Ten Minute Missive

I have a “To-Do List” just like everybody else driven to create such a beast. I know there are folks who don’t use them and there was a time when I didn’t either. But I have one now. It typically lives inside my head where it screams obscenities and insults at me. And wouldn’t you know the nasty beast has a good vocabulary too?

Back in the days of my Life Without a To-Do List (it largely coincides with the Life Before Kids) I was rather dismissive of the folks with To-Do Lists. Why use a piece of paper when you could just remember everything you need to do? But now, I am totally not dismissive of anyone using a To-Do List–primarily because I am so dang submissive to my own.

My To-Do List rules my life.

And yet, before a few minutes ago, you wouldn’t have found one anywhere in my house. Not on my laptop, my smartphone, anywhere. Because my To-Do List is in my head, yelling obscenities at me, remember? In hopes of saving my sanity, I decided to get the hateful thing out of my head and onto a piece of paper where I could give it the side-eye and yell back at it.

I actually typed up a little prototype to try for the next week. I designed it based on something the agent, Kate McKean posted this morning out on Twitter: GTD breakthrough, you guys: My To-Do list is two facing pages, 1: short tasks, 2: long tasks. I pick according to the time I have. Works!” I changed my column titles to “Tasks” and “Fast Tasks” after Littlest and I giggled about describing different things I need to do during my day. He giggled because the words sounded funny together. I giggled because the alternative was to get depressed. But now I smile when I read “Fast Tasks”, which I think is a mighty fine unplanned by-product.

I did this To-Do List making thing after a bit of my own Eureka! moment. Obviously, first I read Ms. McKean’s tweet. And then I thought about my life back when I was a cubicle worker and Eureka-ed again.

Life is better in the cubicle.

There, I said it. And now let the flaming begin. I’ll get another cup of coffee and then explain myself.

A bit of background or explanation or justification… My husband works in the corporate world and has a stressful but rewarding job we are uber thankful for. Most days he comes home, unclips his ID card from his shirt, puts it and his keys in the basket and gets the hug/kiss/DADDY’S HOME!!!!/sniff from the dog/Hi hon, how are you? routine. He is home. His workday is done. That part of his identity is complete for another “x” hours.

Mister Soandso may not always be happy or content with his life, but he has his routine – get up, work-out, go to work, come home for dinner, time with his kids, surf Reddit, hang out until bedtime and then get up and do it all over again. The weekends differ but also have a routine of their own, primarily revolving around the kiddos. In between there are lunches with co-workers, drinks with the guys, reading Game of Thrones, that kind of stuff. You know, life. But it is a life with demarcations.

I have a life with few demarcations not related to school schedules.

And there are no cubicles in my world. I am primarily a stay-at-home-mom; I have a part-time job that I do mostly from home. So my cubicle is the same place where the other stuff in my life happens. There are no lines, only piles of dirty laundry and dust-bunnies dancing under the couches.

I left the cubicle for the classroom and then the classroom for home. And I haven’t felt “successful” since then. That was in 2004 and let me tell you, eight years is a long time to feel like a loser because the To-Do List in your head looks exactly the same at 11:30 pm as it did at 6:30 am.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the cubicle world when I was doing that gig. Dilbert aptly describes many of its nuisances.

But my three years of cubicle existence meant there were three years of punching my time-card at the prescribed times. I knew when lunch and break times were to occur and that I would get them. I knew that when I pushed my chair back under my desk every night, I didn’t need to think about my job again until I pulled my chair out the next morning. The time I spent away from that cubicle was mine.

Even when I was a teacher and I carted stacks and stacks of student’s work home and back again, there was my “work self” and my “me self”. If I didn’t want to be Mrs. Martin, the high school English teacher, I shopped 20 miles away from my home. I could separate those parts of myself and while the teaching part bled into my home life, you can bet I never thought once about if the tub needed scrubbing while teaching ninth graders compound subjects.

