Photo by Colin Rose

Some days are really good.

The kids wake up cheerful, I have time for a shower, the sun shines, my favorite table is available at the cafe, and the ideas just flow out of me faster than I could possibly process and write them down. Sometimes I even have several days like this in a row.

The last 48 hours have represented the other sort of days.

Everything is difficult and just plain wrong. I’m inefficient, spacey and pessimistic. My hair is suddenly full of static (why is this?), I inevitably chose to wear clothes that I don’t feel comfortable in, and apparently I’m walking around with a “Give Me A Hard Time About Inconsequential Things” sign on my forehead.

Oh, and the one thing I can count on about days like this? I won’t have a good idea to save my life.

So it kind of stinks that I was feeling an extra amount of pressure to come up with a great post yesterday, before leaving town for Thanksgiving in Michigan. The first 12 hours of the day were a total waste.

I came up with a few blog post ideas, but then flat-out rejected them. They were all clearly flawed.

Welcome to the Island of Misfit Ideas

I started wondering, though, about all of those poor ideas that I so routinely, harshly banish. Remember the reject toys in Rudolph? (OK, they were misfit toys, but because they were misfits they became rejects.) I started imagining a sad island with all of my misfit ideas, never given a chance.

What if there’s a nugget of truth or brilliance hiding in one of them, beneath the dull grime? Or maybe an idea is just a sketch, now, but in a year or two I’ll pull that sketch back out and base a masterpiece on it? What if?

Some of you might think this is just a lame gimmick for a person who felt like she had to write something and couldn’t think of anything good to say. It’s quite possible. I’m still skeptical myself.

But for those of you who think there’s potential for moments of beauty and brilliance in the common, mundane, and even homely, I give to you: My Rejects.

Exhibit A: Parenting is really hard work.

Rejected on the grounds that some moments are too depressing to share.

There’s not much more to say about this, except:
- My daughter and I recently spent a ridiculous amount of time debating outerwear requirements and what constitutes “a cold day.”
- We repeated the debate, almost verbatim, less than 48-hours later.
- I eventually realized, as I always do with this daughter, that our argument wasn’t really about [fill in the blank] at all.
- And now, once again, I’m feeling a profound sense of dread about my children becoming teenagers in the not-too-distant future.

Exhibit B: Sometimes some Christians almost get it right…

Rejected on the grounds that I might seem cranky and impossible to please.

People seem to like it when I put on my Christians Against Christians t-shirt. They also really respond when I write about sex, like I did a couple of times recently. So when my friend Suzanne pointed out this New York Times article to me, I thought it was post fodder made in heaven.

In my recent post Politics, religion & sex, one of the main points I make is that Christians need to talk more openly about sex. In the article I read today, “Pastors Advice for Better Marriage: More Sex,” Christians were talking a lot about sex. So I should be happy, right?

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First of all, this is not a post about knitting. Really. It’s a post about life. We all deal with life, right? So you should find something that will apply to you (unless you never have dreams or plans, or maybe you have them, but you never screw them up along the way). If you deal with life and you happen to knit, bonus.

I’m a seasonal knitter. Basically, I let the gardening season dictate my knitting season: if there’s gardening to be done, and the days are still long and mild, you will NOT find me knitting.

After the first frost, I put away my gardening gloves and unpack my knitting needles. My first project of the season is generally something small that I make for myself, before I start knitting holiday gifts. This year I ordered some new shades of my favorite baby alpaca yarn and decided to make myself a hat—a stripey, soft, warm hat.

As my “tweets” below (in bold) indicate, I had some problems along the way. In my attempts to not make myself crazy as I tried righting the wrongs, I became all philosophical about how knitting is like life.

Stage 1: Overly romantic plans, dreams & inspiration

Nov. 10: walked to cafe. brrrr. must finish knitting my hat. not that I don’t have a hat, but a new baby alpaca stripey one will make me very happy.

