Try this…it’s fun….

although I was bemused to note that I am BOTH an “Escape Artist” AND a “Home Soul.” Or maybe that makes total sense.

Thanks to Mamacita for this Friday diversion….

*Yes, I am still filling the blog up with various kinds of fluff until the day The Bee is safely buzzing around my office with me, and I can return to offering biting satire, witty commentary, or whatever the hell it is I meant to do here more usually…ahem.

Marking Time

Okay, so let’s get this out of the way first. I am celebrating three anniversaries of sorts this week:

+ today, March 1st, I joined the proverbial Century Club…that means I’m officially on Day 100 of my wait for LOA/TA. *Sigh.*

+ today, March 1st, The Bee turned 19-months-old. *SIGH.*

+ Monday, February 26th, marked my one-year anniversary of blogging.

In honor of that last anniversary (and because I was tagged by OmegaMom), I am doing the latest meme, the five reasons why I blog.

I started to blog last year on the night we arrived in Las Vegas for our second IVF (clinic was out-of-state). I was anxious and looking for something to do in the hotel room. Er…that doesn’t really count as a reason, though, does it? ‘Cause it sounds mighty lame.

When I left teaching in December of 2003, I spent a good solid two years writing poetry. And I mean every day. I had a routine of getting out to the office early, writing for five or so hours, and then getting packets of poems ready to send out to contests and journals. The post office closes at 3:30 here, so it was a natural end-stop to my day, and a reason to turn the computer off and go back up to the house for the evening. I never had to push myself to write during those two years. It was just “there” in the way that is hard for a writer to explain. Sort of like a faucet.

Then the faucet turned off. I’m not entirely sure why. It vaguely corresponded time-wise to my first miscarriage, but that certainly wasn’t a connection I was making at the time. I still felt the same, but the words wouldn’t come. I would try to force myself to finish a poem, and the poem resisted.

So, I decided not to worry about it. Time off was probably a good thing. I needed a chance to renew the creative energy, right? But after a couple of months, I worried that no writing at all might make me rusty…so I thought that maybe the blog was a good place to turn as an alternative.

So, to answer the meme question, the first reason I started blogging was to fill a gap between theory and practice–I was a writer in theory only. Meaning I was a writer not writing. So perhaps the blog was initially intended to legitimize me again.

I wrote for about five months without readers, without comments. The way you find readers is to become one. When you leave comments for other bloggers, they come calling. They read. They begin to comment back. But for a long time I was scared of the possibility of an audience. I liked writing in my little vacuum. It’s a safe space before you get your blog legs under you.

When I first started, I wrote about The Issues. Infertility Issues. Adoption Issues. Family-formation Issues…RAD. Racism. Ideologies. Idiocies. I felt the need to get stuff out on the table. So, definitely, another reason I began to blog was to record my thought-process. To figure out where my carved-out space in this community was going to be, what it was going to look like. Because one sure thing I have discovered about blogging is that you must choose your community. There are literally millions of blogs out there, but my corner of that bloggoverse is fairly small–meaning, the same names keep popping up over and over, even in the comments of blogs I rarely read or merely stumble across. I started out reading The Naked Ovary, and I connected through her web to the RQ, and just started to read the people who were reading the people. My most popular post ever was this one in which I spoke about how I couldn’t be a part of traditional DTC culture. And that opened other doors in the community.

I haven’t written about Issues in so long I can barely remember what it feels like. Fluff has become a safety measure, until The Bee is completely, bodily, here. So, I’ll give my more fluffy reason for why I blog: it does serve the purpose of journal. I might choose to share some of it with my daughter some day, but, in any case, it’s a record of SBird in the days leading up to motherhood.

Another feel-good reason why I blog: it does create community for someone like me, who spends whole entire days (as I have for the past two) speaking to absolutely no one (not even on the phone) but the dogs. R. is in California at a palm-tree tradeshow, so I have the satellite on my roof to keep me company. It’s smarter than the TV. The great thing about the self-selecting communities of blogs is that you don’t have to worry about finding people who can identify with where you are in life or what you’re doing. Y’all know an LID when you see one.

