Thinking outloud



When proponents of "family" as a necessary institution and a mandatory integral part of a life of any "socially-healthy and normal" individual explain the advantages of maintaining good relationships with close and remote family members - the arguments used revolve around the idea that family gives you strength, that the best moments in life are shared with your family, that the family shapes you into your best self, that your parents have made an investment - that no one ever will be able to match! - into you, in money, time, energy. That the seniors in your family will shower you with words of wisdom, care and support in difficult times, and the ones closest to you will always share the burden, and the ones you've helped - will return the favour. And if this is not how things have worked out for you - than there's definitely something wrong with you, ungrateful looser.

All in all - the family is viewed as the best thing that can happen to you, the best thing you will ever have and the main reason you work, stay healthy, educate yourself, have a social life, have a romantic relationship. And of course, we know that the biggest advocates of rules (let alone the creators) - are those who benefit from them the most - but this is a point I will come back to some day later.

The 2 questions I have following the imposed statement though are:

Should blood ties ( or any blood ties of blood ties ) that create a feeling of misery and anger ; that suck out energy and feed on somebody else's hardship and problems; that tell lies and gossip behind the back; that demand commitment to living a life based on their needs and expectations; that use manipulations (especially sudden problems with health), psychological pressure; that are rude, insincere, immature and absolutely do not care about the consequences of their actions and behavior on other people's lives - be considered a family?

Can family - by the definition of people who make you feel stronger, better, more secure, happier - consist of friends and life mentors?





Some raw thoughts.

Today, in the middle of footing some employee IRA matching and totals, I had a sudden thought. Say, I have quite a few goals for the coming year, and not all of them are one-step, unsophisticated plans that I can accomplish in a day or two.

A few of them do look like they will consume a lot of time and money before something will start to shape up, and the problem is - I can not even be sure of the result as I do not really have anyone in my close circles who has gone through same relevant experience. For example, thinking about 1 year from now  -  I will have a choice of either having 3rd child, or run Geneva UNICEF 10K of course, or make some advancements or looking for a niche in my career, which will involve more education and training. And all these projects are absolutely mutually exclusive. I can pick 1 thing and work my schedule and my budget around this one thing only. And I'm sure this is just a small sample of the "forks" that I will need to resolve in the coming years.

And so, I felt like a need help on a bigger scale: people willing to help me in one way or another, whether with time or advice, or sharing some knowledge which will spare me from extensive research, or just providing some moral and mental support.
What if I did have a team - virtual mostly - to back me up with all those needs that will come up? What if I start with a social experiment and see if it is possible to organize such a team, and how it will evolve and whether people will voluntarily offer help on a constant basis in return for support, help and advice back when possible (I believe in gratitude , help and mutual support, yep), but also for being a part of larger projects and receiving constant progress updates, pros and cons of untypical life decisions, and as a result - a blueprint for going through same or similar situations should they ever need to?

On the other hand - and it is a significant downside for me - this team building (literally) strategy implies consistency in following specific steps, providing updates, and hell - creating and maintaining a specific public image. Which I would hate to do on a 5 year span.

But it will potentially provide help and support.

But will take away time, privacy and a certain degree of freedom of choice in decision making.

But will allow me to access, borrow and leverage other people's knowledge, time and ideas.

But will put me in position when I will have to give some back. To owe them. And I hate to owe anything for anyone.

There’re days when even the air around  is still, void and old. Sniff the air - and you know no changes are coming any time soon. Time to keep your head down and work, make progress, build up resources, build up your own resistance and wait for a better moment.

And then there’re days when you can sense the wind of change all around you: fresh, promising, full of hope. Giving you the alert to be ready for the long-awaited to emerge, the anticipation of the new and better. Evolving courage to go with the flow and trust your instincts for nothing can go wrong and the Universe will take care of you and place you exactly where you need to be.