In this initial stage, you recognize a need: Something’s missing in your life. In my case, it was getting cold, and I envisioned the very thing to warm and cheer me: a new hat. I romanticized how I would sip tea and listen to Nick Drake, knitting my evenings away while Jason sat nearby reading snippets of the New Yorker aloud to me. I imagined how easy the project would be, and how satisfied I would feel (and how great I would look) when I wore it.

Stage 2: Something’s not quite right (but optimism lives on)

Nov. 15: finished making the stripey baby alpaca hat, but the decreases aren’t quite right. I properly adorned apple cake w cream ch frosting, tho.

Hmm…at this stage, you’ve met your goal with relative ease. It didn’t turn out quite like you envisioned, though. Not ready to face the problem, you set it aside and turn to some other task you know you can conquer. My finished hat looks really cute—until I put it on and see its goofy cone-head effect. Maybe I can fix that by getting it wet and blocking it…or maybe create a seam to help control the problem…. I think I’ll put the hat away and go frost my cake instead.

Stage 3: Disappointment, denial & avoidance

Nov. 16: wrote a blog post to avoid sitting on the couch, near knitting (ie: the hat I finished that doesn’t look quite right & needs to be fixed).

You know, deep down, that there aren’t any quick fixes. The problem needs to be dealt with properly, but you’re not quite sure what that means. Plus you’re still feeling bruised and emotional about the whole experience, and you know you would start crying if you faced it. Distraction is the perfect antidote, so I avoid the living room where my knitting bag sits, and instead spend the evening at the dining room table, busying myself with something I have more control over: writing a blog post.

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Photo by Chris Moewes

Soon after my first husband and I separated, in 2003, I bought the book How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen.

It’s kind of funny, when I think about it now. I had read enough of Franzen’s earlier work to know I wasn’t buying a practical, how-to guide that would actually give me strategies for being alone.

But I was definitely drawn to the title—to the very idea of being alone, and to the concept that you could learn to do it better.

Keep in mind, I’m an extrovert. Without a doubt, I am energized by being around other people, thinking out loud and sharing ideas. I had also, essentially, never lived alone in the 33 years before my first husband moved out. I knew I had a lot to learn about this being alone business.

One of the first things I learned was that “alone” and “lonely” are two different things. My greatest fear about divorce was a fear of loneliness, but I quickly discovered that being with someone in a distant marriage is much lonelier than being alone.

Being alone is actually defined as being “apart or isolated from others.” Clearly there are many different ways to be alone, and I’ve tried my hand at several of them. After getting a divorce and quitting my “real job” for freelancing, I even cultivated an affection for certain ways of being alone, which is something I didn’t think I’d ever embrace.

But there are definitely moments when “being alone” tips into the category of “lonely.” It just so happens that I had the opportunity to identify two such moments just this week.

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Photo by Jason Rogers

Walking a line is one of the hardest things in life to do. Johnny Cash wrote a song about it then proved just how difficult it was to actually accomplish (if the song is indeed about faithfulness to his first wife, as it seems).

There are a variety of lines we each try to walk at different moments. Like drinking just enough at the high school reunion to relax, but not so much that you make a fool of yourself. Or having lots of friends, but not so many that the friendships get diluted and cease to be meaningful. Then there’s the constant issue of staying up late enough to do all the things you want and need to do, but not so late that you are a completely useless wreck the next day.

It’s about balance. An ability to walk delicate lines might be one of the main badges of maturity (although this just occurred to me, and I haven’t really thought it through completely…).

Lines of ideology are even more difficult to walk than lifestyle lines. They’re more exciting and rewarding, though, too. The tension that comes from the push and pull, as we sway and veer and then regain our balance, is both exhilarating and excruciating.

I know, because I’m constantly trying to figure out how to do it with this blog. My old Halfway to Normal tagline was “Living a life in between.” I recently changed it to “Finding myself neither here nor there,” but the essence is still the same: I’m attempting to tread a fine line in the things I write about: between work and life, faith and culture, church and state, and big ideas and simple everyday musings.