The last reason why I blog is the formal reason: I can only write on the computer now (this is true for anything other than a thank you note…I can’t even write poetry except on a blank screen.) And I like the high-tech collage that you can create with a blog–the words, the pictures, the hyperlinks, the music, the video–that you can feed into a single discussion of something. It allows for a sort of radically individualized reading experience. It basically allows you to click on links until you’re miles of bytes away from where you began–both virtually and cognitively. As a writer, it allows me to gather scraps and patches together in a sort of digital quilt. There’s more for the mind to do than with a conventional paper and pen.

Those are my five reasons for blogging.

Anyone who wants to think about their motivations and complete this meme, I would be really interested in reading!

Gas Station Soliloquy…

Who would have thunk that filling up your tank could come with benefits like this…

Cool, huh?

I love the way they’re arranged. I love that there are 25. I love that they made an inverted pyramid. I love that there is one lone bird at the bottom. The mad hatter.

Confessions of a Blogophile.

Hello. My name is SBird, and I hate Bloglines.

There. I said it. I hate Bloglines. In the midst of a booming Blog Culture and many bloggers who have come not just to depend on Bloglines, but to revere the technological wonder that is Bloglines, I imagine I am a voice in the wilderness.

And, yet, here I am. Here I am to say that Bloglines does nothing for me. I have tried it. I continue to try it. And I understand that it improves efficiency…boy, do I understand that. When I post a new entry on my blog, I usually have a comment waiting for me on my email within minutes. Like two. Minutes. These are folks that I must assume have me on their Bloglines and so can see nearly instantaneously when I have a new post up. (Although I do wonder whether there isn’t some sort of bell that they’ve got programmed to go off, since not even if I liked Bloglines would I check it that frequently.) I, on the other hand, often don’t get around to commenting on other people’s blogs for hours or even days after they put up a new post since I still *prefer* to check the blogs that I regularly read the old-fashioned way.

Yes. You heard me. The old-fashioned way. I realize it’s a bit of an oxymoron to talk about such new technology (how long have blogs been around now? five years or so?) as even having an “old-fashioned way,” but that’s what it has begun to feel like. See if this makes sense: I am on my blog’s home page. At home. In the familiar environs of my singing bird motif, of my own words, of my comfy blog list. I can move my cursor rather luxuriously between my post, my comments, and my personally-categorized list of online friends. I can hover over a bloggy pal’s cybername, I can watch my own poised cursor make that friend’s cybername spring to life as it indicates an active link, I can click on it and be instantly transported into another world. Someone else’s world. Someone else’s home. And then–if they have a new post up–I can visit with them there. I love that feeling of almost-surprise, of confirmed satisfaction, when I discover that, yes, indeed, they DO have a new post up, and I get to unwrap it like a present. Really. Sometimes I check blogs like Johnny’s just to get my fix of confirmed satisfaction because, of course, I know he’ll have something waiting for me every single day.

Sometimes when I click over to visit one of my links, they are not at home. There is an old post still up that I have already read and learned from and perhaps commented on (usually commented on). Often, though, I will check the comments on an old post to see what other commenters have added since my last visit or to see whether the blogger themselves has added anything. Those sorts of updates to the original post (the ones done entirely within the comments section) don’t show up on Bloglines at all. So, I guess what I am trying to say is that there is something to the physical motion–the movement between home and off-home visits–the cyclical nature of checking blogs directly from my own–the emotional reaction to the appearance of either a new post or an old post–that is important to me. I even like the random nature of the “hit-or-miss” ethic. Perhaps it’s like the difference between a garment cut and assembled entirely by machine and one constructed by hand. You pay more attention to the warp and the weave of the fabric when you do things by hand.

Again, though, I realize that the analogy to using old-fashioned methods when we’re discussing the blogosphere is an odd one. We are talking about digital technology here, not about writing out our posts in longhand with a quill.

