Things I could do with myself instead of worrying about how I have no internet or cable

It's been a few days since poorness required me to take time off from my close and loving relationship with the internet on my computer, and it's hard. Me and the internet were made for each other, and it's still weeks before I can upgrade / properly replace my phone to one that almost works like a computer, and get back online more easily and naturally through my data plan. In the meantime, here's a pep-talk-list for myself--and for you, if you're in a similar situation:

1. Meditate on the ways the world likes to block my dependence on dumb things, and see if there's some deep and meaningful epiphany hiding in there.
2. Read the rest of those three books I've started and not finished this week, and then move on to other books.
3. Figure out how to bake a gluten free cake, because a situation like this sort of requires cake.
4. Sleep more.
5. Spend some time outside.*
6. Write more. Because, yeah, I need to anyway, and now there should be more time and less distraction, right?
7. Watch through the DVDs that I own but mostly ignore because we have Netflix and On Demand and Hulu and cable, most of the time.
8. Depend on phone-app-Tumblr to tell me everything I need to know about my shows, if we're still without, when everything starts coming back.
9. Cry some. And make myself cry by composing terrible fanfic to fill the void.
10. Focus on the garden until it's super-flourishing, because there's nothing else to distract me, and also because plants will start going on late-season sales soonish.

I don't like this at all. I joke, but it's only partially because of my love of TV; it's mostly about how I hate being so poor that I have to sacrifice basic parts of culture (basic cable) and the literal most basic needs of my online business (internet) just to keep feeding myself. Which, really, is another point in favor of #10; I can focus on building up a garden so impressive that I can cut a large chunk of the food bill, and maybe free up cash? Even if I can't right now, halfway through summer, I can tell myself I'm doing that and maybe feel better about being so damned poor, right?

NOTES:

*This one is a possibility, but not likely, as it's about a million degrees outside all day long, and full of biting insects, and also smotheringly humid.

Have a twitchy eye? Try tonic water!

A while ago, I had a twitchy eye. it's not that unusual to have an eye twitch for an hour or a day, but I was waking up with it, and it was staying on and off all day. And it lasted for a month. It feels weird anyway, but when it goes on that long, it starts feeling like there's something seriously wrong, and the worry basically makes it worse.

Now, I'm too poor to go to the doctor over a twitchy eye, and that's definitely not enough to go to the ER for, so I decided to look up home remedies. I'm a big fan of fixing for myself what a doctor would either brush off or give me a pill that would just cover it up without telling me what caused it to begin with.

I can't find the sources I found in my research, but it seems a twitchy eye can be caused by chronic stress, lack of sleep, or eye strain, and the cheapest way to fix it is a mild muscle relaxant. It just so happens that the quinine in tonic water IS a mild relaxant!

If you aren't used to it--like I'm still not!--it can taste pretty bad, and it usually was a lot of calories because of sugar you totally can't taste in it. But it goes really well with lemonade or limeade, and is actually pretty drinkable that way.

I drank one whole cocktail-sized bottle a day with lemonade, for there days, and the twitch wasn't come back in over two months!

Notes:
• Be sure it's tonic water and not seltzer, because it's the tonic that makes it medicinal.
• This would probably also work on other small-muscle problems, but I haven't had any to try it out.

I'm NOT churchy; I AM spiritual

This is just going to be my picture for when things are getting spiritual up in here.

I tend to outright avoid discussions of spirituality with people, because I live in the South and the only way you're allowed to be spiritual is that one specific way that involves a lot of fire and brimstone and blaming all your problems on everyone else. And there's too many contradictions in that for me.

I also tend to avoid discussions of which church I go to, because I don't go to one, and I'm super-tired--like actually, physically exhausted--with that horrified face people of the above persuasion get when they find out that you don't.

I have faith. I'm pretty consistent with it, and working on expressing it more consistently as I go. But it's not the kind that tells me that everyone not like me is going to hell, or the kind that is built on separating out the ones the leadership doesn't agree with--in fact, I'd generally group myself with those who are being separated out, what with my tendency to rather learn the actual proven history of events, and ask questions, and think my own thoughts.