It isn’t easy, but I hope that if I figure out how to do it well, I can also pull together a community of others who are neither here nor there—I know I must not be alone.

So…where’s the school for line-walkers?

Much of how we learn about such things, of course, is by trial and error. In my own experiments, I’m discovering that walking the line is much like crossing a log that’s fallen across a stream: sometimes it pays to be really careful and cautious about where you position each next step; other times you do better by just taking a deep breath and letting momentum and luck carry you across.

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Photo by Tom Purves

People blog for every reason under the sun and about every topic imaginable. Some bloggers believe firmly that “true blogs” consist of short daily posts in a specific format, while others blog in whatever way fits their style and subject matter.

But there is one thing I think all bloggers can agree on: their deep, abiding love for reader comments.

Sure, a big part of that love rises out of the insecurities that erupt as soon as we finish a new post and hit “publish.” We desire some affirmation that’s bigger than our fears, to overshadow them. We need to know that the many thoughts and ideas we’re regularly bundling up and sending out into the world aren’t just swirling around aimlessly in the abyss.

I can honestly say, though, that I love the opportunity for dialogue—the back and forth, the pushing and pulling and questioning—even more than I love the sweet affirmation.

The topics I like to write about can only be turned over in my own mind so many times, before they begin to lose meaning rather than gain it through the close examination. I talk to Jason, and to anyone in my “live community” who’s willing to engage, but I still crave more dialogue as a means to more understanding.

Dialogue vs. conversation

While many people think of “dialogue” as synonymous with “conversation,” the Austrian-Israeli-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber understood the two as very different. Dialogue, he said, is an effective means of on-going communication, while conversation involves a more direct attempt to reach some conclusion or to express particular viewpoints.

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Photo by gotplaid

The week that Threadless released this tee-shirt design (above), at least a half-dozen people I knew asked if I had seen it. I, in fact, had already seen and ordered it. (Good thing it wasn’t near my birthday, or I might have ended up with one for every day of the week.)

The shirt made everyone think of me because I wrote a haiku almost every day for more than two years. My habit began on August 24, 2004, and continued until October 25, 2006, to be exact. Knowing the dates makes it feel like those tiny poems comprised a living creature, a close companion that was born and later died.

But let’s not get overly sentimental about it. In many ways, haiku writing was simply part of my morning ritual: pour cereal, put Fritos and grapes in baggies, walk kids to school, shower, brush and floss teeth, write haiku, start dishwasher…you get the idea.

Part structure, part stretching, part emotion-dump

The best thing about haiku-writing was it gave me the structure I desperately needed as a freelancer. Other people get dressed in work-appropriate clothes, leave their homey homes and travel to an office, where their work day clearly begins (or at least is supposed to begin).

Working at home (and sometimes in my workout clothes, without brushing my teeth) makes the transition from life to work much fuzzier. I need structure, and mental and visual cues to keep me from wandering around the house and folding laundry all day. The structure of the tiny, ancient Japanese poem served me well. As soon as I sat down at my computer each morning to write my haiku, the beginning of my writing day was marked, as clearly as a pistol marks the start of a horse race.

The strict five-seven-five syllable format of the haiku creates the perfect confines for a good writing assignment. You have to figure out what you want to say; you have to decide what is most essential to what you want to say, and what can be left out; and finally, you have to find the juiciest possible words, with the proper number of syllables. That usually entails thinking of several ways to say the same thing, until you arrive at the perfect combination of form and content. Writing practice doesn’t get much more focused than that.

Besides providing a good writing exercise for me, crafting a daily haiku also provided a necessary outlet for my moods and thoughts. It’s similar to journaling, but more subtle and focused. When I look back at my days and days of haiku, I can immediately identify where I was in my life, and what I was feeling and experiencing, even if I wasn’t writing directly about it. It’s like identifying a scent that takes you directly back to a moment in your past, even though the scent itself might not be significant.

The two-year stretch when I was in the haiku habit is particularly interesting to look back on, because it begins a year after my divorce and ends almost a year after I met Jason. So many ups and downs represented.