But, finally, it really does come down to aesthetics for me. Bloglines looks funny. It looks like a digital card-catalog with everyone’s posts stacked on top of each other and completely devoid of personality. They all look the same. Now I am very much aware that it’s possible to click on a new post’s title in Bloglines and be transferred over to the original post on the originary blog. But here’s the thing…after using Bloglines awhile, you just stop doing that. It just becomes easier–faster–even more efficient–just to read the posts where they are in front of you. And so eventually you give up and you don’t click over and you read the posts on Bloglines instead, in their completely standardized bleakness. Maybe you click over to comment–but, still, you’ve gone through the process of reading the post in its humorless, emotionless, Bloglines form, and I would wager that that changes how you read the post, what you read within the post. It’s almost as if the post becomes more earnest–and that is not a compliment to the post. Earnest in the sense of taking itself too seriously, too preservedly, which I think can happen even with serious posts that are meant to be taken seriously. If they aren’t surrounded by the homeplace of the blogger that is posting them, they absorb the earnest stolidness of the card-catalog that is Bloglines. The context in which we take in the words affects the words themselves.

I am not a purist. I am trying to do something that’s half-and-half. When I am very busy–too busy–having to moderate a yahoo group gone amuck (ahem), then I use Bloglines just so that my blog peeps don’t think I am ignoring them. They are so good about responding to me, and I believe in reciprocity more than I believe in just about anything. But my preference remains to check my bloglist links one by one from The Singing Bird homepage, as if I am knocking on doors, not entirely sure what I might find there.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming…

…for a brief MeMe brought to us by walternatives: The Nearest Book MeMe.

The rules are simple:

1) Find the nearest book
2) Open to page 123
3) Type lines 6-8 of said book
4) Tag three others

I had a bit of a hiccup in the process because I realized that my actual nearest book–nearest four books–only went to pages 75-100…they are poetry collections and because people in this rag-tag culture of ours don’t read poetry (AHEM!!!), they aren’t long. But then I realized I had a Bilingual edition (so, already twice as long), of the collected poems of Pablo Neruda nearby:

And those of you who know me won’t believe this, but here are the first eight lines from page 123, a poem entitled “Disaction”:

The dove is filled with split papers,
its breast is stained with erasers and weeks,
with blotting paper whiter than a corpse
and inks frightened by their sinister color.

Come with me to the shadow of administrations,
to the weak, delicate, pallid color of the chiefs,
to the tunnels deep as calendars,
to the doleful thousand-paged wheel.

So, besides the bird reference and the obvious writing references, does the line “the tunnels deep as calendars” remind anyone else out there of this interminable adoption wait?

Okay, I am tagging The Slow Boat to China, atomic mama, and omega mom.

Have Fun!

Radio Silence…

Sorry I haven’t been posting recently…I’ve been in a bit of a funk. This funk might be the result of any of the following reasons, in no certain order:

+ We in the SN world are busying our little waiting brains with trying to invent a new acronym for our signature posts. Let me tell you, anytime one is forced to come up with a new acronym–it can’t be good. This time the CCAA has implemented a new step in the SN process that happens after your dossier has been reviewed, but before the TA is issued.

They did this out of the blue. Without telling any agency types.

It is called a “Statement of Commitment,” which sounds an awful lot to me like those pledges Christian fundamentalist high schoolers are making to remain chaste until marriage. But actually this is exactly the same form that NSN aparents receive with their referral. It tells you who your child is and asks you to sign your names indicating that you want her, which of course I already did back on October 11th. They are now adding it as an extra step for SN aparents, and it will delay TA from 3 to 12 weeks. No one really knows for sure.

Does the word redundant come to anyone else’s mind?

The prevailing wisdom is that this new step is a reaction to the increase in disruptions we’ve been seeing over the past six months, but here’s the thing: it still isn’t legally binding, even if it is attempting to be psychologically so. Disruptions point to a sad state of affairs in terms of aparent preparation (or lack thereof), but disruptions aren’t preventable by adding a paper step to the process.

The acronyms being debated are LOA and SC…LOA for “Letter of Acceptance” and SC for “Statement of Commitment.” How about IJWMDN?

I Just Want My Daughter Now.

See? Funk.