...I left gym at 11pm tonight and walking home through the open space felt the change of wind. From still and heavy feeling of two days ago, it brought the sense of strength, calmness and an up move. And when I literally walked up the hill I saw huge full moon right above the lights of Centennial - usually the residential area of Centennial has no lights at night, but tonight the far end of the open space of our community ended in a silent void for miles ahead and rising above were the floating islands of lights and the surreal moon. All - like a picture of a different dimension woven by the wind in the night sky as I was walking towards it. It seemed all I had to do was just to make one step closer and stretch out my hand...

If there's only one good thing about being a witness to a nasty online fight

between a group of... women who howl about all the difficulties of being a women in the modern world and a group of women and men who push back with "oh, why being so negative?" and "let me just tell you about all the problems men have" respectively - it's the happy realization on how lucky I am not to think in such terms and not to live in a world where there is always some fat bully above me just waiting for the next chance to ruin my life.

Not that I live in the perfect world of sunshine, rainbows, puppies, zero gender pay gap and adequate maternity support - I have had my experience with job loss following having a child, being pushed around by male colleagues and managers who did not know what was going on in the department close to how well I knew it (parce que c'est il qui "porte le cravate" (c) ), was approached with random offers of sex by random men and was denied a bank account opening and apartment rental... no, wait, the last two actually occurred due to my origin, not gender :)  But I absolutely can not understand how bashing men online for something they screwed up years ago can help improve somebody's life. And having a thread of dozens of comments where anyone is trying to out-misery everybody else with her own miserable experience indicates there's clearly something more than mere venting going on. Men can never understand us because they don't get pregnant, give birth or "even bleed every month" <sic>. Right. How much more can this fact ruin your life?

I can handle the feeling of "life is not fair" coming around every couple of months and always being replaced by the feeling of  "I'ma show you how great I am"(c), but I can't possibly imagine living 24/7,  year after year feeling insignificant, misunderstood, ignored, abused, used... Growing this feeling inside me, nurturing it, giving in to it...  I wouldn't be able to.

A day ago I got dragged into a quick online comment exchange with two young ladies on - and that's scary - a woman's determinism and purpose in life. Other people's ideas on what a woman's life should be like and what her - thus mine - purpose in life should be, do occasionally reach me, but apparently last time they did was a while ago and reading this again yesterday soured my day a little.
The girls jumped in to reply to one of my comments on the importance of self-sufficiency and self-reliance as woman becomes mother, wrote a few long comments full of irrelevant thoughts, random accusations of being a selfish money-loving child-neglecting control-freak (not necessarily in this order!), threw in a couple of examples that would prove my point rather than theirs, and continued to rant about the outrageousness of women like me long after I retired from the conversation :)

Every time I have somebody approach me with a persistent advice on how I should immediately change my life so my family benefits from it, I facepalm myself.  In my mind, if it is absolutely necessary that I do not appear rude. And while on the World Wide Web it is easier to ignore a well-wishing comment than to start explaining my views to every random person, the though of how many of such people are out there makes me want to facepalm myself anyway.

I get quite emotional over the idea that being a wife and mother  (TM) - means devoting all your life to the needs of your family - is the only true and natural way for a woman to live her life. Has it been perfectly natural for women of the past few centuries to take full and complete care of their babies from birth to age 3? Absolutely! I can easily picture a peasant girl in her late teens, who delivers a baby in Western Europe some 300 years ago and receives a paid maternity leave right away! Or a female factory worker a century and a half ago, a single mother with no relatives in town, who is of course entitled for maternity benefits form both the government and the plant she works at so she could stay home with her baby, and take care of him. Yep, for the next 3 years! Or - on the other hand - a Victorian upper middle class mother would surely stay with her baby daughter day and night, and as her daughter grows up - her mother would be able to cook meals for her from the scratch, go for walks with her, teach her painting, French, horseback riding, dancing, good manner and read her books  - all by herself, of course! Nothing more natural than the history of mothers being attached to their babies from birth until and being multi-functional at all times.

