Mon, 24 Apr 2006
Going crazy
It's 10.30am on a Monday morning... school holidays and I'm home. Already I'm pulling my hair out and ready to have somebody take me away to a quiet padded room....
Matthew is driving me insane. He's wandering around... still in his pajamas, I might add... whining.... I mean really really whining "I'mmmmmmmm boooooooored" in this pathetic whiny voice...
"I'm sorry, Matt, I'm cleaning at the moment. I'm not responsible for your boredom. You have more toys than you know what to do with. You have a big back yard and it's a nice day. Go play. "
"Nooooooooo, Iiiiii don't want to goooo outsiiiiide."
The whining continues. This time it's "I'mmmmmmm huuuuuuuungreeeeee."
"Well, get yourself something to eat."
"Iiiiiiiii caaaaaaaaan't."
Sigh. I wash my hands. I make him some toast. I butter it. I put it on a plate. I give it to him.
"Iiii don't like that sort of bread."
I calmly put the plate down on the table, and walk away. He can eat the toast, or he can go hungry. His choice.
At the moment, he's sitting on the couch making little whimpering "I'm so misunderstood" noises.
Needless to say, I'm not sympathetic to the cause.
Joshua, on the other hand, who's only four years old, is happily playing by himself. No whining. He can play an entire day by himself with no whining, just amusing himself.
How can two kids be so different?
Sigh.
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Thu, 20 Apr 2006
Men at Forty
by Donald Justice
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.
And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practises tying
His father’s tie there in secret
And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.
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Cheese!
When Joshua holds up his glass and clinks it with someone else's, he says "Cheese!" rather than "Cheers".
It's so cute.
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Wed, 19 Apr 2006
A Headache
The full moon and my menstrual cycle came dangerously close to clashing this month. God only knows what's going to happen when it does, because I'm wakeful, frustrated and agitated during a full moon, and completely loony when I'm having my period. Imagine a hypermanic shrewbitch at midnight. *Shudder*
Yes it's that time of the month once again. I hate it. Have I mentioned that before? I absolutely hate it. When is this all over? Somebody please put me out of my misery.
Because it's not just that I'm bleeding like a stuck pig. No, that in itself is just a minor hiccup in the otherwise smooth flow (no pun intended) of my life. It's not that I still get tender sore boobs. It's not that I now know, finally, in my forty-second year what is meant by "retaining water."
No, I can cope with those things. What I can't cope with are the migraines which have, over the last year and a half, become so bad that I finally had to admit that they are debilitating.
I'd been trying to ignore them. I know, I know. How could I be so stupid as to think I could ignore a migraine? Seems obvious to most people. I guess I thought if I ignored them, they might go away. But they haven't.
The Mersyndol had long ago stopped working. I'd held up for a long while on the mixture of codeine and ibuprofen that I could buy over the counter. But after a while that stopped working as well. So I would end up each month just spending a day, or two, at home in bed, taking all the drugs I could buy in an attempt to bring some kind of relief.
The truth that I had a real problem finally hit home last month when I woke up one morning with a migraine, and couldn't feel the left side of my face or my right arm. It felt exactly like when you get an injection at the dentist.
I couldn't talk or swallow properly. I couldn't type or write with my right hand.
Terrific, I thought. A stroke!
Well you can't really ignore complete loss of feeling in parts of your body. So I took myself off to the doctor. She did tests. She tested reflexes. And then she said "It's a focal migraine!"
I'd never heard of a focal migraine, but apparently it's a migraine with neurological symptoms which can mimic a stroke. But it's not a stroke. The loss of feeling and any other symptoms are temporary, whereas a stroke causes permanent damage.
Nevertheless, it was a real wake up call for me. I am now taking medication every day which is supposed to help prevent migraines (A beta blocker. It also lowers blood pressure). And I have Imigran in case I start to get a migraine.
So this month hasn't been nearly as bad, headache-wise.
We'll see how it goes.
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Thu, 13 Apr 2006
Painful
Joshua is going through a phase of not wanting to go to kindy. I'm not sure what the cause is, but it seems to have something to do with his best friend Caleb finding a new friend.
It breaks my heart... when I drop him off in the morning, he clings to me. Doesn't want me to go. I finally have to get one of the teachers to hold him, and turn my back and walk away.... all the while hearing him call out to me.
