Category Archives: creative

crafty Leave a comment

‘Twas the Eve of the Solstice

brownies tied up with ribbon

As I stood in my kitchen this evening, cutting plastic wrap into little squares and individually wrapping brownies I’d just baked from a box mix, I felt… a little out of my element.

This is what “Pinterest Moms” do, I thought. This is what women who grew up baking dozens of Christmas cookies with their own mothers do. Me, I’m almost 40 and I’m having trouble wrapping up my little brownies into cling-wrap burritos that four-year-olds will hopefully be able to open.

A batch of soy candles was cooling on the other counter as I traipsed through the house and into the back closet to fetch a couple different types of ribbon to wrap around the brownies.

Ribbon. To wrap around brownies.

So it’s come to this, my brain snarked as I tied a little raffia bow around each wrapped brownie — again, carefully crafted for little fingers to successfully unfurl. I may as well get used to it. At least preschoolers won’t care what your bows look like.

Perhaps this is practice for future years of favors for class parties. Maybe someday I won’t feel like I’m playing house as the brownie mix poofs up out of the bowl in a dry cloud of chocolate, or as I’m cutting one red fuzzy ribbon into two thin ones because I ran out of gold raffia to tie up the rest of the brownies, or as I slowly become all thumbs and start tying single-loop bows instead of normal double-loop ones like I’d use to tie my shoe.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy baking or making treats for my son’s classmates. It’s just that it seems that so many women do this domestic stuff as naturally as breathing. It’s not just a social-media pop-culture thing, either — I know these women personally. I work with them. Several of them. They make awesome cookies and desserts and —

*pause*

Yeah, I know. I have my own wheelhouse. I don’t have to be good at everything, or feel like I have everything “under my fingers,” to use a musician’s turn of phrase. Some things take practice, repetition, and I’m sure that I’ll feel a lot more room-mother-ish once I do this sort of thing more often.

It was just kind of funny, seeing myself from the outside, studiously wrapping brownies in plastic wrap.

writing Leave a comment

Write Until You Feel Like Writing

Instead of having a New Year’s Resolution for 2015, I opted to set myself a few goals for each month. They changed over time, depending on what I felt like I needed to work on. They’ve mostly been centered about writing, photographing, working out, and sleeping — all things I would like to do more of.

This month, instead of a weekly word count goal, I decided to set myself more of a process-related goal: write for at least 10 minutes at a stretch, three times a week. It’s not much time, really — a half hour total is hardly enough to get a proper writing groove on — but it was the three times a week that I really wanted to focus on. Instead of going on one big writing binge during a lunch break or two at work, then saving my work in Google Docs and pasting it into my blog later, I decided I would like to take some time a few nights a week to sit down with my laptop after my son goes to bed and spin out some of the stuff that’s in my head.

I really haven’t been feeling it. I find myself going down the smartphone rabbit hole, instead: Let’s read Twitter. Let’s check Facebook. Wonder what the weather will be like this week. Let’s play Two Dots. Oh, look, it’s my turn in Words With Friends. Let’s play SimCity. Let’s check Instagram. Wait, it’s an hour later already? How did that happen? Guess I’ll go load the dishwasher and head up to bed — where I’ll play one last turn in Words With Friends and check my SimCity again before lights out.

I’ve had some ideas bouncing around in my head lately that I want to get out, though, old-school blogging style. Ideas about friendship, and family, and relationships in general. But I’m not always (OK, not ever) in the right headspace to really dive into that at 8:00 at night. But that’s when I have time to write, so I need to figure it out.

This brain dump here really falls under the category of Write Until You Feel Like Writing. This brain dump here got me my ten minute goal plus some. This brain dump here made me realize that I do feel better when I sit down and write.

I feel more connected when I write than I do when I parse through my Twitter feed, or even when I write a 140-character missive in the hopes that someone will give a shit. Sometimes that feels like spitting into the wind, or sending a message in a bottle, or talking to no one particular at a party and hoping someone will engage me back. If it weren’t for the fact that those Tweets make it back to my blog as microblog posts, I would Tweet much more rarely than I do. As it is, it’s a way for me to basically blog one-liners and photos quickly.

Which brings us back around to me not writing as much as I would like, or as much as I used to.

Well, this is a step in the right direction.