Another concept I could never fully embrace is - what exactly a mother with no life of her own can pass on to her kids? Being a stay at home Mom of 4 kids looks great on Instagram , but what if it did happen to me and I ended in a... career, social and personal interest isolation for a while - what would I be able to teach my kids about the world around, about problem solving and importance of social bonds forming? How would I be able to train them on the skills I no longer had myself? How would I be able to tell them right from wrong in their teenage years if hadn't expressed my own opinion for years, teach them to persist in getting what they want if I forgot what it means to stand my ground, show them the benefit of creative thinking when I life in a Groundhog's day, advise on applying their skills and knowledge if I never used what I had studied in University? And - that's irrelevant to me now, but what if I had a daughter? What behavioral model would she soak up watching me?

Lucky are those women who get all the support from  their family, friends and peers to continue moving in the direction that suits them best. Otherwise, making yourself ignore dozens of discouraging and disorienting voices coming from all around may eat up a good portion of the energy that could otherwise be spent on just moving ahead quicker.

Just being curious.

Where do all these people around me get their time from?

I've never been jealous in my life, but if I were, I would have wished to become one of those people who seem to be at no rush regardless of where they are. Slowly walking down the hall of a Fitness Center, taking their sweet time to take a right turn on an absolutely empty road, walking at a speed of 10 steps a minute at Costco and as if that wasn't enough - stopping to taste each free sample available.

I can't imagine what life with no deadlines feels like. Still just as fulfilling as the one where you dodge around all the time?  Does not being in a rush help at all? Does speeding up through the day make any difference?

I really think one day I should try - for a change - walking sloooowly with a couple of friends of mine towards the gym exit, all three of us in one line in a narrow corridor. Preferably with strollers. Even better - chatting in a high pitched voice to completely block out the steps of the people behind and those excusing themselves trying to pass. The time when I split thinking and doing into two separate processes with two separate timeframes for each - will come! :)  I will be watching peacefully people half-stuck in a Costco egg fridge for more than a minute without looking at the fridge door with homicidal urges.

But today is the one extra day I got this year, - to be spent on achieving something important or catching up. And I neither caught up, nor moved ahead. I still wasted a lot of time dodging around and am still very far behind. All this is very, very personal of course.

My pre-Birthday Grand cleen up brought me 3 new online points of inspiration within a few days!

In particular, 2 blogs and 1 website/Facebook group =)

A few weeks before that I finally put together for myself the reason I would never become a professional blogger or, for this matter, an Instagram-mer (although the feeling that there is something wrong with posting your thoughts and pictures full time had been flown around me for a while). I wouldn't be able to commit to religious posting of sheets of text or pictures online because at some point I would also have to commit to sticking to a certain personality I had developed through my blog and used most often. And my Alter-Ego strongly objects this idea. I would have to translate everything I do, have or feel into the realm of the person my readers or viewers are already familiar with and expect me to be. But at some point the need to constantly these expectation would ruin the genuinely of my self-expression and hold me back on all those ways I want to show my growth, changes and development throughout life.

I notice it more and more often, when bloggers try to maintain not just their writing style, but their life-style and personality so hard - the things they write about finally stop making sense. It shows when bloggers try to appear casual and care-free, positive head to toes, and projecting love and acceptance to everything around, and suddenly switching to depressed wishing he wasn't so lonely and life wasn't so tough - nearly in every other post.

It pops up when a "professional mother" of 5, who has a whole mosaic of Instagram to prove a happy mommy's life with 5 kids born 2 years apart and all doing distance learning at home is possible, with a working husband, without a nanny (ever), a housekeeper, or any other help - forgets herself and starts posting pictures of her with her mother, who's staying over for a couple of months...  Followed by series of pictures of her kids playing with her in-laws, who apparently, flew in right after to take over after her mom...  Topped by a picture of her with a stroller and a list of her time management secrets, where a super-secret tactics of "Plan everything in advance" is followed by an unthinkable "Delegate! My husband takes 1 full day off work every week to take the kids to a park or playground, so I can have some me-time or meet with girlfriends for coffee."  Closing curtain...