+I got to see my father walk around my house at Christmas in his diapers (he gets disoriented finding his way to the bathroom). Although that cries out to be funny, it’s not. He has Parkinson’s. It sort of takes the wind out of funny, not to mention taking the wind out of everything else. I have a parent in diapers and an (almost) daughter in diapers, which makes me an official member of that sandwich generation. And it’s weird because I’m barely a parent, and yet I’m losing my parents. Those years of Norman Rockwellian, intergenerational bonding and holiday dinners and sharing of family stories belong to some nostaglic past, along with martini lunches and June Cleaver.

I’m realizing that this may be the true fallout of being an older parent…of “waiting” (even if it was not your choice) to be a parent. My parents waited until their 30s to have kids, and I am 40 having kids…which makes my parents first-time grandparents in their 70s. Which means they too are returning to being in a child-like state, if only because of their out-of-control bodily functions. I can’t imagine what that feels like. The idea of seeing your life as a bell curve is dismal.

+I have been thinking about the cockeyed way some countries might view our standing-in-line-by-the-tens-of-thousands-to-adopt-these-Chinese-babies while we bomb the hell out of babies in Iraq and Afghanistan or ignore the babies in Darfur. I think about this at 3 AM sometimes, and I am not a bleeding heart by any standard of measurement. It just seems a rather stark disjunction–from that other point of view.

Actually, I began thinking about this after the P@ula Z@hn debacle, when the Turkish-American panelist made his comments asking why no one is adopting Muslim kids…and that we wouldn’t want them to be near a chemistry class. Yeah, we all know that Muslim countries don’t ever send their children abroad for adoption, but what this guy was really trying to incite us to think about (I think…) is that it’s strange how we decide that some kids are indispensible and some kids are expendable. At least, our national behaviors would seem to indicate that we hold those dichotomous views. What does labeling someone a towel head have to do with adopting orphans from China? Well…maybe everything.

+It is so cold here things are cracking. Garden hoses, pipes, lips, ground, tempers. Cold, wind, and no precipitation. The only ice we have is in the birdbath. (Don’t worry, I bought a heater for it. I try to do right by my birdy friends.) We actually have a below-zero windchill. I hate windchill. If we never had to factor a temperature or anything else by using measurements that are merely metaphoric again, I would be happy.

+I actually do have some more posts planned…a post on the dollhouse my mom sent me for Emme Lu (which was mine as a child) that is some serious 1960s ranch house goodness…a post on the utter emptiness I feel towards the technological wonder that is Bloglines…a series of posts on this wacky ranch I live on…and a very special post that I’ve been planning for a long time on something I stumbled across a while back in the desert wilderness of southern Arizona. It’s sort of a bonafide secret.

Yours,
SBird
who is slowly working at pulling herself out of her purple patch of funk….

Homage to the Holiday Newsletter.

Before we get too much farther into the New Year, I’d just like to take a moment to confess that I am a BIG FAN of holiday newsletters–the ones that get such a bad rap from bloggers, my mother, and Miss Manners alike. Dudes! I really LIKE them. I actually LOOK FORWARD to getting them. Sometimes, I even RE-READ them.

What isn’t to like about a newsy, family-drama-filled page or two? Most of these folks I never hear from during the year, and then I get a feast of selfabsorpedloveliness come Christmastime. To me, that’s cool. I WANT to hear about the largest eggplant you’ve ever pulled out of your garden, your kid’s cello concert, and your trip to Key Largo. Why not? What’s wrong with people grabbing for their 15 minutes? Or their 2 1/2 minutes, as the case may be?

Hell, I’d even come to your house and read the newsletters of people I don’t know. I like them that much. I like to see how people tell a story.

That’s why I read blogs, too.

I was not always such a fan. I was not always so enlightened. My mom raised me to mouth the words, “if you can’t take the time to handwrite a note, then you shouldn’t write at all.” And I bought it. And for years I looked with the look of superior disdain at the all the piss-poor examples of computer-generated fluff and rote-recall of months and bragging extemporare.

Yeah. And then I got over it.

Because what’s worse–FAR, FAR WORSE–than the mass mailing of the holiday newsletter is the drive-by holiday card. You know. Where they let Hallmark do the talking for them and then just sign their name underneath. No note. Not even an attempt to write “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Chanukah.” Often not even a “Love,”–nope. Too many to finish. Not enough time for Love, .

