I hit a point this summer where I was starting to pick myself and surroundings apart, only looking at the negative things around me and within me.  If anyone had needed me to, I could list out all the things bothering me in a heartbeat.  In fact, Josh often got to hear all the negative things I thought about myself and various situations in list form.  I couldn’t really do the same for things I felt good about.

That all changed last week.  Nothing set the change in motion; it was just an internal decision that I wanted to start bettering things that were wrong vs. feeling like crap about them.

Body

I stopped doing daily yoga and running last fall, and while I haven’t put back on the weight I originally lost, I have felt sluggish and soft.  My back and shoulders have started hurting again on and off, something that had stopped happening while I did yoga.  And moreover, I felt less productive, my mind jumping from thought to thought like a monkey, leaving me feeling frantic after work time because I hadn’t gotten enough done.

I decided to return to the yoga app last week.  Every single morning.  I now spend a half hour with Lily before I shower and start working.  It pushes back my morning coffee (which I was becoming way too dependent upon) and yogurt too.  It’s helping me focus and sort of reducing my anxiety. (My anxiety may be too large to expect yoga to really make a dent in it.)  It’s making me feel focused and grounded when I sit down to work.  And it’s helping my back.  So yoga for the win.

Very soon, I’ll probably start adding in running twice a week.  But I want to make sure I’ve established practices that are sustainable before I start stressing out those practices by overloading them.

Brain

I decided I needed a mental challenge, so I went with learning programming.  I like that Steve Jobs quote, “I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.”  And writers need to think in a very calculated, precise way, piecing together a story much in the same way that a computer program is constructed.  Frayed storylines and loose threads of plot are just as problematic as coding missing a character.  Plus, it’s something I can learn that is very important to the twins.  There’s a nice hum between all of us as we work.

I wrote about how the kids are learning coding.  I’m tagging along for the ride, using the same books since they speak to someone on my level.  Right now, I’m trying to learn Python.  The Wolvog is faster than I am at picking it up, but I know a lot more mathematical theory so it balances out, especially when I slow us down by droning on about tuples.  He loves that.  So as long as my programming partner doesn’t ditch me or refuse to answer my endless questions, expect a really cool game that the ChickieNob is helping me design uploaded to my blog some time this year.

Personality

I rarely say no.  My thought is that if I can say yes, then I should say yes.  What I didn’t realize was how often I couldn’t really say yes, but was saying yes anyway.  So this year, I’m saying no.  I’m not over-committing and then feeling frantic in the process.  I’m offering things once, and if the person wants to take me up on the favour, the ball is now in their court.  I’m not going to chase them down in order to provide them with a favour (something I often did in the past that left me feeling resentful afterward).

I am saying yes to things I enjoy, things I think are important, things I can do to be helpful that don’t detract from my own sense of well-being.  And all other things, I am apologetically saying no and not obsessing about the opportunities I’m turning down.  It leaves me more time to enjoy or do a good job on the things I am saying yes to.

Home

We started home improvements this past spring.  There are A LOT of necessary home improvements, and most of them feel fairly urgent, at least from an aesthetic standpoint.  We took care of replacing the windows first.  Window replacement sucks because it’s one of those things that cost a lot of money but doesn’t change the look of the house.  So, for the most part, our house is EXACTLY the same as it was before they came with the exception that we can now open the windows.  Which will soon become more helpful than I realized at the time.

After we finished the windows, we realized that they had cost a lot more than we had budgeted, and we would need to wait a while to make cosmetic changes to our house.  It filled me with dread to live in this ugly space and it filled me with dread to think about a time when we’d be spending a shit-ton of money and have workpeople in and out of our home.  You’ve probably also picked up over the years that I’m a little overexcited when it comes to things such as evenness and symmetry.  Neatness.  I am the woman who bleaches the inside of my dishwasher.  So I spent a lot of nights lying awake, worried that the painters would  — let’s say — leave a tiny sliver of extra paint in some unnoticeable corner of the wall, and it would drive me crazy forever.

The only person I trust to deal with my neuroses is me.  And maybe Josh.  But mostly me.

Over the last few months, we’ve gotten estimates for the work we need done, and whenever they tell me the price tag and the length of time (remember, I work out of the house, so it also means a loss of work time for me when we have people in here), I would spend the rest of the day curled up in a little ball emotionally.  I didn’t see how we were going to do this in a way that didn’t demolish our savings and retain my sanity.

