My Son in his Play

What.

Can't sleep. Feeling sick. Thinking about me and stress.

Last Friday I'm thinking about productivity, feeling hopeful about tackling things. It's massive but I can do it, right? Then lunchtime I get a call with the lovely invitation of do I want to do something this weekend or what? And then I spend the afternoon feeling panicky and acting weird. I'm starting to get it.

May Need a Rewrite... : )

"Just because things have gotten worse doesn't make things better."

Busy, Busy

Super busy at work. I think I really need to hunker down and spend more time working from home.

It seems like I've been sleeping a little more than I should lately. I go to sleep before my kids do and they have to turn off their own light. I should get a clapper. But when you're asleep, you're asleep. It's not like you would clap then anyway.

Ugh

Bad weekend. I ran out of gas in an intersection and crunched my car. (A little.) I'm officially a dummy.

In other news, both my parents look pretty strong.

Win Fail

You win. I lose. I quit. You lose too.

iFriends

Friendships between women include emotional support. Romantic relationships are love and sex and expectations. Internet and platonic friendships are pretty much just about "You are an interesting person." Which kind of rocks.

Sad Baby Love

Sad news. A girl I am aware of from the internet had a miscarriage. I feel bad for her but we don't really communicate so it wouldn't be appropriate to delurk now. But I don't feel too bad that I know. The TMI-ness is okay with me. It's an issue people should be aware of. As much as breast cancer. If we're not going to have an actual village, at least there's a virtual village. I know a lot of people who have had trouble with fertility and felt soul-crushing shame over it. It's good that people are aware that it's hit or miss. Even in this day and age, this is how life is. Procreation is a humongous life issue. I've had a sneaking shadow of babylust stalking me for months. Good times.

Mysterious Ticking Noise

The Better to Hear You With

I got some advice from a new friend: Try to pay attention. Pay special attention to anything that strikes you as interesting, anything that strikes you as wrong, anything you get judgemental about.

Really try to listen. Especially when anyone makes an effort to tell you something, it's because they think you need to know. Try to play angel's advocate and see how those ideas fit.

I'm supposed to meditate on things but that sounds complicated so I'll just think about it. : )

Superpower of Sleep

I used to wake up with answers. I lost that ability for a while but it's coming back. The trick is to go to bed thinking.

I realized that "I am like my Dad, I am nothing like my Mom." is not true. Things are different than I thought they were.

Almost Perficter

I misunderstood what perfectionism was. I thought it was a condition of people who were great and just trying to get over the hump. But it's also the condition of people who are average but feel bad about it.

When I decided the difference between right and wrong, being a good girl I picked the BEST. 'For grades I'm going to get A's. I'm going to work really hard and always give 110%'

Looking at my values, I have extremely uneven segments of good and bad. Good is a little tiny strip at the top and bad is everything else. Sometimes, if I work really hard I can meet my standards. But most of the time I can't. Surprise: Failure.

The insidious thing is: bad is so huge that if you go bad, you could do almost anything.

JPop

I am super popular in Japan! Look!

Almost Perfict

I didn't like my post on perfectionism so I decided I would delete it and rewrite it later. : )

Not So Jung Again

This was supposed to be Not So Jung Part 2, the conclusion of Qaro's quest to wrest control from her emotions.

So the question was how to get the attention of the part of the brain that only speaks emotions not logic. And the clever answer was, toy with my emotions. I hadn't been having any luck changing my wishes from feeling safe and happy to not. I couldn't figure out how to want to go the way I am supposed to go instead of any other way. Amazingly, I stumbled upon a way to make hiding out on the internet feel scary and weird, yet plausible. I pushed on that a little so I could feel stupid and in danger and feel the "whoa" and gain control. Didn't help at all. Got slammed even harder. You can't f'with Mother Nature.

Anyway, the moral of the story is: Stay away from amateur psychologists! : )

I'm just sitting back, taking a breather. Praying, regrouping and trying to be a responsible adult.

This is the kind of strategy that made sense last week. I'm just happy to be able to think straight. When you're under extreme stress certain things make sense in that situation that don't make sense out of that situation. It just feels like survival skills.

3 Mashups

Here is a list of my song mashup ideas for 2009:

1. MIA - Paper Planes / John Cougar Mellencamp - The Authority Song

2. James Taylor - Your Smiling Face / Avril Lavigne - Complicated

3. The Animals - House of the Rising Sun / Death Cab for Cutie - Someday You Will Be Loved

Here are 23 ideas from 2008 and 46 from 2007.

Thankfully the barre is pretty low, so maybe I can do better in 2010! : )

Not So Jung

It's kind of interesting, Carl Jung has come up a lot in the last several months. Someone was telling me about Jacque Lacan's mirror theory and I ran into a Flickr set about (obscure psychologist, I can't find her name) and the theory about the beast came up in a book on writing and then last week my new freind (sp.) was telling me about him...

So I got out a book... [Tangent: During my karaoke year, I spent so much money on books that Thackeray's actually expanded three of my favorite sections. Sad but cool.] I've been reading "Modern Man's Search for a Soul". I am still in the first section. Ugh, if I even tell you what it's about, it sounds like it belies my point, which is, from what I'd heard of Jung, the collective unconcious and also archetypes (which is not intrinsically bad I've just seen it twisted into a defense of astrology), I thought he was full of mumbo-jumbo, but he's really rock solid.

The first section is about using dreams in analysis and it seems to be aimed towards his peers and it's very common-sense and careful. This has nothing to do at all with the dream books my best friend and I read in Junior High which list keywords "If you dream about snakes it means... you know. (Sorry, that's the only example that has stuck with me.) It's actually more a warning against transference and a reminder that it is more important that the patient understands than the doctor understands.

Then it talks about how the unconscious compensates for things lacking in the conscious and you should try to understand these things and accept them or actually "assimilate" them, like Borg. Repression only gives things more power and it seems to me makes them kind of whats-the-word.

PBS has been running a series all week about emotions and how they work in the brain, etc. Last night they explained the fight or flight response and how the amygdala sends out these powerful chemicals, emotions, whatever to the prefrontal cortex but it's a one way street. There is no direct way to send messages the other way; It's much more difficult for the logical part to control the emotions.

I have often thought about the "part of the brain that doesn't speak English". I've always had problems with watching the news and feeling sad and wanting to save the stupid people in the horror movies and wanting to comfort crying toddlers at the grocery store. Yeah, lady, I'm smiling at your baby, try it.

It doesn't speak in words, so how to talk back?

Thought of a good analogy for repression: Thinking about all the different places you would not eat green eggs and ham.

Foods that Begin With 'Q'

Still thinking about resolutions. I know I need to work on humility. (Does anyone want to hear about the year I won 4k in karaoke contests? Or how I helped resurrect green cars? Or ran through a tornado to save my babies?) It's interesting to think about why I need this prop, I have an inkling. But I don't know how to fix it or drop my crutches.

It's not that I can't be a Mensa rock star executive comedian Jeopardy hoochie-mama*, it's just that it's not relevant. How does anything mean anything about anything? The only thing I can be that's of value is an employee and a mom.

*Reference to the movie "White Men Can't Jump". I am not an actually hoochie-mama, nor a food. LOL! : )

Snow-ker!

Me and the boys were going to go to the zoo today. But we got there and saw the river frozen and had to check that out. We had a super fun time climbing up and down the stone stairs to the river and down into the river itself. I am so intrepid now! They wanted to see if it was safe to walk on the ice and I can tell you myself, ahem, that it is not! : )

Happy New Year!

Wishing you a happy new year! I'm primed for improvement and growth. Perhaps I shall Six Sigma myself. : )