So, basically, what was happening with the Disdainers of the Holiday Newsletters is that they were becoming Drive-Byers instead. And so I got nada. Nothing. I learned zilch about their year, zero about what the world’s dished out to them, nothing about them as people in their currenthood of peopleness apart from the card they chose that year to represent them. And– come on!–how much can a chickadee hanging off a snowy branch or a Coca-Cola-sized Santa or a penguin manger scene really say about a person? Okay, yeah. Maybe the penguin manger scene speaks volumes, but what I really want to know is…

where were you on the Fourth of July? What did you think of that election? Did you travel to someplace I’ve been or someplace I’ve always wanted to go? How much hay did you put up (we get a newsletter every year with this as its theme), which river did you raft down, which kid had the chickenpox, graduated from high school, visited you, didn’t visit you, went on a field trip to the science museum, said their first word?

Inquiring minds want to know. I want to know. Really. The alternative is so, so impoverished.

I think the holiday newsletter gets its bad reputation from some overly-refined sense we have that generating the same news in the same format for every single person we mail a card to is somehow inauthentic. That the mass-ness of it all and the techology of it all makes the stories we tell and the well wishes we convey somehow less genuine.

But I don’t think of Andy Warhol as less authentic or genuine an artist than Van Gogh. Their projects were different, of course. But I love both their work. What I don’t love is an empty wall.

When my parents were here visiting last week, I showed my mom the card I had just received from her best friend back at home. (Yes, I exchange Christmas cards with my mother’s best friend. I’ve known her since I was six.) My mom had already received the same card from G.–but without the newsletter inside. My mom’s best friend doesn’t send it to my mom because of the way my mom has denigrated the practice over the years. And guess what? My mom LOVED reading her best friend’s stories from the past year, even though she had heard most of them before. It was a catalogue, an encapsulation, of events and feelings and thoughts.

Was it accurate? No. Certainly not. Stories aren’t accurate. They’re more like housekeeping. An attempt to make order, an attempt to preserve–before the dust of the new year with its new events settles in again. And so what if some people brag like there’s no bragging left in tomorrow? So what if others bore you to tears with their rote declension of month after month after month? That’s their story. And I, for one, vastly prefer it to the empty wall.

New Year’s MeMe

1. What did you do in 2006 that you’d never done before?
Blogged, started an adoption, saw my child’s face, spoke a
few words of Mandarin, moderated a Yahoo Group, had a Mexican doctor perform a medical procedure on me that is banned by the FDA.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I lost 20 pounds Feb-April last year (no sugar, no wheat, no dairy IF diet), then gained it back this fall (post-LID stress?).

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
My sister had a baby girl, Claire, in April, and my good friend from graduate school had her son, Bennett, in May.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Apart from my miscarriages (was that a cheap shot?), no.

5. What countries did you visit?
Mexico–twice. Once for fun, once for not-fun.

6. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?
My daughter. So, I guess, technically, a TA.

7. What dates from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Jan 1–started the adoption process.
April 21–bad ultrasound.
May 21–5th anniversary dinner in San Francisco.
Sept 7–saw Emme Lu’s photo for the first time.
Sept 18–turned 40.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I got to think of myself as a mom.

9. What was your biggest failure?
I didn’t write a single poem (this is supposed to be my profession now) all year. Not a one. I’m giving myself a by.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
See #4.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
I consider the adoption expenses to be money towards The Bee’s first 18 months of life–(Why don’t people use this explanation when confronted by idiots about how much an adoption costs? I always want to say, “it cost way less than it did for you to raise your bio child to 18 months!”)–not really a “thing bought.” But, it’s an obvious answer.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My stepson’s. He’s turning 20 and turning adult.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
You mean besides The Bushy? Uhhhh….

14. Where did most of your money go?
IVFs that we will never use and can’t get a refund on.
And taxes (don’t even ask).

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Switching to SN.

