Category: observations/thoughts (Page 8 of 12)

On Tidying and Stuff and Resisting “More”

I’ve been trying to Kondo my stuff for over a year. This is partly because I have too much stuff and want to minimize, partly because all my stuff is making it hard for me to keep a (relatively) clean house, and because clutter and an unclean house give me anxiety. I’m also doing it because I want my husband and children to perhaps see my example and follow suit. I’m hoping our house in general can become tidier and therefore more comfortable.

I don’t need a house that is uber-minimalist, not by any means. I like piles of books stacked up on desks and shelves. I like random sticky notes stuck all over the place and tons of kiddo art hanging from the refrigerator. I like that we have an art room that is messy and an art shelf that is wonderfully helter-skelter. But what I don’t like is the feeling of my stuff closing in and creeping all around me like a black pudding. I want to be able to breath. And to dust a room without having to lift fifty million things.

So I’ve been Kondo-ing, but it’s going slow. I did the clothes pretty easily, but then I’ve never been particularly attached to my clothing. Books weren’t hard either because I basically kept everything. (Okay, that is an exaggeration, but  honestly, I didn’t get rid of many books. They are the objects that “spark” the most joy.)

Paper — the category Marie Kondo says is the easiest — has proven to be the hardest so far. This has to do with the fact that I have a lot of drafts of my writing sitting in boxes, and notebooks from years past, and old magazines and cut outs that I plan to use one day for… something (maybe making zines?), so it’s not just a matter of shredding a bunch of old credit card statements and outdated bills. Also, my kids make art at an incredible level — and they often refuse to throw any of it in the recycling box — so we have boxes and boxes of their drawings and art projects. I want to keep some of their things for sentimental reasons, yes, but honestly, most of it needs to go. I feel bad though because this project was supposed to be about tidying my own stuff, not my kids’. Nevertheless, if I’m going to have any sanity, I need to tidy some of their artwork. Remember, for me clutter = anxiety.

So it’s back to the old grindstone, trying to sort my way through all these papers.

The latest installment of The Convivial Society newsletter couldn’t have come at a better time now that I’m rededicating myself to Kondo-ing. In this issue, Sacasas explores the way our economic system and society program us to want and need more and more stuff, and while our culture is perhaps very good at providing for our material needs, it’s less good at satisfying immaterial needs:

This is one of the most perverse effects of contemporary society. People need food, water, shelter, etc. These are, of course, material needs we cannot do without. Profound suffering accompanies their absence. But there are other critical needs which are nonmaterial in nature and thus cannot be simply manufactured and distributed. Your list and mine of what these might be will differ in the details of the enumeration, but I suspect we would both agree that such needs exist and that their absence also entails profound suffering. Material deprivations manifest materially. You can see when someone is being starved. Nonmaterial deprivations typically manifest non-materially. Someone who looks perfectly healthy may bear a crushing load of loneliness, desperation, or anxiety. I would argue that while modern societies may be particularly adept at the satisfaction of material needs (4), they are also structured so that nonmaterial needs are more likely [to] go unmet. These two tendencies are not unrelated. The relative degree of success on the material front depends upon conditions that undermine the satisfaction of nonmaterial needs.

The newsletter goes into much more depth than I’m quoting here, but what struck me about it was that even though I don’t think of myself as being particularly materialistic, my family’s life is still very much centered around material goods. My kids have a woeful amount of toys, so much so that they have taken over the living room. My husband and I buy entertainment-based stuff all the time: board games, role-playing games, gadgets, gear, books, DVDs, CDs, LPs, etc. I tell myself it’s okay to buy these things because these are the things we like, these are the things that “spark joy,” but what if I asked myself a different question? What if I asked myself whether this new CD or record album or book was necessary to my happiness?

I’m quite confident that my answer, in almost every instance, would be “no.” No, I do not need that CD or record album or book to be happy. I can find joy without it. In fact, we have so many books and CDs and records we’ve never even read or listened to that we could probably spend the rest of our lives just making our way through the stuff we already have. And on top of that, we could probably spend the rest of our lives making our own music and telling our own stories and not consuming anyone else’s at all. My husband and I can both play several instruments. We have musical instruments all over the house. We both love storytelling (and related pursuits like puppetry). We could entertain ourselves and our kids without any consumer products at all (as wonderful as many of them are).

