I subscribe to a dot com that is written for bloggers and other professional writers. Today’s update was somewhat unexpected. The message was about a forthcoming book that will focus on stories of political oppression in Burma. The point of the article was that here in the western world, for the moment anyway, we blog with impunity while the Burmese who blog do so at their own risk. Yet, at the risk of their lives, they struggle to tell their stories. Why do they take the risk?
Telling stories, whether about the clan or the individual, fact or fiction, is an ancient and universal human activity. I am fascinated with the act of storytelling, with the connection forged between tale-teller and audience, with the transformative power of narrative. We tell stories over the phone, on the porch, at funerals and weddings, in books and on blogs, in movies and in song lyrics, even in our advertisements. We tell our tales to our spouses, our children, our friends, and our casual acquaintances, to unseen audiences and corporate entities. Stories make connections among us. Stories are arguably the source of all art – an art form that does not make a connection doesn’t last long.
The stories we love best are the ones that give us a glimpse into our own lives. Think how the pleasure of hearing about someone’s vacation trip is increased when we’ve been there, too. When we add our stories to theirs, we enter into dialogue, enjoying the opportunity to mix and match our experiences. We can enter into dialogue with current acquaintances, or, through the power of the written word or film, with people in distant lands and distant times. We come away from those conversations satisfied, content, and affirmed.
In the context of storytelling, social networking begins to make sense. In our tweets and Facebook entries, in our blog posts and emails, each of us reaches out to everyone else, to tell our stories and to listen to the stories others share with us.
Some stories are hard to hear: stories of pain and death and disappointment, stories of sorrow and regret, of abandonment and loss. But when we allow others to tell us those stories, we give the gift of presence and compassion. When we truly listen to painful stories, we help the tale bearer shoulder the load and we give the relief of being heard. When we are heard, we can begin to heal. Ask anyone who has suffered through a divorce and whose friends picked up the phone to listen, over and over again.
Perhaps that is why some of the Burmese people take the risk of sharing their stories with the rest of us. They may want to educate or inform, but most of all they want to connect, to let all of us know what is happening in their lives. Theirs are the painful stories, the ones that heal when they are told.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
The Hood
Boaters tend to walk up and down the docks and visit with each other the way I remember the grown ups walking up and down the street in the evening when I was a child. I think it has to do with the lack of a private drive; to get to your boat, you have to walk down the dock. As you wander by, everyone who is out says hi and stops to chat, offers you a cold drink, asks you if you have this or that widget, if you know how to fix this or that broken whatsit, or if you’re going out (on the bay) this weekend.
Liveaboards range from young families with children to oldsters whose bodies and boats are decaying at about the same rate. Among our acquaintances who are actively working while living aboard are two canvas makers, a hotel builder, a boat salesman, a teacher, a hospital worker, an IT contractor, a trial lawyer, and a jewelry maker. Among those who no longer work are those who want to cruise, those who like to sail the bay, those who haven’t got a clue, those who’ve just returned from cruising, and those who just like to sit on the stern of their boats every evening and watch the world go by.
There’s not much privacy in our little world, because everyone knows someone else, everyone has a story to tell, and when you tell your friends, they tell their friends, and pretty soon the entire marina knows and enjoys your saga. Of course, every story gets better if properly embellished. If yours is dull, it will be fixed.
There’s the foreign fellow who has been told in no uncertain terms by the INS that his visa has reached its sell-by date. Because of his age, he needs crew in order to leave. Evidently he is so incredibly irascible, no crew has made it past Galveston without jumping ship. I’ve never met him, but when I’m out walking the dog and he peddles by on his bike, we wave.
Then there’s the oldster who, although pretty much blind and deaf, set to sea for Mexico some months back. The coast guard returned him to our shores, boatless. His friends organized a boat rescue, set off for mid-Gulf, and returned towing his home. He is now busily engaged in fixing the damage he sustained and making plans to leave again. No one is worried. There are folks around here who have been fixing up their boats for ten years and aren’t close to leaving. No one minds; it’s the dreams that count.
