Year End To-Do's

18 November 2011 at 11:25 pm (Family, Greece, Plinky Prompts, Reading, Seasons, Self, Special Days, Style, Wellbeing)
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Perhaps setting a close deadline works better than new year resolutions.

Things to do today

I've already struck the unfeasible items off the list (read The Wheel of Time in six weeks? yeah, right), so this is only what depends solely on myself and circumstances as they are right now for its accomplishment.

1. Get myself accustomed to a daily schedule involving more sleep and exercise. With husband's new job, I have to get up earlier and shoulder more tasks during the day, so I need to rake up more energy and keep the winter blues at bay.

2. Finish the book series I've put on hold for NaNoWriMo (Cate Tiernan's Sweep). Five instalments are down, 10 remain to go. Each one is a couple of hours' worth of reading, so it may seem like a light task. It is, as long as I manage to make the time, which can be trickier than it seems, especially on full-blown work days.

3. Bring my paperwork up to date. My passport will expire in January, and my identity card is still of the kind that started to be replaced a decade ago. Unless something goes terribly wrong, we will be going back to Greece for Christmas, and I will have both taken care of while we're there, saving myself trips to London and dealings with the embassy.

4. Buy myself at least a couple of smart garments. I've grown too comfortable with the 'mum uniform' of yoga pants, t-shirts and sneakers; I need to reacquaint myself with smart clothes (especially slacks – that's going to be hard) and heels, in anticipation of working opportunities.

5. Take the little one to at least one Christmas event. Probably the arrival of Father Christmas at the local zoo, in a sleigh pulled by real live reindeer.

6. Be happier, for myself and in myself.

That's it, I guess. A short list, fully achieved, would do much better things for my self-confidence than having to work out success percentages.

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TGIE

12 November 2011 at 10:35 pm (Family, Plinky Prompts, Reading, Roleplaying, Self, Wellbeing, Women, Work, Writing)
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That's 'Thank God it's evening', for the acronymically challenged.

Relax.

I may be years out of work and even more years out of school, but don't think for a moment that a full time wife and mother like myself doesn't have a cutoff time at the end of the day. If I were on call 24/7, I'd have gone raving mad by now. (Between you and me, I am on call 24/7, but there's just enough downtime to stop me chewing furniture. On most days, at least.)

My work day is officially over once I tuck my son into bed, around 8. After that, I have about three hours to do what I enjoy. Sometimes I may get a couple more hours, but not often. My boy is an early riser every day, and sitting up till the wee hours, no matter how I enjoy it, is a bad idea if it means I will end up sleep-deprived.

The first thing I do once I turn off the nursery light is go over to the master bedroom, plop down on the bed and read for a half-hour or so. That gives the little one time to fall into deep sleep, so he won't be disturbed by comings and goings later. That slot is my only guaranteed reading time in the day, so I take full advantage of it.

Then comes shower time. I'm not a morning shower person, as I catch cold easily; on the other hand, an evening shower is the perfect way to unwind after a working day longer than any professional's. I'm not into baths; I get fidgety if I stay still for long. High pressure water and a good scrub is what I need to renew myself.

After showering, it's time for another, shorter bout of reading in bed before dressing. Although the feeling of just lying there letting my skin breathe and dry thoroughly is relaxing enough that I have fallen asleep more than once. Most often, however, I manage to get up, dress and head downstairs to enjoy the rest of my evening with writing and socialising on my beloved forums, and perhaps a DVD or some music on the side. And if there are some nibbles and drinks to share as well, all the better.

It's not much free time (I don't know if it's less than other people's, only that it's definitely less than I'd like), but it's all the more precious for that.

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A Little Deep Reading

6 November 2011 at 4:30 pm (Britain, Insight, Internet, Plinky Prompts, Reading, Religion)
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I love finding books to recommend, and that doesn’t happen half as often as I’d like.

I should have written this five years ago. That’s when I bought 366 Celt by Carl McColman. It was at the Past Times outlet store in Freeport; the promise of insight into Celtic culture and lore, combined with the art deco-style cover, convinced me easily to fork out a fiver for it. I leafed through it and blogged about my acquisition on my very first blog, on the now-defunct Yahoo360, and the following day I woke up to a comment from the author himself! I think that was when it started dawning on me that online networking had power.

The book came with me when I moved to the UK for good, but first one reason and then another kept me from actually reading it. I kept following the author, though, first on his Y360 blog and then on his site (anamchara.com), especially after I settled here on WordPress myself.

The time to actually sit down (actually, lie down, in my personal reading habits) and digest the book itself came this past September. Its 366 pages went very fast, probably because each unit – I wouldn’t call them meditations, as they’re between reflection prompts and encyclopedia entries – fits on one page and can be absorbed swiftly, allowing the reader to move to the next without gaps, as well as to read up to the last available moment, without risking having to stop mid-section.

The 366 entries are organised into 40 ‘paths’ of uneven length; most have 9 entries each, some have fewer, and then there’s the Path of the Ogham, with a whopping 21 entries. I found myself reading four to six paths a day, and was done with the entire book within a week.

