Sometimes the good overwhelms the bad

My family has gone through a tough few months. Plans fell apart, people were hurt and sad, big steps were taken only to fail, changes and more changes and reversals and then more changes have happened. Even the good things were full of stress and anxiety and really felt diminished by how much energy they were taking.

But this week, two things happened that were unexpectedly wonderful, so wonderful that I have to write about them:

I sing with a choir which is premiering a new work by a world-famous composer. Tonight, the three choirs that commissioned the piece rehearsed it with the composer himself accompanying on the piano, and his son playing percussion. It was magic. The concerts (two this weekend) will be better, no doubt, because the audience always pushes the energy way up. But there was something wonderful about the intimate making of music which has never been heard before, not the way the composer had envisioned it until tonight. I hope Paul Halley was content with this 'first time' experience.

Tonight I also won a VIP ticket to a big event with internationally acclaimed speakers happening in my home town next week. I entered the contest (write a response to my blog posting & tell me why you should win! ) completely not expecting a thing. I never win these things, and my entry was pretty cheesy (you know, sincere and quirky and stuff). Lo and behold - I won! Next week I will attend the Art of Marketing with Mitch Joel, Guy Kawasaki and others. I cannot wait to hear what they all have to say, and am hoping like fury that the presentations help kick me out of my Masters' project doldrums.

These two good things are not much to set up again the weight of sad, frightening, stressful, worrying moments we have been going through over the past few months, and I am not Pollyanna-ish enough to claim that they are. But they are reminders, I suppose, that life comes in a variety of colours and flavours, and if you concentrate too hard on the bad, sad, mad things, you may just miss out in the moments of transcendental serendipity.

Using Q-R

So, for one of my course I have to promote a social enterprise. I am much better at thinking of non-profits, but I've come up with something that I think will work, at least in theory which is all I need at the moment, at least.

I made up this Q-R, but I can't read it myself: I don't have a Q-R reader! Irony: I haz some!

Dark Knit of the Soul

I am writing two assignments at once. Being ADD has never been a problem for me. I am listening to my kids fight - it was very quiet in the house five minutes ago, but now it is very noisy. Being ADD has never been a problem for me.

One assignment is essentially finished, and is comparatively short (500 words). That is a huge problem for me. It takes me more words to introduce myself. I like to write lots of words but I do not like to cut them. So I write several hundred words over the limit, then I cry and snivel and simplify my lovely complicated sentence structures to lose words one by painful one.

The other assignment is 1500 words. I like that length - it is possible for me to stretch my arms in that space and say things the way I want to say them. I like to let a sentence meander and expand and get to know itself. However, the assignment is a case study, which is neither interesting nor difficult enough to capture my competitive nature. Because it is business writing, the assignment needs to be focused, compactly written, well defined, and obsessively organized and referenced.

Oh dear.

So I am writing this blog to propose my NEW blog: Dark Knit of the Soul. A knitting blog. Where people can post their weird knitting projects that make no sense and couldn't possibly be worn by normal people. Weirdly, no one else has used this blog name (well, it surprises me!), so I will be in on the ground floor at least.

Of course, there are lots of great sites where people post their oddly formed projects.

But the name is ALL MINE!

Okay, time to get back to my assignments.

ADD is sometimes a problem for me.

I guess.

Isn't it odd

that people I meet online, or in books, or in music, are sometimes more real to me than the people I say hello to every day?

I spend a lot of time online, I admit, and some pundits and many parents warn that millenials (a term for children entering college age during the 'new millenium') are becoming disassociative - separating themselves from the 'real world' and connecting only to people online, to people who may 'not be what they seem to be'.

I am the mother of four millenials and I spend as much or more time online as they do. And I am connected to people online, through Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, and GoogleReader, because we have some interest or hobby in common, like my writing group or choir discussion group, or because I admire their work, like Neil Gaiman and Stephen Fry, or have been introduced to their work by said admired people, like Zoe Keating. I follow the RSA in Britain, where smart people talk about things I know nothing about, and where other smart people talk about things I am passionate about, and I follow Smartbitchestrashybooks, where smart people (mostly women) talk about life and love and romance novels and sometimes about men's bodies. I laugh at Cakewrecks and squee at steampunk on Epbot, and sometimes I get an email from this totally obscure band that no one's really heard of, but I found out about them after one of their songs was played on this show I like...

At work, I pull staples out of papers.

Online, I am a writer who is followed by more than one hundred readers from all over the world, including at least one from the United Arab Emirates. At one point, I was publishing several times a week, and I heard from up to 20 people a day, asking why I had written that, or how was this going to end, or couldn't I just put the guys in cowboy hats, or why do I write like an American but spell like a British writer?

