I grow old...I grow old...I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Happy 30th Birthday to me.

http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html

Flip-flops are a type of shoe. That is all.

I know a guy who gets upset when people change their minds.  He thinks politicians are wishy-washy if they reverse their opinions.  He points to a money trail when organizations rethink their policies.  He believes that people should stick to what they believe.  I get what he's saying.  But here's the deal: it's not that simple. In fact, the most intelligent people I know carry around conflicting paradigms and embody those paradigms' constantly fluctuating harmonization.
Polarized thinking seems to be our current society's downfall. Hence, a fiscal cliff over which a bridge was not built nor from which lemmings leaped. Politicians kicked the can down the road. And what choice did they have but to do so? To represent their constituencies, politicians have to be hard-nosed liberals or stubborn conservatives. Even a mere glance toward the middle, or God forbid, the other side, and there's a mass exodus from their support base. But if we could peel back scalps and peer into, perhaps not the thoughts themselves, but the processes that form them, I think we'd see that nobody is truly as flat as paper. We're all more dimensional than that. We believe in contradicting values. We make exceptions to our own rules based on circumstance. We do things we never dreamed ourselves capable of doing, both good and bad. It's the people who realize themselves to be so 'hypocritical' who can harmonize their thinking without ridding themselves of the dimension and produce rational ideas. They're people like Juan Williams, writing in Muzzled about how political debate is stifled by political correctness. And earlier, Rhana Reiko Rizzuto, redefining what it means to be a mother in Hiroshima in the Morning. And here, I'm going to be pretentious, and voice that I have no affinity for either of these people, but that while I disagree with them, personally, I see the value in what they have to say and I do agree with them, philosophically. I attempt to put into practice the harmonization of which I'm speaking. I attempt to be one of the intelligent, to see the thing for what it really is.  Does this mean that I'm not holding to my belief system?  I don't think so.

'Archipelago' is my second favorite word.

Islands.  A group of them together.  They're not alone, but they are separate.  Each has its own landscape, its own view of the sunrise.  Perhaps each even has its own inidigenous people with imperceptibly different dialects from the that of the other indigenous people on the other islands nearby.  But I am not part of an archipelago.  I am a boat that continuously and monotonously circles the islands.  My identity is only in relation to the position of my orbit.  Because I am a mother and being a mother is my only career.
I am a classic case of Betty Friedan's problem that has no name.  I can name all of the things that are not the problem: being a wife, being a mother, staying at home, cleaning house, perparing meals, organizing playdates, reading stroybooks, volunteering at the elementary school.  Yet, I am unfulfilled.  In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan concludes her first chapter as follows:  "We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'"  And I do.
Friedan, writing in the 50's and 60's, suggested that women solve the unnameable problem by continuing on with higher education to obtain worthy careers, not just part-time secretarial work.  She is credited with sparking second-wave feminism.  And since her time, the ideals of femininity have changed in many positive ways, opening up all sorts of opportunities for women.  However, her solution cannot apply to me. 
First, I have a college education.  I would actually argue that having an education furthers the complexity of the problem that has no name.  The more of my potential I realize to exist, the more I'm aware of how far I'm falling short.  Ignorance is bliss, after all.  Second, having a career at this time in my life is not an option.  In the face of a society that doesn't care at all about what I do everyday as a stay-at-home mom, I find immense value in what I do, as boring and mind numbing as it is.  I often wonder whether the problem that has no name wouldn't be resolved completely were society to truly value women who do what I do, but as time marches on, society seems to care less and less about the family as an institution so I won't be holding my breath in anticipation.  I wish that the value I see in my own work would somehow make that work fulfilling, but it doesn't.  I am still not part of the archipelago.
So, what am I to do?  After a lengthy and meaningful discussion with my husband, I came up with a plan to form my own, new identity while continuing in my chosen occupation.
1. I will do something I want to do everyday.  Right now, this thing happens to be posting to this blog.  Once necessary tasks are completed for the day (and I mean *necessary*), I focus solely on the want.  It's interrupted multiple times with my children's needs, of course, but I don't give up on it until it's done. 
2. I will not worry about whether or not my house is clean.  This is not to say that I will not clean my house.  In no way will I be transferring any of my own workload onto the income provider of the family.  I will do everything I always do, but in my own good time.  If I don't feel like doing the laundry and the laundry can wait until tomorrow, it will.  If I need a nap, the crumbs on the floor and the piles of toys will stay.  It sounds very simple, but before I made this conscious choice to care less, I was constantly beating myself up for being 'lazy' and not getting things done when reality was that my expectations of myself, my resentment for the chores that were sucking away my life, and my guilt over putting things off were paralyzing me from getting anything done to begin with. 
3. I will figure out what it is that I want.  Because I don't have to worry about making money, I have the unique opportunity to go back to school or take unpaid internships or do volunteer work in pursuit of a career I would like to have when my children are older.  I can literally do anything I want.  I just have to figure out what that is.  Spending more time thinking about the future will ease the painful boredom of the present.  I don't believe in living in the moment when the moment makes me want to take five bottles of pills, lie down in a full bath, and slit my femoral artery.
I'm on Day 2 of the plan.  I have no idea whether or not it will be successful.  Guess we'll find out together. 

Wilde about Oscar

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.  Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."  As you follow me along on the journey into the furthest recesses of my mind, I would ask that you keep this quote at the forefront of your own.  You may read about the time I envisioned myself bludgeoning someone to death in great detail.  Or you might realize, as I'm rambling on about family and friends, that I am a true misantrhope - equal to Bronte's Heathcliff or Dickens' Estella.  You could find out something as trivial as the fact that I passionately hate carrots.  But no matter what you read, please reserve your judgment to nothing more than whether the writing was at all effective - did it resonate with you?  If it did not, you might consider not visiting here again.  But if you feel it, and it permeates into your soul and maybe even moves you, I hope we can be more than friends.  I'll come to love you, my reader, with the whole violence of my being...

Sneezing

Loving you is a slow motion sternutation. Fireworks,
short-circuiting myelin sheath, light up
both hemispheres in the pitch behind eyelids,
... photo reflexively, at the thought of you,
keeping me
awake. No one can sneeze in her sleep.
But it's not self-contained, this reactionary body.
You drop through numb fingers like wet sand
along with our unformed memories
so my heart stops. 'Gesundheit.'
And the skin also
forgets its own pressure. Flower-like our bodies
dry, alluvial limbs splayed, a colorful momento
in life-thick volumes of meaningless black marker.
I bite my lip: blood. I'm unforgivingly alive.
I bit my lip and know you,
orgasmically
without touch, every spasm coupled with a fatal exhalation (God bless)
as my systems shut-down, simultaneously lacking you.
There goes my soul, trigeminally. You see it fall
before it's too late

for you, anyway.