But now, my world is a blended thing resembling something that Van Gogh and Dali might have created if they had collaborated after a night of hard drinking. There are no crisp lines neatly bisecting the whole into tidy pieces. Instead the lines start off strong but then meander off and then stop all together part way through things, only to take up again and head into a different direction. There are bits and pieces where they don’t belong. The colors are flamboyant and would be lovely in more moderate consumption or at least in a more orderly fashion. My world is a world rendered by other’s hands. And while most of it is exactly what I want it to be in theory, the delivery isn’t quite how I planned back when I decided to live life this way. It turns out that a pay-check provides more than income. It and its work place create space for the other parts of one’s identity to flourish in ways that the kitchen table cannot.

I want to go to bed at night feeling more accomplished.

And not simply in a theoretical way. I want to be able to check things off, to be able to go to bed feeling like a success. I want to find the way to combine the mom parts with the director parts and the writer parts and still have a few hours left over to sleep. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is to write it down and check it off.

So my thought is to try this: for a week, try to use a “real” To-Do List and see if crossing off the little things helps me focus on getting some of the big ones crossed off too. If I’ve already checked off the laundry, letting it sit while I work on another task. And ultimately, can I go to bed at night feeling like I really got something done? Or will I go to bed still feeling overwhelmed and underachieved?

I doubt Dilbert would appreciate my need to create a To-Do List nor my thinking his day in a cubicle is all that grand. But then, Dilbert can push in his chair and go home tonight thinking to himself, “well, at least I got all those paper clips unchained and back in my drawer.” When I’m doing that, I’m still trying to remember if I got Oldest’s track uniform washed and did I get tater tots or French fries and what was I thinking I would do with the pork chops, grilled maybe?, and what is the best way to get permanent marker out of Littlest’s karate go anyway?

I am hoping that a To-Do List breaking tasks into the stuff I know will take focussed attention versus the stuff I can do while supervising piano lessons will help me be able to push my chair back under my kitchen table tonight and feel like I may not have got it all done, but I did enough to get up and do it all again tomorrow.

Hopefully smiling.

This beauty just opened yesterday. So lovely!

It’s that time of year here in the northwest when the flowers and trees are going crazy at a pace matched only by the allergy sufferer’s running eyes and noses. All the stores have their spring flowers out and the remaining hanging baskets from the Mother’s Day bonanza fill the shops. It is a torrent of color and wonderful smells. It pleases me. This time of year always fills me with hopefulness and that great possibility of the what if.

Yes, I love gardening.

Or, to be more honest, I love creating a garden.

There is something calming to my way of thinking when you take a piece of land in wild disarray and turn it into something of beauty. Perhaps you’ve tilled it into a vegetable garden, or sown wildflowers via seed bombs. Or perhaps you’ve weeded a flower bed of the plants choking out the flowers. No matter what, you have created something you find beautiful.

When I bought my first house, I spent many hours one summer turning the square lawn into a space with gently curving flower beds filled with perennials planted with height, color, and bloom times all taken into account and mapped out. (Jenny, if you are reading this, sorry I ignored you while I was toiling away in my garden beds. I suck.) It was hard work under that Minnesotan sun to turn a thirty-year old lawn into sculpted flower beds, but the potential for color and texture and scents was worth it.

Years laters we sold that house and I presented my accurate and to-scale maps of the front and back yards to the new owner who’s eyes glazed over. Finally I stopped yammering on about how the lilies would bloom at the precise time to best complement the bush in the opposite corner and simply asked her to water them.

Thousands of hours of labor and dollars in bulbs and plants, left in the hands of the uninitiated and uninterested.

Now I’m in my third home and I’m back to standing, hand on shovel and pondering xeriscapes. But now my interests lie more in the direction of creating order. Lasting order.

Because now as much as I still want color and texture and scents, and butterflies and hummingbirds, I don’t have the luxury of the time it takes to maintain that kind of garden. So all the bulbs I carefully moved from one area of my yard to another and which grow badly in their new spot…all getting ripped out and given away. In their place, hard to kill and requiring very little attention hostas.