Where an ancient form meets a new one

Twitter has essentially replaced my haiku habit, which has its positives and negatives. I have been encouraging students at my Media Bistro copywriting seminars to use Twitter as a writing exercise, because it forces you to figure out what you want to say and how to say it best in a very confined space (140 characters or less). I generally like the interaction that’s inherent with Twitter, too. You can write something funny or touching or controversial, and get immediate reactions.

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Photo by Dan Brady

The kids didn’t have school yesterday, so Saskia, my eight-year-old, decided to spend part of the day doing what any dutiful writer’s child would do: churning out poetry.

She wrote eight poems in total, including this one, which made me laugh. It also happens to serve as the perfect intro to the post I want to write today. (Sometimes my kids are helpful, without even knowing it.)

Rules Are Made To Be Broken

If your mother says…
Do not play with bears,
or eat a pickled skunk,
Do not race with hares,
or play monkeys on your bunk,
Do not invite
an elephant to bed,
Do not drink three cups of coffee,
instead…
Do the opposite!

What’s especially funny about the poem to me, the poet’s mother, is that of our three girls, Saskia is the one most bound by rules. She’s cautious and careful, and is more eager than either of her older sisters to please us.

So why did she write this poem?

I think it speaks mostly to her quirky sense of humor and her love for poetry written by the likes of Shel Silverstein. But there’s certainly a bit of deviousness in her, too, and a desire to break some rules, just like there is in all of us. It’s inherent.

If that’s a true assessment of human nature—that deep down inside we feel like rules are made to be broken, or at least bent as creatively as possible—is it possible that kids might feel that way about promises, too?

And if so, can someone please tell me this: Who on earth decided that pressuring kids to make definitive, public promises is a good idea? Aren’t we setting our kids up by presenting them with so many varieties of “forbidden fruit?”

Politics, religion, sex, and the psychology of promising

This is essentially Part II of my last post, Politics, religion and sex, which I wrote after reading the New Yorker article Red Sex, Blue Sex: Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?. There was so much to chew on that I couldn’t resist writing at least one more post.

To me, one of the most fascinating issues addressed in the article is the clear “gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior,” especially among Christian teens. The gulf is particularly apparent when you look at teens who have participated in “abstinence-pledge movements.”

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photo by dizznbonn

It’s a fairly established fact: politics, religion and sex are The Big Three. They’re the topics we’re not supposed to bring up at big family events or parties—the ones that make people sit up and take notice or squirm (or both). They each carry a lot of weight individually; when they’re combined into a single discussion it’s explosive.

That’s probably why I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a New Yorker article I just read: “Red Sex, Blue Sex: Why do so many evangelical teenagers become pregnant?”

While I’m not an evangelical, I am a Christian, and I know a thing or two about how religion shapes our earliest understanding of our sexuality. I also know something about the kinds of consequences those perspective can have down the road. I actually blame my divorce, in part, on some of those understandings, but I’ll get into that later.

Being the mother of three girls, ages 8, 10 and 12, also makes me extremely interested in this subject. Our youngest began asking questions about how babies were made more than a year ago, soon after Jason and I got married. Her logic was “you’re married so that must mean you’re going to have babies soon.” She’s a scientifically-minded girl, so we decided it was time to get technical in our explanation of baby-making and birth control.

At any rate, all three of our girls are inquisitive and somehow exceptionally cute, so Jason and I are already bracing ourselves for when they’re 12, 14 and 16. We do not take the subject of sex education lightly, and we’re convinced there must be a better paradigm for sexuality than the one most Christian children are inheriting from their parents.

Pregnancy & marriage statistics are tied to red & blue states

What I found so fascinating about the New Yorker article was how clearly the statistics back up what I’ve long suspected. The five states with the highest divorce rates, the youngest marriage age, and the most teen pregnancies are all traditionally red states (by traditionally red, I mean pre-Obama, 2008). When you reverse the statistics, you get all blue states, with the exception of North Dakota, which had one of the five lowest teen pregnancy rates.