And that’s when I decided to do it myself.  Like almost all of it myself.  Like watching YouTube tutorials and then doing the whole ding-dong home improvement project mostly on my own.  When I tell people who know me well that this is what I’m doing, there are long pauses of silence.  But everyone eventually comes around to the idea.  And for the first time in many many years, I feel calm about it.  I feel in control.  I feel like I own this renovation; that it will be done my way with all lines very very very evenly measured.

Redoing every room in my house on my own feels very Riot Grrl.  I have a feeling it may also look a little Riot Grrl when I’m done, hence why I’m starting with low-stakes rooms such as my bathroom and building up to redoing my own kitchen.  I’ll need to hire out for some of the plumbing and electrical tasks, but anything carpentry?  I taught woodworking.  I mean, sure, it was one summer and our projects ranged from wooden napkin rings to alphabet blocks.  But it was woodworking nonetheless.  And painting the walls: I have an MFA and six of those credits had to be in a different medium.  Sure, my visual arts course work was in printmaking and my background is general illustration.  But how different can painting on a wall be from painting on a canvas?  Not that I ever really painted on a canvas but we can overlook that for a moment.

I am probably not going to post before pictures because they’re too embarrassing.  But I will post after pictures.  I’ve given myself a long window of time to complete this, and I’m going to do it in small pieces at a time.  All the better to obsess over every rotation of the paint roller.

Coda

So that’s where I am.  Not working toward perfection (except in terms of evenness of the distribution of paint) or anything silly like that.  Just bettering.  Making myself and the space around me better than where it is right now.

Anyone want to join along with their own personal bettering over the course of the year?  It’s pretty laid back.  Not too much stress (unless you count the fact that I am planning to lie on my side on the floor so I can be eye-level with the baseboard when I paint it).  Just tiny, sustainable change.  No, I’m serious: tiny, sustainable change.

I read a post that affected me deeply the other day. Danielle LaPorte writes about why she burned her journals.  20 years of recorded moments, up in smoke.

Image: Thomas’s Pics via Flickr

Like LaPorte, I love clutter-free living, but while I’m happy to toss away favours from parties or donate unneeded kitchen utensils, I don’t see my old journals (or my blog) as something I could part with willingly.  All my words somehow stand outside that idea of clutter, along with my sofa and stand mixer and all the other tangible objects I can’t imagine purging either because they mean a lot to me or because I see them as well-integrated into my daily life.

Unlike LaPorte, I am nostalgic.  I love reopening old journals or scrolling back through my blog.  I’ll be looking for an old post, and I’ll read the ones before and after it, remembering moments — good or bad — which have faded from memory.  Maybe the right trigger would organically bring back those memories from my mental basement, but I get nervous over the idea of needing to wait for a trigger to access my past, by which I mean, my life.

LaPorte breaks us down into historians and burners, and I think there is a lot of truth in that we really aren’t a blend of both but more one or the other.  There are those who like to document their present and reflect on their past, and there are the ones who like the fleeting nature of the present and like to dream about their future.  And despite my dislike of clutter, I am a historian to the core.  I like to remember where I’ve been, even the unhappy times.

At the same time, I don’t really love the idea of people reading my personal journals after I’m gone.  My blog, sure; I’ve chosen to publish those thoughts and put them out there.  But my rage-y journal from my high school years: do I really want the kids to read those without me there to give those passages context?  Still, I can’t imagine burning them to prepare for the day I’m not here.

Are you a historian or a burner, and can you ever imagine burning your old journals or deleting your blog?

cross-posted with BlogHer

 Image: 1derwoman via Flickr

I took the twins to a comic convention.  It was a much larger venue than the convention I took the twins to a few weeks ago, which was their first convention.  So, I think they entered thinking it would have a similar feel.  I certainly thought it would be just as kid-friendly due to the scope of kid-focused programming (which it was, but in a very different way from the other convention).  But it was, from the very start, a very different experience.  There were tens of thousands of people at this convention, and a cavernous room of artists and vendors (not to mention panel discussions).  We wandered through Artist’s Alley, looking for the children’s programming.

While there was certainly cosplay at the smaller convention I took them to a few weeks ago, the sheer number of people increased the sheer number of costumes exponentially.  What has always been overtly there on paper suddenly brought with it an entirely new understanding as the page came to life in the three dimensional world.  Namely, that female superheroes don’t wear very much.  At all.

It’s not the fault of the venue or the fault of the cosplayers or the fault of the artists who create female superheroes either in skin-tight outfits outlining their voluptuous bodies or in mini bustier-like contraptions that cause their breasts to spill out the top, yet the problem exists: we have an activity that naturally draws both children and adults that hasn’t found its balance yet to cater to both ends of the age range and we have artists presenting a very limited fantasy that isn’t shared by the wide-range of consumers of their art.