There have been days when I have stayed for a long while... not wanting to leave. Wanting to know that he is happy and okay. Interested in what he is doing at kindergarten. But in doing so making myself so late for work that I've long since given up any notion of making up the time.
I know that this is not something I can do every day. I can't always be with him. He has to learn to be independent, to solve problems for himself, to make friends on his own.
And for the most part he does. The teachers tell me that he is usually quite happy after he settles down. Sonya, his caregiver who picks him up, always tells me that he is always happy when she picks him up.
It's just heartbreaking to see him go through this painful transition. I want to fix all his problems, but I know too that doing so would not only be impossible, but would do a disservice to Joshua, who needs to be given the chance to find his own solutions.
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Sat, 08 Apr 2006
Blue and the sun
This image reminds me of the sea floor and the sun on water.
Have me
by Carl Sandburg
Have me in the blue and the sun.
Have me on the open sea and the mountains.
When I go into the grass of the sea floor, I will go alone.
This is where I came from—the chlorine and the salt are
blood and bones.
It is here the nostrils rush the air to the lungs. It is
here oxygen clamors to be let in.
And here in the root grass of the sea floor I will go alone.
Love goes far. Here love ends.
Have me in the blue and the sun.
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Darkroom Magic
Today I did my final session in my photography course. It was a darkroom session, and I spent three hours in the darkroom with Mark.
I'd taken a roll of black and white film one lunchtime this week, and was quite pleased with the results. So today I spent three hours getting proofsheets and three prints from three of the best shots.
I just loved it. I could spend all day in there... trying different things... dodging and burning.
I'd used chromagenic black and white film that I was able to just take to the lab, and got 5x3 prints and negatives from the lab. I then used the negatives to create prints.
When I compared the small prints I had got back from the lab to the darkroom prints, the prints I had created in the darkroom were just so much better! They had more depth, tonal range, contrast. They were... dare I say it, frameable!
So... I am completely hooked on film, black and white, and doing my own darkroom processing. I'm even thinking about creating my own darkroom here at home.
There is something so magical about seeing an image that you've created mysteriously start to appear on white photographic paper. I don't think that thrill will ever disappear.
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Mon, 03 Apr 2006
Not exactly
My little boy is growing up. I figured at four, they are still adorable and cuddly little boys. But no.
On the weekend I swooped Joshua into my arms and gave him a big hug and a kiss, and when I finally let him go, I said to him "You still love mummy's hugs, don't you, Josh?" Expecting this to be a rhetorical question.
Joshua looked me straight in the eye and said with just a tinge of sarcasm "Not exactly."
Ahh, it starts so young. My mother's heart is breaking.
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letting my soul run free
I thought you might like this picture. It's been on my Flickr stream for a few months now, but thought I would post it here.
I love this beach. It feels so peaceful and right and good when I'm alone here.
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Wed, 29 Mar 2006
The People Yes
If you want to hear something inspiring, controversial, thought-provoking - go download the podcast of Bruce Sterling's closing speech at the SXSW conference this year. Words that come to mind when I think about this speech are: visionary, technology, global, people, environment, responsibility, people, politics, culture, people, people, people.
I can honestly say that this is the only conference speech that has ever made me cry. Ever.
The download time will have been worth it just to hear him recite an excerpt from Carl Sandburg's "The People Yes"
The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.
The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
"I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time."
The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:
phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:
"They buy me and sell me...it's a game...sometime I'll
break loose..."
Once having marched
Over the margins of animal necessity,
Over the grim line of sheer subsistence
Then man came
To the deeper rituals of his bones,
To the lights lighter than any bones,
To the time for thinking things over,
To the dance, the song, the story,
Or the hours given over to dreaming,
Once having so marched.
Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
for lights and keepsakes.
The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.
The people is a polychrome,
a spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux of color poems
wherein the sea offers fog
and the fog moves off in rain
and the labrador sunset shortens
to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over the shot spray
of northern lights.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can't be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
"Where to? what next?"
~~Carl Sandburg
This poem resonates with me, brings to mind the Maori whakatauki "He aha te mea nui o te Ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata." (What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people).
Go. Now. Listen to the podcast. You will be glad you did.
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