We were raised Christian, but it was a Christianity that really only made an impact on me because we had Easter and Christmas. I was too busy learning about mythology, the local history and traditions of wherever we were living, and running wild in the woods. Church was somewhere we went when we were new to a place, not something we did every week without fail. People around us, generally, didn't much care, and it didn't occur to me that others might.

And when we moved back to the States and suddenly it mattered, and things were hard and we were supposed to turn to the church, and we started going every week? By then I was old enough to know that the particular churches we went to were terrible, and it made me physically ill. I couldn't handle being told that everything I knew was me was wrong and devil-spawned, that all my culturally-diverse friends, no matter how good they seemed, were all evil and going to hell, and that I'd go to hell if I didn't change everything about the way I thought about the world.

So I stopped going. And had several long, upset years dealing with all that.

And I came out the other side knowing what I believe, and knowing also that it's not anyone else's business unless I say it is.

Maybe it's just that we were in the South, where things are supposed to be simple and really they're tending more and more toward oppressive and narrowminded. Maybe it's just that we came back right at the time when every church seemed to want to be a big, rich TV church--and all the news about what those actual big, rich TV churches were about was everywhere. Maybe other churches are less horrible. But all I know is that I went to seven or eight different churches over a decade and all of them were flat-out wrong, or built on the idea of hating everything, or hurtful, or close-minded, and so I stopped trying.

I found my own ways to have faith, quieter, more personal, more accepting ways. Ways that no one told me to do, and no one told me I shouldn't do. And I don't regret it, because it's what matters to me, it's what gets me through the hard parts of life.

So that's how I am. I'm not churchy--and I'm pretty sure most of the people who are churchy, and not just holding their faith in a church, are missing some aspect of critical thought or interpersonal compassion. But I am spiritual. And that's how it is.

And now I want to hear about your story. How did you get to what you believe? Be nice, and we'll all talk about it.

Why I gave up on online dating despite wanting to date

I'm not that great at meeting people in person, and I'm much better at writing what I think and feel than saying it--which is why I have blogs instead of a YouTube channel, ya know? So a while ago (and by 'while' I mean 'several times over the last several years') I thought, "I should try online dating". My friend met her husband that way, and he's wonderful and they're happy and strange and perfect, so why couldn't I do it, too?

But, a while later, I gave up. I just can't do it anymore. And here's why.

The stress-factor is too high

It's hard for me to keep meeting new people, even if I'm only meeting them through a chat box. It's also hard for me to go looking for new people--it feels predatory in a really skeevy way, judging people and weighing pros and cons. And there's a constant, constant low-level fear that someone will turn out to be a killer or an abuser or a kidnapper, and it's very stressful, reading profile after profile, trying to see if someone sounds rapey. I'd much rather believe that most people are good, but that's not something I can afford to do when I'm looking specifically for love like that.

"Looking for love" is totally stupid

I've come to the conclusion that you can't force it. E and R worked because they would have worked anyway, not because they met online and went on a date. And I'm not E or R, and I can't expect a repeat performance of that. Plus, looking at people's profiles specifically to see if they'd make a good mate feels needy and hollow, and is not at all how I want to start a relationship.

Matchmaking is hit or miss

And, unfortunately, you never can tell whether it's a hit or a miss until you're in a room with them. And then mostly, it's miss. Someone reminds you too much of the specific tics and quirks of your brother. Someone else is too forward. Someone else is too broken. Someone else is totally not how his profile described him or his interests.

And then there's the whole thing about the "numbers game"; I tended to talk to one dude at a time, trying to make it work, but more than one guy I actually spoke to was talking to lots of girls, trying to make lots of them work, and that means lots of "sorry, I've found someone" messages--or no message at all, and just silence.  

Stupid names and illiteracy

Vast, disturbing quantities of functional illiteracy. I'm okay with not being as educated as I am--I'm over-educated, really--but a total lack of punctuation, capitalization, complete words, AND thoughtful sentences? Combine that with intentionally calling yourself by some macho, pushy, idiotic handle, and I'm just done.

