Here we go again...

Sometimes I just get so caught up in the rollercoaster that is frequently my life that I forget to take a few minutes to myself to just stop and breathe.

Of course, sometimes, I have the actual *time* to stop and breathe, but I'm afraid if I do I won't be able to restart, or I'll drop one of the carefully juggled balls, or I'll just...give up. Which is kind of the same as not restarting, or at least very similar.

I'm caught between loving my life and hating it a little, and I feel torn and guilty. I am trying really very hard to not hold myself to standards that are not actually my own.

I don't know; maybe I'm overthinking. Probably. The problem with my particular rollercoaster is that it doesn't exactly require a lot of brainpower. The stuff I love, the stuff I hate -- it's all stuff that keeps my body occupied but doesn't exactly engage the mind all that much.

I've thought about trying to take random classes, just, you know, stuff I'm interested in but aren't necessarily part of some big Plan for My Life, but...that kind of thing just isn't available here in town, and between kids and travel time and gas prices, I can't go elsewhere looking for it. Maybe I need to set some local goals, like retraining myself to read a little more critically, or less for enjoyment (some stuff, at least). And, I don't know... maybe some other stuff? volunteer work? I have so many things running through my brain sometimes, and none of them ever quite seem to click with me.

I'm feeling a bit like Charlie Brown right about now: "'Nothing lasts forever, All good things must end.' I've memorized that phrase by heart. So, tell me, I need to know it... When do the good things start?" (Only, yeah, I've had some good things. But this particular moment in time is kinda short on them.)

DH & I are still talking about moving to Pittsburgh within the next couple of years. I am so beyond ready for that.

Sieve-for-Brains

I actually had something I wanted to say on here.

I can't remember it now...




Anyway, mostly I've been doing my thing (looking at pictures & gifs & videos of primarily hockey players) on tumblr.

I'm not making much progress in doing things that need doing; I need to start setting timers even more than alarms, I think. & maybe when we have medical insurance again, I should see about figuring out what the hell it is that keeps me so tired & unmotivated all the time. It's kinda getting old; I'm done with feeling mentally foggy all the time.

I'm trying to get back into the habit of yoga every day. I may have to start letting the kids practice with me; otherwise I won't have time till midnight every night (starting Friday they have a WHOLE WEEK off school, then they only have about 3-4 more weeks before the super-long winter break (which is at least a month long).

I dunno, it feels like I had something of substance to say, but I can't think what it is, still.

Laundry and reading...

I have been remiss....

... I have been letting this blog languish. In my defense, there's been a lot going on. One of these days I may update on that. For right now, I'll just say I've been spending a lot of time on Tumblr loving hockey. & on the rare occasion I have a thought that requires more than 140 characters, it's generally not that long & it's easier just to slam it out really quickly on Tumblr.

But I will figure something out & get back to this, I promise! For the whole, what, 3 of you reading?

Gender Roles in my Life

I just read an interesting blog entry on gender propaganda in toy stores, not the first such article I've read, but this one really got me to think a bit more than usual about specifics of gender roles as they're presented to kids and even adults, and how they actually play out in my life. The bit that got me thinking was the last couple of sentences of the first paragraph: "The underlying point all the irrational statements have in common is one foundational core that its advocates desperately want to “protect”.  That point is that men and women hold mutually exclusive roles in the family and neither of those roles can or should be filled by a member of the opposite gender."

So, I started thinking about those roles that are seen as "typically male" or "typically female," and while I don't consider myself either particularly feminine or particularly "tomboyish" (the only acceptable descriptive word for an ostensibly straight, non-girly female, apparently), I will admit that in plenty of ways, I fit more of a "typically female" role in my life.

Typically (or really, stereotypically) "female" stuff I do:
 -cook
-clean
-pop out kids
-read
-watch romantic comedies (i.e., "chick flicks")
-wear bras & occasionally skirts
-paint my toenails
-oversee homework 
-shop

Stereotypically "male" stuff I don't do:
-mow the yard
-vehicle maintenance
-grilling
-play video games
-watch horror movies

The thing is, the things I do, we have very good reasons for why I do them. I am the one who is home regularly and frequently, so I get to be in charge of the everyday things. Considering DH is on the road driving a truck for 5-12 days at a time, it would be very difficult for him to actually cook, clean, shop, or oversee homework on a regular basis. There is NO OTHER REASON why he could not, were he equally geographically present, take over any of these chores. And the things I don't do? Well, I have to do all the day-to-day stuff, so we discussed it and decided that the occasional stuff, like lawn care and vehicle maintenance, were going to be his prerogative. He grills because he wants to, but he can also cook on the stove, and he in fact enjoys doing so every once in a while to give me a break. As for the video games and movies? Well, I'm just not coordinated enough for video games, and I don't enjoy horror movies, so why would I want to watch them? 

