Time

There is not enough time to do anything. Today I baked bread and cookies and did 3 loads of laundry but I want to just sit down and read and it's not going to happen because I have to fold those 3 loads of laundry. I would so welcome some time during the day when it is quiet, when I can sit out on the back patio and read books and think and write.

My life has become what I didn't want: the corporate job, the 8 to 5 job (okay, I like my work but it's still in the corporate mold, even if we are a casual office and don't have to wear suits or work in cubicles). I have become the writer at night. The writer who writes when all the cooking and cleaning and laundry is done, when the children are taken care of, when I'm so exhausted that I can barely write.

I have let Virginia Woolf's "angel in the house" swallow me. And I want some time back.

That's really enough complaining. I have to just make the time. No excuses.

To politic or not to politic, that is the question

Whether 'tis better to work within the system and "take over" your political party from within to change it or whether it is better to change it from the outside.

I actually am thinking about getting back involved in Democratic politics in Arizona (which is akin here to trying to find an illusory oasis in the truly barren desert). I have the time. The problem is twofold: if I spend too much time I won't have time to actually make money, which we need desperately (the conundrum there is that if the Republicans run things too much longer here, I'll never make money anyway). The other "fold," if you will, is that I'm not sure that I can get in there and actually do any good or if the party here is progressive at all.

On another front, I had always wanted to write a scholarly book about paradox (for me, primarily in literature) but never got the opportunity because I never got that wished-for tenure track job. And then, in a little posting I got in email today, I saw this:

"If it’s not paradoxical, it’s not true."
Shunryu Suzuki

It certainly opened up the desire to write that non-fiction/scholarly book again as well as fiction. I have always seen the truth, indeed the entire world of possibility as well as truth, contained in paradox (it is not a dilemma to be resolved; it is to be accepted as true. This is the difficult concept for Western minds to grasp).

Monday panic

Okay, now I am panicking because I can see out ahead without a job. And the more I read about our economy and the more I look at the bad mortgage we have and the real lack of caring about what happens to "ordinary" people in this economy, the more frightened and panicky I become.

How will we be able to live on a teacher's salary? If I can get a teaching job, that is. My husband has a good job and makes good money but a teacher's salary is not very good and will not really add a huge amount.

Positive aspects: everyone you talk to has a story and if you tell people, just people you know everyday, that you've lost your job, they have things to tell you if you can listen. It may not make a difference in the short term but there may be connections to be made or just lessons learned from the stories. And as a writer, just hearing the stories are important.