Sami's top ten rules for life

1. Be nice. Read as Wil Wheaton's "Don't be a dick". When faced with any situation where you can be nice or be a dick, pick nice.
1. Note that 'nice' does not mean 'be a pushover' or 'be a victim'; it means 'don't needlessly be hurtful or rude'.
2. Pay attention. Learn to know when people are tying to pull one over on you, but also learn when you should see the wonderfulness around you.
3. Ask questions and get answers. Don't take things at face value just because someone said them with a strong voice; ask why, ask when, ask 'how does that even start to make sense'. Learn how to find the answers, and teach others how to.
4. Do you. Aside from being a psychopath or something, you know what you want to do, so do it. Build the life you want. Live in accordance to your own beliefs. Don't be damaging to society, but also don't excuse the badness of society just because it's your culture.
5. Aim for healthy. For yourself, but also for the world, for your community, for your house and your kids and your pets and your garden. For conflict-resolution. For mental state.
6. Lessen your footprint. There's always a cleaner, kinder way to live. You don't have to turn eco-terrorist overnight, but think about these things--choose to be better. Pick farm-raised over battery-raised. Pick gas-saving over gas-guzzling. Pick walking over driving less than a mile. Pick up your trash. Recycle. Buy local.
7. Remember your lessons. Life is made of lessons, and if you aren't learning them--and the lessons your culture should have learned, you aren't doing your best to improve and avoid past mistakes, big and small.
8. Share. Knowledge, funds, food, stories, art, your talents, your gifts, your experience, this article you just read, this beautiful thing you just saw, this terrible news we can do something about. Share it all. Be open and ambitious with your sharing.
1. Don't ruin yourself, though; remember "Aim for healthy".
9. Build family. Not hate. Find the people you would have in your family if you got to choose, and keep those people around you.
10. Love. It's harder than hate, but it's so much better. Fight against the piles of bullshit that make people keep being mean and hurtful and scared and crazy, and replace them with love.

Lessons I'm struggling to learn

The universe laughs at the really important plans, but to survive rough times we have to make and use plans anyway.

It's hard to think about things outside the boundaries of the current crisis, but outside it is where the most creative solutions are.

Change is the only thing we can bank on--and banking is much better than fighting.

Life is a moving target.

There is always a way to take ownership, or control, or meaning from every situation. I'm done with being a passenger, a victim, or a blind reactionist.

I need to find ways to remember this. We all do.

What lessons are you learning?

I hate frustration, but sometimes...

Sometimes coming out the other end without having smashed your phone to bits against a hard rock is such a great feeling.

I went to my best friend's wedding, and somewhere on the first day I was there, I lost my phone. It wasn't insured because a) I couldn't afford any extra costs, and b) I've had phones for 11 years and never lost or broke one. I spent the rest of the trip feeling like I was missing some third arm I didn't really think about ever having until it was gone.

A few days after I got home, I got the announcement that someone had found my phone--Yay Find My Phone! I gave them my mom's number, and they were cagey about whether they'd get a reward, but they said they'd send it back, and we agreed to repay whatever it cost them to send it. I told said bestie that someone had found my phone, and he called my number and told them that he would be back in town in a few days and he could just pick it up for them, saving them any shipping costs at all.

And that's when that person, whoever he was, decided to be a jerk about it. He wanted $500 to turn over the phone.

I'm like, Dude, if I had $500 I could just get a new phone. For that, in fact, I could get the highest-capacity, newest version of the phone I lost. Do you think I'd have one three editions out-dated, with the lowest capacity HDD if I could just throw around half a thousand dollars like that?

And now my phone is dead, so I can't track it, and I don't know if he mailed it or not. But I also can't be without a phone while I wait to see, what with the caregiving of children who like to get into dangerous situations, and the modern world entirely lacking payphones and landlines, but not yet having any sort of Star Trek ubiquitous computing.

I went to the Sprint kiosk where my mom originally set up the plan we're all on, because they said she had an upgrade, and she wanted to talk to the person who called her. Nope, not an upgrade, one of those new things where they call it an upgrade, but really they're just not making you pay for the whole thing right now. Except, the downpayment was five times the tiny bit I had to spend, and we can't afford to add more to the cost of the already annoyingly expensive* plan. They sent me to the stand-alone store to see if they had temp phones I could get.

The stand-alone store did not sell temp, refurbished, or otherwise cheap phones. The guy there spent half and hour or forty-five minutes crunching numbers and trying every trick he knew, and could not find a way to get me a new phone without changing our whole four-person plan, and probably also making it more expensive.

So my brother says I can use his old phone, which he replaced because it doesn't hold a charge very well. I said, okay, because at least it's a phone, and it's not a flip-phone, so maybe I can use it for Etsy and Instagram and all the other non-phone stuff that is most of what I use my phone for.

So we called the number the guy at the second store gave us, and they said they don't do phone activation live anymore. A) dumb, what if we didn't have a computer? and B) maybe they should tell that to their dudes in the stores so they won't tell customers to call.

Can you feel the frustration mounting?

So I go online. I have to make an online account, because my mom has never had a computer and never set up an online account. I finally get in, and it won't load the list of lines to let me pick my own and get to the part where I actually activate the phone. Three times. Until I find a link somewhere else and go that way. Auto-activation doesn't work. Manual activation doesn't work, twice.

Finally, I get someone on the chat help-line. They give me new numbers to go through, and talked me out of throwing everything down a well and moving to the antarctic.

And it works.

And the frustration evaporates, leaving me feeling annoyed, but also a little silly, like I've been overreacting.