This nowadays fashion for being happy and absolutely self-sufficient tends to push people to extremes, which eventually come up as fake and completely not belonging to lives of people with the strengths, values or abilities they claim to have. Or, as one of my Regulation course instructors says, - "When you see an answer that starts with All, Always, Never, Only, Must - it is almost always a false answer". :)

Anyway... The 2 blogs I stumbled upon (or maybe they found me once I was ready and had space for them) - proved to be extremely useful so far, filled less with claims of the writer's ability of Having-It-All in the Land of Rainbows and Unicorns, and more - with precise examples of how they coped with every complex situation and life challenge using resources they had. Some wisdom for me to soak up during my 2am nursing sessions :)

I think I know now how insanity, in it's most trivial and common form, emerges.

First and foremost, it comes from not being able to receive any substantial informative valid feedback to what you do. Week by week you do something (might be a repeating action, but different approaches), and expect to see a result... and the result does not come. No result you were hoping for. Neither attempt is no good or no worse than any preceding or subsequent one.
Am I going the right way at all?
Is anything going on here at all?
Hello? Anyone out there?
And so it goes: week by week, and if objects started talking to you suddenly, or if you started hearing voices in your head - that would have been a better sign than no sign at all. Day by day - seeing all your energy being sucked into the void. And then, at some point, something just shifts in your head...

The world is changing.

On a large scale, major changes are inevitable. The entire human history is the history of new discoveries made, rise and fall of empires, values changes, cultures abandoned, technical innovations playing "survival of the fittest" game with traditions and lifestyle (not in favour of the latter).

On a much smaller, much more selfish scale... I dread these changes. I learnt the world as it was centuries and centuries ago, I know it well the way it is now, and this is the way I want it to stay. I know the existing system well enough to understand and analyze current global events, and make plans for my life and the life of my family accordingly. Is it likely that during my life at least one major geopolitical change will take place and the balance of power at some point of our planet will shift? Most likely than not! Will I be able to adjust and adapt to whatever chain of events this will cause? Absolutely! Will I be able to make new speculations about my life, make plans for education, traveling, work? But of course!

Once again, the mankind has been through revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, change hundreds of times. And yet, on a scale of my single short human life, I want to hold on to science, culture, art medicine, philosophy and peoples just as they are now. One stupid move - and the world does change, people within it change in response,  and it may so happen - that whatever I am used to, whatever I appreciate, respect and value - will cease to exist.

All petty things always come up in batches but never mean much.

That is, it's not too bad when an espresso maker breaks down all out of sudden or when your bathroom is about to be taken apart and turned upside down, or appliances or plumbing are acting up. All that's negligible, even thought weeks can go by feeling like all you every day is playing tennis against three. All day long.

It's much worse to binge google side effects of spinal surgery or vein removal and hope that everything goes well with the former, and the doctor has enough experience and knowledge and there'll be enough luck in the air at the time of surgery. And trying to decide if the later is absolutely necessary right now, or can wait until thrombosis starts to form and what not.

And then the fact of adding some formula to Chinchilla Jr's breast milk  - that completely throws me off the balance. Although having nursed for over a year now - 5 months of exclusive breastfeeding since birth is way more than I have hoped for, with both babies.  Still.
One day I will look back at this time of my life, and laugh...

My body is happy, my body is singing, my body is back to gym!

 It is an amazing feeling to have your body under control again, do what feels good, do what you know is right. Surprisingly, I'm not even half as much out of shape as I thought I would be after pregnancy. I would like to believe that all those yoga classes, walking and swimming during this last few weeks of pregnancy are finally paying off. 

Definitely, any woman who takes her health, physical capabilities, mental state of mind for granted - should have at least one kid in her life to fully appreciate being in harmony with herself, strength and self control.

While driving to prenatal yoga class today, I had a thought

(and the view of mountain from County Line rd when approaching Broadway delivers all sorts of philosophical thoughts :) )  on how I'd describe the way most people are using social networks and media. I'd compare the quality and quantity of their original posts, reposts and pictures - to their  cooking abilities. And the way they express their thoughts and show their emotions - to use of spices when cooking.

