writing skills/profession

Neglect


I know it probably seems that just when it appears I am posting daily again, I disappear. I am blogging nearly every day but much of it is for other sites. I wrote a post for Care2 late last week that was a monster hit. Over 450 comments. Of course it was about Wiccan students being discriminated against by Christian teachers. Colossal hit. Out of the park. I love it when the commenters take over and begin arguing points amongst themselves. Deeply satisfying.

A couple of mom posts on 50 Something have gone up recently as well. I know that is only of slight interest to most of you here, but I’ll throw it out as an option if you have been missing me terribly.

This week has been eaten up by the pursuit of blogging for almost no money and homework  for my upcoming yoga training weekend. I am crispy where training weekends are concerned. I attended a workshop or training every weekend in February and have only had one weekend off in between. French-fried would be the state of my mind and some things are still only as “clear as Mississippi mud” as my sadistic high school Algebra teacher used to say. The woman thought I was a step up from dangerously inbred. She used to look at me with a mix of puzzlement and determination that was demonic. She’s dead now. I always planned to dance on her grave but it’s not worth the effort to search around through a cemetery full of moldering nuns to find her.

Friday I have a treat for you only – Friday Flash. I have so neglected my puny attempts at fiction in the last months. I’ve been reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It’s Henry VIIIth from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view.

Cromwell is normally vilified when he isn’t being portrayed as a toady or a Protestant zealot. He was a commoner who rose to uncommon heights in the service of King Henry. The mastermind behind the Reformation in some respects and probably more than a little responsible for the policies and law that would advance the idea of representative government.

Mantel hints at a romance between Cromwell and Mary Boleyn (The Other Boleyn Girl) and it’s fascinating speculation. Inspiring. So I ran with it a bit. Friday.

But now I am off to town. The older girls are coming out for supper and I need groceries, and I have to catch a quickie yoga class and sit a bit with my teacher, Jade, to see if she can make sense of the class sequencing I have to put together for my homework this month. The anatomy bites and I am still swimming around a drain where external and internal rotation goes. I also have an opportunity to teach a yoga class in the late afternoons after spring break and I need pricing and such advice.

The Macbook is (almost) Dead


The macbook’s history is a relatively short one. Purchased the day after Black Friday in 2006, it enabled me to go wireless, which ended up really facilitating the courtship of Rob and I after we met in mid-December of the same year. My desktop, also a mac, was inconveniently located in my bedroom. Inconvenient because Dee still slept in my bed and her bedtime was early. I couldn’t be on the computer once she was tucked in for the night.

But now, the macbook is near history. Problems this summer with the blue-tooth led to its being turned off and now it’s developed some sort of corruption that crashes the internet browser every five minutes or so. It roars like a jet plane most of the time due to a fan that rarely stops running.

Sigh.

I guess it is back to PC’s for me. We have a house full of computers – literally – and financially it makes no sense to run over to the Apple Store to replace the macbook.

I will be able to archive files on an external hard drive and transfer them. Which is good. I have way too much writing and three years of photos and music on it. Rob thinks he can wipe it and reprogram it, but there is no guarantee it will fix the issue or that he will have time anytime soon to do this.

“Do you want a new macbook?” he asked. “We could just replace my laptop and use it and the desktop.”

“And the netbook,” I added.

I like macs. User friendly in the extreme as long as nothing ever goes wrong. But when something glitches? Forget it. Steve Jobs has designed them to make it impossible for the ordinary person to identify and fix the issue. There is just no mechanism for diagnostics for the user. The physical make up even is such that a person needs special training and tools just to get into the dangit things.

Much as I would like one of the new desktops. They are too expensive and ultimately they all possess the same fatal flaws that keep user in thrall to the Genius Bar* at the Apple Store.

As long as my writing is saved and re-archived on another machine, it doesn’t matter what the machine is. Computers are computers. Tools to an end.

Alas then poor Macbook, I knew it well, Horatio.

*The Genius Bar is where you take your Apple products to be fixed by in-store techs, who often can do little more than replace or box up your mac to send away to be replaced/repaired. The “genius” part is how no one questions the fact that macs either work great or just intermittently and that by getting a customer in the store periodically, more product can usually be sold to them despite the defective by design nature.

Opportunity


In Sondheim’s Into the Woods a line comes up again and again,

opportunity is not a lengthy visitor.

In my opinion, it’s not a frequent visitor either though it does often seem to follow the old saying – when it rains, it pours.

On Tuesday I was offered a presenter’s spot at the upcoming Strathcona Writer’s Workshop in April, and on Wednesday, my yoga teacher asked if I felt ready to teach as she’d been offered a couple of after school jobs at local elementaries that she didn’t have time for herself.

Solid opportunities that I am taking, but it feels a bit odd coming from my background of conventional nine to five work. Free-lancing is such an artsy thing though in truth, I have become a rather artsy person in many ways. Manner, dress and mild distaste for the scrambling that goes on in the pursuit of lifestyle.*

It’s a fortunate space I occupy at the moment to be able to do what I want to do. Not a place I would have envisioned a decade ago. The Des Moines school district, where I taught, is very likely to savagely cut its teaching staff in the next 8 weeks. Even with twenty-three years of seniority, I might not have been safe from that and my mother and BFF tell me that the lay of the land is grim. I wonder at the twists and turns that spirited me away from all that and why.

My writer friend, Abby, once commented that it appeared I was meant to be here in Canada. Some higher purpose? Giving talks on blogging and teaching kids yoga? A dubious purpose, but it could be that humans have the idea of destiny and purpose confused with World of Warcraft questing.

Getting back out into some hippy mom version of the world of employment feels okay though.

*And I mean the choice of lifestyle that many of those around me engage in. I know from experience that for a lot of people work isn’t, and has never been, a matter of anything other than survival.