But are we willing to live that kind of austerity? And if not, why not? Is it because when we feel an urge for something new, we know we can satisfy it, and there’s nothing really stopping us? How can we stop ourselves when the newest gadget or gear is just a click away?

My desire for more tidiness is one such antidote to the accumulation of stuff, but as a family, we don’t live an anti-materialist life. We — all of us, myself included — accept the default of our economy which is that if you can afford it, there’s nothing wrong with satisfying your desires by getting something new. After all, that newest DCC RPG product looks fun and we love to play role-playing games, so why not? After all, listening to music is fun and we’ll spend hours listening to that new Fleet Foxes album, so why not? I’m not even saying these products are bad or unworthy of purchase, but when we already have a lot of stuff, are they really necessary? Why aren’t we content with the DCC RPG stuff we already have? Why aren’t we content with listening to the four Fleet Foxes albums we already own?

The lure of novelty, of newness, as well as the fear of missing out, are strong pulls on our desire. Austerity and self-denial do not come easily. You’d think, since we’re Catholics, we’d be pretty good at self-denial, and I guess we are when it comes to things like Lenten sacrifices and no meat on Fridays, but when it comes to the things we really love — the books, and music, and games — then it gets a lot harder to deny one’s wants and be content with what one has.

I have no answer to give. I’m lost in the muddle of trying to declutter and minimize my stuff, but I don’t know if I’m ready to stop buying. Of course, I have to buy some things — food, clothing, toilet paper — but can I call a moratorium on buying entertainment products? Can I spend a year without buying a new book or a new game? Can I spend the next ten years?

After all, we have these places called libraries. I can always just check out books I want to read. I can check out DVDs too. And we have enough role-playing stuff already in our possession to last a lifetime.

In many ways, our desire for more stuff inhibits our ability to create. There’s nothing stopping us from making our own music or inventing our own games. There’s nothing stopping us from even making our own movies.

But of course, creating and consuming are two different activities, and they do fulfill two different needs. There’s input and output, after all. But nevertheless, perhaps we need to do more output to balance the scales.

Again, I’m not sure of the answer. I know I want to reject consumerism as much as possible and help my kids to do the same, but I also know how weak and flawed we are as humans. I suppose all I can do is try. I can keep Kondo-ing, and I can keep resisting the urge to satisfy my every entertainment whim. I can invite my children to create more and consume less. I myself can create more and consume less.

I can try saying, “‘That’s enough, thanks,'” to myself and to the marketplace. I have to believe it will be worth the effort.

Summer Drift

Summer is slowly whittling away…

I have reached the half-way point for summer break (gotta go back to work on August 10), and yet there’s still so much I want to do: the beach, Greenfield Village, the Detroit Zoo, up north again, finish a short story, finish Avalon Summer, finish Gates to Illvelion, read more books (so many books!). It’s not like this summer has been sloppy or anything — we’ve actually done quite a bit. But there’s so much more that I want to do. I can’t figure out why it feels like the summer days have slipped through my fingers…

Maybe it’s because I HAVE done so much already. Maybe that sense of going places and doing things has caused a kind of drift, like when one is swimming and the tide slowly carries one farther and farther from shore. Summer drift has pulled me out past the breakers.

Last summer, we stayed home and did mostly nothing. We tried to be cautious because of Covid. We embraced peak Idler. (It also helped that I had been working from home since March and so spring simply melded into summer and it all felt like a hazy fog of time.)

This summer, of course, now that I’m vaccinated, and our local Covid numbers are low, we feel safer, and we’ve ventured forth. So instead of a hazy fog of time, we’re in a rip tide. Time has sped up. We are racing toward the end without any feeling that time has passed. This moment is the same moment as the first summer day; June 1st and July 7th are two points on the line, but we’re moving so quickly, they feel the same. All points are the same. And when summer ends and I go back to teaching, it will feel as if no days have passed, as if summer has just started.

But of course, summer will have ended. And I still have so much to do.

Looking for the early 1990s

e13d13798c2b8c46b9076c25651e2b1bThe 1980s spilled into the early 90s.

This is a phenomenon we see throughout the 20th century. The early 60s were a continuation of the 1950s (until Kennedy was assassinated). The early 70s continued the tumultuous counter-culture of the 1960s (until withdrawal from Vietnam).

