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We made it! Now what?

 I could start with the usual "is this thing on?" and apologies for being gone for so long, but I'm not going to do that this time. You who are reading this (both of you) are aware that I don't always keep up to date with things, and you've come to accept that. I'm hoping to stay more on top of this blog this year, but we'll see.

With that auspicious beginning... I want to talk about 2020. No, come back, don't run away! I know 2020 did a lot of us dirty, and we're going to be recovering from the damage for ages to come. I also know that it isn't truly over - no matter how much we want to blame 2020 for everything that went wrong in our lives last year (and believe me, I absolutely did), there are still a bunch of things that we're having to deal with now and will have to continue handling for months or possibly years. The work's not done, but we're getting there and moving forward.

What I really want to talk about is coping mechanisms from 2020. So, I personally have generalized anxiety and clinical depression, so my brain is on edge and cranky in the best of times, much less when the world is on fire and has a raging pandemic. I also have some difficulty in focusing on one or two things for long periods of time, particularly when the anxiety is staying at an 11 at all times. Not being able to focus, but knowing that you need to focus on something to get it done, is one of those cycles that can just lead to running a track to nowhere in your head and exhausting yourself without getting anything out of it.

One thing that I found last year that helped was a small, discrete project that I could finish and feel a sense of accomplishment. The dopamine hit of completing something is such a powerful feeling. It is something that gets my focus running on one particular track for a little while, and gives it a little more direction. After that, I am more likely to be able to focus on something a little bigger (like the stuff I get paid to do), and keep the anxiety on simmer for a little while longer.

My preferred type of project is something tangible, as it adds to that sweet, sweet accomplishment dopamine to hold the completed item in my hands. I learned how to cross stitch and crochet 30+ years ago, and while they may not always be the most useful of skills, they certainly help when it comes to small handcrafts that don't take long to finish. My new discovery last year was blackwork, and that discovery came through a free stitch-a-long from Peppermint Purple. It was set up incredibly well, so that each week, the pattern released a new block that contained one motif. It was small, self-contained, and didn't require much by way of resources (either physical or mental). I got started on the 2020 stitch-a-long later in the year and so still have a little way to go to finish it, but I'm right on top of things for 2021. (The stitch-a-long is free again this year, and available through the Peppermint Purple Facebook page - you can join any time!)

The beginning of the 2021 Peppermint Purple 2021 stitch-a-long, with bonus! cat hair, of course

I want to spend some time this year focusing on how to move forward in this new normal where we find ourselves. 2020 did a number on society, and nearly every part of our daily lives is different than it had been in 2019. Some of those differences are going to stick; some may go "back to normal," but it won't look the same way it did before. We've all been changed by the pandemic, quarantine, lock-downs, and all the other things that caused 2020 to be a year that did the work of a decade. Whether it was the worst year in your life, or one of the best you can remember, your life doesn't look the same. 

Humans, in general, aren't great with change, particularly a lot of change all at once. We have to get out of the mindset that things are different "for now" and figure out how to handle things going forward, and I hope to provide a bit of insight in some coping mechanisms that I found useful. Everyone is different (shocking, I know), so what works for me may not work for you. Still, I hope it gives you something to think about and some ideas for how you can find your new normal.

Take your meds, drink some water, and wear a mask! You are loved.

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[setauuta]

Stories to tell in whispers

I've finally come to realize why I've had such a hard time being online lately. It's not just this blog - I haven't been doing much on any social media, and what writing I have been doing has been in a notebook that I keep with me at all times. I'll start to write a response to someone's post, or reply to a tweet, or even begin drafting a blog post, and I'll delete it. I worry, a lot, about how other people see me. I'm usually better at reminding myself that most people just don't see me, that I don't take up much mental real estate. It means that so long as I'm not actively hurting people, my voice is probably not going to be heard, and that's great! Less pressure all around! Lately, though, the pressure has been on. It's not enough to "not actively hurt someone" - I feel like if I'm not actively helping, making things better, fixing things, then there's no point in saying anything at all. I'm not sure what flipped that switch, but it's been unpleasant. Now? Now I'm just trying to pull back to the beginning. The whole reason I want to write is because I like telling stories. I've been trying to make my stories do too much, and it's locked me up. I want to go back to just building a world and some characters, and just watching what happens. from Insert Scene Here https://ift.tt/2mFEaXA via IFTTT

