The Cerebral Mum

I’ve been shite lately. Obviously. I don’t even want to look at the date of my last post. I haven’t been reading my friends blogs. I haven’t even been reading my emails much. I think there are a gazillion people online that I haven’t thanked for various things. And a few offline as well. At some stage, things just got “all too much” and I left my computer off, zealously, and buried my head in sand (aka Sci-Fi DVDs). And when you feel like everything things all too much and so ignore them, it actually makes you feel worse.

So here I am, back again and feeling somewhat miserable and stressed, but I’ll probably feel better by the time I finish this post. There are so many things I have to do right now. I can’t even begin to enumerate them. I know people say to break it down into small parts, and to write lists and tick them off so you feel like you’re getting somewhere, but when the task of writing such a list is overwhelming, I think you’re pretty much screwed.

So I’m starting my baby steps - again - here. And apologising to all those people who deserve much attention and haven’t been getting it from me. I can’t promise you’ll be getting it any time soon, but now at least you know that I am thinking about you.

Sometimes, I am the life of the party. And sometimes I am a very antisocial creature. My real life friends are mostly aware of that, and don’t worry when they don’t hear from me for months on end. That’s just me. I think internet relationships are more tenuous. They don’t, for me at least, have the strength of years. So I feel more guilty when I don’t “water” those friendships. Which, again, makes me want to bury my head in the sand.

I’ve been slack at taking photos too, so I have no picture of “Monday’s Child” (I don’t want to cheat and use an old one) but I can promise that he is still as gorgeous as ever. And we started toilet training a couple of weeks ago.

Caspar will be 18 months in 2 days, which is apparently on the early side for toilet training these days, especially for boys. (Yes, I scanned a couple of pieces of the child rearing literature before ignoring it and Skyping my mother.) He’d been showing signs of readiness for a while, and I had a potty on hand but decided that trying to get him to use the potty when he was interested in the toilet was a stupid idea. So I looked around for a toilet seat for him. I didn’t think that would be so hard.

I just wanted one of those seat and step combined folding things. I thought they were pretty standard. But no, I couldn’t find one anywhere. Just seats and separate steps which were too low. And ridiculously high tech things which convert into Lear jets or some such and had a similar price point. After a couple of weeks searching for simplicity, I gave up and just bought a padded seat because he didn’t want to wait any longer, and holding him over the bowl was not fun for my back.

(I also shopped around for some plain undies - without crazy patterns or “licensed” characters. I loathe “licensed” characters on everything. It was worth the extra pennies not to have to look at them 10 times a day.)

Of course, the standard seat didn’t fit on our toilet, so out came the hacksaw to remove some excess plastic and we were off.

One other issue is that Cas still doesn’t speak so has no way of telling me that he needs to go so I’ve had to be a little vigilant about keeping an eye on when he’s fidgeting. Kelley from Magneto Bold Too and Leechbabe from Stuff With Thing (I think - it was a while ago) both gave me a couple of handsigns I could use so I taught him one of those as a way to say “toilet”. He learned that pretty much instantaneously. Of course, learning it and using it are two different things.

Overall, it’s been a simple change. To be honest, throwing a couple of pairs of undies in the washing machine is easier than laundering nappies. And he gets it. There have been a few accidents, obviously, but also a few days accident free. We’ve even gone out a couple of times without a nappy. And he’s actually really great at weeing on the loo. He doesn’t even need rewards. He’s happy just to get a piece of toilet paper when he’s done and to wave bye-bye. The pooing, though? Not so much.

In the couple of weeks, we’ve only had half a poo in the loo. But he’ll get there. Toilet training is not as bad as I thought. Maybe because I decided not to stress about that, at least. It helps to have a Mum that says it takes longer than they say it does, and to not be a sucker for the Potty-Train-Your-Toddler-In-A-Day Brigade. If he’s fully toilet trained in six months, that’s good enough for me. Although, after seeing how well he’s doing, I doubt that it will take that long.

So there you go. I wrote a blog post. That’s one thing I can cross off my gargantuan non-existent list. And I feel a bit better.

Although still a crappy person for not, figuratively, returning my friends’ calls.

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Ever had one of those days when you’ve slogged through some of the hardest things you have to do and then, when the sun goes down, you realise that you’ve gotten exactly nowhere? That’s today. Intellectually, I know things are step by step and today’s steps count but, to mix clichéd metaphors, it still feels like a house of cards and the road ahead is long.