And the early 90s were one last flourishing of the tubular 80s: neon was still en vogue (though perhaps declining); jangly college rock was still ascendant; hip-hip was still funny and loose and political; for me, Nickelodeon still represented the kid-centric spirit of the age, with its slime and its orange splat and its strangeness.

The 1980s were the decade of strange: Pee-Wee Herman, They Might Be Giants, Dungeons & Dragons, Garbage Pail Kids. The early 90s were strange too; Ren & Stimpy were born, and Dick Tracy came to the big screen, and R.E.M. could sing about “Shiny Happy People.”

The early 90s are R.E.M. to me. The early 90s are color-change t-shirts. Super Soakers.

First emerging in the 1980s, “nerd kid culture” took wing in the early 90s. The dweebs from all those John Hughes movies gave us permission to be proud pre-teen dorks in the early 90s. Drop Dead Fred told us to go play with our imaginary friends, and Salute Your Shorts invited us to make summer camp adventures in our own backyards.

The backyard was still a world in the early 90s. So were sidewalks and community swimming pools. So was candy from the corner store.

Do I sound ancient? Do I sound like I’m murmuring “the good old days”?

Well, I am. If today is all flatness, then the 1990s were the last decade of dunes and divots and bumps. It was a pimpled decade — especially the early 90s — not yet completely air-brushed.

Everything is on the internet now, or so we tell ourselves. Hundreds of thousands of websites and articles and listicles about the 1990s, but none of them really contain the early 90s. Not my early 90s, anyway.

My early 90s are not these flattened versions, these smoothed out versions that we see reflected back at us today, all these websites showing us the same things. My early 90s doesn’t exist on the internet. It can’t.

It’s too personal, too wrapped up in the strange confluence of pop culture and real, lived experiences that make my memories my own. When we write about these decades in our usual flattened way on the internet, we reduce them to the culture of the time, to advertisements and trends. But these don’t capture the experience of living through a time period. They don’t reveal what it felt like to live in that era.

Maybe this is why I decided to write Avalon Summer, my weird memoir-that’s-not-a-memoir. I wanted to see if I could capture the experience of my childhood. Stories, after all, aren’t websites or articles or listicles. Perhaps narrative is the only way we can really express the lived experiences of our memories.

Looking for the early 90s is quixotic. It only exists inside my head, just as it only exists inside your head, if you were lucky enough to be alive back then. I don’t know why I want to write about it, except somehow, I want you to understand. I want you to go looking for the early 90s too. It won’t be found in a “You Might Be a 90s Kid” video or a pop culture website. It can’t be found on the internet at all.

And that’s why we have to find it.

Readying Myself for the Circle

Every school year as spring gets under way, I begin thinking in earnest about the next school year. Looking back on all the mistakes I’ve made and contriving ways to do better next year. Figuring out new lesson plans, new texts to read with the students, new methods and such. I do it every year; before the current term is over, I’m already on my way to the next one. By April, I’m ready to chuck everything and restart in September. I suppose it’s my way of renewal, of keeping myself on my toes, of trying constantly to improve. I want to be good at my job. I want to get better. So I start looking back at what I did wrong and try figuring out how to make it right.

Except this year, when I wasn’t even sure I’d return to teaching at all. That was in December/January. I was having an existential crisis (which I tend to have every few years or so), and I wondered if my dedication to teaching was waning. I had been lured by the work-from-home days of early COVID and started looking for ways to get out of teaching. I was ready, I told myself.

But I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t even very willing. I knew this because I was still reading tons of books and articles about teaching, pedagogy, schooling and unschooling, education philosophy, “how to be a better teacher,” all that jazz, and I was still thinking like a teacher: How can I share this with my students? What’s the best way assess their work? Why is learning important? What is worth learning? A lot of my mental space was taken up with teacher-y stuff, and I found myself not disengaged but reengaged, recommitted.

It helped that I started forming the habit of daily fiction writing (and blogging!). One of my biggest reasons for wanting to leave teaching was the fact that I seemed to lack any meaningful time for my own creative writing. I felt like my fiction writing was drifting further and further out to sea and I was standing on the shore, helpless and abandoned. So, of course, I had a grass is greener moment (or several) as I pictured myself working from home and having copious amounts of free time in which to write.

But as we all know about that green grass on the other side: it’s been spray-painted on.