[setauuta]

Hunting the Plot Bunny

You never knew when you might see one. You may be scrolling through the internet feed of our choosing, or riding a bus while listening to music. You may even just be walking down the hall. Suddenly, you see a flash - just a quick tuft - gone almost as soon as you notice. Or you may hear, just for a second, the tiniest tap of a paw.

You stop, holding very still, while you try to process what you just might have seen. Trying not to make any noise, not even breathing, you wait. You don't want to scare it off, after all. Moving slowly, you look back where you saw that tuft, listen again for that tap of a paw. Careful! If you try too hard, you'll scare it away!

Sometimes, you're wrong. What you thought was a tuft of fur was a bit of discarded fluff, with nothing behind it. That tap wasn't from a paw, but the angry sounds of a keyboard being used as a weapon. You thought it was there, and sadly, the hunt has not gone your way this time.

But sometimes, oh my friend, sometimes, that tuft of fur slowly reveals itself to be the tail of a beautiful bunny. That tap is followed by three more as the bunny moves in your line of sight, showing off its glorious fur and wiggling nose. You were right! It's there, waiting for you!

Now what?

Now is the time to hope your tools are close at hand, and that you're able to capture the bunny before it flees. You don't hunt for meat or to kill, no - that's not the kind of hunter you are. You hunt to study, to learn all you can from these ephemeral beasts, and so you need a net of some sort.

Anything will work - a notepad and pencil, a laptop, a smartphone, even a receipt and a crayon if it comes down to it. You must be quick, and you must be careful. If you dawdle, the bunny may hop away before you've completed your net. If you are too harsh, the bunny may change in your net, morphing into something else, something strange and not a bunny at all.

If you're careful, and if you're quick, you'll capture your bunny and can study it at your leisure. Make sure to give it plenty of attention, now - bunnies are apt to slip away if no one's looking, leaving just a trace of fur in their place.

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[setauuta]

Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts

Particularly, in this case, if you are a bacterium, and the Greek is bearing iron. Today's Illumination comes to us from the world of medicine, as scientists have developed a new antibiotic that manages to trick bacteria into absorbing it. Essentially, the body's defense against infection is to create an iron-poor environment. This medication hitches a ride with iron, which the bacteria absorbs. Then, the caller is inside the house! And doctors have another way of fighting infection. New antibiotics are needed, as germs have a bad habit of becoming tolerant of the ones we have. Having new ways of delivering them is certainly a step in the right direction.

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[setauuta]

Day 14 of #storyadaymay (and day 81 of #the100dayproject) - the Protagonist Game from the Writer's Toolbox. Stories at http://insertscenehere.blogspot.com/

[setauuta]

Story a Day May challenge

http://insertscenehere.blogspot.com/

So, since the beginning of May I've been writing a story a day on my blog, and filming videos showing how I use the various story prompt devices that I've collected over the years to, well, prompt a story. I realized I haven't posted here in a minute, and it might be a good place for the stories to live, too.

So come! See the ramblings and the extremely rough drafts! It'll be fun!

[setauuta]

Hope Is A Four-Letter Word

I've been bouncing around with this for the last few weeks, ever since I read a couple of quotes from the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The book overall had some interesting ideas about reframing the idea of trying to get everything done. Even though there were a couple of things that made it clear the author was not approaching things with an eye toward neurodivergence (his discussion of distraction, for example, only talks about the "choice" to be distracted, and not how some people's brains simply don't focus the same way others' do), I was feeling generally positively toward the book until I got to the last chapter, and read this:

"Hope is supposed to be 'our beacon in the dark,' [environmentalist Derrick] Jensen notes. But in reality, it's a curse. To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment - the government, for example, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just 'the future' - to make things all right in the end...[It] means disavowing your own capacity to change things..." (Four Thousand Weeks, p.230-231)

This, in my mind, is beyond untrue - it's actively harmful. Hope isn't some passive idea of "maybe things will get better" - it's a force. It's an active verb - a person hopes for things, putting energy into the world by that action.