At work, I answer the phone and talk to people who need answers I don't have to questions they don't know how to ask.

Online, I get to participate in something bigger than myself - I can step out and join a million people standing for democracy in Egypt, or find a better way to prepare dandelion leaves so my children will eat them, or share a factoid with my cousin's 16 year-old daughter whom I have only met a few times but feel connected to when I see her drawings and she 'likes' my link.

At work, if I do it right, no one notices. And if I get it wrong, everyone does.

Online, I can be whatever I want. I can say whatever I want. I can write whatever I want.

Okay, I can do most of that IRL as well. I'm nearly 50 - I don't care what people think of me as much as I used to.

But online, I can reach out and ask a question and follow a trail and see where it goes. I can look up the strangest fact I can think of and find out something even weirder in a couple of clicks. I can find people and follow them and see what they are interested in. Do you know started following me on Twitter? Chris Garver. From Miami Ink. (I think he'll stop soon, because I'm boring.) But how cool is that? For a few days, I was connected with a tv star, who is also an amazing artist, not that I would ever let him touch me with his needle.

How, you might ask, did a big-time, bad-ass tattoo artist from Miami connect with an small-time, mother-of-four administrative assistant living in Vancouver?

Well, I could tell you. But that would be no fun. Tell you what. See if you can figure it out. Go on. It's all there. Just... follow the trail.

Stunned and overwhelmed

When I can no longer focus on what I am trying to do - for work, for school, for my family - I take refuge in the multi-layered world of the web, where it is easy to lose oneself for hours. Today I watched three RSA videos: on the evolution of leadership (for class - not that anyone else will pay attention), on the Future Mind (not hopeful), and on making mistakes (a topic I know all too well).

The I checked Facebook, and Twitter, and gmail, and all the other ways I connect - not so much with people as with ideas and trends and what is going on out there. And as always, I followed a Twitter link from Neil Gaiman and found the link to Christopher Salmon (who grew up in the BC Interior, which was unexpected) and then to Kickstarter...

I am fascinated by the fan-culture explored by Henry Jenkins - he was interviewing a professor from Athabaska U (also in Canada) talking about fan culture, which led me to think about kiva.org and freethechildren and ways people seek to influence the wider world around them - knowing that everything they do is just a drop in the bucket and rather than taking that realization as a sign that they should give up, instead getting their friends to drop a little something into the bucket too until the bucket overflows. And a film is made or a novel published or a well is built... $10 at a time until the job is done.

And this fills me with such hope - such enormous energy - all the feelings that I thought I would find in the programme I am enrolled in. But it only fills me with a deadened sense of "do it the way we've always done it because otherwise people won't take us seriously."

And I say - who cares? Who cares if people take you seriously? Do what you want, break the mould, try something new, make mistakes and learn and grow, make a mess and clean it up and learn something from the doing of it...

I am angry half the time and frustrated all the time, and then I go to my magic mirror on the world and I see people doing so much with so little and I think, "Wait. Why am I taking this course? In this programme? Banging my head against this brick wall with people who really just want me to do things their way (and when I refuse, punish and humiliate me). Do I need this degree? Do I need to be accepted by these peers? Is this important?"

And I have to reluctantly admit: it is. It is important to me to complete - if not this degree then A degree. To be accepted in this world. To have my work acknowledged and accepted. I am too old (and I mean that literally) to throw off the idea that my worth is somehow bound up with what other people think of me.

But I hope my kids will have better ways of dealing with the world.

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New Year - every fall

It's been a while - but time to find a place to drop some thoughts and let the words flow again.

I am back at school - not teaching but learning. Not learning but studying. Not studying but reading. Not reading but thinking. Not thinking but worrying. Not worrying but procrastinating.

I wanted so much from this course. Too much - I know that. Always want too much. But I feel that I am getting nothing - not even the minimum. Then I feel ungrateful and bitchy. Not wrong, just unkind.

I am interested in the concept of community and community-building. Which is the programme's focus. But it is limited in its view to face-to-face economic or social justice communities. It is tied to paper and text. Nothing wrong with that - it has sufficed for 1000 years and more. But what about the virtual communities that exist, that flourish, that succeed, and achieve, where people never meet f2f, never know the tone of each's voices or the colour of each other's skin? What about the words that fly, float, spin on screen and never fall dead on paper? What about hyper-text and inter-net and webbing-4-good?

I want more - and less. I want to write-my-own-adventure because I hate to be led, to be told, to be judged. I want less prescript and more flex - I want to write a film-script, movie-score, poem-rant with cast-of-1000s.

I want to do it myself. And not be corrected.