Ever feel as though - if you’re the puppeteer of your own life - there are too many strings to manage and while one limb is dancing to your tune, the other is flailing? Somewhere along the line, things must get easier. I liked being young and irresponsible, able to just cut strings. Now, I have no choice but to arduously untangle them all, hoping nothing breaks in the process.

Ever feel like there is an evil Judy Garland in your head singing, It never ra-ains, but what it po-ours… in her chirpy little voice just to drive you insane? So what if all your troubles come in bunches, keep sticking to your silly little hunches…

And the sun will come shining through.

Yeah, right.

I’m a child of Nirvana. I need depressive music to cheer me up. So I’m turning up Lisa Germano and listening to Cancer of Everything.

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Yes, that dastardly ISP did it again. There I was, Caspar tucked in with his bottle for a morning nap and where was the internet, I ask you? Oh, it was there: Just long enough for me to start testing the coding on some elements of the new blog. And then it was gone.

What was saved and where I was at? Good question. Instead of having one more thing ticked off my list and an afternoon of fun, what did I do? I dug my heels in good and deep.

I spent three and a half (yes, that’s 3 ½ ) hours on hold listening to something that soundly vaguely reminiscent of muzak echoing through a mile of rusted pipe, interrupted only by a saccharine voice saying, “We are sorry for the delay. Your call will be answered as soon as possible”. And you know how much I love saccharine.

Of course, it might have been me digging my nose in to spite my face, rather than my heels. My call might have been lost in the ether. I’ve been told on good authority that can happen. (Big Sis. She worked in call centres until her spinal injury.) But, dammit, they’re a communications company! They should be better communicators.

I am stubborn.

(Unfortunately this story doesn’t have a dramatic ending and I can’t recount to you all the scathing things I said to them, the things I know everyone has wanted to say to “service” providers at some stage and gets vicarious enjoyment from hearing, because the connection returned all by itself and I hung up.)

But I have work to do. Just a little bit more tweaking over at Blogging Personal to get it ready for launching. In truth, I could have launched it by now. I have some things written and the site is functional. But I’m scared.

Writing a personal blog and writing a blog intended as a resource are two very different things. No matter how much you frame it as a conversation, because it’s your space it is in some ways a claim to authority. But I’m opinionated and I have convictions and if caring about something constitutes authority then I’m okay with that. I guess.

Another thing that makes it scary is that, even unlaunched, the site has already had a great response and I think that shows how many of us want someone to be talking seriously about personal blogging, not just calling it noise and moving on to how you can make the most money. That feels like a big responsibility and I really hope that I don’t disappoint anyone.

Yes, that sounds megalomaniacal. I’m not saying the worries are justified. I’m just saying that I feel them.

So to get over that, I’ve set the launch date in stone. The first post is being published on Tuesday, January 15, come hell or high water, so I’m off to spend the evening tending to my new baby, making sure everything is perfect for its arrival.

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At the moment, I have the house to myself. Big Sis is away camping with her B and his kids and I was really looking forward to the time alone to get the house in order, among other things. The mini heatwave put paid to that idea for a couple of days because all I could do was sit with my feet in a bucket of water and sigh. During that time, Cas learned what dunking is and he enjoys it immensely.

I think I mentioned on the post I wrote when it was too hot for me to fill in the title field that I’ve been giving him a big bowl of water to play with. I put my head in it once to dampen my hair and he thought that was extremely funny. He then spent as long as he could (ie; the short length of time I indulged his 1 year old sense of humour) pushing my head back under.

But I digress. Today, the weather was perfect and I got a few dishes washed and took the recycling out but something else is interfering with my productivity. You see, the neighbour’s kids are here.

It is guaranteed when he has them, my door will be knocked on at least four times a day because one or both of them wants to hang out with me. (I really don’t understand the attraction. At first I thought it was Caspar, but apparently it’s me.) After turning them away several times yesterday I promised the youngest last night that I would make some time for her today.

At the first early morning knock I let her know that we could go to the park together at a particular time in the afternoon. Three knocks later I caved and got Cas all sunscreened and ready to go.

This isn’t an eventful post. Nor was it an eventful day. The weather was perfect, sunny with a cool breeze, and she was happy enough to tag along with me to the local shops because I needed milk. Without Big Sis’ car available, that takes over an hour or all by itself. Then we played in the park, something Cas seems to enjoy more and more everyday.

And now the day is over. But I have this simple post written and those few dishes done. That’s something.