Hope is a tool. Sometimes you have to destroy the obstacles in front of you in order to build something better, and hope is what you use to do both.

There's a reason why some of the worst situations are referred to as "hopeless" - the idea of being without hope, being beyond hope, having no hope left, is terrifying. It's where despair lives, and despair is a power all of its own, with an agenda of destruction. Hope is what keeps it at bay.

Telling people to give up hope is telling people to give in to despair. In the book, Derrick Jensen is quoted again as saying "When we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free - truly free - to honestly start working to resolve it." (Four Thousand Weeks, p.231) Why can't we do both? Why can't we both hope that the situation will not get worse, AND work to resolve it?

I understand that Jensen and Burkeman are pushing people to do more than sit back and wish for things to get better without acting on that desire, and that is something that can be frustrating when the world is on fire. Telling people to give up hope, however, isn't telling them to stop being passively optimistic - it's telling them to stop being optimistic at all. If there's no hope, then why bother trying to make things better?

Now is not the time to give up on hope. Hope powers revolutions.

(x-posted from my blog Insert Scene Here)

[setauuta]

Working Through Writing Excuses Episode 8.2

 Episode 2 is all about the Campbellian monomyth/Hero of a Thousand Faces, which is one of those things that always sounded vaguely interesting from a distance. Even just listening to the beginning of this episode, though, it's sounding so much like a prescription for a story (at least, that's how way too many people look at it or treat it), and that kind of prescription has never felt organic or, frankly, interesting to me. This is probably why I was never a huge fan of literary criticism - so much of it seems to be focusing on labeling the different pieces of a story to fit into some kind of formula, and it just takes so much joy out of the experience. No wonder I fled academia.

Writing prompt: Take Goldilocks and the Three Bears, apply the Campbellian Monomyth, and give us a short story.

Babe opened the door wearily, slumping into his home just ahead of his two brothers. All three had been pulling extra hours at the mines lately, because money was tight, and Christmas was coming. He moved toward the kitchen, dropping his thermos and lunchbox on the table as he started thinking about what to make for supper.

"What a day!" Mitch groaned as he hung up his coat. Paul grunted in response, maneuvering his big body around to the armchairs angled in front of the TV. "I swear, it feels like the days are just getting longer and longer."

Babe nodded, hardly hearing his middle brother as he stared down the half-empty shelves of the pantry and started the calculations of the cash-poor. They had enough rice to get through the week, and enough dried pasta and canned beans to bulk out at least another two days. He could have sworn there'd been another couple of cans of tuna in the cupboard early in the week, but he knew Mitch liked to have that at lunch, so that was probably where it had gone. If he used the can of tomatoes he had there and some of the pasta, there was some ground beef in the freezer-

"What the hell?" Paul's voice boomed from the living room. Babe and Mitch turned and hurried over to their older brother, who rarely spoke above a mumble. If he was shouting, something was Wrong. Neither of the brothers was particularly small, but Babe was able to move around more easily to see what had caught Paul's attention.

There, on the coffee table in front of Babe's chair (the smallest and ricketiest of the three, of course), was a plate and a half-eaten sandwich. It was a tuna melt, which Babe hated, and it smelled like it was still warm - he wasn't sure how he'd missed the smell earlier.

"Yuck! Who left a sandwich out?" Mitch yelped, looking all around the floor frantically. "That's how we ended up with ants a couple of years back, remember? I am NOT putting up with that again!"

