I am getting ready for my third semester at Goddard which in itself sets my life flying as I prepare my family to tend to themselves for the week plus that I am away.  Also, as all of us students who manage the responsibilities of adulthood as well, I must consider how to plan my life around my studies.

 But also, there is always more. Usually it all hits after I get home. There were health crises of one sort or another, within a week or so of my returning home from residency at school.  This semester I have the “luxury” of knowing in advance I will be juggling my school load around contract work which will take me on road trips regularly. I also know I will be substitute teaching. This semester I know in advance there will be medical issues to address, hopefully not from a full crisis mode. This semester, I know I have a summer ahead with a teen and a not quite mature 20 year old child who will both need shuttling and cajoling. This semester my eyes are more open to the possibility of confusion than previously. And still I am likely to be surprised.

 I want to do better. This semester I start my senior study. This semester I have to meet requirements to continue to my final semester. This semester I will be working my ass off.

My first one, a year ago, had gone into much detail, reviewing the work I had done over the semester. This one was simple and it basically passed me. I was sad, too, because it basically gave me a “pass” too.   Granted it has been a crappy few months in my life.  Family illnesses, accidents and even a death. But I feel like I let myself down in the quality of work I did.  I know I learned plenty – about myself if not the subject matters at hand. Still, I know I dropped a ball or two. I am not sure that was acknowledged there. Should it have been?

 I like:

“Don’t ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.” (Chapter 18)

 How difficult it must be to accept the change intellectually, to accept that something prior was not right and then to implement the change in something you had been practicing over and over again.  It is a process of unlearning or relearning. 

 How does one become open to such changes, and how does one get others to hear and consider alternate possibilities?

 I spent a part of my semester reading on just these subjects. Of course the books were more, “big picture” than this one topic. But don’t we have to start somewhere?  And, it seems to me, changes in a routine like that are monumental and life altering, to those involved.

Judith

 On Sunday (February 14^th) I noted it was the Lunar New Year, celebrated my many Asian cultures, but I don’t know all the specifics.  It was also Valentine’s day and, important to a few members of this house, the racing of the Daytona 500.

 The Daytona 500 was the media of importance for me on that day. It is the first race in the Sprint Cup season every year. And this year it felt different and a little unusual.  Everyone seemed in great spirits. (Sportscasters, drivers, and fans I saw on the TV)  There was a new energy of conversation about Danica Patrick’s showing the day before in a Nationwide race. 

 Danica

It turns out, I hadn’t known this, that Danica is going to stay out of the Sprint Cup races for a little while as she gets her feet wet with Stock Cars in the Nationwide races. I like that. She gets to earn her way in. And she is going to keep racing Indy cars too. I am going to have to pay attention to hear what she has to say about the differences in the types of racing. I know others have done it, but somehow her involvement in both is more intriguing to me.

 Could the participation of a capable female driver in NASCAR encourage the rest of the participants to feel stronger and more capable? Or is it just a competition thing? Personally, I think it is something they should feel proud of. Especially if she really competes.

 The Daytona

Harry Connick Jr. sang the National Anthem and kept fairly understated so that the focus was on the song not just his voice.  I have mixed feelings about the National Anthem that I will go into some other time, but I recognize that it is a song due respect. I appreciate it being treated well.  And he did.

 During the race there was need to patch the track which should have taken a half hour at most but ended up delaying the race by more than an hour and a half. But somehow that didn’t ruin things or annoy too many people. I have to admit to channel surfing a bit, but I kept coming back.   And I started to learn the new rules about the, Green/white/checker, restart when there are cautions at the tail end of the race. This was addressed so that the race has a fair chance of ending as a real race, not as a default win, by who got out of the pits in what order and had to hold there place on the track until the end.  As it turned out, the drivers and the officials got to test out that new rule due to a couple of wrecks on the track at the very end. It made it a much more significant win for Jamie McMurray.  I was very impressed.

 It was good to see the race be a race not just gliding around the track for no reason.

 Judith

 I wonder if I am the only able bodied semi educated adult that feels like I do.

 Do you?

 I am 46. I dropped out of college when I was twenty because of a lack of direction. But I kept reading, writing, and being part of the world. I must have learned something, gained experience, generated some sort of common sense.  But I often feel inept.  I can certainly feel inept when my children are miserable from hormonal angst and there is absolutely nothing I can do. That I expected, I was warned.  But not this!  Going back to school to finish this bachelors’ I feel like I am a naïve child again. I feel like I am missing the basic stuff. I feel like I am failing constantly.

 I feel like I am a grown adult that can’t do the basic school work. It feels humiliating and I wonder if it is worth it.

 I completed a packet of work for the end of semester at school.   Each packet for Goddard represents approximately 3 weeks of reading, research and writing, averaging about 25 hours of study per week.

 It is time management and organization to start with.

Being temporarily unemployed, determining priorities is difficult.  And it is all for me, not for someone else, which makes it harder. Find a job, get school work done. Clean the house, do the laundry, read, write, LUNCH!

 I have a lot of trouble having patience with myself doing the actual work. Sitting down and staying on task. Getting through one thing before I am distracted by another and not wanting to forget what I had in mind.  Yes, I will make a note to come back to it, but by the time I get down to organizing the packet of writing I am feeling such pressure and confusion, that I have rarely been able to go back and review what is in those notes. I rely instead on my saying to myself, “hey don’t I have something about…” and I go looking in my notes for something specific instead of working through them. All the while I think I should be doing this more deliberately, more calmly.

 Then it is word flow and ego.

I love to write. I love the extension of my hands on a keyboard and the ability to just keep moving my thoughts into words. And sometimes I get so enamored with my choice of words I am more caught up in that than the content and meaning. I know, many writing teachers and experts and published authors will suggest that it is exactly those words you should simply toss away.