False sense of relationship

There seems to be an idea that if you exchange a few messages, you're dating. Or, if you get along well in your messages, everything else is a foregone conclusion. Or, there's the idea that you know someone--and then you find out they're different in real life, no matter how great they seemed in writing, and then there's all this stuff they never mentioned--baggage, hangups, weird opinions, behavior strangeness, lack of effort. This isn't how relationships work, and I can't be the only one putting in an effort to be fully honest. It puts me at a disadvantage, and that's a power struggle that shouldn't even exist, but does.

Concentrated weirdness

I met some nice guys. But I met many, many, many more who were bizarre. Most of those, I never even acknowledged. Guys who couldn't write a sentence, but thought so highly of themselves that they were basically trolling my profile. Guys with really strange ideas of how girls and guys should behave toward each other. Guys with previously-formed opinions that were so wildly different from mine that they were just ick from the first line.

And then, also, lots and lots of middleaged men who already had kids and didn't want more, and who were carrying around so much baggage they were being crushed under it. Guys who were lonely to the point of desperation, and starting to sound borderline crazed. Guys who were less experienced than me, and it's obviously because they were so awkward around people that they were probably needing help of some sort--which I can't give them--and which they weren't admitting to or coping with. 

 And, you know, the kinks. Like, can't two people just maybe decide they'd like to have sex once in a while? And if that's the first thing you put on your profile, it's so not going to be with me.

Far too much cut-to-the-chase, in the bad way

Which brings us to this: the vast majority of these guys I didn't even answer were of the 'hey, I don't need your name, let's just meet somewhere' sort, and that is so gross that I don't even. What life produces a guy who thinks just any old stranger will agree that that sort of thing is a good idea? Not one I want to deal with.

The wrong market

And ultimately, I think I was just a chunk of meat in the wrong market. First of all, I don't want to be a chunk of meat. Second, I can't afford to pay 35-40$ a month just to see if maybe someone might want to date me--I get that for free right where I am. And third, the guys I met were just not my sorts of guys, with only a few exceptions. They had totally different interests, hobbies, backgrounds, philosophies, life goals, education levels, opinions about everything, that no matter how great the algorithm said we'd be, not one matched up that way did a single thing for me.

 And it was exhausting. So I called it quits. I'd rather be alone than be a piece of bait in a tank full of predatory and mostly gross guys. I'd rather hope that I meet someone at the bookstore or at a con or in a coffee shop, than go specifically looking for him on one of those sites. I'd rather never meet the person I want than slog through more and more and more people who make me question the sanity of the culture we live in.

But I did learn from it all.

• I learned what I most definitely do NOT want in a match.
• I learned what I DO want, through how much donotwant I got from those guys.
• I learned what I will and won't make allowances for.
• And I learned that matchmaking is totally not my thing.

Your mileage may vary. In fact, I hope it does, because that means I was just doing it wrong or looking at things wrong. Do you have better stories? Tell me! And if you have worse ones, tell those, too, and we can commiserate.

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.

The Fourth of July taught me a lesson about being GF

I've been doing pretty good, GF-wise. Only cheating when there's nothing GF in the house--we've all been sick on and off the last month, and sometimes just no one is up for going out. Tracking what I'm eating and thinking about it before I eat it. Reading labels.

But the Fourth means lots of pie and hot dogs and hamburgers and biscuits with butter. I generally don't worry about staying GF on holidays--I want to be free to eat the traditional foods we always eat, without demanding alternatives that aren't right, or depriving myself of the food I miss the rest of the time.

So I stuck to the diet all week so that I could cheat when it came to the family cookout.

But I cheated too much.

Not only did I eat the pie and hot dogs on buns and biscuits, but I also ate seconds and thirds and stuffed myself with all the food I don't eat anymore, and it was wonderful. And then it very much wasn't.

An hour or so after we got home, I started feeling like a drumhead, pulled tight. And then halfway through the night, I woke up hurting. My stomach hurt, and I was queasy, but I never felt so queasy that I could just throw up and make it better. My back and sides hurt. My lower stomach hurt. My shoulders and my legs were so tight and achy that I couldn't relax and get the pain in my insides to loosen up.

It was bad. For hours.

And I learned a valuable lesson: just because I can do what I used to do, doesn't mean I should. Through my whole life, I would just eat until I was too full on these picnic-type holidays, and I never worried about it--but now, after rearranging my diet and working to be healthier, I can no longer tolerate that much food at all, let alone that much of specifically what I'm avoiding.

