Category Archives: writing skills/profession

It’s My New Year

Posted on by Ann
2007

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Because I was a teacher, I’ve never really gone off the school calendar. My year begins when school resumes in late August. I have longer weekends nearly every month and life is regularly interrupted by early out days, oddly placed vacations and the occasional night duty.

So when everyone else (and by that I mean normal adults with real jobs) were heading back to work after January 1st, I was still in “off” mode because Dee had another week of Christmas vacation to go.

Today, however, she is back to school and Rob is back to work and I am officially beginning 2012 with a schedule of my own, which includes 3 nights of teaching yoga, one night of soccer, one late afternoon running of the child to her own yoga class and two yoga classes of my own to attend. Monday thru Friday is beyond packed and the margin for error or the unexpected is slim to none.

But you still have the weekends, I hear you thinking. A long one at that. This is true. Aside from soccer practice on Saturday mornings, the weekends are blissfully free of obligation. Happy Year of the Dragon to me.

The only thing I have not settled on is my writing focus, but that’s hardly new. I am leaning towards going back to fiction and the memoir. I like Abel’s idea for a theme for the latter and my e-copy of Game of Thrones has made me nostalgic for fantasy. Some of the first good fiction I wrote was fantasy because that’s primarily what I was reading at the time.

I will say that I have lost the fire for freelance. The class I took in the fall was a good experience. I learned a lot. I discovered, however, that I still dislike journalism. Essays and opinion pieces suit me much better. And, I am still burnt out on activist political posting. The world has become such a sad, dirty place in terms of politics and issues that I think it’s bad for my soul and not all that good for karma to immerse myself in that kind of writing at this time. I don’t need the extra negativity. I have family for that.

I have a couple more things to say about widowhood, dating and remarriage though but I am still running them around the track in my mind’s eye.

Last thing on the agenda is organization. It’s past time for the next great purge and there are a few legal things that need to be taken care of in addition to the fact that the house is screaming for all things to find a place and just stay there – no more musical chairs.

Did I just make resolutions? Good gods!

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Calling All Women Married to Widowers

Posted on by Ann
Just-married

Just Married

Abel Keogh’s working on a follow-up to his Dating A Widower book and is looking for women who have actually married widowers and are willing to share their experiences. You can find out more information about the book and the criteria for the essays by following this link.

Rob follows Abel’s Wednesday Widower posts although mostly to read my comments and when he saw the call for submissions, he asked me if I planned to write an essay.

“I don’t think I have anything to add,” I said. “If I have anything to say about you and I, or how we ended up married or even how it went that first year, I should probably write my own book, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” he said. “Are you going to write that book – ever?”

Probably. But I am still working on the angle. Frankly, I think the whole “widowed find love again” thing is played to death despite the fact that when stories turn up in the media they elicit a great deal of cooing from the general public, which in my opinion treats the stories like freakish there but for the grace of God go I cautionary fairy tales.

I’ve been reading George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and have been totally taken with his POV chapters. I wonder if I could write our story in a similar style? But, that would mean soliciting Edie, Mick and various other friends and relatives. Would I really want to hear their take on that first year? It’s better sometimes not to know what people were really thinking behind their party manners game faces. It’s an intriguing idea nevertheless. Or maybe it’s the dwarf.

At any rate, widowed stories are a dime a dozen and let’s face it, it’s only widowers who are “hot”. They are like unicorns below a certain age and capture the fancy and tug at heartstrings more than widows, who just another breed of single mom for the most part.*

I am still not convinced that Rob and I did anything particularly amazing despite feeling that we are amazing. My feelings are biased and they are the basis for a book anyone would read. I’ve read … tried to at any rate … other books by widowed. Mostly they focused on the first year and selling the idea that somehow grief is like learning to walk again on tree stumps. Something a person has to just learn to be okay with like any other permanent disability – only while being really brave and semi-cheerful so as not to frighten the non-grieving folk. I don’t think I could write a similar tale because being widowed is just a “shit happens” thing and moving on is what a rational person should want to do badly enough to actually choose to do it. Remarrying or not is another choice that is based partly on you, partly on luck and partly on someone else seeing things as you do.

But Rob says I am too practical a person to really see the wonder in it all, which might be true. I know I am too practical to view it as magic or destiny (outside the idea that we all have a destiny which needs are active participation to be realized here and there).

Anyway, if you are married to a widower and have words of wisdom or caution to share with other women considering or preparing to marry a widower, here’s your chance. Follow the link.

 

*No I haven’t forgotten that some widows are childless, but they seem to be an ever smaller sub-set of an already tiny percentage of the population and like single mom’s, they don’t inspire much enthusiasm in the general population. Everyone knows a single woman just like everyone knows a single mom. The whole extra x dooms us to known-ness and renders us uninteresting at best and stereotypical at worst.

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A Tragic Baking Injury

Posted on by Ann

Gingerbread is a Christmas treat and there is a good reason for that. It’s time-consuming and potentially injurious to the baker due to the endless kneading of dough.

I am not blessed with a fluid ambidextrous nature. I am predominantly right-handed with a few specific left hand only functions. Dough kneading just doesn’t work with my left hand and my right wrist is prone to tendonitis due to a repetitive strain injury I acquired working salad prep back in my university kitchen wench days. So today, I am blessed with a stiff and sore wrist that is going to set back my cookie making schedule a wee bit. Or a lot bit. Depends on how much tendon and muscle kneading my dearest husband can stand performing and whether or not my massage therapist can work a slight miracle this coming Wednesday.

The right wrist is my bane. It was broken during a freak accident in grade 7 and rendered weaker by my insanely bad pencil grip and years of scribbling in spiral notebooks. Typing came along later but had I a computer before I was 25, things might not be so bad now. And it’s kind of bad. Not carpal tunnel bad but enough that it makes bearing weight on the wrist – which is somewhat to intensely important in a yoga practice – to just writing a blog post, a chore that requires ibuprofen and icing in the aftermath.

Don’t cry for me though Argentinians. There are worse things in life than a game wrist. It’s inconvenient, however, for someone whose left hand is limited in function.

I was reading recently that scientists really don’t know why most people are so handicapped by extreme right-handedness. The reason we favor our right over our left isn’t even clear. We are the only animals in the kingdom with use of both hands that limit ourselves to just one or the other. Ambidextrousness is common among other primates with “hands”.

Rob’s like “Just switch your mouse to the left for a while” in terms of making the computer easier to cope with during my convalescence. But I might as well use my left foot as my hand where mousing is concerned because they are equally awkward.

On the upside, we have tasty gingerbread despite the fact that I had to google to salvage the dough, which was very dry and crumbly. Need to tweak the recipe me thinks.

The frosting set well despite my lack of meringue powder. Is there a substitute for that? Powdered egg white maybe?

But the day is dawning, bum wrist or no, and there is Christmas shopping to attend to. Dee asked for one thing. Just one.

“Santa will know what else to bring me,” she said. “He does a good job guessing.”

Indeed. But if this one thing isn’t secured, the whole charade goes down the toilet this year.

Sure is Monday.