Just Kristin

I have finally, for the first time in my adult life, real­ized some of the things that I want to both put into and get out of my life. This is novel to me, for rea­sons that for the most part sound whiny and will there­fore not be enu­mer­ated here. It is a won­derul feel­ing, though, to have more con­crete goals for myself.

Here, then, are the dilem­mas that sit in the mid­dle of my new­found source of motivation:

• My two pro­fes­sions of choice are teacher (ele­men­tary or mid­dle school) or librar­ian. Orig­i­nally I leaned more toward the for­mer, but I am fright­ened by the require­ments placed on and hur­dles placed before teach­ers in US schools these days, and I won­der if I will be able to find more reward than frus­tra­tion as a teacher. I know that what teach­ing I have done brought me the most sat­is­fac­tion I have ever felt at a job, but that was in Japan, where atti­tudes toward learn­ing and teach­ers are very dif­fer­ent than here. I love books, help­ing peo­ple find infor­ma­tion and doing research, on the other hand. I also think that defend­ing the free­doms of speech and expres­sion, as most librar­i­ans to quite vocif­er­ously, would be right up my alley. I am rea­son­ably sure that I would enjoy being a librar­ian and would excel at it, but… Both jobs fit into what I con­sider “right liveli­hood”, so I won’t lose either way.
• Either way, I will need, first, to fin­ish my degree. Where oh where to go to school? SDSU would be easy to re-enter, and is def­i­nitely cheaper. It seems to be a more racially and eco­nom­i­cally diverse school. The actual edu­ca­tion may be nar­rower, in num­ber and vari­ety of majors and classes offered, than UCSD. UCSD is def­i­nitely more expen­sive, but closer to home and to work. UCSD would require me to go first to a com­mu­nity col­lege, and even then may either not accept me due to the num­ber of cred­its I have already achieved (if I want to trans­fer them), or require me to forego all credit trans­fers from my pre­vi­ous 3 years of col­lege, hav­ing me start afresh(man). Then there is always UC San Mar­cos, but I am not con­vinced that it would be bet­ter for me than UCSD or SDSU, and I know that it would be worse for me traffic-wise…
• Really, for either pro­fes­sion, I will need to con­tinue school after I get my BA, so will my major really mat­ter? I am think­ing of either Comp. Lit., Eng­lish Comp., Lin­guis­tics, Japan­ese or ???

I am hop­ing that some­one out there will have some advice for me. Anyone?

May all beings be well and happy.
May all beings be har­mo­nious and peace­ful.
May all have the light,
the way out of suf­fer­ing,
the way home.
May we each share our bright, won­der­ous nature
for the ben­e­fit of all beings.
   - The Bud­dha, trans­lated and paraphrased

Some­times we need to be reminded of our luck, of oth­ers’ needs and or our capac­ity for com­pas­sion. Namaste, getup­grrl, peace, and thank you for sharing.

Vita Sackville-West is my newest role model. Her rela­tion­ship with her hus­band, Harold Nicol­son, stands as an exam­ple for me, a ray of hope.

I just rec’d, thanks to abebooks.com, a copy of Another World Than This, a col­lec­tion by the Sackville-West/Nicolson duo of favorite quotes from their respec­tive libraries. It is a com­mon­place book unlike any oth­ers I own, filled with snip­pets I have never encoun­tered, many in ancient Latin and Greek. I had to order this book, as well as another (a col­lec­tion of poetry assem­bled by Auden) from an Eng­lish book­seller.… Some­times I despair for this coun­try. Too long to go into here, really, but the phrase “dumb­ing down” has a lot to do with it.

I only hope that McCain doesn’t team up with Shrub this next elec­tion, or else I will once again take real action on my blus­ter to expat. *sigh* Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate my coun­try at all. I think I feel toward it the same way a par­ent feels toward a way­ward, abu­sive, near-hopeless (for can any par­ent com­pletely lose hope?) child…

Any­way, this book is almost enough to make me for­get my trou­bles. A trip to have my name embroi­dered on my new bowl­ing shirt, a la Lav­erne, may cover the rest of my woes, at least for this morning.