I was collecting newspapers in preparation for this huge project and got thinking about my current love-hate relationship with gardening. As much as I love the act of gardening, the act of creating beauty, I hate maintaining that beautiful garden. My gardens, flower and vegetable alike, serve as reminders of my life: excitement and enthusiasm worn down by the daily drudgery of it all.

I simply cannot maintain things in a way I want. And by things, I mean not just the gardens around my house but the things within my house. In fact, I mean the things even in my own head.

There is so much potential for beauty and bounty within me, but it’s all in danger of being choked out by the weeds that exist within me as well.

So what’s this girl to do? Do I rip it all out and plant only hostas? Or do I embrace the weeds as hardy perennials and mourn the deaths of my more high-maintenance but beautiful plants? I’ve already stopped performing stand-up to focus on writing, but is writing any more hardy than comedy? Do I shrug my shoulders and put all those creative outlets aside until I’m no longer the parent to three young children? The garden in my mind needs a balance between bloom times!

For now, I’m hoping some hard work, back bent beneath the hot northwestern sun, will cultivate not just more tidy gardens but to-scale maps for a long term plan.

For I am a garden, inside and out, begging for tending. I am filled with hopefulness and the possibility of what if. I am a newly bloomed rose bud that will unfurl and then fade away but be breathtaking at least for a day.

Last week at this time I was at a much higher elevation, both geographically and intellectually. Not to go all whoo-whoo on you, but I’ve long believed that people and events come into our lives at precisely the right moments. Sometimes those intersections look way more like crap floating down the river of our lives than butterflies in our meadows, but those intersections between people, events, and places are usually more than they originally appear.

On my way back through one of the nation’s high places, I stopped for lunch in Frisco, Colorado. And while I was unable to find a fully gluten-free lunch, I did manage to find food, more coffee, and this little thing. I’ve decided it makes a fine talisman.

After all, who doesn’t need to be reminded to be fearless?

I rather like the combined effects of this bit of shiny. First off, it’s a puzzle piece. Secondly, one side is engraved with “I am” and the other with “Fearless”. When I spied it, it was like one of those hokey ray of sunshine Hallmark card moments. Like the proverbial powers that be were reminding me that if I want to figure out this puzzler of life, then I’d better find out what I’m made of and then figure out how to be a bit more fearless.

I’d like to think that the fact I was even there on a road I’d never before travelled was a nod to my ability to be a bit more fearless.

But the fact is I am not good at being fearless. Heck, some days I barely manage the “I am” aspect of the equation.

All those crap-moments that have floated down my stream over the years has created a fearful little ole me. And how crappy is that?

Do you remember when you turned fearful? Was it a person or an event or just a whole lotta crap coming down the river at you? For me, the answer is Yes.

And, of course, the ultimate answer is me.

Because in order to become fearless, I must remember that I am.

After two flights which made me mildly panicked, I arrived home. And I’m still buried in all the stuff I normally do everyday but which didn’t happen while I was gone. You know, like the two loads of laundry that have to happen everyday. That kind of stuff. The stuff that is only important when you realize there are no clean undies in your drawer or the hardwood floor becomes fuzzy.

And when the dust bunnies and laundry and dirty floors get to this point, I am totally overwhelmed. Instead of getting anything done, I just want to curl into a fetal-shaped ball and take a nap. A messy house makes me fear-full like whoa. But like most fear-filled  moments, there is only one thing to do…get through it. In this case, it’s setting a timer for 15 minute increments and working through the chaos until I get through it. One freaking dust bunny at a time, one 15 minute rotation at a time until I get the house clean enough to invite someone over so I don’t stew in my own sad-panda juices. (Yes, I am aware that this makes me seem a bit left of normal, but I also know I’m not alone in this.)