But let's really look at those lists, shall we? Aside from popping out kids, there is NOTHING on either of those lists that a man couldn't do as well as a woman, or vice versa. And let's be honest. We all know plenty of women who've given birth but are the farthest thing from a loving, competent parent. Some of them are even smart enough to admit it, and don't try to parent their children; others leave their kids permanently damaged because they've bought in to this ideology that as women, we're inherently ideal parents.

I know plenty of men who love to cook, maintain FAR cleaner households than mine, enjoy shopping far more than I do (I'm really not very good at browsing anywhere but kitchen stores and book stores), and probably enjoy skirts, bras, and nail polish more than I. My husband has even been known to laugh at a rom-com with me, because humor and love are not exclusive to the X chromosome.

As for the "male" stuff -- I know women who are better at car stuff than my husband (he's pretty decent but he's not a mechanic and he's ok with that). I know women who love to grill, women who enjoy mowing the yard, and women who play video games and watch horror movies. The only thing my husband has done that none of them would be able to do is produce sperm with which to get me pregnant.

I have tried not to confine my kids by gender roles in their play or their chores. If the boys choose to play with dinosaurs or trucks, and my daughter prefers Barbies, that's what they like. They all have access to the same toys, the same sports equipment, the same games and movies. My boys dust shelves, read books almost obsessively, fold laundry, sweep floors. My daughter picks up sticks from the yard so Daddy can mow. She goes hunting and fishing. 

The only "gender roles" that are predetermined by the body are reproductive, and there are ways around that. There are ways beyond adoption for a couple -- or an individual -- to have a baby without one of them getting pregnant, or donating sperm, or even having sex at all with another person. There are people who choose not to do so, for medical or personal reasons, or just because it never happens. There are ways to prevent it happening at all (of course, this is Frowned Upon by those same people who are so desperately trying to fit us into gender roles). 

The harder we try to force ourselves or others into ill-fitting boxes, the more we try to shoehorn into a prepackaged "acceptable normality," the harder it is to make them fit. The world has so many new opportunities, and the only ones putting "Boy" and "Girl" labels on them are ourselves -- a mountain doesn't care if the person standing at the top is XX or XY or any of the possible variants, or even if you identify with your particular combination, or whatever. 

Also: a few "Boy Things" that I do better than my husband? Science. Math. And I kill my own spiders.

True Confessions of a SAHM: Glee and me

I know it's a weird time for this. Glee is heading into its...ummm...3rd? 4th? 5th season? Something like that. I don't know. And one of its stars, Corey Monteith, OD'd a couple of months ago.

But for some reason I started watching the first season the other day (thanks, I think, Amazon?)

I am HATING myself for this. Not because I'm not a soap opera type, but just because it's, frankly, obnoxious.

The only characters I feel any ability to sympathize with are Sue Sylvester's sister, Kurt's dad, and Finn's mom.

That's it.

The others are ALL irritating. I didn't have time for people like that when I was in high school.

The worst part is that the final episode of the season is the only one in which any of the characters seem to have shown any actual genuine character growth, and from having caught bits and pieces of other seasons, I really think it's NOT actually genuine.

UGH.

Just... UGH.

Anyway... the reason I'm watching?

The music. I love so much of the music. Except for Gaga & Madonna (but I kind of like Madonna, a little, at least her earlier stuff).

So, there you have it. Crap show, great music. I like the lessons they're trying to impart, but... I don't really think they're actually *doing* it. I really don't.

Just sayin'.

Series review: Campus Cravings by Carol Lynne

I have had a really HUGELY hard time with figuring out things like how to rate these books, individually and as a series, and how to explain that. It seems like the people I actually know who have read them loved them, and I know that Carol is kind of a Mover and a Shaker in the M/M Romance community, but at the same time... I just had so many *issues* with these books!