So I won't be doing that again. It's four days later and I'm still feeling it.

No thanks.

No way.

How to schedule when you hate scheduling

Confessions:

• I love office supplies
• I love datebook supplies
• I hate scheduling
• Without a schedule I flounder

This is a tangle of love and hate that I have to deal with ALL THE TIME. When I was in school, scheduling was a must--I had to make sure I had enough time to get everything done on time, as well as whatever I had to do in my life. In Highschool and in College, I had those planner books that come with being a student, and that made things easier; in Gradschool, I not only didn't have one of those books, I also didn't have physical classes, and for a large chunk of it, I didn't have a job, so there was no external way to force a schedule, and I had to learn to schedule myself.

What I learned was that I hated it.

I don't like imposing deadlines on myself. I don't like the feeling that if something goes long, or if I can't sleep at night and oversleep in the morning because of it*, I've messed up the whole plan. I don't like the idea that things can only happen on one day at one specific time. I don't like the constant failure-feeling standard sorts of scheduling was giving me.

But I also learned that I love little pages that tell me what needs doing, I love lists, I love looking back through my notebook and seeing what I did do. From a lifetime of dealing with myself, I've learned that I need a framework to hang my days on, but if there's more than that I start feeling trapped, and then I start feeling like I'm failing, but to stay creative I need to feel like I'm succeeding, and like I have the flexibility to go with new ideas when they come.

So I adapted the old school-style scheduling, and I allow myself to look at it each week and see what does and doesn't work for the week coming up, and to change it totally if my needs change.

Here's how:

Sunday is weekly-schedule day. My week starts on Monday, because I like to keep a weekend together on a schedule, not split it up, so the day before, I do the schedule.

• I look at what needs doing, and any non-negotioable deadlines I have--usually due-dates for bills, or appointments, or my babysitting schedule.
• I look to see if it's a pay week, and when money is meant to clear from Etsy or wherever.
• I set up the things that are the same every week.
• I look at the wall calendar and the future-dates list I keep to see if any of those things are happening in the week I'm looking at.

And I write all that stuff down--even the routine things, because I WILL forget to write my four pages, forget laundry, forget to do the week's blog posts. I'm super-easily distracted by things like whims, weather, allergies. If it's written down, it has to be done. These all go on a week-at-a-glance sheet. They're available all over the place, but right now I'm using one I found at the Target Dollar Spot last year, the red one in the pic above.

Then, I make a list. There'll be other lists during the week, but I make a master list at the beginning, while I'm thinking about scheduling, of all the things I'd like to do this week. Sometimes it's just in my notebook, since I'll be sticking the schedule in there anyway, but usually, lately, it's on this to-do list thing I also found in the Dollar Spot, the green one up there. This particular page is great because, for whatever reason, it's divided into three different list sections, and I use them for Blog Topics for the week, Shop stuff that needs doing, and writing stuff that needs doing. I'll also write down about three reminder-goals of how I want to be during the week--things like "wake up early", or "do tai chi before getting started", etc. Sometimes I'll write stuff I'm waiting on that's coming in this week--orders that should arrive that the shop is waiting on, books for review that I might get, a magazine that I'm expecting soon, stuff like that.

The important part is that this list is separate from the schedule, so that none of it is bound to any specific time or day and is therefore available to any day, whenever I have time. And that the weekly schedule is not planned down to the hour--only a list of things I need to do on that day, at some point, in whatever order I feel like doing them.

And some weeks, that's all I do. But I have options for more.

A lot of times, I'll take a pen of a different color, and I'll write down what I actually did do on each day on the schedule--especially if there's a lot going on that's memorable, holidays or visits or movie premiers and stuff.

If a particular day is really busy, I'll put one of those spiral-time chronodex pages in the notebook near the weekly schedule, because I like the shape, but I'll color them in as I go, rather than planning beforehand, so I don't have to change it. I'll also add a list of things that need doing, and check them off as I go, as I add them to the spiral.

A lot of weeks, I have a secondary, sort of aspirational list--the week's journal prompts, reminders to start a new writing project, the arts or crafts things I want to get to this week, stuff like that.