I might just give myself the night off, not worry about the forum, not worry about reading all my feeds which have exploded once again, not worrying about tweaking every little this and that both here and on the other blog. (Yes, I just told you where it was.) I might just manage to do those things in my own time, without making them a source of pressure.

There just comes a point when you have to let everything go, mentally at least, in order to become productive again. It really isn’t that I have too much to do. Like most things, it’s how I think about it.

Tonight whatever I get done will be a walk in the park.

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I’m a little bit bombarded. There seems too much going on at once and although in the workplace I’m a thoroughly organised person, the rest of my life has always been chaotic. Maybe I should start reading Zen Habits. I need the same common sense advice pounded into my brain over and over again.

• In the kitchen, every single dish I own is piled up around the sink and covering the benches. (Muy hygenic!)
• In my bedroom, every single piece of clothing I haven’t packed away yet is strewn across the floor. (This doesn’t even make sense because most of them remain a little snug since having Caspar.)
• On my computer desktop, there are more files than can actually fit on the screen.(I have since dumped them randomly into yet another to-be-sorted folder.)
• I have a list of to-dos about a mile long. (Or I think it is. One of those to-dos is to actually write a to-do list.)

And even here there are a few things not functioning the way they should. It’s not an entirely peaceful place to write.

Add to that the boxes all around the house that keep getting reopened and repacked and the pile of papers which, if they could be stacked, would be as tall as me. (What’s that you say? Matches?)

I’m a bit of a shocker at throwing things away. Having worked as an archivist, I like to archive things. And that would be fine, if what once were systems hadn’t gone to hell in a handbasket and I was the archivist in life that I am when something actually restrains me and makes me do things. (Like a paycheck.) There is something to be said for working for The Man.

I need a good, hard talking to. I always have. I’m sure my mother gave one to me time and time again as I was growing up. It’s a wonder she’s not now a shadow of herself, pale, and defeated by her inability to make me register the sense of what she was saying.

My skull is thick. The power of my deafness is awe-inspiring. Nothing has changed since I was a child even though, in primary school, my Opa sent me “A Round Tuit”.

I still never get around to it.

Discipline. I need discipline. It would be nice if I could blame the lack of it in me on my mother but I’m afraid I know very well where the blame lies. I am easily distracted. I have grand ideas but my impetus stops at the idea as though someone else would be there to implement it. I move on to the next one too soon and hence…

My ducks do not swim in a row.

There is too much to understand, too many things to do, too much I want to give, too much time that I want to take.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…” _{W.B. Yeats}

Leaving aside the objectional usage of the word anarchy in that poem, I’m sure there is a reason these lines came into my head right now. Because I am standing amidst the ruins. Because I am not centred. I rebel at the notion that I need to be but, in truth, I need to be.

I need to be dogged, to sustain my efforts, to take on only what I can manage. And then manage it. There are no good fairies to complete my works; I am not Psyche and there are no ants to sort through all the grains of my life.

I need to change this.

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I don’t even know what to do any more. And I don’t even want to write this. I want to be doing a million trivial things but I can’t get a grip on any of them. I am physically restraining myself, sitting here, but I don’t know that I would be able to get these bees out from under my skin even if I let them go.

I don’t know how to deal with this. It’s different. It’s not like in the past when I had big, big pains too large to be held in; pains that I released in writing, that I cut out of me, literally and figuratively, that I starved and binged and purged myself to control. All of that made sense and none of this does. And it was so long ago. And nothing I learned seems to fit.

More and more, I begin to think that there is something “chemical” going on. It is not outside the bounds of reason, considering my previous lifestyle and a pregnancy. Maybe it is that simple. Then again, what is simple about that? I don’t like things I can’t understand. I don’t like feeling as though something is out of my hands. It makes no sense to me, philosophically. I can’t unify the knowledge of the biological nature of human thought (what little we have) with the metaphysics of it all.

I can’t let go of my ultimate responsibility, but I can’t avoid the knowledge that I cannot be right or be wrong. I cannot make a moral choice. So this is checkmate.

Oh, I know that the two are not sliced so cleanly. I know. Normally that knowledge comforts me. It removes the basis for all those ignorant hatreds in this world, removes the rights and lefts and radical oppositions. But it leaves more difficult philosophical questions in its wake. The same questions, yes, but the paths extending from them are multiplied and too entangled to unravel. Has anyone unravelled them? Are there any philosophers left?

I read an opinion the other day which I objected to.

A woman is not born a woman. She becomes one.