Liveaboards range from young families with children to oldsters whose bodies and boats are decaying at about the same rate. Among our acquaintances who are actively working while living aboard are two canvas makers, a hotel builder, a boat salesman, a teacher, a hospital worker, an IT contractor, a trial lawyer, and a jewelry maker. Among those who no longer work are those who want to cruise, those who like to sail the bay, those who haven’t got a clue, those who’ve just returned from cruising, and those who just like to sit on the stern of their boats every evening and watch the world go by.
There’s not much privacy in our little world, because everyone knows someone else, everyone has a story to tell, and when you tell your friends, they tell their friends, and pretty soon the entire marina knows and enjoys your saga. Of course, every story gets better if properly embellished. If yours is dull, it will be fixed.
There’s the foreign fellow who has been told in no uncertain terms by the INS that his visa has reached its sell-by date. Because of his age, he needs crew in order to leave. Evidently he is so incredibly irascible, no crew has made it past Galveston without jumping ship. I’ve never met him, but when I’m out walking the dog and he peddles by on his bike, we wave.
Then there’s the oldster who, although pretty much blind and deaf, set to sea for Mexico some months back. The coast guard returned him to our shores, boatless. His friends organized a boat rescue, set off for mid-Gulf, and returned towing his home. He is now busily engaged in fixing the damage he sustained and making plans to leave again. No one is worried. There are folks around here who have been fixing up their boats for ten years and aren’t close to leaving. No one minds; it’s the dreams that count.
Friday, May 28, 2010
In search of glass or wood or paper or cardboard or...
According to a friend of mine who is a chemist, plastic begins to react with food in a matter of minutes, meaning that food becomes contaminated with greater or lesser quantities of chemicals, depending on the food, the temperature, and the type of plastic used to make the container.
Minute amounts of these substances, if not eliminated from the body, will build up over time. What may not be toxic in small doses or eaten a few times may cause harm in larger quantities or when eaten over a period of years. We don’t know what health conditions, if any, different levels of different chemicals may produce or inhibit. Did you know that arsenic used to be a beauty treatment (it gave you lovely skin)? Then it was discovered that the body does not eliminate arsenic. It just builds up to that final, fatal dose. Terminal beauty, indeed.
Since these questions are of concern to me, I decided to quit buying food in plastic. After some weeks of grocery shopping with this in mind, I have to tell you I am shocked at my lack of choices. Try to buy food not wrapped in plastic! Even when I buy fresh produce from the bins, I have to put it in plastic bags. The only cheese I could find that wasn’t wrapped in plastic was Edam, still cheerfully packaged in red wax, or Laughing Cow, its neat little triangles wrapped in foil paper.
Consider bottled water. It sits in plastic for days or weeks waiting to be consumed, and it sits mostly in warehouses and on grocery store shelves, not in a refrigerator. I decided to buy Perrier, which I remembered comes in glass. I found that even Perrier has a plastic option – and that is the only Perrier option in Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.
I decided to store food in glass and was amazed at the prices I was asked to pay (and all the glass storage containers have – you guessed it – plastic lids). So I went back to my old practice of saving good jars for leftovers and buying only a few of the nicer glass storage containers for use in the microwave or for those leftovers that need to be frozen. Peanut butter jars and spaghetti sauce jars with wide lids and the squat little salsa jars make great storage containers for leftovers – and they’re free!
I have found that it is possible to decrease my exposure to plastic contamination, but I have to be persistent and inventive. To eliminate plastic containers from my life I’ll have to move to another country!
Minute amounts of these substances, if not eliminated from the body, will build up over time. What may not be toxic in small doses or eaten a few times may cause harm in larger quantities or when eaten over a period of years. We don’t know what health conditions, if any, different levels of different chemicals may produce or inhibit. Did you know that arsenic used to be a beauty treatment (it gave you lovely skin)? Then it was discovered that the body does not eliminate arsenic. It just builds up to that final, fatal dose. Terminal beauty, indeed.