Once I got into the groove and started writing more each day, I discovered that teaching wasn’t what was making me gloomy, it was the fact that my writing had fallen by the wayside. Once my writing was back on-track, teaching no longer felt like a terrible grind. It has immense perks, not least of which that I get to spend a good chunk of my time talking to students about writing and helping them develop their own skills as writers and readers. The other perk is that I get to spend my time thinking about big ideas, about literature and politics and language — all things I enjoy thinking about. And finally, I get to spend my time with the students, who are funny, passionate, goofy, clever, insightful, and kind. And I get to work on being kind too, and patient, and compassionate. It’s good for my immortal soul in that way.

All of this is an immense preamble to my main point, which is this: I think I am at last ready to embrace the “Harkness Circle” in all my classes (with one large caveat: this will be a Harkness Circle on my own terms; see below).

Until now, I’ve been using it as one tool among many; every few days we’ll have our “Harkness Discussion” and the students will lead the discussion and I’ll take notes and we’ll all pretend like we’re doing something important and educational, but in reality, we all know this is just a performance, just one more thing to enact in our elaborately designed game of “playing school.” I’m not saying these discussion aren’t sometimes really excellent. They are. Sometimes the insights and ideas are surprising and astounding. I’ve come away from some of these discussions seeing new things about a novel or a poem that I never would have thought of on my own, and that is all due to the ingenuity and insight of the students.

So, it’s not like the Harkness discussions I do now are garbage. They’re not.

But there’s something lacking in them because they are simply one thing among many. They are days to endure for students who don’t like them, and they are days that feel different from all the other days in our week or our month. They stand out, and not always in a good way.

What I’ve decided is that I need to stop making these discussions just one of the many tricks in my bag. Instead, I need to focus my entire classroom around them.

Everyday, students will enter my room and they will find a seat at the circle. (Side note: this year, because of COVID, we can’t have the desks arranged in a circle; this has severely hampered the discussions because students can’t face each other. I pray to God that next year we can arrange the desks how we like.) After students enter the circle, they will write for a few minutes to clear their heads or prepare for our discussion. And then, with myself usually seated amongst them (but not necessarily always), the discussion can begin. I may start it. I may ask someone else to start it. I may propose a question or have students begin sharing their commentaries on the reading. I may have a student share her writing and we conduct a writing workshop on it. I may just have the students ask me questions or tell me what they want to talk about. But whatever we do to facilitate the discussion, each day we’ll meet in the circle. It will be our thing. Not just a card trick we do every few days to impress, but the very air we breathe, the sun around which we revolve.

This is where my caveat comes in. One problem I’ve always had with Harkness is that the teacher is supposed to fade into the background. This is how it had been presented to me by other faculty and some articles I’d read. But after a bit more training and reading some published work from Phillips Exeter Academy teachers themselves, I’ve come to see that the teacher doesn’t have to disappear (in fact, she probably shouldn’t, most of the time). The teacher can be in the circle too. She doesn’t have to always stay, but she doesn’t have to disappear either.

One thing that’s been missing from my classes this year (and this is mostly due to the COVID restrictions we have in place) is the spontaneity with which I like to teach. I always imagined the Harkness discussions as being somewhat formal; they weren’t authentic discussions, but instead these rigid performances where everyone tried to score her three points. They had topics that were to be discussed or a text or whatever. But they weren’t supposed to veer, they weren’t supposed to swerve.

I reject that. I want swerves. I like looseness. I want discussions to be natural and real. And my voice as the teacher is part of that realness. I’m part of the class too, not just an overseer. My voice might be needed, just as the voices of the students are needed. For me, the circle is more important than the method. By being in the circle everyday, by being able to see each other’s faces and talk directly to each other, to allow that kind of connection to happen in the circle, that is the important thing. That is what I want to embrace. Disappearing into the aether or pretending I don’t have opinions or ideas doesn’t feel right. If I’m in the circle, then I’m in the circle.

This doesn’t mean I lecture in the circle while the students all stare off into space. It simply means I’m part of the discussion too. Sometimes the students need to hear my voice, my ideas, my idiosyncrasies. All of us our necessary, including the teacher.

And it reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: the importance of design. The way we set up our classrooms matters. The way we design our spaces matters. One of the most important things I plan to do next year is keep my desks in a circle. The circle matters. It is the means by which we will engage with one another. It IS the pedagogy, in a sense.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at. My late spring reassessment and preparation for next year has sprung these seedlings. I hope I’ll get to see if they flower next fall.

