How is it May again?

Posted on 13 May 2012 at 7:45 pm by Stephanie

Hello there! I’m finally home again and, despite the fact that it is eighty degrees in my apartment, I have the urge to knit. It has been a long while since I last really wanted to knit rather than felt like it was a chore, so I’m really enjoying it. I think it has to do with the fact that I’ve had a lot of wrist pain associated with knitting in the past year. I’m trying not to get to that point. I’ve spent quite a lot of time this weekend knitting, but I haven’t had any wrist pain yet. I’ve been taking breaks! Look at me, learning!

I’m almost done with the last sleeve of my aunt’s sweater. It’s finally getting there. Next weekend I bet I can do a lot of the finishing stages. I haven’t knitted anything for myself in about a year. Nor have I knitted any socks, and I’m feeling the loss. Still, I have three or four projects I have to do for other people in the near future yet. I’m a little frustrated with it, to be honest. I didn’t realize how little I would be knitting this year, and I forgot how much knitting socks calms my mind. I really should start another sock project soon, to curb a bit of my anxiety lately.

I’ve been out of town a lot the past three weeks. After my last post, I visited my family to celebrate my younger brother’s coming of age. I can’t believe he’s growing up. We had a great ceremony, rich with family history. Then I was home for six days and went to a conference afterward. I can’t wait to type up my thoughts about the conference. It was good in many ways and bad in some ways. In any case, it was a good experience.

Lots of health issues lately, too. I keep pretending to everyone that I’m a well, normal person, but it’s just not true. I am not well and healthy and I take too much on and I forget that I need to rest. I figure if I can’t get a job, at least I can try and change the world, and then I get too involved and forget that I matter, too. Hopefully I can learn from that.

So, that’s me lately. How’re you doing?

Posted in Musings | 2 Comments

So close

Posted on 25 April 2012 at 5:22 pm by Stephanie

My sort of self-imposed deadline of THIS WEEKEND is going to fly by. I see I’ll be doing some mailing at the end of May when I’ve FINALLY finished all the knitting projects I’ve had on the needles for the last six months. Or longer. I’m really ready to be knitting something else…

wip-sweaterpieces

And I’m so close, too! Just off by a sleeve and all the finishing I’ll have to do.

In the meantime, I’m on vacation! Woo!

Posted in In Progress | Tagged | 1 Comment

A Lost Generation

Posted on 21 April 2012 at 6:30 pm by Stephanie

People have talked about this before, in newspapers and on the internet. We’re disconnected and don’t talk to each other and we rush about and we are out of time all the time. I am a part of this generation. All I really know about is trying to fend for myself without a whole lot of support. When I was in high school, I took care of myself, got a 4.0 GPA the whole time, and made dinners and drove my brother and myself to the places we needed to be. I was the second mom in my family. I did not make lasting friendships and I did not have a mentor and I did not feel supported by any one outside of my immediate family.

To the future and college age, I did not make friends easily. I was too used to taking care of myself. I rarely asked for help from professors and counselors. I thought I was on my own for everything, and I assumed everything would be up to me. Saving the world. Stopping genocide. Maintaining a 4.0. I had to be on top of all of that and I had to do it all myself, and no one reached out to me to say, “Hey. It’s really okay. We’re in this together.”

I hit a pretty low period at the beginning of my junior year of school and near the end of that year I fell apart. Since then I’ve been putting together the pieces that are truly me, and trying to discard what isn’t. It’s been difficult, so difficult. I’m at the point where I’m happy with my friends and generally content most of the time (which I couldn’t have said much in my life before 2010), and I feel like I’m always discovering something that needs to be tweaked to work better in my life. Right now it’s community.

I grew up in the digital world; my community ties are almost all online. The people who have known me the longest are friends in far-off places that I’ve only communicated with via text. They supported me, but they were also lonely and far away. They were all young people without a sense of community in their geographic location.