If a whole week is busy, instead of a week-at-a-glance, I'll use a two-page-per-week schedule so I have more room to make notes and add details. 

And sometimes I'll find some fantastic new idea that I just have to adapt and add, and that goes into the week's pages, too.

And that's how I schedule myself without limiting myself.

How do you schedule things?

NOTES:

* Which happens a lot, because literally almost anything can throw off my sleeping schedule, AND, my natural pattern tends towards staying up until four or six and sleeping all day, which is not the sort of timing that works with, like, any real-life business in the outside world.

On the self-guided life

A while ago, I realized that somewhere along the line, I'd lost track of my life. I was coasting, doing what other people thought I should do, letting other people make my decisions. It was easy--but it landed me where I didn't want to be, and left me in a position where I could be left behind, or I could overstay my welcome.

Neither was a good option, so I decided, then and there, that I needed to find Other Ways.

Since then, I've been working on getting my life back in my own hands, and I've been reading up--I didn't know, when this started, that there was a whole community of people who are trying to make their lives the way they want them to be, and that I could possibly be one of those wonderful, radiant people.

So I'm making the food I want to eat.
I'm cleaning up my body and my dependence on unhealthy products.
I'm looking for ways to get back on my own two feet and into the sort of situations I want to be in, and to minimize the ones I wind up in because I'm not paying attention.

It's hard. But it's also hard being passive, being pushed around by whatever someone else's life throws at me.

The learning curve is sharp, and sometimes I just want to slide right back down it and just be easy, but I was so unhappy and I didn't even realize how bad it was.

So every day, I have to choose to be self-guided, to listen to myself and to what I want to do, to be happy the way I'm happy, not how someone else is. I want to get married and have babies, but to do that, I have to be healthy and to know myself so I can be that open. I want to be a famous author, but to do that, I have to have a good writing habit and a working relationship with the muse that keeps generating ideas and flowing creativity. I want to be spiritual, but to do that I need to know what I believe in, now, today, not ages ago when I last worried about it.

And all of this is stuff that I'm in control of. No one else.

The Personal Cannon

A while ago, I found the idea of the Personal Cannon from David Cole, and bookmarked it for later...and then forgot about it. Last night, I was looking through my bookmarks when I couldn't sleep, found it again, and knew it was time to think about it and talk about it.

Cole defines the Personal Cannon this way:

These are the pieces that I find myself referencing regularly in my work life. Big, small, philosophical, practical, and between.

He has links to things in his cannon, and they're mostly work and life related; I'd expand it to include also the fictional things that define who you are and how you think about things. So I'm adding a new tab to the top bar: my personal cannon.

Here's why I think it's important:
It's like another layer of reminding me who I am. When I'm down and feeling lost, it can tell me exactly what my goals are, where I want to be, how I want to act, how I think about things--it can give me guide posts to get back on track.

It can help others to understand me, but listing exactly the things that matter most to who I am, how I want to be, what I want to know.

It's a standardized version of "Justify Your Existence". My friend Julie Beth Andrews says she keeps a folder that basically has all the info she needs whenever she's being made to defend something she does or loves or creates; this will be my version of that file!

And it'll be ongoing. It'll adapt and grow and divide itself into categories as I read and watch and learn and evolve, so it'll be a record of that.

What would be in your personal cannon?

Ten things little girls should hear before puberty

1. You are the boss of your body, so long as you're being smart about it.
2. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks of how you look, it matters what you think.
3. There will be hard times; they do pass. Let's figure out ways to help them do that.
4. School is pretty much a hole filled with pressure, anxiety and hormones, but you don't have to drown in that.
5. Just in case you have a problem you can't come to me about, here's a list of websites and helplines and contact info for people who might help.
6. Your opinions are valid, and no one has a right to say they aren't, but make sure you listen to new information because opinions can change.
7. Be nice to your friends, even if it's easy to be mean to them--especially if it's easy.
8. General culture isn't that smart; think for yourself.
9. Always ask questions, especially about stuff people don't want you asking questions about.
10. "Finding who you are" is an ongoing, lifelong process; don't lose yourself and give in to things you know aren't you in the process of trying to figure out what is you.