Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
I’m leaving a note here to say I’ll be without the internet until at least tomorrow night. My youngest, Alex, has dental surgery with general anesthetic at 8am tomorrow morning. Please wish him luck.
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
The underlying truth? The molecules, the bits and pieces that make you up, were present at the moment of the universe’s creation; they’ve just been rearranged millions of times over to cast you as the imperfect robot that you are. And that means, in a sort of beautiful way, that all things are connected. And if all the things are connected, that means all the things we do are connected.
Here, then, are 11 ways that writing is like parenting, and — more obviously — 11 ways in which they aren’t alike at all. Why 11? Why not just pick the top ten and go with those like a normal, order-conscious human?
Because this list goes to eleven.
Writing is like Parenting a Toddler
You birth your creation, for all intents and purposes, out of sheer will and a bit of sweat.
Either one is a good way to find out who you really are.
Your creation will occasionally wake you up in the middle of the night for a bit of attention.
You will find that your creation wanders into your thoughts without prompting at all hours of the day, regardless of whether you’re directly involved with it, or if it’s even around at the time.
You will spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning up messes that your creation has made: dangling or unresolved plot lines, refrigerator empties onto the floor, characters behaving badly, toilet paper unspooled all over the house and watered with cranberry juice…
Sometimes the best thing to do for your creation is to take it for a walk and get it some fresh air.
Pretty much anybody can write a story or become a parent just by deciding they want to do it. Or sometimes even by accident.
But writing a good story, much like raising a good kid, requires a heck of a lot more planning, thought, and hours than you can probably conceive of at the outset.
Your story, like your toddler, will seem to have unexplainable mood swings all its own; you have to learn how to weather the storm.
When it’s going well, you feel absolutely bulletproof.
When it’s going poorly, you feel eaten by sharks.
Writing is not at all like Parenting a Toddler
It’s pretty unlikely that any problem involving your child can be solved with any amount of ink or word processing power. In fact, adding ink to a situation involving your child is probably a recipe for disaster.
Your story will never literally barf in your shoes.
Or dunk your favorite tie in the toilet.
Or paint with salsa on the carpet.
Society is pretty forgiving to writers who drink. In a lot of cases, writers are almost expected to drink; it’s part of their craft. Parents, on the other hand…
New parents get a free pass to show off pictures and talk about their kids at every opportunity. Nobody wants to see or hear about a writer’s unfinished story.
If your story gets on your nerves, you can shut it down and forget about it entirely for a few days.
Your story will only grow and improve with your active participation. Your kid will grow and learn things entirely on her own. (Usually the wrong things, if you’re not careful.)
Your story probably won’t throw a tantrum in the toy aisle of the Target, earning you the sympathetic glances of fellow writers and the disapproving stares of non-writers.
You only get to pick your kid’s name once.
If you screw your story up, you can throw it out and rewrite it from scratch as many times as you want.
There you have it. A perfectly scientific comparison of two things that totally make sense together. Bear this information in mind when you’re deciding whether you would rather be a writer or a parent. Because you obviously can’t do both at the same time.
This is a post I’ve been procrastinating on all day, because … there is nothing to describe. It is, of course, about the attacks on Paris. The attacks all over the world, but understandably it is Paris we relate to because if it can happen at a concert somewhere in the “civilized” Western world then it can happen in our own back yards. But that’s not where my mind is going. Where my mind is going is how do we stop it.
I’ve spent the day considering how a follower of Tao, as I am, would handle this and the only thing I can come up with is this: teach by example. We must teach our children tolerance. We must be tolerant. Human suffering goes on everywhere. Yes, some suffering is more … extensive? That’s not really the word I’m looking for. Prolonged. Yes, prolonged. But suffering is a human condition. And until we can teach our children that we are all equal, whether we are disabled, or have different languages, or colour of skin, the truth is we are all human and we all feel the same things… until we can teach our kids that THAT is what is important and not what we believe is out there in the cosmos, or what might have created us or guided another human being to write a book – until we can teach our children that what really matters is that whomever our neighbour is that they feel the same things we feel and dream of the same happiness we dream of, until THEN, there will be wars and intolerance and discontentedness and hurt and pain in the name of that which only matters within the confines of our own minds and our own homes.
All lives are precious. ALL of them. This is not indescribable. It does not defy description. It transcends it.
Blogger’s guilt. This should be a thing. A recognized condition to describe how we writers in blogland feel when we want to write something but we just can’t.
Take, for instance, the matter of theme. This can range from the entire basis for which our sites exist, or it can be as small as something we decided in a fit of inspiration that our Nano Poblano challenge would revolve around. Yes, you guessed it. Today I fail. There will be no Japanese lesson today. I simply haven’t the heart, the brain, nor various other body parts for it. It’s been a rough day, full of doctor’s appointments at which I folded in the face of a red-eyed frightened child who didn’t want to get his flu shot, and a car parked in a parking lot miles from home, causing me to have to walk with the aforementioned child.
But tomorrow will be better! Perhaps we’ll talk about the joys of ordering coffee, not only in Japan but worldwide! Or maybe I’ll expound on the treat that is saying “I’m sorry.” Stay tuned! It’ll be fun! As everything should be when your life is in progress. Right?
Right?
Right.
This strange confession/cheerleading session is brought to you by NanoPoblano. Find all the links here!