Since these questions are of concern to me, I decided to quit buying food in plastic. After some weeks of grocery shopping with this in mind, I have to tell you I am shocked at my lack of choices. Try to buy food not wrapped in plastic! Even when I buy fresh produce from the bins, I have to put it in plastic bags. The only cheese I could find that wasn’t wrapped in plastic was Edam, still cheerfully packaged in red wax, or Laughing Cow, its neat little triangles wrapped in foil paper.
Consider bottled water. It sits in plastic for days or weeks waiting to be consumed, and it sits mostly in warehouses and on grocery store shelves, not in a refrigerator. I decided to buy Perrier, which I remembered comes in glass. I found that even Perrier has a plastic option – and that is the only Perrier option in Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.
I decided to store food in glass and was amazed at the prices I was asked to pay (and all the glass storage containers have – you guessed it – plastic lids). So I went back to my old practice of saving good jars for leftovers and buying only a few of the nicer glass storage containers for use in the microwave or for those leftovers that need to be frozen. Peanut butter jars and spaghetti sauce jars with wide lids and the squat little salsa jars make great storage containers for leftovers – and they’re free!
I have found that it is possible to decrease my exposure to plastic contamination, but I have to be persistent and inventive. To eliminate plastic containers from my life I’ll have to move to another country!
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Plastic, plastic everywhere
I remember laughing at a line in The Graduate, many years ago. The hero, Benjamin, is home from college and is trying to get a handle on life. His home life is absurd, his parents are absurd, his future is murky, and he is surrounded by people who all seem to be as alien as Martians. At his graduation party, Benjamin is cornered by an inebriated guest and told that the secret to life is plastic. It was a great joke and I laughed, taking it as yet another comment by Mike Nichols on the absurdity of the society we live in. Now, of course, I see what that advice was about – the guest was telling Benjamin how to get rich.
Plastic, in the late 60s, was the coming thing. It was cheap, indestructible, and could be molded into any shape you could dream of. No longer would you break your shampoo bottle in the shower if you dropped it. America was sold.
What did we do before plastic bags? We put produce into small paper bags. We put our accumulated purchases in large paper bags. We reused those bags all the time – to take out trash, to wrap parcels, to line cake tins, to make hand puppets, to line the kitty box and the bird cage. And when they were discarded, they rotted (moist paper in a land fill decomposes in a matter of weeks). We had cardboard boxes, glass bottles, and wooden crates.
Now, over 40 years later, plastic is ubiquitous. It remains cheap, indestructible, and incredibly versatile. There are a lot of issues with respect to its use (pollution, land fill, the ever expanding “continent” of floating plastic in the ocean, the fact that, in general, it takes 1,000 – yes, one thousand – years for it to disintegrate, etc.) but we’ll leave those issues for wiser heads.
What concerns me in this particular blog is the fact that we may be poisoning ourselves by buying and storing food in plastic. I’ve known for a long time that I shouldn’t microwave food in a plastic container or put hot food into a plastic container that’s headed for the fridge. For years I’ve refused to buy milk in plastic containers because the milk just tastes funny.
What I didn’t know is that the chemicals in plastic begin to react with food stored in it in a matter of minutes, regardless of the temperature of the food or drink.
Plastic, in the late 60s, was the coming thing. It was cheap, indestructible, and could be molded into any shape you could dream of. No longer would you break your shampoo bottle in the shower if you dropped it. America was sold.
What did we do before plastic bags? We put produce into small paper bags. We put our accumulated purchases in large paper bags. We reused those bags all the time – to take out trash, to wrap parcels, to line cake tins, to make hand puppets, to line the kitty box and the bird cage. And when they were discarded, they rotted (moist paper in a land fill decomposes in a matter of weeks). We had cardboard boxes, glass bottles, and wooden crates.