The paths deal with aspects of the Celtic microcosm as well as macrocosm. They cover peculiarities of the Celtic character and understanding of the world, keeping to more general, ‘umbrella’ points rather than delving too far into particular Celtic branches (although, in practice, most of the lore collected comes from Ireland, with the Welsh element a distant second), as well as history, mythology and spirituality, both of the Pagan and Christian flavours.

I don’t have any Celtic ties myself, whether by blood, family or location, but the view presented in that book fascinated me – even made me a bit jealous of the community spirit that Celtic ancestry generates in modern people with nothing else in common. It was written before McColman reverted from Paganism back to Roman Catholicism, but there are no attempts at reconstructionism. It’s a balanced account that will hold plenty of interest for the Celtic enthusiast, whichever side of the hill they’re climbing. I can’t recommend it enthusiastically enough.

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Off the Press

4 November 2011 at 9:06 pm (Art, Education, Entertainment, Greece, Plinky Prompts, Reading)
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Dead tree news: The throwback that won't go away.

Greek Newspapers

I've had a love/hate relationship with newspapers for most of my life. On one hand, I like them. Moreover, stuff really sticks with me when I read it, while if I hear the same on the radio or the TV… whoosh and it's gone five minutes later. On the other hand, I was pressed into reading the Sunday paper, and quite a highbrow one it was too, when I was in high school, as preparation for my essay-writing classes. Not necessarily all of it, just the op-eds in the back pages, where the mayhem of actual breaking news had come to a lull, but, being myself, I couldn't resist reading the whole hog, and that's not the most palatable reading material for a teenager.

That's why, after I was done with those pesky classes, I swore off reading the news for several years. Sure, I browsed the front pages as they hung at the kiosk, but no more. I got back into the swing when the fashion of freebie CDs, DVDs and books swept the publishing world. If I was paying for it, damn well I was going to use the whole package.

Second time around, though, I was less obsessive. Really, it was all right to leave whole sections unread. I never read the radio and TV listings – I bought a specialised weekly for that. The sports section was out as well, unless there was something non-football-related in which Greek athletes had done well. Finances – well, let's say the orange pages went out first of all.

Conversely, I read the international and domestic news, down to the smallest bits. In fact, the smallest bits usually hold the most interest, being little human stories that don't whore for attention. I skim through the classifieds as well, even if I'm not looking for anything. And of course, all the social announcements – weddings, baptisms, funerals. Again, news about people, not statistics, ideas, or gadgets.

In the end, though, do you know which is the section that I would still make a beeline for, if I had access to it? '9', the magazine about comics that came with Eleftherotypia every Wednesday. The one paper I would throw away unread to focus on the colourful insert. I had built a library of the first 300 issues that I mourned having to leave behind when I moved across the continent. It got me into a whole slice of culture I'd never have known about without it – comic art conventions, cutting edge science fiction, adult graphic novels. I miss it so much it hurts.

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No More Heroes?

19 January 2011 at 9:18 pm (Music, People, Rants, Reading, Religion, YouTube)
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Hugely, obscenely misunderstood song. It’s not about nihilism and ‘the age of heroes is past’. It is about calling for more heroes, for a way out of mediocrity. ‘Whatever happened to the heroes?’ If your English is not good enough to understand the words, don’t critique.

Excuse the fit of pique; I recently came across a series of articles on rock music collected from a Christian youth magazine I used to read. I hadn’t seen them in a few years, and only came across them on my last visit home, while sorting out books to take back with me. I remember reading them when I was a teenager and being rather unconvinced. As an adult, I can fully grasp the extent of their bias and ignorance, and both are monumental. Really, proof that one should leave well alone if they don’t know their subject well enough. Ignorance is no excuse for misinformation. (Yes, I know it happens all the time, but don’t get me started along that track.)

The heart of the matter, however, is that people need heroes. Rather, they need role models, and in the absence of heroes, they’ll opt for antiheroes or villains. So, whatever happened to the heroes in the 21st century?

The short answer is: we’ve grown closer to them, and they no longer seem larger than life, like they used to. With the media covering every corner of the planet, it is easy to find out nearly everything about those who are everything one wants to be, and that makes them appear just human, regardless of their glamour levels. It’s hard to imagine legends of divinity about someone that you know even where they stop for coffee.

It’s not the heroes’ fault if they fail to fill the boots we prefabricate for them. It’s up to us and what we want from our lives. If you want 15 minutes of fame and aim to go on Big Brother to get it, you should be prepared to bitch and whore for attention, and eventually to be shoved aside when the next crop comes up. If you want to be Sir Alan Sugar when you grow up, be prepared to be treated the way he treats his apprentices on the way. We all have a big goal, but it doesn’t matter when we reach it, or even if we reach it at all. What does matters is the how; the journey there and the choices we make along the way. Because the goal is one moment and the journey is, you know, one’s life.

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