Strangely enough, I’m still tired after sleeping until 10am (thanks, Alex for letting me lay in) and so I’m writing this while I wait for my tea to steep. I’m a bit picky about how I make my tea. I used to have a teapot, but it broke and I haven’t bothered to get another one. So I have this cup that came with a lid and a plastic basket for the tea bag that I use all the time. I still always put the milk in first, even though I’m pouring boiling water over the tea bag in the cup. (I can hear all you teaophiles gasping. But I’m halfway there, aren’t I?) It makes a pretty decent cup of tea.
I find it strange how things work out sometimes too. For instance, as I already noted, I woke up at 10, which means I didn’t start Alex’s first feed on his feeding pump until 10:20. The feed takes about 2 hours to go through, so he finished his breakfast at 12 or so. He’s having his lunch now, at 3:46pm, which means it’s going to be a late night for me as he’ll want to go out trick or treating before he has his dinner. BUT. I’m hanging on to the fact that we have an extra hour tonight. It’s like a gift from the g-tube god. Or the clock god. Or maybe it’s some sort of spooky Halloween god-type-vampire who goes around giving rest instead of taking blood. Or something. Did I mention I’m tired?
I went for a walk with, Alex, my best friend John, and his two young granddaughters today. There was an elderly gentleman walking a little dog (we were on the path that runs along the water) and the two girls ran up to the man and asked if they could pet the dog. It both amazes and scares me how easy it is for little children to run up and talk to strangers. I do say hello to people I pass on the trail all the time, but at least I’m more than two and a half feet tall and weigh more than 40 pounds.
Anyway, now I’m rambling and my tea is ready. I’ll leave you with a pretty picture of the water though, that I took a couple of weeks ago. Enjoy!
Last night, as I was driving down the main laneway in a parking lot, an entire family stepped out in front of me. I stopped rather close to them by necessity and the woman yelled at me through my open window, “We’ve got kids here, you could wait your turn!” I hmphed and drove away. When I got home, my adult son told me I should have retorted, “I’ve got a car here, you could wait yours!”
From now on I’m not leaving home without my 21 year old son. I’m sure he’ll be pleased with that arrangement.
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
I’m not sure if this is going to come off as a tired rant, a tirade, or an attempt to show others that they’re not alone, but here we go anyway.
Advocating for one’s family is a ball-buster. Bureaucracy makes it so that the people working at the level the public deals with on a daily basis in the schools, and all the way up to the federal government, are in a position to simply throw up their hands and say, “Sorry, this is the way it is.” Which makes it necessary for us advocates to go above their heads. But it’s not as easy as just making a phone call. Oh no. There are “proper channels” we must go through. Forms to fill out and send either by snail mail or fax machines we have to drive around town to find and then spend money on. And then there’s the wait. The wait that is so damned long we forget whether we do indeed have to just wait or follow up. Follow up? Oh yes, start at the bottom again to get the right phone/fax/post office box number.
And while all that’s going on, something else has come up. It’s a lot of work and it’s stressful! Even if we do manage to talk to someone on the phone we have to go into “stand and fight” mode before we even start. Because nothing is easy and no one at the other end is going to give in. If we’re lucky (and I use that term loosely) we get transfered to the next higher up on the food chain so that we can go through our case again. And then what? Normally it’s wait and see. Or, “We’ll mail you the forms to fill out.” Again.
What I have on the go includes (but is not limited to) getting an aid to help my 20 year old Autistic son in class so he can graduate high school this year; getting the funding I’m entitled to for my other son’s eyeglasses; finding out what the hell is going on with the holter (heart) monitor his cardiologist ordered months ago; sorting which hoops I have to jump through for the nurse at his school who doesn’t want him to eat by mouth this year, this after a lengthy process (with a two year waiting list) of having a swallow study done, followed by a report which was discussed at a meeting with the specialists and the above mentioned nurse to explain that he could eat by mouth; finding out what happened to the money my mother was supposed to get back from the condo corporation after we sold her unit… The list goes on and on. And it’s all wrapped up in bureaucratic bullcrap.
Luckily I’m a stay-at-home mom, so I don’t do anything all day anyway… 🙄
I’m sure I’m not alone in this. In fact I’m sure there are others out there who have it even worse than I do. I have to wonder if there’s a better way to do things. Don’t you?
Is it possible to write stream of consciousness style when there’s someone screaming in your ear, stealing away your focus? I’m about to find out.
“Never expect anything and you’ll never be disappointed.” it’s a phrase I live by. I had hoped – half expected – to get this weekend away, but my ex came down with some kind of a bug so here I am with a disgruntled kid who doesn’t want me to pay any attention to anything but him. I had a back-up plan – his older brother – but he’s sick too.
It’s funny. I spend so much energy attempting not to promise the kids anything until I’m positive it’s going to happen but I don’t always put it into practice myself. But it’s really the same thing, isn’t it? I allow them to hope by saying maybe, or wait and see, but I don’t allow them to expect anything, and so if it doesn’t happen, they’re not too disappointed. It’s good advice, no matter whether you’re doing it yourself or doing it for someone else. Yet I don’t know if I’m actually teaching them anything…
It’s particularly important for someone like my son who is Autistic not to have unexpected events happen. Or for plans to go awry. Although I find as he gets older (he’ll be 20 next month) he’s getting better with change – more able to accept it. Still, there are certain things that can not, in his mind, be tolerated. God forbid anything ever happens to his computer.
I like surprises. Good ones at least, and most of the bad ones I’m able to roll with. Then again, I try not to expect too much.
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