Now, over 40 years later, plastic is ubiquitous. It remains cheap, indestructible, and incredibly versatile. There are a lot of issues with respect to its use (pollution, land fill, the ever expanding “continent” of floating plastic in the ocean, the fact that, in general, it takes 1,000 – yes, one thousand – years for it to disintegrate, etc.) but we’ll leave those issues for wiser heads.
What concerns me in this particular blog is the fact that we may be poisoning ourselves by buying and storing food in plastic. I’ve known for a long time that I shouldn’t microwave food in a plastic container or put hot food into a plastic container that’s headed for the fridge. For years I’ve refused to buy milk in plastic containers because the milk just tastes funny.
What I didn’t know is that the chemicals in plastic begin to react with food stored in it in a matter of minutes, regardless of the temperature of the food or drink.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Online Work is Working Out
I have to report a crashing lack of interest in my grant-writing career. It sprang up, flourished in the zero-oxygen world of non-profits for a brief moment, and died of exhaustion. I simply stopped getting up, dressing up, and showing up, which pretty much put a bullet in the head of my ambition.
Face it – I have a very small amount of ambition for anything that becomes tedious, and seeking grant writing opportunities became tedious fairly quickly. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I wither fairly quickly without encouragement, and I got very little encouragement in this endeavor. I put it all back on myself. I’m just not someone who thrives on meeting and talking with people. In fact, it wears me out in a hurry.
So I decided to axe the people part of technical writing and just do the writing. I haven’t made much, but I’ve made 100% more than I did at grant writing!
There are days, like today, when I spend far too much time indoors, at the keyboard. I have been below this entire day, ignoring pathetic looks from the dog and my own eye strain as I apply, apply, apply for writing jobs on the internet. I just finished a series for a friend’s new magazine and sent those off. She likes the articles, which is great, but they’re freebies. Great practice, no money. My hit rate online is now about one in 20, which overall isn’t the worst. The money has, finally, begun to increase. If I can just be patient. If I can just trust that this is, finally, the forum that best suits my talents.
The wonderful thing about working online is the fact that I communicate almost entirely by the written word. I don’t have to hurdle the obstacles of age or physical appearance, nor do I have to appear sprightly, competent, and grateful for employment. I’m not much good at any of that. Of course the bad news is that to date the gigs don’t pay much and they don’t take long to do.
I have finally started exploring other online writing options as well. What on earth takes me so long to move out of my comfort zone? I guess it’s like anything else – I have to be miserable enough to take that leap.
I have got to walk that dog.
Face it – I have a very small amount of ambition for anything that becomes tedious, and seeking grant writing opportunities became tedious fairly quickly. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I wither fairly quickly without encouragement, and I got very little encouragement in this endeavor. I put it all back on myself. I’m just not someone who thrives on meeting and talking with people. In fact, it wears me out in a hurry.
So I decided to axe the people part of technical writing and just do the writing. I haven’t made much, but I’ve made 100% more than I did at grant writing!
There are days, like today, when I spend far too much time indoors, at the keyboard. I have been below this entire day, ignoring pathetic looks from the dog and my own eye strain as I apply, apply, apply for writing jobs on the internet. I just finished a series for a friend’s new magazine and sent those off. She likes the articles, which is great, but they’re freebies. Great practice, no money. My hit rate online is now about one in 20, which overall isn’t the worst. The money has, finally, begun to increase. If I can just be patient. If I can just trust that this is, finally, the forum that best suits my talents.
The wonderful thing about working online is the fact that I communicate almost entirely by the written word. I don’t have to hurdle the obstacles of age or physical appearance, nor do I have to appear sprightly, competent, and grateful for employment. I’m not much good at any of that. Of course the bad news is that to date the gigs don’t pay much and they don’t take long to do.
I have finally started exploring other online writing options as well. What on earth takes me so long to move out of my comfort zone? I guess it’s like anything else – I have to be miserable enough to take that leap.
I have got to walk that dog.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Gluten allergy causes depression?!