It pissed me off, this cheap sloganeering that insulted women while pretending to make them free. I did not even recognise it as a quote from Simone de Beauvoir, whom I respect. It was out of context, certainly, but it is also out of it’s time. This brilliant thinker has been reduced to an anachronism.

I know when I was writing Polar seasons… the other day, I wrote lengthy passages about genetics and society’s poor understanding of it and the ridiculousness of the nature/nurture dichotomy given what contemporary science is learning. (I think I removed most of it. I’m not sure. I couldn’t proofread it clearly, and still can’t. I don’t know what I was saying. I am worried that I said something offensive.)

I truly believe the line between biology and experience has all but disappeared, that each part has a powerful effect upon the other, that what we are and how we live is so closely intertwined that we can no longer see these things divided.

But I don’t know what that means.

I have strong views about individual responsibility. My concept of it is the foundation of all my principles. I loathe what Kant called our non-age. I loathe what Sartre called bad faith. I loathe what I call abdication. I rebel against “the unreasonable silence of the world” and strive for meaning anyway, strive for Truth in spite of what will be my ultimate and necessary failure.

Biology confuses all of this.

What about this is the product of my behaviour and thoughts? What about this is illness? How much has illness created my thoughts? How much have my thoughts created illness? These questions cannot be answered.

Some people are ill. Some people know that they are ill, and they are qualified to judge. Some people are too ill to make that judgement and someone else makes it for them, rightly or wrongly. Some people make themselves ill and absolve themselves of their responsibility. Some people have a greater potential for illness but remain free from disease their whole lives. Some people set off the chain of disease by their choices. Some people are made ill by events in their lives which they have no control over. Some people…

No. No answers can be found there. If I am ill because of my own action, I must take ownership of it. If I am ill because of my biology, I must disabuse myself of my responsibility. Everything in between is unsolvable.

I cannot untangle it.

I cannot.

I cannot.

I cannot.

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The situation in Sudan is ongoing and unfolding and there are developments not yet covered in the media which I can’t/won’t talk about but, obviously, it is occupying my mind. My day has been filled with hurried IM conversations and emails, and alerts on every piece of news that is published on the web. There is a lot I would like to say but, in the end, a blog is media and I just can’t find it in myself to capitalise on it.

The thing is, if I wanted lots of traffic right now all I would have to do is repeat the conversations I’ve had, disclose the information I know and add a couple of meta keywords to this post. But I’m not going to. I realise that is kind of sucky for readers. Who wants to read, “I know something you don’t know and I’m not going to tell you”? Really, to be perfectly strict I shouldn’t mention it at all. But it’s on my mind. And it raises an interesting question so I’m going to move away from the specifics of this situation altogether and throw the question to the floor.

Have you ever given any thought to handling the media?

This may seem left of field. It may seem like something that people don’t need to consider. The media is other. The news is what happens to other people. But is it? Really, all it takes is a car accident, or being in a particular place at a particular time, or being related to someone who’s friend who went to school with someone else. The media has successfully invaded all our lives. It is pervasive. And it could easily come for you next. What will you say to it?

Everyman Joe is not blessed with media consultants. Perhaps Joe has the savvy to understand how his words might be used, the context they will be placed in or taken out of, the repercussions they will have. But I don’t think he does. I don’t think he knows how to manage his public relations, and I don’t think he realises that all media is public relations. Does he understand the way his words will be squeezed through filters and fed into huge databases and mixed with other people’s words until they fit into the meta narratives the media creates, even in this post-modern world? Does he realise that his words will never go away? I don’t think he does. Or, at least, not consciously enough.

Don’t we, at a minimum, need to consider whether or not this is essential knowledge? We all have a basic idea of media ethics. If by some accident of fate someone asks you to speak, will you hold yourself to those same standards? Will you have time, then and there, to figure out how those ethics relate to you? Do you know whether or not saying something even as simple as, “The best team won on the day,” or, “He was a quiet neighbour,” is really that simple? Can you weigh up all the privacy issues, the political issues, the implications, the ramifications? Do you know what narrative you will be slotted in to? Do you know which beast you are feeding?

Don’t get me wrong: I love the media. I think that we have the media to thank for a lot of the knowledge and freedom that we have. (Not as the creator of it, necessarily, but certainly as its vehicle.) But it isn’t an unmixed blessing and it isn’t tame. If it crosses your path, will you know what to do? Because you cannot call the dog-whisperer. You’re on your own. And it’s salivating.

Today, is having a clear understanding of the way the media works a social responsibility?

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