In other words, if we don’t talk about it, we run the risk of alienating the very people we’re trying to bring into the fun: the next generation of geeks (and specifically, girls).

I got to watch the ChickieNob process in real time.  She came to the event, proudly wearing a female comic book character on her t-shirt.  The shirt shows a fairly tame version of the top-half of the superhero’s body.  The first time she saw someone dressed as this superhero, she started jogging towards her and then stopped, whispering to me, “that woman isn’t really wearing anything.”  She… uh… sort of wasn’t.  What looked fairly chaste two-dimensionally suddenly became all about the cleavage three-dimensionally.

“Do you want your picture with her?” I asked.

ChickieNob shook her head and we kept walking.  But I could see her now noticing just how tight Catwoman’s outfit is when it’s on a body rather than on a page.  And how much Poison Ivy’s breasts leak out the top of her green merry widow.  And it just didn’t seem… real.

“Real female superheroes wouldn’t dress like that,” ChickieNob decided.

“It doesn’t seem very likely,” I agreed.

“They’d wear a t-shirt and shorts,” she decided.  “So they could move around easily.”

“And they’d probably wear knee pads and elbow pads to protect themselves,” I added.

She shrugged at the idea of protective gear but she laughed when I leaned down and whispered, “It’s almost like men think that we like to fight crime by whacking bad guys with our boobs.”

Costumes that are eye-catching and realistic can be done.  Perhaps Michael Lee’s illustrations aren’t your cup of tea, but he has proven that we can make women interesting without placing them in what amounts to colourful lingerie.  I would love to see others reimagine the current pantheon of female superheroes (and even female villains) in clothing that allows their actions to be bad-ass; not the fact that they’ve shown a lot of skin.  This is a Wonder Woman who would emerge from a battle with both her breasts intact.  Or to see more characters like Dust.  Even Batgirl or Rogue’s form-fitting black outfits looks modest next to the cleavage-heaving underroos of Elektra.  I’m not talking about putting Supergirl in baggy yoga pants, but my G-d, would any superhero really want their midriff bare if they were facing down enemies?

Women don’t always feel welcome in the comic book world and certainly, the tech world hasn’t been incredibly inviting.  From the recent Titshare fiasco at TechCrunch (which again was a collision of kids and adults) to the on-going Dickwolves saga, it takes a dedicated woman to plow through this aspect of gaming, comic, and tech culture.  And it’s sad because that aspect of popular culture — that anti-woman sentiment — is such a small part of the larger whole, but it’s the one that gets noted and repeated.

But take aside our generation for a moment: what are we teaching our daughters?  And are we giving them a gaming, tech, and comic world they’ll want to inherit?  Is it possible to keep all that exists today and add to the pantheon female superheroes (and even villains!) that have their breasts protected under clothing while they fight crime?

There needs to be room for both: for female superheroes that fulfill a collective fantasy as well as female superheroes that reflect the sorts of girls we’d like our daughters to emulate in their very human way.  No, I don’t want to raise a crime fighting supergirl, but I would like her to be influenced by the bravery and confidence that goes hand-in-hand with comic book storylines.

The younger generation of geeks are always observing the older generation of geeks, especially when our worlds collide as they seem to do as conferences with digital natives programming alongside adults and new comic book lovers sharing the joy with their comic book loving parents.  Even moreso when adults invite kids into that atmosphere by providing kid-specific programming that encourages their attendance.

We want to raise the next generation of geeks, to bring them into our activities and interests.  We need to make sure what exists on the page translates well in the three-dimensional world.

Coda: I posted this first on GeekDad the other day, unsure of the response it would get from a mostly male audience.  But I was really excited to read a lot of people saying the same thing I said: that this has always been there, but until those outfits came off the page, it wasn’t totally clear just how unrealistic the clothing was in the context of the story action.  It would be like having a school principal wearing a bikini: there is nothing wrong with the article of clothing at the pool, but it makes no sense (and would probably make people a tad uncomfortable) if they saw it in a school.

There was, of course, as you’d expect, the person who used the argument of “if you don’t like it, stay away.”  And yes, that is certainly one way to solve the problem.  But if that’s the approach people are going to suggest, they can’t complain in the future when there are no girl comic book-lovers.  Or girl gamers.  Or girl programmers.  Anywhere girls are currently feeling unwelcome due to the climate AND the message they get to leave if they don’t like it.

