Category Archives: Social Science

Criticism Personified

People who want to create often struggle with a lot of internal negative criticism comprised of scripts integrated from past comments, usually made by people important to the creator, and the fear of the unknown. There are many self-help books that give advice on how to “push back” in order to proceed with creating. Those books can be helpful at a certain point. I think of it as creative adolescence, where one doesn’t completely believe in her worth or right to create and needs the help of rebellion to forge ahead. It’s the process of individuation. However, the critic is not always the enemy. At some point, the critic might actually have helpful feedback. If we demonize a quality, we lose sight of the potential benefit that it may provide if applied carefully. An email conversation with Liora inspired me to look up the following passage from a beloved book.

Criticism was always the shortest kid in the class. He learned early to use words to defend himself. As a teenager, Criticism loved to take things apart. At that time he didn’t care if they ever got put back together. He retains a strong curiosity about how things work and a deep respect for tools. Criticism is a strict father. He adores his children, but he fears their spontaneity.

Sometimes I want to write Criticism a letter and tell him to leave me alone. The problem is that when I don’t see him for awhile, I start to miss him. Still, my conversations with him often make me nervous. I usually believe the bad things he says and forget about the good stuff. When we really disagree, I am upset for days and run around asking everyone I meet to reassure me. If I could trust him more, it would be different, but he changes his mind as much as I do. For all his sensitivity, it was years before he realized that other people also have feelings.

When Criticism looks at a painting, he sees the finished picture framed on the wall, and at the same time he sees the picture as it was being painted — what was drawn first, what went in last, where the artist hesitated, where the artist smiled. After Criticism lost his glasses, he discovered that he did not need them anymore. His focus is less acute, but he can see the whole picture better. The colors are more distinct when the outlines are blurred.

You can count on Criticism to have an opinion about everything. He is exceptionally well-read and usually knows what he is talking about. I don’t recommend that you speak to him when your project is in the beginning stages. However, as it approaches completion, he can be quite helpful. He is not interested in measuring what you or I do in relationship to each other or anyone else in our fields. At his best, he surveys the distance between our intentions and our accomplishments, between what we are and what we could be.

–J. Ruth Gendler, The Book of Qualities

Riches Found

Space is limited at Chez Mindful Life, and I have gradually filled the bookcases we have. Lately I wanted to read a pair of books that, while they were sure to be good reads, just weren’t worth spending money on, especially since I would only read them once and don’t have storage space. One copy was at my local city library. The other was listed as being “on the shelves,” but after repeated searches without success, I concluded it must be lost. So I searched elsewhere.

What I discovered amazed me. You see, some years ago a law was passed in California that removed residency requirements for public libraries. This means any person with a California residence and a photo I.D. to prove it can get a library card at any, and as many, libraries as she wants. This means I could actually get a library card for the Los Angeles library system. (Though that would be impractical, there is something tantalizing in the thought.) For years I have been a supporter (financially and civically) of public libraries, but I rarely used them. It’s time to walk the talk!

After discovering this mother lode, I’ve visited all the libraries closest to me to get cards (collect one! collect ’em all!) and thus was able to borrow the book I wanted (plus several more). In addition, each of these libraries offers inter-library loan services. Here is a list of my keys to free knowledge.

Santa Clara City Library
Santa Clara County Libraries: Campbell, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Altos, Milpitas, Morgan Hill, Saratoga (each library has its own website)
Mountain View Public Library
Sunnyvale Public Library
Los Gatos Public Library
Peninsula Library Foundation: Atherton Library, Belmont Library, Brisbane Library, Burlingame, CaÃ±ada College Library, College of San Mateo Library, Daly City, East Palo Alto Library, Foster City Library, Half Moon Bay Library, Menlo Park, Millbrae Library, Pacifica Library, Portola Valley Library, Redwood City, San Bruno, San Carlos Library, San Mateo City, Skyline College Library, South San Francisco, Woodside Library (each library has its own website)
Palo Alto Public Library
San Jose University & Public Libraries

I could also get a card for the San Francisco Public Library as well as the East Bay (Alameda and Contra Costa counties), but I may hold off. I think 40 miles is my geographic limit for borrowing books, and those are well beyond! Then again, there’s a brand new branch of the SF library just across the street from where I park on those days I drive to the city (and it’s less than a mile from the train station).

This And That And The Other

Things that please me and make me a nice person to be around.

The car engine light remains off and it’s running great.
My car passed smog inspection.
I got a free cup of coffee this afternoon when I happened upon a grand opening party of a new Starbucks in San Mateo.
There was a musician performing for the party whose style and voice I found very striking. Her name is Katie Knipp.
I spent an enjoyable evening packing safe sex kits for the AIDS program in San Mateo.
I am scheduled to get a massage tomorrow (my annual trip).
One of my new social groups at LibraryThing has taken off. It’s a group for people who like tea, of all things.
The temperature is cool again.
I had dinner with a friend and caught up over coffee at Borders while in SF yesterday. We hadn’t seen each other in nine months.
I am eating fresh, sweet cherries as I write this post.
I will attend the Collard Greens Festival on Saturday. It’s in East Palo Alto; if you live in the Bay Area, you should come! I can hardly wait to sample the collard green ice cream!
As of August 1, I will have only three months of my service to complete.
I have decided to let go of anxiety about what will happen next and just enjoy the abundant life I am blessed with.
While the past week has been creatively quiet in terms of knitting and visual art, I wrote two poems for the first time in three months.
This means that I’m “getting back on the horse again” after my dreadful experience with an online poetry forum and a raking over by one critic/troll in particular.
Meanwhile I discovered some new books with techniques and bought some more supplies (rubber stamps, paper, ink), which has been like taking a super-creativity vitamin. My hands are itching to make something!
There are brilliant, incisive, creative people out there, such as Ze Frank, who amuses me daily, and the occasional You Tube video such as Keep Your Jesus Off My Penis by Eric Schwartz (thanks to Emy for that one).