Paul just glared at Babe, who shook his head firmly. "Not mine. You know I hate the stuff. It's still warm, anyway, and I came home with you two." Paul stared for another long moment before nodding, then narrowing his eyes. Both of the other brothers were hit by a similar thought at the same time - if it wasn't one of them, then who was it? And were they still in the house?

Babe's mind raced. "Who breaks into a house and makes a sandwich?" he said out loud as he pulled out his cell phone. He lit up the screen, then hesitated. "Paul, should we call the cops, do you think?"

Mitch inhaled sharply. "I don't know about that, brother. You know what happened last time." Babe felt his cheeks flush in embarrassment. Maybe not the cops, not yet. Paul shook his head slowly. "Not yet." His voice had dropped back down to its usual quiet volume, but Babe could tell he was still on edge.

Babe turned the flashlight on on his phone instead, and light up the area around the sandwich. He frowned, staring at the small bites taken out of the neatly cut bread and tuna, then shone the light around the windows, looking for broken glass. Nothing seemed to be smashed, so whoever broke in had done so without making a mess. However, there did look like a path through the stacks of books that filled much of the open space in the hall had been made. He gestured, and Mitch and Paul both nodded.

Babe went first, tensing as he passed each doorway that branched off the hallway. The house was small, but there were rooms enough for each brother and two bathrooms, which had never felt like so many doors before. His door and Paul's were both open, as was the main bathroom. Mitch's door, however, closed securely. "Mitch?" Babe tried to keep his voice low, to keep from surprising whoever was behind the door, if they were still there.

"Go ahead, kid," Mitch replied, only the slightest tremor giving away his nerves. Hearing his brother's voice made him more confident, but also pissed Babe off more - someone had made Mitch feel uncomfortable. Someone had messed with his family. That was not allowed. Someone was going to need to answer to him.

Babe felt the doorknob and gently turned it, grateful to discover that the handle hadn't been locked. He looked back again to his brothers, who had stayed near the living room end of the hallway, and Mitch gave him a thumb's up. Paul, he was relieved to see, had his cell phone out, camera facing the hall. Whatever happened next was being filmed, so no matter what happened to him or potentially his brothers, there would be evidence. That should have been comforting, but Babe still felt a little hollow and alone at the idea. Taking a deep breath, he turned the knob and pushed the door in dramatically, hoping to catch whoever was on the other side off guard.

It was a dramatic gesture, and completely lost on the woman lying in the center of Mitch's bed, fast asleep. Babe stayed near the door, but shining the flashlight over the bed, he could see what looked to be a young woman, fully dressed in jeans and a grey hooded sweatshirt with a yellow hood, curled in a ball on top of Mitch's blankets. She still had her shoes on, even - this wasn't someone who was sleeping because she was comfortable. She was taking a moment to rest before she had to do something else, and wanted to be ready to run at a moment's notice.

Babe backed away from the room, keeping his phone's light shining in her direction as he moved away. "Well?" Mitch demanded in a loud whisper. "Is there someone there?" Paul snorted and kept the camera pointed at Babe, just in case. Even if it didn't turn into some kind of murderous situation, you never knew what might turn out to be a good TikTok.

Once Babe reached his brothers, he turned fully around to face them and smacked Mitch's arm. "Did you give your new girlfriend a key or something, idiot?" He shot Paul - or rather, Paul's camera - a withering look, which Paul returned before lowering the phone. "She's curled up asleep on your bed. We talked about this, dude."

Paul turned to face Mitch, and Babe almost felt badly for his middle brother. "We did talk about this, Mitchell," Paul rumbled, and Babe winced in sympathy with Mitch. Only their mom and dad had ever used Mitch's full name, and only when he was in Deep Trouble. Mitch looked like he was shrinking in front of them, but to his credit, he held Paul's gaze.

"She doesn't have anywhere else to go, man. I told her to only use the key if things were really bad, and it was an emergency, so it must have gotten really bad. Let me go talk to her, see if there's anything she needs from us right now." Mitch pushed past Babe, who moved aside to make the way easier. Mitch entered the room and pulled the door closed most of the way, and Babe could see the light come on once the door was closed.