And as I pointed out above, that unwelcomeness is a small part of a much larger, much happier world of geekdom.  It’s a shame that it’s the part of that world that keeps getting highlighted.  But it will keep getting highlighted until we do something about it.  Because girls are going to speak up if they don’t feel welcome.  And as my little girl pointed out with that simple thought of “Real female superheroes wouldn’t dress like that,” there is a big disconnect between the realistic-fantasy that could exist and the objectifying-fantasy that does exist.

And that what works on the page doesn’t necessarily work in the three dimensional world.  With the popularity of cosplay, artists need to remember that and work together with the fans who bring their images to life.

Instead of foisting a one-note fantasy on the reader, allow them to build their own fantasy and not get distracted by the details that are pigeonholing the character.  You can present a sexy, confident, ass-kicking, intelligent, beautiful character who just so happens to have her boobs covered up so they don’t fall out as she delivers a roundhouse kick.

And no one is saying that grown women shouldn’t be able to walk around in merry widows.  If that floats your boat, more power to you.  But girls do need to see that there are a plethora of options out there.  If you walk into the comic book store and see what’s on display, you’d walk away thinking that there’s not.

My old yoga teacher used to talk about the monkey mind, which jumps from thought to thought, never settling down to tune in to the moment.  My brain has gone totally simian.

In a 20-second period, I jumped from “I feel like a sad blob” to “maybe I should pick up the kids early from school so we can read Harry Potter” to “I think I’m getting my period” to “let’s go to the Faroe Islands.”

I’m not entirely sure why the Faroe Islands.  It was one of those things where an article mentioned the place and my monkey mind made me Google it.  And then I saw pictures.  No, wait, I saw these pictures.  And then I watched the video made by a travel service.

And then my monkey mind went wild, like a golden lion tamarin who has found an untapped treasure trove of unblemished fruit.  How could I focus on anything like… work… when the Faroe Islands existed?  And for that matter, how could I focus when I had to think about all the other places I’d love to visit: how I want to get to Mingulay one day.  And ever since I saw a pictures of the Azores in my National Geographic Kids book when I was eight, I’ve wanted to go there too.  And Iceland — I need to get to Iceland at some point.

Then I Googled airfare to the Faroe Islands and came back to earth like a sad monkey.

There are a lot of places we want to go, and a few places we should go to before we go to all of those places.  Israel, for instance, trumps the Faroe Islands.  I have a feeling I will get there at some point if I want to put it at the top of my wishlist.  But not now.

Where would you love to go?

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Time Out” (Two Adults, One Child)
• “He’s a Watcher” (The Little Grape)
• “Little Red Hen” (AndMom)
• “Childfree – the Life for Me” (a guest post)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Here We Go Again has the most brilliant, simple idea in her post.  I’m not going to ruin it by telling you it here, but suffice to say, when you read her post, your mouth with drop open and you’ll say, “daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn, that is really really smart.”  Feel free to tell her that in a comment.

The Medicated Momma has a tale of two baby showers.  She writes, “I hate that I can’t get a baby shower invitation in the mail and not just stick it on my fridge and move on with my life without weighing my options with best case and worst case scenarios about the state of my uterus.”  Sending her a lot of good thoughts that today brings her good news.

Mellow in the Midwest has a post unpacking everything on her mind before her second baby arrives.  While she rationally knows that it will all work out since things have a tendency to work themselves out, she also admits that “All of this physical stuff I’ve checked off the list, but I still feel utterly unprepared emotionally and know that there’s no way to feel differently. There’s no way to prepare for the change that’s coming.”  It’s a great post about feeling off-kilter, not knowing what to expect, but also knowing that cool things are about to happen.

Lastly, Searching for Our Silver Lining has an incredibly helpful post about the NICU that you should bookmark and pass along to any friend or family member who ends up with a child who remains behind at the hospital.  This advice would have been invaluable during our NICU stay.  It’s a must-read.

The roundup to the Roundup: Where do you want to go?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 6th and September 13th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

Updated at the Bottom

I was so inspired by the New York Times’s article today about the “fertility industry” that I thought I’d apply that keen eye to other aspects of the medical world.  So yes, cancer industry, I’m looking at you.  I mean, aren’t ALL medical practices making money off our medical issues, churning us through protocols without any regard to how much the patient can take emotionally?  If reproductive endocrinologists are selling us the fantasy of fertility, aren’t oncologists just selling us the fantasy of cancer survival?

No?