16. What song will always remind you of 2006?
Like, personally? Or pop-culturally? Because “I’m Bringing Sexy Back” is definitely the pop-culture anthem of 2006. But I was something more along the lines of “The Riddle” (5FF).

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
 a) happier or sadder? b) thinner or fatter? c) richer or poorer?
Happier. Much. The same weight-wise. Poorer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Hiking on the trails.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Fretting.

20. How did you spend the New Year night?
At home with hubby. Trying to figure out why the east coast is the only region in the U.S. that apparently has a count down that the networks are willing to acknowledge.

21. Did you fall in love in 2006?
Yes. With a little girl’s picture.

22. How many one-night stands?
I have a theory: I think most memes are created by MySpace-addicted teens and 20-somethings. Because some of the questions on some of these things are SOOOO WTFFFF. Ahem. Young, I mean.

23. What was your favorite TV program?
CBS Sunday Morning (smart TV with the best final 30 seconds on any broadcast)
Gray’s Anatomy
Project Runway
American Idol
Lost
select HGTV/FineLiving/FoodNetwork shows

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Hate is a strong word. Let’s say I have been disappointed by some people.

25. What was the best book you read?

Wayne’s College of Beauty by David Swanger

Miracle Fruit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

26. What was the best movie you saw?
Best In Show

27. What was the most beautiful day you spent during the year?
Hiking up on the trails.

28. Your best Christmas present?
Camcorder. And a Swiss @rmy pocket knife.

29. Your wish for everyone for the new year?
To be like this:

This is my dog Gus at the end of Christmas Dinner, sitting on my mom’s lap. He is not begging! He is totally, blissfully content to sit among ‘his people’ and take it all in. His eyes followed everyone who spoke around the table, and he was comfy enough to settle in and listen.

And, no, he did not even blink at the pumpkin pie. With apologies to anyone who thinks it’s gross to have hairy creatures at the human table–he was only there for the tail end of dessert. Pun intended. So there.

Abecederian* Meme…

A is for age:

40, last September.

B is for Beer:

Amber. I don’t drink beer too much because the bubbles bug me.

C is for Career:

English Professor (Renaissance Lit) and Poet.

D is for my Dog’s Name:

Spot, Gus, and Fiona.

E is for Essential Item I Use Everyday:

Computer.

F is for Favorite T.V. Show:

CBS Sunday Morning.

G is for Favorite Game:

Chess.

H is for Hometown:

Columbia, Maryland.

I is for Instruments I Play:

Flute, Piccolo. I actually had a music scholarship to college. Long time ago.

J is for Favorite Juice:

Tomato. With lemon slice.

K is for Whose Butt I’d Like To Kick:

Yeah–the Bushy.

L is for the Last Place I Ate:

Home. Roast chicken last night.

M is for Marriage:

Married 5 1/2 years. A Second Time.

N is for my Name:

SBird (which actually does have something to do with my real name).

O is for Overnight Hospital Stays:

Never.

P is for People I was With Today:

Just the hubby, before he left for California.

Q is for Quote:

“The only way out is through.”

R is for Biggest Regret:

Where to start? Actually, “regret” is too strong a term. I am critical of some of my choices, but I do think I’m who I am because of where I’ve been. And it’s hard to imagine that much differently at this point.

S is for Sport:

Swimming. Hiking.

T is for Time I Woke Up Today:

Six.

U is for Current Underwear:

Victoria’s Secret. Cotton. Colors. Not bikinis. Never bikinis.

V is for Vegetable You Love:

Asparagus.
Butter Lettuce.

W is for Worst Habit:

Procrastination.

X is for X-rays I Have Had:

Hmmmmm…lots of sonograms, a CATScan and a MRI or two, a mammogram…but otherwise, only dental x-rays.

Y is for Yummy Food You Ate Today:

Coffee Ice Cream.

Z is for Zodiac:

Virgo. (Pisces rising, I think.)

Year of the Horse.

*abecederian…a word puzzle or cipher that uses the alphabet to guide the text. Often thought (long ago) to have supernatural powers…as in the case of a few of the biblical psalms. See “C for Career” to know why I know this geeky, less-than-useful tidbit.