Becky and I were talking the other day, as we do very often, and mentioned how we wish we had had a mentor growing up. And still wish we had a mentor. Growing up is difficult and lonely, and I never feel like I’m doing the right thing. I feel like I have all this responsibility and none of the words of wisdom. I don’t (and won’t) belong to a major religion, so those community ties are not available for me. So what is? Where do I get someone older and wiser to tell me things are okay? How do I work with people in all stages of life to be an example to me? And I an example to them?

Questions that I’ve been pondering.

Posted in Interconnectedness, Musings | 1 Comment

Fitting into the machine

Posted on 20 April 2012 at 6:30 pm by Stephanie

I’ve been thinking about mindfulness all day. I think it started because lately I’ve been going and going and my head just hasn’t stopped and I fear I’m going to die from the adrenaline rush of the past few weeks and future few weeks. So today I’ve been trying to disconnect a bit from the world, and it’s gone pretty well. I talked with a friend in a coffee shop and I feel a lot better about myself and how I’m doing. It’s a beautiful day out, so I also took a walk. My fast-paced life hasn’t given me a lot of time for ME, which I find hard to swallow. Everyone thinks that being unemployed is sitting around in your pajamas and playing video games. Even if I wanted to play video games, I doubt I’d have time for them. I spend too much time chatting to people over instant message, browsing message boards, keeping up with people who are important to me, job hunting, and volunteering.

Reading 10 Ways Meditation is Green, Frugal, Healthy and Sustainable a few days ago was frustrating. I have heard before that meditation is a really good practice. I’ve heard tons of good things about it. So reading a blog post that had to justify why someone was meditating was jarring, to say the least. And has me noticing even more the fact that our culture does not value time off to be yourself. Job hunting has me feeling like I’m a square peg trying to fit myself into a round hole; either the jargon of a job posting throws me off, or the bizarrely long listing of responsibilities and qualifications. I feel like I’m supposed to fit like a cog in a machine, and I don’t know how to.

So while I’m struggling between trying to fit into the machine and trying to figure out how to be human, it’s a lot easier to throw away being human because the work world and job hunting tells me the only thing is important is doing the things in the job description and making money for that. There is no “wellness” or “mental health” in the work world. It’s just work. You produce value. You have no worth without that. You are not a living, breathing human.

Which I am having a very hard time accepting.

Hi, Sunbeam Soapbox. I’ve been super busy.

Posted in Musings | 1 Comment

Follow Friday 16.3.12

Posted on 16 March 2012 at 3:21 pm by Stephanie

I am making up for the fact that I didn’t post these last week by posting three times this week, right?! Right.

Posted in Noteworthy, Revel | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Happy Pi Day!

Posted on 14 March 2012 at 5:05 pm by Stephanie

PiDay

Let’s be realistic, I just used this as an excuse to bake pie. (I made brownies on Monday too, so I’m kind of overflowing with sweets right now.)

Posted in Baking&Cooking | Tagged | 1 Comment

Telling My Story

Posted on 13 March 2012 at 1:41 pm by Stephanie

On Saturday I attended a volunteer workshop for being an effective grassroots leader. I’ve been volunteering with an environmental organization since last summer, and most of the time I feel out of my element. I haven’t done any environmental activism, really, despite thinking a bit about it over the past few years. (It’s been a couple of years since I last used the APLS! category. I don’t think it even applies anymore.)

The first session in the workshop was about telling your story: why you should and what elements are involved to have people understand that story and connect to it. The story to tell? Why we’re involved in this campaign. Why are we doing this work? And before last Saturday I didn’t have an answer to this question. There is a spiritual aspect of it to me; I consider Mother Earth a sacred place and home for every living being, but I am too shy and afraid to talk about that part of myself to a room full of strangers.

If that’s the case, what is the primordial, gut-wrenching, emotionally-impacted reason behind my drive to work on behalf of the environment?

Once I asked myself that question, I had my story.