I've had a good week, thanks, I think, to chemicals ingested. I discovered this past summer that an intolerance to gluten was responsible for my periodic deep depressions, into which no light could shine. Within a week of eliminating all forms of gluten (and they are legion) from my diet, I popped out of a three month depression and could move forward. The next psychological toxin to take hold was anxiety. Granted, I have a lot to be anxious about, personally, professionally, and as an inhabitant of this world, but my anxiety was such that all I could do was stand in the metaphorical road bleating in terror. I hardly accomplished anything at all between bursts of existential terror. Then I read somewhere that a magnesium deficiency could cause anxiety so I bought a calcium-magnesium chewable. Next I discovered a homeopathic remedy in Kroger, of all places, for "stress due to work." About three days into these two remedies, the anxiety peeled away. All the rational causes for my anxiety are still with me, but the anxiety itself is either absent or so reduced I hardly notice it. The result? I am able to move forward.
I've finished my website (www.funding-finder.com), I have three clients (no money, just three clients), and have started to connect to a whole group of people, to have conversations and do work that matters to me and generally to feel a part of something again. I have actually made a friend in the area, and what a blessing that is! Like a dog that turns around three times before settling in for the night, I am scratching my blanket and beginning to settle into my life here.
I've finished my website (www.funding-finder.com), I have three clients (no money, just three clients), and have started to connect to a whole group of people, to have conversations and do work that matters to me and generally to feel a part of something again. I have actually made a friend in the area, and what a blessing that is! Like a dog that turns around three times before settling in for the night, I am scratching my blanket and beginning to settle into my life here.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Sharing a few fears
My bright idea when I started this blog was to do a little therapy for myself by writing down my struggles and successes and insights as I slog through the last half of my 50s and beyond. I know there are people out there who share the same frustrations and joys. Lately, however, there have been so many frustrations! I hesitated to share only the bad stuff, but I seem to be drowning in bad attitude these days.
My loudest problem is my failure thus far to earn my keep. I got hired as a paralegal last fall (my profession for over 20 years before we left on our adventures) and I was more or less happily resigned to working at that for another 10years, until Social Security and Medicare kicked in. Then I was fired. What a blow that was! Not only that, but since it was in the 90 day no-fault period, they wouldn't even tell me why.
It was such a huge rejection, I have just been stunned, paralyzed, and completely unhorsed. I know, rationally, that I have the same talents and skills I have always had, but it took me two years to get that interview (and I only got it because of a friend) and then - wham.
I have started several businesses over the last three years and none of them has produced much income. I do good work, but have a heck of a time marketing my services. My current attempt is grant writing. So far I have one client - for no pay (it is, after all, my first professional effort).
Every day, including today, I have to take a deep breath and put myself out in the world and put a lid on the voices in my head that tell me failure is just around the next bend. I keep trying to remember all those inspirational stories about Abraham Lincoln and others who made failure an art form until they finally hit on the right path. May this be it! I am running out of money, time, and courage.
My loudest problem is my failure thus far to earn my keep. I got hired as a paralegal last fall (my profession for over 20 years before we left on our adventures) and I was more or less happily resigned to working at that for another 10years, until Social Security and Medicare kicked in. Then I was fired. What a blow that was! Not only that, but since it was in the 90 day no-fault period, they wouldn't even tell me why.
It was such a huge rejection, I have just been stunned, paralyzed, and completely unhorsed. I know, rationally, that I have the same talents and skills I have always had, but it took me two years to get that interview (and I only got it because of a friend) and then - wham.
I have started several businesses over the last three years and none of them has produced much income. I do good work, but have a heck of a time marketing my services. My current attempt is grant writing. So far I have one client - for no pay (it is, after all, my first professional effort).
Every day, including today, I have to take a deep breath and put myself out in the world and put a lid on the voices in my head that tell me failure is just around the next bend. I keep trying to remember all those inspirational stories about Abraham Lincoln and others who made failure an art form until they finally hit on the right path. May this be it! I am running out of money, time, and courage.
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