I will be honest that some of the problems no doubt came from the fact that I pretty much read almost the entire series all at once over the course of about 3-4 days. There are 17 stories in the series; I lack only the last two. I have acquired them slowly over the course of a couple of years and read them originally as I acquired them, without going back to reread the series first. So things that would have been less problematic for me individually wore on me when they were coming at me en masse.

So... On Goodreads, I rated all the books at 3 stars, which is my "problematic" rating (I'm going to link back here from the first book, Coach, rather than post an individual review for each book, because I don't want to write that many reviews. We'll just consolidate All The Things right here.) "Problematic" rating, for me, means that there was enough that I loved about the book that I'm liable to want to read it again some time (in this case, it's a fluffy-light reread; they're all novella-ish/longer short story length) but it had enough issues that pulled me out of the story to keep me from being able to whole-heartedly give it a better rating. And to be clear, probably 85% of my issues were things that could've been easily cleared up by a half-way competent editor -- they were in no way related to plot/characterization/general storytelling ability. So really, I guess 85% of this is "Really? I thought this was supposed to be a Professionally Published story!"

So, let's get right to it. As I frequently do, I'm going to bullet list a lot of stuff of the "This Really Bugged Me" variety.

• A lot of the formatting was crazy-frustrating. There were times where POV or time of day or whatever would change, and there would just be no indication. No breaks, just maybe a new paragraph; meanwhile, there would be an entire blank expanse with nothing but the book title (a complete page, according to my reader) between chapters. It would definitely pull me out of the story.
• LOTS of misused apostrophes -- "the kid's are coming over," "the car's were zooming past," and the like (not actual examples, just the *kind* of misuse). Or places where they should have been but weren't -- "That is Coaches car," "the cat's drank Georges milk." (Again, not actually from the books.)
• Homophone abuse, particularly and frequently your/you're -- "Are you going to finish you're dinner? Your going to be late."
• Some more random "Spell-check Has Issues" words: shoe-in (shoo-in), shear ecstasy (sheer ecstasy), "the damn just broke" (dam), passed/past, desert/dessert, throws/throes (direct quote-ish -- several times characters were in the "throws of ecstasy." Just No.)
• File under "How long has it been since you were in college?" -- when a character who is a student is having a Final Exam during a regular class period. Not just "was lucky enough to get an exam period scheduled for the normal start time of that class," but actually a Regular Class Period. And we're talking the kind of test that should probably take a fair bit of time more than the 35 min the character took to finish -- there should have been several essay questions, at least; it's That Sort of Class. I mean, FINAL Exam. Not midterm. FINAL. There should be a LOT of ground to cover.
• Continuity Is A Thing: Char is in a car accident. Love interest witnesses; has to pry open passenger side door to get to Char b/c driver's side door is a mangled wreck. Later, at hospital, someone (who was at the scene) says something along the lines of "Well, these kinds of injuries happen when you're thrown from a vehicle." 
• Continuity Is A Thing 2: in one book, a char describes his parents as "Mom is black, but Dad is white." In another book, he says "Both my parents are black." Granted, he's blind, & of mixed ethnicity, but still...Author As God needs him to think he's African-American, therefore we must ignore previous statement.
• Things I just Can't Explain: Blind character is reading brail. My spell-check doesn't even accept that as a word. It is Braille. With the capital letter. Every time. Because it is a proper noun.
• Random punctuation issues: Sentences that sound like questions punctuated with periods. (What, do you have some sort of quota you're not allowed to exceed?) Ditto with commas; they're in random places where they shouldn't be and aren't in places where they should. I'm a little extra-aware of that right now, because my kids are back in school and they're bringing home their language arts homework and the third-grader is learning all about proper sentence structure. And, frankly, most of the sentences in these books would fail ALL THE THINGS in my third-grader's text book.
• I get that the publisher (Total E-Bound) is based in the UK, but... as much as British authors (rightly) complain about having their British-set books "Americanized" in spelling/slang, the reverse holds true in some ways with this series -- words like centre, paycheque, & others litter it, throwing me off since the books are all set in freaking IDAHO. 
• Lack of female characters -- to me, it seems VERY odd that a series of stories mostly set on a college campus would have only roughly a half-dozen female characters. Of those, only a handful appear actually "on-screen," as it were, and of those, one is wholly unsympathetic, one is rather disappointingly weak in her personal narcissism, one is literally not completely sane, and one is a quintessential, almost stereotypical "Mother" type.