 Sometimes it is about being afraid that helpful read thrus by friends and experts, because of time constraints and again that ego thing.

Despite the fact that the end result will be critiqued in some fashion (an advisor?!)  In the end and I do care what people think. Still, it is hard to have someone else give my work a look over. They would then make reasonable, non- personal, grammatical corrections (that I should have caught) and comment that they don’t understand something.  Their comments might make me question myself further, and against a time restraint. This is something I am afraid of.

 The exercise in writing out this vent on myself, feels like I am my 13 year old daughter who does not want her mother’s opinion (mine) for fear I might make her fix something even though she has worked all afternoon on it and I don’t know what her teacher expects from her anyway, so please mom, don’t read it, just print it out and hand it back. (breathe) 

 Yeah, that is exactly what it sounds like. Damn Judith, grow up!

 But I am grown up.  I should know better. I know how to tell my daughter to do it. I can hear my dad’ mantra running through my head. “do as I say, not as I do.”

 And then there is the self confidence thing about true ability. Am I even capable?

 Another blog for another day.

Judith

p.s Taking a lesson from myself, I am taking my time with this entry. Original version was written a few days ago, put aside and come back to. I am revising and adjusting it.  Still, I won’t hand it off to someone to edit for me, hoping you can tolerate the mistakes grammar check and I do not catch.  But, then, this is for me and you I hope.  

 Please share your experiences with self confidence and growing up as an adult too!

 My daughter is in 8^th grade. She has been a “B” to “C” student most of her school years, just getting by because she didn’t want to not get by.  She rarely had teachers that motivated her, or gave her a reason to reach further.   But in her down time she is creative and sets goals for herself about writing stories and drawing pictures.

 I have known she was capable and shared with my kids my theory that a “C” is proof that you can get the work done but are not really working on it. A “B’s” and “A’s” signs that effort has been taken.

 My daughter has been inspired by creative arts and theatre arts the last couple of years. She went to a summer program that stresses leadership skills and used theatre arts as a way to build these skills. She loved it. She loved the feeling of being around the stage and clear parts of theatre organization.  Granted, the way this program was run, she might have been inspired by the CSI leadership program also, but she is part “ham” so performance did not hurt. 

 We have a Performing Arts high school in our district that is enrolled by application and grades only.  We went to the informational meeting about the school early in the school year and, despite suffering the tail end of a head cold, she was sold.  “I want to go here!” she chimed on the way through the parking lot to the car. Immediately she began paying attention to her school work. She voluntarily followed up with her teachers about missing assignments when out sick. She started speaking up when she had questions. And with the one class where she is struggling to work with her teacher, she is making it known and not giving up.  Her grades are showing the effort.  And she sees the relationship between this effort, and the results on tests and her confidence in her work.

 I wonder about the kids who are pushed and prodded and harassed into “A’s” from the day they start kindergarten.  I wonder about those whose parents teach that the “A” defines the person’s worth.  Do those kids learn relative differences between their emotions?  I am not saying “C’s” are a good thing.  I am not saying you should just get by.  But being able to have the perspective between what it takes to get a “C” and what it takes to get a “B” or an “A”, is a life lesson worth having. And knowing that you are capable of both is amazing. It is the ability to recognize ability in your self instead of expectation of others.  From my perspective the messages are clearly different, “You are able,” not, “to be worthy you have to be better.”

 The magnet schools make acceptance decisions strictly on grades and number of openings. With the performing arts school the grades will get her as far as the audition.  Then there is some need for ability or promise necessary.  They only take a two or three kids from each of the surrounding feeder schools. I think she has a fair shot at getting in and if she does, once in the door she has learned the lesson of caring about her work and being part of it.   This is a lesson, I am sad to say has taken a long time to filter into my soul the same way. But my daughter is inspiring. I am learning from her.

 I am looking at journal articles, Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, My Stroke of Insight and a book called How God Changes the Brain by Andrew Newberg, MD and Mark Robert Waldman.  I am realizing that as Bolte Taylor describes a state of consciousness she calls “thetaville” (taylor, 36) a kind of freedom, detachment that she compared and contrasted between just before you wake up and a nirvana state she experienced, and that called to her, during the stroke experience.  According to Waldman and Newberg, this “timelessness and spacelessness” experience comes from a decrease in activity in the Parietal lobe and that activity is decreased by some forms of Buddhist and Christian meditation. (Newberg, pg 51)  So, is it possible that meditation is not good for increasing the understanding of duality that is actually necessary to physically live in this world?

 (I am drifting in my thoughts here)

 I wonder if continuous speaking opportunities would not be beneficial to people suffering with dementia and people with learning disabilities.  As I believe it is written in several places, and I will have to find the documentation, the brain continually rewires itself and it seems to me if there is a continual change and necessity for it the brain to function doing things like this, and lethargia is not allowed to set in, then the brain will continue to find ways to move on.  – this of course is something to add to what I look into for the meditation and dementia part of my packet work. YES.

 Back to the meeting.

 I am a little frustrated that I am anxious to join and get started. but the newcomer routine seems to be difficult for them to get going on.  But I have been part of volunteer run service organizations before and I understand that we are all busy people who have to set our priorities on a day-to-day basis and sometimes the volunteer work gets a short shrift. (What does “short shrift” mean anyway?  Note to self: look it up.) The art of “Welcoming” is a huge thing for me.  It is what makes or breaks that first impression so often.  Not everyone will see the bigger picture and give you a second chance. In this case, the group is important to me.  I giving it a second chance because I think it is important.  Hopefully it will work itself out this week.