On Resolutions and Doing Something for Me.

Posted on January 4, 2013 by ariel

I’ve never really been a resolution kind of person. The few times I have made resolutions I have done them around Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which focuses on repentance and returning to following the commandments. But this year I found myself wanting to make resolutions. Maybe it’s because I’ve now been a mom for a full year, and have been at home with JB that whole time.

If I look back at last year, I started out with the pretty awesome goal of finishing grad school while caring for a newborn. And I did it, with a huge amount of support from friends and family. But just because I can accomplish and awesome goal, does not mean that I must, or even should set huge goals for myself all the time.

Being at home, without any sort of formal evaluation over the past year has made me think that now is a good time for some self evaluation. I don’t need to be like Lisa Simpson during the teachers strike (““Grade me…look at me…evaluate and rank me! Oh, I’m good, good, good and oh so smart! Grade me!”) and the fact is that I have a healthy, happy, thriving one year old, which is probably the best evaluation I could imagine. But I do think there are things I can and should do better.

I signed up for the Apartment Therapy January Home Cure, and find myself waking up each morning excited to get the daily email. I like the home cure because it doesn’t make me feel like I’m behind before I get started, and it seems geared towards working families (unlike some of the ongoing home organization like the FlyLady, who seems to expect that all of the people following her must be women who stay home all day).

I also signed up for a gym in late October. I gave myself a reasonable goal and reward that would motivate me to keep going: we’d planned a trip to Denver for mid- January, and if I could go to the gym twice a week until then, I would reward myself with a snowboarding trip. I didn’t kill myself, there was a week when I had strep… I didn’t make myself go that week. And when my family was in town for JB’s birthday, I didn’t go that week either. But other than that I made my goal. And by setting myself a reasonable goal and a reward I’ve also given myself a new habit. I actually enjoy going to the gym.

Baby blanket

In the past, Dan has identified my tendency to get distracted during projects. I’ll be cleaning the house for a dinner party and decide that I need to hang new curtain fixtures. I’ll be planning to plant my garden and decide to build raised garden beds. What I am realizing is that I need to set reasonable goals. I can’t go to the gym every day, and I can’t lose thirty pounds in a month. I can go to the gym twice a week and keep a general accounting of what I eat. I can make a list of all the things that I want to do or change around our house and then slowly knock them out, in order of priority. And I can do something scary. I found out this week that I was selected to be a part of the Studio 360 Listener Challenge. So I’ve been revisiting all of my bookmarked projects, identified so long ago, and looking for projects that can fill the holes in between. Because can I really jump from building a breakfast bar to a floor to ceiling built in bookshelf?

In a way, I’ve been working towards this for a few months – I see it most definitively with my knitting. I don’t start projects that I don’t plan to finish, and I work on a single project until I have finished it, no more multiple projects going at once, or starting something without a plan for how it will end. Perfectionism has been one of my lifelong demons. When I can’t do something perfectly I have a tendency to give up and move on to something else. But I’ve started embracing the idea of “good enough”, of being happy, instead of being perfect. Even when that has meant frogging an entire project and starting over, I finish the things I am starting.

While I’ve identified lots of projects, goals, and yes, resolutions for this coming year, I think the key that it all boils down to is a process of setting reasonable goals for myself.

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Following Directions?

Posted on December 22, 2012 by ariel

I have a circular saw in my basement that I’ve used twice. But I’ll get to that in a second.

I’ve never been good at following directions. Or rather, I never used to be good at following directions. I hated baking, got a D in chemistry, always wanted to wing it when it came to making things.

It was probably around the time that I was working at the fruit stand that I started to realize that when you follow directions, things are a lot easier. Recently I’ve noticed that my knitting has become a lot more fun, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I started following patterns. In fact, I bought a book, and am working my way through it in a way that has built up my skill. Not only can I follow the pattern, but I understand why the author/ pattern creator does things in the way that she does.

All of which is to say that I finally think that I follow directions well enough to start using my circular saw.

See, I’ve always wanted to MAKE things. I’m envious of John over at Young House Love, who breaks out his tools and builds a deck, or a console table. Or even some bookshelves for his kid. I want to make the things that my family uses.

That knitting book I got? It’s a book of knit toys. And let me tell you, it’s pretty damn awesome to see JB actually playing with something that I made from scratch.

There are little things I can make that I think are within reach. I’ve been thinking a lot about starting, and then I get intimidated, and I don’t start. Well, today, I was listening to Studio 360 while driving, and I heard that they are seeking people who are making a creative new years resolution. So, I’m going to send them my project. I want to make things for my family in 2013 (and hopefully for some time afterwards).

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Copyright your info?

Posted on November 26, 2012 by ariel

Over the past day or so I’ve seen a number of statuses pop up on Facebook regarding the poster’s desire to prevent Facebook from using their status updates, pictures, or information for its own purposes. And I simply have to laugh. It’s all there in black and white (or #000000 and #FFFFFF). Facebook’s terms of use and privacy policies, that no one ever actually bothers to read, which includes:


…you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

and

We use the information we receive about you in connection with the services and features we provide to you and other users like your friends, our partners, the advertisers that purchase ads on the site, and the developers that build the games, applications, and websites you use.

I wonder what it means about society that so many of my friends, a number of whom I generally would think are too smart for something like this, think that the information that they have published on the Internet is private. But maybe that’s because waaaaay back at the beginning of the blob-o-sphere (this would have been January of 2002 for the record) I learned an important lesson. If you put it on the Internet, it is public. And it can be printed out and read back to you in front of a judge and a courtroom where your ex-boyfriend can attempt to use it against you at the hearing at which you are attempting to get a restraining order against him.