Let's try to end this on an up note: 

• Despite the shortness of these stories, they had clearly defined beginnings, middles, and ends, so that, even if a conflict wasn't completely resolved, it was clearly well on its way (although there were a couple that I felt ended prematurely in a way that felt like the author had reached Maximum Word Count and had to cram in the last little bit).
• There were some satisfyingly realistic "Life Issues" to cope with -- several characters entered into some fairly serious therapy to deal with their pasts, there's blindness, one major character has a stroke & has some fairly bad reactions to being confined to a wheelchair -- and not too much (but some) Magic Sex Cure-All.
• Characters didn't just pop up out of nowhere right before they got their story, then disappear completely afterward. There's a nice over-arcing story of a group of friends and coworkers, and they grow organically to welcome in new members, and to keep the friendships growing and developing.
• Even though many of the characters are jocks, there's a whole range of characters -- it's not just All White-Boy Football Players, All The Time. There's a certain amount of racial/ethnic diversity. Not a lot, perhaps not as much as there could have been, but there is some. There are also guys with other ambitions besides sports. 

I really did, overall, enjoy the stories and the characters, enough that I may someday buy the last two books in the series. I think it's a shame that Total E-Bound didn't seem to take enough pride in their product to make sure that it would at least pass a third-grade text book test, though. However, that's a quibble against the publisher, not the author.

True Confessions of a SAHM: My Youngest and ADD

I'll be honest here: I've just about researched myself out on this subject, but what's problematic for me right now is the school system. My youngest is 8, and last year he was diagnosed officially with ADD. He doesn't have the Hyperactivity part that is so often associated, and he seems (according to the doctor who diagnosed him, for whatever that's worth) to only have a mild case. And the only meds she could offer me are designed to treat the hyperactivity part of the equation, so for now we're trying to go the non-medicated route.

There are SO MANY PROBLEMS with this, that I'm torn about whether or not this is the right choice to make. The two big problems at the root of it all are school and therapy.

There are maybe four therapists locally who treat kids w/ ADHD who accept our insurance. NONE of them are able to help us. I have called all of them, and talked to them, and visited them, and all of them say they have no therapies that might help VelcroBoy's focus, but they have lots of things they can do for hyperactivity, but ONLY if he's on meds for it. But why would he be on meds or therapy for hyperactivity when he's not hyperactive?

As for the school... Well, let's start with the teachers. Every year, I have had a discussion with his teacher before the start of the school year. This year it was very simple. "VelcroBoy was diagnosed with ADD last year. He doesn't have the hyperactivity portion, just the attention deficit. He is not currently on meds (with the explanation of the bit about WHY he's not on meds)." I explain a bit about problems he's had in classrooms in the past, problems we have at home with homework, a few strategies that have helped in the past. Teacher says, "OK, I've had ADHD kids in my classroom before; we'll work together and it'll be fine." Less than a full week into the school year and the teacher is somehow baffled by my kid exhibiting the EXACT SAME ISSUES I explained to her about! Really, did you think I was making it up? Exaggerating? WHAT? Yes, I'm a SAHM. No, I'm not an idiot. I am capable of evaluating my kid's issues and warning you and YOU are the one who chose to ignore what I had to say.

As for the school as a whole... the best they have to offer, given budget restraints, is that they might be able to come up with a paraprofessional to work with him one-on-one for about 20 minutes a day. Which might, maybe, be enough to get him through ONE classroom assignment per day. But other than that, they don't really have any resources or budget for anything else. And the rest of the local system is in just as "dire straits." The nearest private school is a church school that doesn't have a good reputation academically, and the nearest school that might possibly help him is in Savannah. Which I can't exactly afford -- even if, by some accident of God, it were possible to get him fully scholarshiped, I couldn't afford the gas to drive there and back, plus the after school care DinoBoy would need.

Anyway, I know that medication seems to really help some kids -- and their parents. I'm not judging anybody who chooses that route; we all have to make the decision that works for us. I just don't think it's the appropriate response for my kid. But I'm also feeling like I'm being steamrollered into it by the sheer lack of any other option available to me.

And it doesn't help that every time VelcroBoy has to do something that makes him unhappy, and nearly everything that is not what he wants to do makes him unhappy, he develops a mysterious tummyache or headache or other minor ailment that never comes to anything...

*sigh* I don't know. Am I doing the right thing? Is it time to start thinking about medication? Do I need to look harder for therapies? I just feel lost and helpless about this.