Paul grumbled under his breath, but moved back to the living room, picking up the remnants of the sandwich on his way. "No use letting the food go to waste," he muttered as he got settled into his recliner. "Set the table for one more, would you? And uh, did she look like she was hurt or anything?" Paul reached for the remote for the TV, but hadn't turned it on yet, waiting for Babe to respond.

"Nah. She was asleep, but she looked ready to run." Babe moved back to his spot in the house, and heard the TV turn on, the volume low. Babe knew they had enough ground beef to stretch some pasta and sauce for four people, so he might as well get that started. As far as he knew, Mitch's girlfriend didn't have any food allergies or anything, and she clearly wasn't a vegetarian if she ate tuna fish. He turned up the lights in the kitchen and started putting the water on for the pasta. He also turned on the stereo in the kitchen, getting it started with the audiobook he'd been listening to the other night. Even if there was a new person in the house, some rituals remained in place - it was the way the house worked.

By the time the beef was browned, the sauce was bubbling away, and the pasta timer was down to its last two minutes, Mitch and his girlfriend had emerged from his bedroom. All of the boys had their own distinctive footfall, and Babe could tell who was moving through which part of the house just by the series of creaks and groans from the floor. He paused the audiobook and turned the heat down on the sauce before entering the living room.

Mitch and his girlfriend were standing next to the TV, which Paul had also paused. The big floor lamp was on, letting Babe see the woman clearly for the first time that night. Her blonde curls were pulled tightly back in a ponytail, and there was a dark shadow on one cheek. She kept her eyes fixed on the ground, gripping Mitch's hand tightly as he spoke in low tones to Paul. He looked up when Babe came into the living room fully and got close enough to hear what they were saying.

"Hey, kid." Mitch gave him a tired smile. "I was just telling Paul here that Gilda was going to stay here for a bit. She, uh, she needs a better living situation than what she's got right now. That OK with you?" Mitch's tone was mild, but his eyes were pleading with Babe. Babe looked to Paul automatically, who was watching the interaction with interest but not showing much emotion.

They'd all lived together, on their own, for long enough that they were able to say a lot without words anymore. Mitch was furious at whatever had caused Gilda to be in pain, and he just wanted her to be out of harm's way. Paul didn't think it was a great idea long-term, but he didn't see a better way to handle it right then, and clearly, she needed help of some kind. He was also pretty pissed at the whole thing - all of the Bauer boys were sensitive about people beating up on people who couldn't defend themselves properly. Ultimately, though, they wanted Babe to weigh in, since he handled the food budget.

Babe looked back at Gilda, who was still watching the floor, shifting her weight from foot to foot. She was holding one arm across her stomach tightly, and the way she was standing gave Babe the impression that her face wasn't the only place that had been hit recently. "Hey. Gilda, right?" He smiled, trying to make his tone friendly, even though he felt wildly out of his depths. She looked up quickly and nodded.

Before he could say anything else, the timer for the pasta went off. All of them jumped, showing just how tense everyone had been. Babe laughed, and that seemed to lighten the mood a little. "It's just spaghetti. Why don't you come in the kitchen and help me plate up?" He nodded his head in the direction of the kitchen, then turned and started moving that way. If nothing else, he needed to turn off the damn timer - he always forgot how loud the thing was.

He drained the pasta, putting it in the sauce and giving it a stir, when Gilda came in. "So, um, where are the plates? How can I help?" Her voice was lower than Babe imagined it would be, and a little bit shaky. He pointed to the appropriate cabinet, then to the silverware drawer. "Come on. Everything's about ready. You want something to drink? I think we still have a couple of cans of soda in the fridge."

He knew it would take a little while, but Babe was pretty sure that the routines that ran the house could probably be adapted to add one more person. He'd just have to find another chair, that's all.

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