I am being sarcastic, but it is frustrating that no other area of health care is labeled an industry and condemned.  We don’t blame the medications or doctors when people die from cancer; we blame the cancer.  In that situation, we understand that our bodies are not under our control as much as we’d like to believe, though we do hold out hope that what has worked for others will work for us.  But yet when infertility treatments don’t go according to plan — and anyone who believes they’re a sure shot hasn’t done due diligence as a patient to explore success rates (and yes, exploring success rates applies to every area of the medical world as well along with second opinions) — we blame the “industry.”

We’ve been promised something that it hasn’t been able to deliver.

Except no one promised it.  Or, if they did, they didn’t promise it any moreso than oncologists make similar claims when trying to assuage the feelings of very anxious patients.  Have hope.  Focus on the success rates not the failure rates.  It’s worth a try.

Miriam Zoll writes,

Medical science has achieved great feats, improved and saved the lives of many. But when it comes to assisted reproductive technologies, science fails far more often than is generally believed.

But isn’t that true for ALL areas of medical science, at least the ones that have high emotional stakes?  When it comes to cancer technologies, science fails far more often than is generally believed if you only focus on all the people wearing “survivor” shirts as they cross the finish line on a fundraising walk.  But even knowing the failure rate, would anyone not try reproductive technologies or cancer technologies within reason, hoping they’ll become part of those success statistics?

Individual doctors who are treating individual patients need to do a better job at talking through the risks, success rates, and counseling patients out of treatments when they don’t make sense financially.  And the good ones do.  If your doctor isn’t doing those things, that is the fault of that doctor, not the fault of all doctors.

I am all for regulations.  I do believe that patients need to be better informed, and the media needs to stop holding out IVF as a panacea for all fertility problems.  I think it’s disgusting when I see the quarterly reports for a fertility clinic and see just how much money they’re making because I have a medical issue.  Though the reality is that I’d probably say the same thing if I looked at the quarterly reports for medical practices focused on treating other diseases, AND I also know that I am looking at numbers without any understanding of how much of that money goes back into running the office so those doctors can keep providing treatment.  I have no clue how much of my doctor’s annual salary goes into paying his insurance; how much of it is actual, usable take-home.

But above all of that, doctors need to do a better job educating AND supporting patients who choose to resolve their infertility by leaving treatments and pursuing another path including adoption and living child-free.  I would be all for doctors being required to help patients explore those other options before starting any treatments; just mentally help them through the decision process.  I think if there was more support for it, there would be people who would look at the success rates and say, “for me, it’s not worth the gamble.”

Because sometimes it isn’t.  Though sometimes it is.

What I’m not for is skewing the story in the opposite direction.  I don’t think that actually solves the problem with the way the general population understands infertility and the limits of treatments.  Zoll quotes what she presents as eye-opening statistics such as the fact that “In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the overall failure rate at almost 70 percent.”  And yes, that is true if we look at the number of IVFs performed yearly vs. the number of times it is successful.  But Zoll’s number doesn’t tell us anything about the individual success rates of IVF.  The percentage of people who get pregnant after two or three tries.  When you look at it that way, the success rates of IVF mimic the success rates of an unassisted pregnancy.  In other words, just as fertile people often take a few cycles to get pregnant, the same goes for treatment cycles, and a lot of that is dependent on the age and diagnosis of the patient.

To hold doctors or technologies to a standard that even the healthiest of bodies can’t achieve feels like it’s picking the wrong fight.

Oh, because there is a fight here to be had.  But this isn’t it.

I don’t blame the author.  I think she did a fine job presenting a facet of the infertility world, and she has a personal story that deserves to be heard and considered.  I do blame the New York Times for that title and the lens it put on the article.  Because they have a big agenda when it comes to infertility and we’ve seen it over and over again.

Update:

I own Pamela Jeanne an enormous apology.  I missed until right now that she worked on the op-ed too.

As I said before, Zoll has a personal story that deserves to be heard and considered, and that goes for Pamela Jeanne too.  I think both women have stories that are worthy of attention on their own, and I think it detracts from their personal stories to lay blame on the medical community or the media, both of whom didn’t create infertility.

I mean yes, we can argue that McDonald’s creates a product that creates a health crisis in people, but we can’t really argue that reproductive endocrinologist created infertility.  Nor can they provide a perfect solution to a disease they didn’t create.  If we want infertility to be defined as a disease, we need to treat it as a disease; one that has a wide range of severity within the diagnosis and one in which a single protocol or a single path doesn’t fit all.  I’m glad that both women ultimately found a solution that worked for them and wish they had been given more support along the way.