The best thing about my trip to a writer’s retreat was not just the camaraderie or the locale. It was being refueled with the ability to write. I think most of us writerly types get to a spot in our stories where the words might be there, but the way to align them is gone. Or perhaps the way is there, but we cannot see it due to the dust and life-debris obscuring our view. Being with other writers was like being handed a map through the chaos. It also reminded me that the way to fix this novel is the same as cleaning my house: set the timer, work like a mad woman, and move on. It may take more rotations than I want, but eventually I’ll get it cleaned up until it’s ready to be shared with others.

Amazing how a different pair of eyes can see what we so easily overlook.

So I’m back home, doing the dishes and the laundry, and the writing. My house and my novel are both heading in the right direction…tidy enough to be shared. The house cleaning and the words are never really done, because the living in them happens. Both are messy, requiring effort and time and the reminder to fearlessly share the results.

As I said on Friday, I was at the Hand Hotel in Fairplay, CO for the YA with Altitude writer’s retreat. Talk about a wonderful experience. Not only was our moderator Courtney Koschel fabulous, but she put together a really helpful retreat. Both Sarah Ockler and Heidi R. Kling shared a wealth of information with us. It’s hard to believe but I actually left feeling like I now have an idea of how to write my pitch and query.  And if you’ve ever had to write either of them,  you know just how shiver-worthy that is.

But I know you are really curious about the ghosts of Hand Hotel. I don’t put myself in the “disbeliever” category. Instead, I’m a fan of the “why not?” category. There are folks who think the hotel most definitely is haunted (UFONUT) and others who think such an idea is ludicrous. Me? I left thinking that most likely the hotel had more guests over the weekend than visible.

Now perhaps you think my belief in the Hand Hotel ghosts comes from my fantastic imagination. To some extent you’d be correct. After all, there were no wavering faces in my bathroom mirror aside from my own. But during one of our sessions the swinging doors seemed to open and close in response to what people were saying. Could it have been the wind? Sure. But is it possible that while a group of writers shared the meanings in their novels, unseen folks were inspired to respond? I’m going with yes even though it gives me a wee bit of the shivers.

Another shiver-worthy aspect of the retreat was the presence of a wonderful group of women (and three men!). Saturday night we donned our pjs or otherwise more comfy waistbands, chocolate and wine (for some of us) and we hung out before the fire trading tales and simply enjoying the company of once-strangers who are now more than that.

As a writer, I feel like I wear my heart not simply on my sleeve but in all my words. Sharing those words, the raw and unpolished, is fairly terrifying at times. To let someone read what I write and am unsure of is quite a bit like how it would be for me to climb the ladder to the high dive, hold my breath and then leap off the board. Since I can’t swim, it would be quite a leap of faith. To drag my bedraggled self out of the pool would take more strength for me than for some others. But to stand there shivering and be handed a towel and a smile…it would make it all worth it.

And that was what happened for me over and over during the course of the writer’s retreat. I took risks and other writers supported me.

This morning when my alarm dragged me back to the land of the wakeful, I was both exhausted and energized. My body meekly begged for a few more hours and my brain jumped up waving pom poms, ready to get to work on turning my novel into the novel it can be.

Mister Soandso asked me last night “so how much longer until you are done?” I laughed.

And I am still laughing. Because a writer is never done with their novels. We simply get them to a place where they make us shiver with anticipation instead of fear. Then we send them into the world where they can make others shiver.

A big thank you to Courtney, Sarah, Heidi, Jessi, Ingrid, Anne, Jenny, Amy, Stacie, and Xochilt. You “girls” are delightful. And totally shiver-worthy.

Today, instead of being focused on you and my normal world, I’m focused on me. Which is a fine thing, right?

I’m at the Hand Hotel in Fairplay, Colorado at the YA with Altitude Writer’s Retreat. The hotel is purported to be haunted and while I haven’t yet had any overtly corporeal experiences, let’s just say I’m open to it. Read more…