Poem #10

She’d said she wanted to go back to Naples one more time.

She’d said FDR would always be her president.

She’d said things about my Uncle Leonard

that I didn’t quite understand.

At her death, I was home, the football game on TV.

They’d said she had died.

I’d said something unremarkable because

that was all my lips could say.

It came out all wrong.

It was like the salt sea waters had choked me,

the waves crashing the shoreline of Ischia,

and gray water and rocks.

 

[This poem came from a writing exercise that we did in the Exeter Humanities Institute online pilot program that I’m participating in. We started with a poem written by someone else, and then after reading it aloud several times, each of us taking turns with a line or a phrase or a sentence, we had to choose one line or one fragment of a line and make it the start of our own poem. I took the simple fragment of a line: “she’d said.”

The original poem had been about an aunt, so then I thought about my own great-aunt. I had been thinking about her earlier in the day, while showing a film to my students. It was an old movie — 1934’s Imitation of Life — and the movie famously ends with a funeral procession. During the film, I had been thinking about — and regretting — that I have often been absent from the deathbeds of my family members. As the day wore on, however, my mind moved on to other things: grading papers, making dinner, getting the kids ready for their sleepover at Grandma’s.

I knew I had this online class to attend, but I hadn’t been thinking about Imitation of Life or my great-aunt or anything beforehand. And then we read the original poem together, which really had nothing to do with my own aunt, but it triggered memories for me. It helped, I think, that we had to go around the Zoom at the beginning of class and name our race, ethnicity, and heritage. I named my heritage as being, in part, Italian, and that must have started my brain thinking again about my great-aunt.

When the poem was read over and over, the simple line — “she’d said” — stuck out to me. The things we say can seem unimportant, just off-hand remarks, but other times, those same remarks can have a kind of resonance. They can take on new importance when we hear them again, or think of them again. It was with all of this swirling around in my mind that I began my own poem, the result of which is above.]

Why I Blog, Reason #17

My daily blogging has taken a hit lately. Part of that is due to being more focused on my fiction stuff at the moment. When I only have 40 minutes each day to devote to writing, those minutes are better spent working on my stories and novels. The cool news is that I finished “The Wind Masters,” I’m almost finished with “Things” (which is being re-titled “Berserker” or “A Good Defeat,” not sure yet), and I’ve written several chapters for my novella, Avalon Summer, and two chapters of a new novel (The Gates of Illvelion). I’m just writing what feels right, so each night I sit down and see where my subconscious takes me.

I do miss blogging though. It’s nice to write my thoughts and see where my mind wanders. The process for the blog is that I usually steal stuff from my writer’s notebook and type it up here, maybe adding or tweaking a bit. But generally, I start with my notebook and then formalize or expand on those thoughts here on the blog.

Sometimes, however, I just craft a blog post without any previous drafting or anything. That’s what this post is. Just me writing random stuff. Sitting down with the WordPress dashboard open and typing away. I’m not sure what the point of this post is; there is no point, really. But I’m old school, and that means I think of this blog more as my personal space than as some kind of marketing thing or whatever. I’m not trying to get “traffic.” Maybe I should be, but I’m not.

(Note: This wasn’t always the case. Early on, when I first set up the website, I thought the blog should be some kind of marketing or “branding” thing and I tried to fit my writing into that model. After struggling to add “content” and finding the whole thing burdensome, I gave up that approach. When I restarted blogging these past few years, I did so with the intent to write more personally, more randomly, and more authentically. Thus you get blog posts like this one, which are little more than idle thoughts.)

Is it self-indulgent to write all these random thoughts and ideas? Perhaps. I mean, if I’m not writing for some specific audience, or about some specific topic, then one may ask, “What’s the point?”

But I’d like to think that if — on some off chance — someone stumbles onto my blog, they might find solidarity or comfort or interest in my odd ramblings. Maybe this hypothetical reader is also a struggling writer, and maybe this hypothetical person might enjoy reading about my travails and ups-and-downs and whatnot. Or maybe they like the blog posts about the different writing exercises I use in my classroom. Or maybe they like to laugh at my poetry. Who knows.

I don’t really write for anyone, though. Just myself.

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