Here’s how the article’s author, Margaret Talbot, summarizes the red state-blue state divide when it comes to teenagers, sex and pregnancy:

Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

My own story, and the one I want for my daughters

As someone who grew up in a blue state and a “blue family” that went to church every Sunday, my own experience fell somewhere in between the extremes. The biggest problem, looking back, was that sex simply wasn’t discussed much—at church, home, or school for that matter.

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photo by Raul!

OK, I’m wondering: Are some people just addicted to stress and drama? Or do we each have a hierarchy, and when one agitating issue is set aside, the next one in line simply bubbles to the top?

With the election behind us, I somehow imagined I would feel free-and-easy this week. But the last few days have brought a repeat-series of social media anxieties to the surface: Who am I, and how do I neatly package up my identity in a sentence or two that will stand out in the crowd?

My identity crisis is rooted, I think, in Twitter (where I’m kt_writes, not that anyone will rush to sign up for Twitter after reading this). I used to follow 30 or so people. I knew more than half of them personally, and another handful represented only one degree of separation—personal friends of my personal friends. There was plenty of fun, comfortable banter, I didn’t worry what people were thinking about me, and the interactions generally helped me feel less alone throughout my solitary days of freelance work.

Feeling un-cool at the Twitter bash

When more people began following me (it’s sort of like “friending” people on Facebook, but on Twitter it’s more common with strangers), I was pleased. That’s the whole point of building a network, right? I followed many of them back. Before I knew it, only a small percentage of the tweets I was reading were from people I know. It was starting to feel like I was at a party full of strangers who are mostly ignoring you. And I had dressed all wrong.

To make matters worse, many of the people I started following are very into Twitter stats: how many people follow them, what kind of score they get from Twitter Grader, how many times they’ve been Favrd, etc.

Yesterday I even ran across a Twitter bio that reads “Clearly it’s not hip to have anything useful here.” I found that both very funny and very sad (and, naturally, it prompted me to re-consider my own bio line). Who are we trying to be on Twitter? And what’s wrong with simply being ourselves?

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The first presidential election I remember was in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was voted into office. I was ten—the same age as my daughter Quillin is now. The day after Reagan’s landslide victory, I wrote this deadpan sentiment in my journal: “Yesterday Ronald Reagan was elected president. Dad says we’re moving to Canada.”

Last night, at the crowded, lively election party hosted by some friends, I couldn’t stop watching our three girls and the other ten or so children in the house. Even before it was clear Obama would win, I knew they would always remember a collection of random and odd details from that night.

No one had to tell them it was an important moment. Not only had they keyed into the mood of their high-strung parents (OK, maybe I’m just speaking for myself here), but they had also been given “special permission” (via laissez faire parenting tactics) to eat whatever they wanted and stay up late—on a Tuesday, no less.

Much of the evening the kids were off on their own, playing games that only those under the age of 13 can decipher, running in thundering packs through the house, and periodically taking pit stops in the kitchen to fuel up on the wide assortment of savories and sweets covering tables and counter tops.

As the results started coming in and the adults began cheering, the kids gradually migrated to rooms with TVs. By the time CNN was demonstrating that there was no feasible way for John McCain to win, the sofa across the room was lined with elementary-aged children staring intently at the television and at the electoral maps they were coloring in. They stayed with us, focused, until after McCain’s concession speech and Obama’s victory speech.

Important civic lessons for our littlest citizens

Watching my children watch Obama was perhaps the most gratifying part of the evening for me. It’s partly because I believe their future is brighter because Obama will be leading our nation and bringing people together for good (in other words, I didn’t have to say “We’re moving to Canada”).

But I also believe my children just witnessed an incredibly important paradigm shift—one that’s at the heart of how I want them to understand patriotism and the liberties and freedoms of this country: A candidate of color, with a foreign-sounding name, overcame the odds and was elected president. Competence and humility, intelligence and honor, vision and hope, were all rewarded by the electorate, rather than dismissed.

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