It's not just that too many people seem to have the very same way of seeing life, very same goals and priorities  - and even ideas of what they need and how it will change their lives once they get it. The world they use to describe it - are so very same. And - this has never occurred to me before - their feelings and emotions, or at least the words they use to translate their feelings and emotions are often out of place or exaggerated. Any banal object must be magical, amazing or adorable. Any life event or situation, from a weekend hiking trip to a workout session  - awesome, or at least wonderful. Any problem gets blown up 10 times bigger, any joy or success - gets projected as phenomenal. That does leave a thought of emptying a whole jar of cayenne pepper into a pot of soup, instead of putting just a pinch. Or when baking chocolate muffins - doubling the sugar in the recipe, adding caramel and topping the whole thing with double layer of chocolate frosting. Or adding Tabasco to every dish or every meal: whether it's chicken , beef or fish; because without Tabasco "it has little taste".

On the way back from Santa Fe we stopped for lunch and got some broccoli cheddar soup, after tasting which I grumbled to Von Zobel that nowadays it is impossible in F&B industry to mass sell something unless it's too salty, too spicy or too sweet. Just now I thought that this might as well relate to mass selling of self online.

A long angry post about gender specifics of sharing life experience and emphasizing values in womens' blogs could have been published here.

But there will be none.
Because after 10 minutes of reflecting on virtual paper I realized I was reinventing the wheel and boiled it all down to a short advice.

If you are a female in urgent need of inspiration in any part of your life - do go read Forbes or the Economist. Do NOT search for life inspiring examples or tips in blogs and amateur articles of women who belong to your Zone of Proximal Development.
For gender hell breaks loose in their blogs...

Spain. Early 20th century. Born a woman? Enjoy!

Watching Gran Hotel and between learning to say: "Donde esta la carta?"  picking up some Spanish  - I can feel hair on my head move. What's scarier to be - a helpless rightless mother or a helpless rightless baby? An unwanted, unexpected baby. Almost killed right in the process of delivery. His mother almost killed in the process of his delivery - this time deliberately. And that's  not counting a potential abortion and mother's poisoning during pregnancy - but what's new there, really?

For a few miserable weeks the infant sleeps in an old chest, is wrapped in rugs, is left alone in the room, suffers severe malnutrition, co-sleeps with his Mom, never receives any medical attention or a single vaccination, is used for blackmailing,  kidnapped, freezes up in the woods during a thunderstorm and eventually - never recovers from illness.
His elder twin brother is a bit more lucky, closer to end of the series he is still alive and only gets stolen once, and not for long, and most of the time he spends all alone in his crib, wearing multi-layered dress with frills all over and a bonnet, not playing with anything or anyone, and apparently - not being fed anymore - but this is really just a negligible detail...

A fiction movie is a fiction movie, but I can't help thinking how lucky I am: during my whole pregnancy no one tried to poison me, buy my baby or force me into abortion. Since his birth, he was never used to blackmail his real father. He has actually been living since birth with his real father, who never tried to kidnap and send him away. He has a closet and a chest full of clothes he can wear and still move around. He can have as much milk as he wants, and as much of any other food as he wants  without rolling on the floor crying: "God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!"   . He has his own comfy bed to sleep in, his personal space, his toys.

I take a deep breath and breathe out with relief every time I think it's amazing that all basic needs of my child are already covered. He can focus on  growing, learning and developing, exploring the world around , getting to know himself better. I find it hard to imagine what would it feel like to spend every day with a tiny helpless person by your side, hiding him in a chest to protect, boxing up his whole life with my only concerns of his unsafety and hunger. Living hell.

Pelevin has a strange effect on me.

 Instead of  getting back to my 16-19 year old life period, playing it over and over again in my head and trying to find the errors and fixing them (mentally, or course, just in case they come up again as life lesson in the future :) )  - coming back to my 15 years, just before all that... ehm... adventure began.