Any­way, a sam­ple from some of Vita’s writ­ings, this one from the first part of a con­fes­sion­ary, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal man­u­script pub­lished post mortem by her son, Nigel Nicol­son:

Of course I have no right what­so­ever to write the truth about my life, involv­ing as it nat­u­rally does the lives of so many other peo­ple, but I do so urged by a neces­sity of truth-telling, because there is no liv­ing soul who knows the com­plete truth; here, may be one who knows a sec­tion; and there, one who knows another sec­tion: but to the whole pic­ture no one is ini­ti­ated. Hav­ing writ­ten it down I shall be able to trust no one to read it; there is only one per­son in whom I have such utter con­fi­dence that I would give every line of this con­fes­sion into his hands, know­ing that after wad­ing through this morass — for it is a morass, my life, a bog, a swamp, a deceit­ful coun­try, with one bright patch in the mid­dle, the patch that is unal­ter­ably his — I know that after wad­ing throught it all he would emerge hold­ing his esti­mate of me stead­fast. This would be the test of my con­fi­dence, from which I would not shrink. I would not give it to her — per­ilous touch­stone!, who even in these first score of lines should teach me where truth lies. I do know where it lies, but have no strength to grasp it; here am I already in the mid­dle of my infirmities.

Happy birth­day, D!!! I hope you love your new cam­era… (Any­one who wants to hear about it should bug him until he blogs about it.) :P

• If I haven’t men­tioned it before, Ver­ba­tim is a fan­tas­tic mag­a­zine for word-lovers, and this year’s sum­mer read­ing sug­ges­tion arti­cle has again length­ened my Ama­zon wish list.
• Bitch Mag­a­zine also resides on my list of mags I read cover to cover, and they, too, have fur­thered my lit­er­ary con­sump­tion.
• Grou­phug is a great site to visit if you want to pre­tend to be a priest in the confessional.
• Cof­fee warms more than mouths and burns.…and I don’t mean laps.
• While look­ing for infor­ma­tion for the Myf­ster (sorry about Men­do­cino, lady), I found a site called City-Data.com that offers inter­est­ing if geeky tid­bits about most US cities I could think of.
• Thanks to the Rev, I now have two more poetry source sites to offer: poemhunter.com (just typoed that “poemhunger”…thanks Mr. Freud) and oldpoetry.com. Also, don’t for­get that Project Guten­berg still exists. I think I may vol­un­teer.
• Buy Joanna New­som’s CD… she is prob­a­bly one of the best lyricist/poets I have encoun­tered in a long time, and any­one who can play a harp like she does should be, well.…*sigh*
• Keep your what off my what??? (I bought 3 CDs already, and I haven’t been disappointed.)

I know I have more, but I have to go home soon. Later!

So, dur­ing what became a more-heated-than-intended dis­cus­sion with the Rev a while back, I was made to take a bit of a con­tem­pla­tive look at my love for sar­casm, cyn­i­cism and neg­a­tiv­ity, espe­cially, if not mostly, in the media. Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, Mark Mor­ford and their ilk make me smile; I started an invec­tive col­lec­tion in high school, and still delight more in a person’s abil­ity to crit­i­cize cre­atively than a person’s tal­ent for ver­bal back-patting; I find more of use to me in neg­a­tive reviews than pos­i­tive, at least in the begin­ning when I am mak­ing the deci­sion on whether or not to read a book or see a film; neg­a­tive social com­men­tary moti­vates or brings about change far more effec­tively than pos­si­tive — for exam­ple, the Catholic church doesn’t need praise for the things it does right, as, most assuredly, it is already quite smugly sat­is­fied with itself, but it could use con­stant reminders about its archaic views regard­ing women, birth con­trol, and queer­ness (sorry, my choice of word), among other things.

Any­way, suf­fice it to say, 1)we agreed for the most part that valu­able lessons can be learned from any author, no mat­ter how neg­a­tive or pos­i­tive their views on life, or how per­sis­tent their mes­sage; 2)we agreed that we can­not com­pletely know the heart or life of an author by his or her writ­ings; 3)we were both quite emo­tion­ally invested in this argument.

This last bit was made clear in his case by (if I under­stood cor­rectly) his wish that more atten­tion be paid to humanity’s promise, espe­cially that which lies within the soul of each of us (a “divin­ity” that I agree exists), a wish based upon a painful period of his life dur­ing which he strug­gled with per­sonal neg­a­tiv­ity and despair. My emo­tional involve­ment came from feel­ing that my char­ac­ter was being judged — although not explic­itly — by the vehe­mence of his debate (which turned out to be an incor­rect under­stand­ing of his point), and despair at the knowl­edge that I could not deny my attrac­tion to seem­ingly neg­a­tive mes­sages: a flaw in my char­ac­ter was pin­pointed, but I could not change it; I had sinned but could not stop. As with most of our “dis­cus­sions”, it ended for the most part with sin­cere accord, and per­haps only a few dan­gling strings of thought to each.

