery thus far is to fill my life with busy-ness so that I don’t have to think about the inevitable. (When I think about it, that’s  my strategy for everything.  Not the healthiest, but there it is.)  I’m hoping that within all this busy-ness, before and after, I can take some time to relax, be gentle with myself, and allow myself to heal.  Here’s to hoping.

Posted in Body Awareness, Knowing Myself, Pop Culture | 1 Comment »

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December 6, 2009

The Countdown

Around this time of year, the best way to survive the cold is to look for the next big event. Sure Halloween is fun, but then you get to anticipate Thanksgiving. While Thanksgiving sure was nice, it won’t be as awesome as Christmas.  After Christmas, there’s New Year’s, my birthday, my husband’s birthday and then only one more month until spring.  This constant anticipatory thinking helps to make the bitter cold manageable.

This year, my anticipation train has been seriously derailed. Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone, the next thing for me to look forward to is not Christmas.  See, in less than two weeks, I’m having major knee surgery.  I remembered that this Friday, when I looked forward to my other upcoming Fridays, and it hit me that I have a big event coming up…in two Fridays.

(Don’t worry - I won’t go into all the gory details. Nor am I posting this for sympathy. Right now, this is the most significant part of my life and it’s taking over most of my thoughts.  I feel like I need to mark this down and give space for my nervous anticipation, so that it doesn’t completely consume me.)

I’ve known that this surgery is coming since October, but it’s been easy to forget, what with my job and the holidays.  But now, I keep trying to make plans for the rest of the month, and I’m constantly hit with this deadline that seems final.  December 19 – the day after my surgery – apparently is the most awesome day in Minnesota. There’s a MNRG bout, a reading by a local chef and cookbook author, and probably countless other super-fantastic events that I will not attend.

I think the hardest part for me in all of this anticipation is that I don’t know what comes after the surgery. I understand what’s going to be happening during the surgery, even though I will be (blessedly) passed out for the whole thing.  But what about after? I’ll be in crutches and a leg brace, so mobility will be slightly limited, but how much pain will I be in?  How long will I have to use narcotic pain medication, as opposed to heavy-duty Tylenol or good old-fashioned Midwestern silent endurance?  When will I feel like going out of my house again? How long will I be wearing pajamas and watching Lost and Buffy on my couch?  I know from my last knee surgery, which was much less invasive, that I don’t enjoy pain medication all that much and I’m not a very patient convalesce-er, so I think my instinct will be to wean earlier rather than later. But I just don’t know what earlier means.

Since I have all of these unknowns,  my whole calendar is just a big black hole for at least two weeks. And, since I’m so devoted to think about what’s coming ahead, this is driving me a little crazy.  December 18 happens and then nothing else can happen after that.  So, I’ve got to cram all of my good times into the days before December 18, which puts pressure on all of the days before to be The Best Days Ever.  I’ve got to have at least one nice date with my husband and fun with my friends and all of my day job work done and a level of completion on some creative projects I’m tinkering with, and…and…and.   Forcing all of the activity into the next few weeks means that December 18 will come more quickly and then I’m left with the big unknowns again.

I know that all of this is temporary, which is of course part of the problem, and December 18 will just happen. I’ll have days after that and I’ll learn what those days will be like when they get here.  (My little planner brain just whines, yeah, but how will I prepare for that?) At some point, I will be able to have a life that’s not 100% focused on my knee. After all, that’s the point of this surgery. Sometime around February, I’ll be able to burn the stupid knee brace that I’ve been wearing since July (ugh) and I’ll be able to walk and exercise normally. I’ve just got to learn to live with the in-between time, at least for a little while.

Posted in Body Awareness, Knowing Myself | 2 Comments »

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December 4, 2009

Protected: Awakening Potential through Team Leadership in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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