And then again, of course - trying to go over the key events. But were there really so many key events that year, between 15 and 16?

Facebook as a great tool for

 evaluating people. 

This thought crossed my mind from time to time when I was glancing through the friends' updates, but I never bothered to find time and right words to put it down on pixels paper.

Facebook makes you defenselessly public. All the pictures, personal info, statuses and places updates you put in - crack open your mind to whoever sees it - scanning through your profile reveals your priorities, fears, weaknesses by how you want yourself to be perceived. That's nothing new.

But. Another way you reveal even more about yourself is your reaction to the way others want you to perceive them. Your pattern of thinking shows much better in the way you comment on others' pictures posted and updates than if those were carefully picked by you. "LIKE" is a great shortcut to find out who is either in line with certain values, or supports somebody with those values or is playing neutral on expressing their opinion.

And so, it is with mixed feelings that I note to myself that a person I thought of as smart and interesting, can actually "like"  his friendless's girls' night out drunk pictures, updates on 0.7 pound weight loss by another friendess, an ongoing romantic correspondence between a friend and his fiancee, and a status updates by rhetoric questions obviously determined to emphasize the friendess's high moral and feminist values as well as self-perceived high IQ.

Online social networks are simply online social networks. But they can save a great deal of time in evaluating a person with just a few quick Litmus tests. That is, if you do pay attention to shallow and superficial friends' activity - your are either not such a profound person I thought you were, or - you care enough about your shallow and superficial friends to know you support them.

Priceless if you are unsure about how close to keep a certain person; although does not work on those who have a deep and sophisticated plan behind every comment and "like" :)  

Me in the language-learning world

How awesome would it be to be the main character in some foreign language study book?!

First, I would have had a very  typical,  very traditional name for the country I was born in, and for the language the book was written for. Margot in my world of Manuel de Francais.   Margaretha - in some Deutsch ohne Probleme :) Last name would be pretty typical for the area too; although it could have an unusual sequence of letters, if would be no longer than 2 syllables, and definitely shorter than 11 letters.

In the event if I was not born in the same country where the action in the units of the books takes place, I could still be a lucky tourist or a visitor to this country. Say, came to Rome to visit my friend for a month and meanwhile - picking up a little Italian :) My host family would be extremely friendly and nice to me: in the very first  few units they all introduce themselves to me,  would show me around the city, do a tour of the local sights. In the following few days I would visit a local university and talk with one of the local professors about the differences in education between their country and my home country. I would go to a grocery store and purchase some random amounts of some random foods: one kilo of apples, 200 gr of cheese, salad, 1/2 kg of potatoes.  Then I would go to a shoe store and would purchase the second pair of shoes I was recommended.

In the middle of the book I would see a doctor about something minor. I would complain about simultaneous headaches, sore throat, loss of appetite and sleep - and would sounds as miserable about it as possible. The doctor would take my temperature and diagnose a cold or a flu; write a prescription for something good for fighting merciless seasonal flu and would see me off with all the most pleasant wishes to get well and promises to check on me in a couple of days to make sure my cold is getting better.  Whatever you came to your doctor with,  he will never look at you like at an idiot, and would be most sensitive, polite and pleasant. In foreign language study books everyone is always sensitive, polite and pleasant - wherever you go. Talking back ,swearing and being rude  is never considered in these books :)

Once feeling alive again I would head out to a local museum or art gallery. I would talk about entertainment and music with my friend, ending up in a long discussion with all her family about their tastes and preferences.
Having realized that it is about my time to leave, and I have not tried much of the traditional cuisine, my friend would invite me and several friends of hers to a restaurant where the traditional dishes make at least 50% of the menu.

On my departure day, the whole family would say buy to me, me a good trip back and would be invited to stay with me whenever they go to my home country :) everyone would be polite and pleasant. After all, all the foreign language books are about nice and pleasant adventures in A foreign country  with a  happy ending :)