Only in the past few days did I real­ize that a good por­tion of our dif­fer­ence in this case stemmed from our points of view (again, as is the case in most of our flak ses­sions; I say azure, he says cobalt and we argue until a) tired of the excer­cise, or more likely b) we both real­ize we were say­ing “blue”). He was relat­ing to neg­a­tiv­ity as a force that can pull a man down, harm his quest for inner real­iza­tion. I came to the table with pockets-, bags– and boxes-full of life expe­ri­ences in which I was made strong by cyn­i­cism in the face of things that I felt were keep­ing me down, where this neg­a­tiv­ity helped me keep up the fight to bet­ter both my inner and my outer worlds. I see peo­ple exer­cis­ing their destruc­tive voice as those who are con­tin­u­ing the fight, and are work­ing to break down those things they seem as harm­ful so that rebuild­ing can take place — a kind of social Kali. He sees it more as a giving-up, or per­haps as a mean-spirited older brother who kicks down every sand cas­tle one builds.…maybe?

I guess I am still con­fused, but I am, as always, try­ing to under­stand. I do love a good debate, tho. Don’t you?

…that there is really no rea­son to post­pone post­ing. Even list­ing all the excuses I have used on myself and oth­ers over the past few months is embarass­ing. Instead, in order to keep myself inspired, I will give a few rea­sons I have started post­ing again:

• I sent Neil Gaiman a present, and noted my URL. It would be hor­ri­ble, should he actu­ally show up, for the site to be dormant. :)
• Lots of nice peo­ple keep check­ing up on me and my blog and, while I can’t believe that this is because they miss the posts for their lit­er­ary merit, the thought that they miss them at all makes me feel grate­ful and guilty — two big moti­va­tors in my life.
• A won­der­ful group women who com­prise the writ­ers’ work­shop at my favorite non-used book­store in San Diego have, with­out know­ing me, found merit in my work, thereby moti­vat­ing me.
• I seem to, for the sec­ond time in a year, lost a large body of my pre­vi­ous writ­ings (the first time to a poten­tial car thief, the sec­ond time to my own cyber-stupidity), and feel com­pelled to attempt to view this as a rea­son to renew my resolve to prac­tice word-art, rather than the tragedy that my dark side keeps whis­per­ing that it is.
• Prac­tice — only prac­tice — makes per­fect, or even gets one close.
• I miss it.

Now, the big prob­lem: how to over­come the guilt I feel when I spend more time writ­ing and less time read­ing and com­ment­ing. How do you all bal­ance your blogtime?

…or, how Kristin fills up future book­shelves with­out even a thought for the over­pop­u­la­tion prob­lem cur­rently ram­pant in her lit­er­ary world.
Even if for no other rea­son, I can jus­tify hav­ing my TJ37 CLIE™ Hand­held by employ­ing it as a books-to-be-purchased-list-keeping-device. :) Here is the recent batch of books I ordered:
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I have been gone from here long enough to come back older by a year… or at least on paper. I have not, how­ever, given up. In a recent arti­cle in the NY Times, it was said that most blogs are soon dis­carded, the nov­elty hav­ing worn off. For me, this was/is not the case. I have missed it the whole time I haven’t been post­ing, but I haven’t been post­ing men­tally as well, so my absence hasn’t been lim­ited to my blog. :) Any­way, I have swapped soft­ware, and will post about that and many other things from my list of notes from the last month, lit­tle by lit­tle when time allows. In the mean time, here are some pics from my 36th birth­day cel­e­bra­tion. I love my family!

Today, at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Museum, I pur­chased a “Nancy Pearl, Librar­ian” action fig­ure. It comes, as the box notes,

“With Amaz­ing push-button Shush­ing Action! plus bonus Trad­ing Card & Bookmarks

God, if there is any­thing sex­ier than being whis­pered to in a for­eign tongue, or a woman play­ing a cello, it is some­one who loves books and has a great col­lec­tion of them. This has to be the sex­i­est action fig­ure I’ve ever seen.
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