When I was very young, before I became self-conscious and full of anxiety, I used to love to run. We lived in a town house in the middle of a forest of eucalyptus trees, and I and the neighbor boy would run around through the bushes and trees as if we owned the outdoors. We never understood when people told us not to walk on the dirt: wasn’t dirt meant to be walked on? When I went to school, my favorite part was playing tag at recess. I raced my friends around the field, delighting in the smell of grass and the wind in my hair. (I still love those things.)

I developed asthma pretty early, around the time that we started being graded in P.E. on whether or not we could run a mile in a set time. All my doctors said I had asthma, whether exercise-induced or not, and I have been on daily medications for it for at least ten years.

I could never run a mile in under 10 minutes.

I would chug along, the cold, dry air making my wind pipes freeze, and I would cry because I would suddenly start gasping and wheezing and everyone could see how slow I was. And I would fail that P.E. class because I could not run the mile in less than ten minutes.

I was humiliated and frustrated and I was too young to have the words to make the teachers understand that I could not do what they asked of me and that it was not my fault. For years I shied away from exercise, firmly believing that there was no way I could get my body to do what I asked of it, because it was imprinted in my brain so well that I could not be normal. I could not run a decent mile and therefore something was wrong with me, something outside of my control, that can’t be accommodated for.

I didn’t realize it until Saturday, but I work on environmental issues for the children like me. The children who grew up with asthma, who couldn’t control it, who are terrified that they are sputtering and gasping and there is no one patting them on the back and telling them that it will all be okay. The children whose air is so polluted and buildings are so full of toxic materials that they develop asthma. The children who will grow up into people like me, so fearful of their own bodies and having no clue that their body can be just as strong as anyone else’s as long as they understand how to take care of it.

It makes me angry that so many people can be having such a hard time breathing and we are not as a whole doing something about it. That I noticed a difference in my breathing once I moved next to a freeway. That we are struggling with our health and if we were truly taking care of the Earth we would be taking care of ourselves as well.

I am an environmental activist so that I can promote health.

Posted in Anecdotes | Tagged | 2 Comments

Follow Friday 2.3.12

Posted on 3 March 2012 at 6:42 pm by Stephanie

A day late is better than never, right?

Ask a Manager: Dealing with Domestic Abuse in the Workplace is really scary, but something everyone should think about just in case.

Online TMI: or why I am planning on deleting my Facebook account.

Am pretty tired today and have spent all of it pretty much staring at the screen doing nothing. Hope you’re all having a good weekend!

Posted in Noteworthy | Tagged , | Comments Off

On a roll

Posted on 27 February 2012 at 3:55 pm by Stephanie

My best knitting friend, mentioned in the last post, got me Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day for my birthday, which reawakened a dormant obsession with baking. On Saturday I made the master dough from the book and I’m thinking this evening would be a good time to make a loaf to go with some lentil soup. I’ll let you all know how that goes.

Anyway, I was talking about baking and pizza over the weekend, which I haven’t had in a long time on account of being gluten-free for two years. I have missed baking. It fuels something in me. So I looked up how to make pizza dough in my new favorite book How to Cook Everything and I decided to make a little cheese pizza to start off.

mini pizza

Things: Too much sauce. Very, very hot after coming out of the oven (How to Cook Everything puts the oven at 500˚ to 550˚F), and I was really hungry at that point and ate too fast. The dough could absolutely have been stretched out more and it wouldn’t have been a problem. It puffed up a lot in the oven. The good thing? The crust was sooooo good. It was very soft and chewy, how I like it. So now that that’s figured out, I can have pizza more often! I froze 3/4 of the dough, so next time I decide pizza is for dinner I just have to defrost 1/3 of it.

I am SO glad to be baking again. As my dad said over the phone, “Wait, you’re talking about bread, right? It’s been a long time since you’ve gone on about baking…” My name is Stephanie and I obsess about baking bread. Nice to meet you. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.

Posted in Baking&Cooking | Tagged | 3 Comments