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a journal |
 This book is intended as a place to blog about my life and things I'm interested in and answers to prompts from various blog prompt sites here on WDC, including "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  and "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" I'm not sure yet what it'll turn into, but I'm going to have fun figuring it out. |
| Prompt: “The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.” ― Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality- Are heroes cowards inside? What do you think? I agree because people who don’t feel fear don’t have the ability to overcome fear, and that ability is what makes a hero. Being scared senseless and moving forward into greatness anyway. And I think that most heroes don’t realize it. They see the inside of their heads, the doubts and insecurities that we all face and they don’t see the shining stars that others can see. There are people who are called heroes who aren’t. The real heroes are quiet and doubtful and certain that other people don’t see the person they really are inside. Because the kind of vanity that it takes to call yourself a hero is the kind of vanity that conceals a worse kind of self doubt. I also agree with another writer, who said it’s much more difficult to live with yourself when your public honor is shining but your personal honor is in tatters—for one thing it’s much harder to look at yourself in the mirror. But when your personal honor is intact, it doesn’t matter what the world thinks. I paraphrased terribly—but it was Lois McMaster Bujold. But I have to go run after kids. I’m heading back home next Monday. I hope the illness that I can feel creeping in on me will hold off until then. |
| The new normal. You have something devastating happen to you and you have to get your life back to normal. Have you ever had a new normal? Yes. That’s the short answer, but the longer answer is yes, I have. Over and over. The biggest new normal that I’ve had to live with for the past ten years is the diabetes. Overnight I had a new way of eating, a new medication, a new set of markers that guided my days, new habits, new obsessions. And it was a definite lifestyle change. I had to do it because what I had been doing in the past was obviously not working any more. But there have been others. Every time I move, there’s a new house, new friends, new room, new town, new library. Going to college for the first time was a new normal. Coming back home after living in England for eighteen months. Going to England. My life has been filled with change. Right now, my normal involves seven children and sleeping on the couch. Who knows what my next normal will be? |
| "We don't stop going to school when we graduate." Carol Burnett Do you agree with this quote? I completely agree. We need to spend our entire lives in learning because when we stop, we’re dead. That’s one reason that I like to read so much and the reason that I like to write. Sometimes, the best way to figure out what I think about something is to write it out . . . to put my thoughts into words so that I realize what those thoughts are. I haven’t been blogging much lately. Too much going on, and there are children still awake right now reading over my shoulder as a write. It’s kind of frustrating, actually, because I don’t like to write with an audience. But I guess I make him let me watch him do his school work, so it’s par for the course. My sister-in-law homeschools (my brother does too, except here we’re dealing with the main breadwinner vs. the person who drums learning into some frustrating little heads), and because the baby is three weeks old and she’s still on bedrest, I’ve been taking over some of the pushing. She does it much better than me, of course. She knows what they’re capable of and how to coerce them into doing it, even if it does take all day. Home school has some advantages over the school I went to . . .for one thing, it’s supposed to have only a short period of formula learning followed by long periods of learning through activities and daily life. In other words, they’re being prepared to learn through their lives. I just wish it was easier to convince them that it was important NOW. Because the little eavesdropper in particular is as frustrating as my baby sister was when I helped her with her homework every night for a year while she struggled with dyslexia and thinking that she was stupid. She wasn’t. He isn’t. He’s just trying my last nerve and if he doesn’t go to bed soon, I’m going to do something nasty. Yes, I’m talking to you, you little foolish person laughing at what I’m writing right now. I would just like to also comment that this isn’t hard to write. It’s not difficult to come up with sentences in response to a prompt. Here I am, I wrote for less than five minutes about learning (or going to school after graduation—or Carol Burnett who is a funny lady that I wouldn’t mind getting another thought from in the future) and I have five paragraphs. My little eavesdropper sees a prompt and his mind goes completely blank. Trying to get him to write complete sentences is like pulling teeth out of his mouth . . . it involves pain and possibly blood. Speaking of blood, we had a bloody nose this morning because of (a different) child who got overexcited and managed to hit his nose into a table. I didn’t know that it was possible to give yourself a bloody nose, but I have a talented family. He was in the middle of an online lesson, and his teacher offered to let him stop, but he wanted to continue. Now, that’s learning beyond schooling. But I have an eight year old to terrorize and send to bed. So that I can sleep. I'm tired. And the annoying thing is that I have a hard time sleeping if the kids are up. And he refuses to sleep. And he bruises me and refuses to do chores and hits his little siblings and is generally misbehaving which is probably because he wants more attention, but I can't reward disobedience. So, he better get to bed. NOW. |
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