Putting things on the Internet in the form of a blog often feels like sending things out into space… it’s so vast and big and there’s so much space that it’s difficult to think that anyone will ever find it. And Facebook is kind of the opposite, we populate Facebook with our friends and family so that it feels like they are the only people there. But the Internet is kind of like your car. You feel like no one is near you until you get in an accident, and you feel like no one can see you, except that you forget that your car is made of windows.

Facebook has privacy controls, I find it laughable that so many of my friends think that posting some malarky as a status message is a viable alternative to reading Facebook’s policies and then setting the privacy levels they deem appropriate. And then remember, when you entrust your privacy to Facebook, you are entrusting it to a private company with its own motivation.

As users, we don’t pay money to use Facebook, but don’t equate that with not paying. We are paying for Facebook with our data. Our click-throughs, our likes, the shape and depth of our network and social graph, and our influence over others. The World Economic Forum has determined that personal data is a commodity. Trying to tell Facebook that they can’t use your data via status message is like standing outside a bank with a sign that says the bank can’t make loans with the money you’ve deposited. It’s not going to do anything, and it makes you look like an idiot. If you don’t like what they’re doing with it, don’t give it to them.

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It’s all just fun and games

Posted on November 1, 2012 by ariel

Over the past couple of years I have rediscovered games. As in board games and card games, that you play with real actual people who are really actually in a room with you.

At the end of high school my friends and I would sit in a diner playing Lunch Money for hours, wantonly beating the imaginary crap out of one another. I took my cards to college, and played a few times waiting in line for various things, and then slowly my game fell to the wayside.

But those nights, in the diner, as my friends smoked and we all drank coffee, are some of my absolute fondest memories of high school.

I think that’s why I love watching Wil Wheaton’s TableTop so much. I love that he created a show all about the joy of playing games with friends. I love the banter, I love the explanation of the games. I have gotten much more serious about playing games since he started the show. I feel like TableTop accomplishes on a moderate budget what Comic Book Men is trying to accomplish with a much larger budget. I really hope they are able to make more seasons of TableTop.

An Amazon snafu (possibly hurricane related?) resulted in my receiving a duplicate order of two games today. After checking with Amazon that I was not obligated to return the duplicate products, I thought about the value of what I had received… The monetary value was not insignificant (especially since we’re on about 1.5 incomes at the moment). But I had purchased the games with a gift card, and considering the community and friendship that is fostered around game playing, it seemed pretty crass to try and profit off of something I hadn’t paid for in the first place. So I gave the games away to people who have been recent gaming companions.

I love that Dan and I have been playing more games. I love that I have been seeing more of our friends as we invite them over to play games together. And I love that Amazon’s processing mistake means I was able to share some new games with some good friends (with Amazon’s ok).

(These pictures are from our Hurricane Sandy game tournament. My thoughts and prayers go out to those in New York and New Jersey for whom the hurricane turned into a far more serious affair than it was for us. Please consider donating to Rebuilding Together or another highly rated Charity Navigator non-profit to help rebuild the devastated communities.)

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Distracted Parenting?

Posted on October 14, 2012 by ariel

This article has been getting a bit of attention over the past couple of days. The allure of devices has certainly affected my parenting style. When JB was tiny, we had a rule that we could not have devices if we were holding him and he was awake. I felt (continue to feel) that I don’t want my son’s earliest memories to involve his parents staring at a screen while playing with him (and would I really be playing with him at that juncture?). I tend to always have my phone with me, mostly because I love LOVE (like a bad habit) taking pictures of my son’s cute daily moments. And honestly, the camera on my iPhone produces pictures that are pretty much as good as anything my five year old DSLR can come up with. But the temptation is constant. Has that potential job responded to my application? Has someone commented on my blog? Has someone liked that picture I just posted?

Melissa of Stirrup Queens recently posted about going on an “Internet Diet” . One of the things that struck me most about her recap of that period was that it wasn’t sustainable. She compares it to the grapefruit diet, quick results, but not a way of life. I was also interested by the fact that Melissa has structured her Internet diets (she has done them in the past) around Jewish holidays. Over the past few months Dan and I had been trying to unplug on Shabbat. It started out as not using phones for anything other than phone purposes (i.e. phone calls and occasional text messages), no iPads and no computers. Then it became just no computers, and as of last week we were using computers again. Why is it so hard for the two of us to go 27 hours without Internet?

I’ve thought about it some… it’s not that we don’t have anything to say to one another, we do have interesting conversations (six times out of ten about something one of us saw on the Internet). We go on family walks through the neighborhood, and we sit together for meals. I think the issue is that Dan and I simply love the Internet. Our connection to one another was maintained for two years solely through the Internet. Our careers have both been focused around used of technology, which has become pretty much synonymous with connectedness. The Internet is full of so many wonderful things that it’s hard to turn away from it.

Over the past week I’ve been trying to do activities that require me to be fully present. Learning new knitting stitches, writing patterns, baking, taking JB to the park. I look forward to the day that JB can play games with us, since I’ve been on a real game kick recently (Dominion and Catan are two of my current favorites, but I’m looking forward to checking out Ticket to Ride soon). But even now, JB is hugely interactive. He knows how to roll and throw a ball to us, he loves to read books and turn the pages, he crawls around and gets into everything, requiring much more of my attention than ever before.

I think that likening the role of Internet in my life to needing a diet is apt… a fad diet, a fast, these may help me achieve immediate, short term results, but if I have a problem they are not going to help me long term. Like a diet, I don’t think I can decide one day that I need to make a drastic change and then make it and expect to be successful, Change needs to be gradual, and it needs to be balanced. I’m not going to cut potato chips and cola out of my life completely, but we don’t buy them on our grocery trips any more. I want to start scheduling my “online time” in an effort to grow into a lifestyle that is less about what’s happening with the rest of the world, and more about what’s happening in front of me.

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