I'm still not pleased with how little the shop-guys could actually do, or now the system is set up, or how slow and useless the website is, but I'm so happy to just have a phone again, to not have to worry about it while I'm supposed to be a responsible adult, that, for now, I can let that go.

I can just be happy about the relief.

And that feels really good.



NOTES:
*I'm researching where I can get a much cheaper plan when my two years are up, because this family plan is stupid-expensive and goes against my ideals, my finances, and my willingness to hand over money for things I can get cheaper elsewhere.

The Baby says he doesn't need me...

"I don't need you! And you don't need me! I fine!"

Here's the weird place I am, emotionally right now. A while ago, The Baby said the above words to me, and I sort of got broadsided by this wave of Things:

• He really isn't a baby anymore, he's three and a half, his curls aren't so soft, he can put on his own shoes and brush his own teeth, he knows that I drink tea for breakfast and eat soup for lunch, and that the mac and cheese I eat is not the same as the mac and cheese he eats.
• He says "I not a teeny tiny baby, I a bigger little boy" when babies show up on commercials, but he says it while still wearing diapers and drinking from his ba-ba and holding onto my skirt while standing between my knees.
• He has the same need to roam all over the place that his mom and uncle and I all had, but he lives in a world that is not nearly so nice to little kids out wandering alone as the world we lived in at the time.
• He's not my kid, but he might be the closest I get to one if I don't find someone I feel like breeding with or adopting with in the next few years, and he's getting big.

And then, I thought:

• He probably really is fine. He knows he can't go in the road, and he isn't overly willing to do what strangers tell him to do, and maybe that bird really does need to be chased, and that hill really does need to be rolled down.

I've spent a lot of time lately trying to sort through the pile of emotions and wants and needs that I haven't really dealt with for the last three years because I've just been Going With The Flow in that totally passive way that means you eventually wash up somewhere where you didn't want to be and now you have to deal with it. It's less that I don't want to be here physically, though there are other cities that better fit my idea of a city and life therein, and more that I don't want to be here mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It's led to a lot of thoughts that end with me not watching the kids anymore, and that's not something I want to do--I like watching them, I like seeing how they're growing up, and, revelation here, if I don't get my own kids, they're the ones I get to do this for.

I worry a lot about being a good other-mother (and not a bad other-mother like Coraline had) for these beasties, and I worry about being selfish in a way that will harm them even if it helps me--because if I'm improving my life by ditching one of the few things I like about how it is currently, that's against some pretty core values I have, and it's not really an improvement. I worry also about being sucked into someone else's life and then being bereft YEARS from now, when I surface again and I haven't done anything to make what I have for myself better. And when they're messed up because of not being allowed to be themselves any more than I allowed myself to be myself.

So it hurt when he said he didn't need me. But he didn't stop there, and to me it sounded like the Universe telling me something I needed to hear-- he doesn't need me the way I think he does, but I don't need him the way I think I do, either, because it's all fine. We're adaptable. We know who we are. We know we can do things for ourselves and stand on our own two feet and keep moving forward. He knows he's not a baby, no matter that we all call him Baby, and I know I'm not his mom even if I worry like I am, and we're fine. Because that's the Truth. And there's freedom in the Truth, even when it hurts to hear it.

He has to keep growing up, and so do I.

This Week's Lesson From Life: Don't just trust things will turn out all right; make sure they do

I had plans to visit a friend, and I didn't do my usual round of checking on all the details and educating myself in how it works. And then I waitied too long to book transport and look at all this stuff, and now I can't go.

Lesson learned. Next time, I'll plan more carefully, make sure I know all the details, and book well in advance.

What lesson did you learn this week?

Life Lessons: When life messes with your computer harddrive, get a new computer.

Last night, I bit the bullet and just bought that new computer. Dell was having a sort-of deal--no speakers, keyboard or mouse, but you get a new tower and a 20'' monitor for 399$, so I spent some of my moving-my-stuff-up-here money and ordered it. It wasn't easy--four hundred dollars of money that's already spoken for is a lot of money--but last week I lost a lot of time to the poor old girl crapping out on me, and I just couldn't take it anymore. I actually made the decision earlier in the week, but it took me until Sunday, the last day in the way I count weeks, to get it done.

And you know what? I instantly felt better. Whatever this week throws at me, computer-wise, I have a shiny new one coming, and it has the right connection for me to hook it up as a double-monitor machine like I've always wanted. It's not the all-in-one shiny newness I was hoping for, it cost more money that I wanted to spend, but it's new and it shouldn't have all the problems I've just been living with because I didn't want to spend the money to fix them.

There's got to be a lesson in here somewhere. Don't delay the inevitable? I didn't put it off as far as I did when I bought this one, which was until the old one literally died and left me with no options at all. Suck it up and just act like an adult, even if you don't feel like one? I never quite feel like an adult, but I did feel a little more in control of my life and this shaky situation by just doing what needed to be done. 

I'm notorious (at least with myself) for not getting mundane stuff done until I have no choice but to do it. I have this deep and abiding feeling that I shouldn't have to do what I don't want to do. But I think that is exactly the definition of being adult--doing all the boring and annoying stuff you don't want to do, but that has to be done. What I'm starting to figure out, is that we all have the choice about how we frame all that stuff--and that the frame determines whether we avoid it or just suck it up and do it.

And, I mean, it's been seven years since I got this computer. It's served me well. I've saved it three times now. It's time to get a new workspace, since school AND what little job I have all depend on this.

What dumb thing have you been avoiding? Do you think you can just suck it up and do it after all?