Hot Air, Amusements, and Irritations

Today, Friday July 21, has been another Spare the Air Day. I worked from home rather than drive in to Milpitas. Unfortunately, tomorrow will also be a Spare the Air day. (Public transportation will not be free, however.) The Bay Area Air Quality Management District has now used all six of the budgeted free travel for poor air days, but the season doesn’t end until mid-October. I’m supposing they will continue to announce such days and ask people to take public transportation but won’t offer the incentive of free travel, which is significant. I saved $13.50 yesterday. (Cost as well as length of commute are the reasons I don’t work in SF full-time.)

Last night I had tickets to a Giants game, where I got to see Barry Bonds hit his 722nd home run. This was followed by two more home runs by Ray Durham and Pedro Feliz (and overall, I find three home runs in a row more impressive than Bonds adding one more notch to his baseball bat). I had excellent seats — the third row from the very top, which is nosebleed heaven for some. However, the direction I faced afforded a beautiful view of the bay. My friend Nathania took photos, one of the bay and another of the playing field.

While there I discovered that I am gustatorily fond of Gilroy garlic fries. For about $6 you get a huge helping of fries dressed with oil, chopped parsely, and at least three minced garlic cloves (probably more). They are heaven to taste, and they have, of course, a potent bouquet. I’m sure I’m sweating eau de garlic today. Husband practically fell over when I kissed him (he did not attend the game).

Also, since it was a Stitch n Pitch event, I got a totebag with yarn and free size 17 needles. The only thing I would do differently next year is arrange to bring a friend. I am acquainted with several people who work at the local yarn store where I bought my ticket, and I mistakenly assumed we’d be a bunch of women all sitting together. Most people attending were women who brought their husbands and/or kids, and I was the only solitary fan. I chatted a bit with the woman sitting next to me, and I admit I felt a tad lonely.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt lonely. And this also led me to wonder why. What is it about my disposition that I generate this experience? Why do I not find friendship everywhere, as some people do? There are two factors at play. One is my introversion. Instead of being an exuberant, mellow person, I experience myself as turned inward, reticent, and detached. This detachment is the writer in me observing my surroundings and experience, paying attention so that I can write about it later (especially as a poem). I have found that when I am immersed in something completely, I am not thinking about it — I am it. I have yet to manage to both pay attention to details and experience a situation fully at the same time.

Then there is the fact that I struggle with judgment more than I care to admit — arrogant irritation over what I perceive as the stupidity of people. For example, there’s the person who jeopardizes my life by driving 90 mph on highway 101 and passes on the right. Or the person at the state agency I call to ask a question about the complaint process for car mechanics interrupting me to say, “Ma’am, I can’t advise you, blahblahblah” when I’ve barely started to ask my question and who keeps talking over me until I pause and say, with irritation, “Will you please let me speak?” Or the stadium worker who sends me in the wrong direction when I’m trying to find my seat and another worker tells me to head back in the direction from which I came. Or the bank representative who doesn’t listen when I call and ask, “What do I need to do to close the XYZ certificate of deposit I have?” and who instead just tells me I have this CD for X amount of dollars due in 2011. I knew that. My question is how to convert it back to regular savings. And this goes on for several rounds before he understands the question. When people respond by reflex and rote, I experience forehead-smacking frustration with their rigidity. It’s not only the rigidity per se that gets to me (i.e., my view that people “ought” to be more attentive), it’s the fact that the response interferes with and delays with the accomplishment of my task (my single-minded drive to get what I want when I want, which is a selfish position).

The world is brimming with irritants. I can either rise to the occasion and experience them, or find a way to flow through them and discover amusement. I tend to fail at the “go with the flow” attitude. And really, all it does is diminish my quality of life and no one else’s. Perhaps some of this can be attributed to hormonal tides, but I am not a prisoner of my biology, at least not completely.

I find my inherent misanthropy disconcerting. Really, sometimes I wonder if I’m a much kinder person on my blog than I truly am. It’s been observed of me that I love humanity (in that I want to help it) but I don’t like people all that much. There’s an uncomfortable ring of truth in that.

Shooting Stars, A Creative License, and Everyday Matters

I’ve discovered an interesting blog that synthesizes mindfulness and just about everything else. Evelyn Rodriguez of Crossroads Dispatches does an excellent job quilting together a variety of ideas from a wide arrays of sources and providing her perspective. In a recent post reflecting on a study that announced how much more isolated we are becoming, the following grabbed me by the shirt-tail. I am compelled to share.

We live in an age where we collect ‘friends’ like trading cards on MySpace, Tribe, LinkedIn (David Sifry’s quip), and as in any age it is habitual to keep the bolt of our heart fastened. I know in my own life I’ve said I want intimacy, but I’ve often run in the opposite direction. My therapist was my close confidant four years ago. (Less than the whopping average of 2.08 the study cites – thank god for those fractional friends!)

Today I easily count at least eight extremely close friends; friends I can count on to discuss the bread and wine of life, and ones that would share their last dollar with me as I with them if need be.

Paradoxically, at the same time every person that enters my life in person, however briefly, be it in line for a jasmine green tea with tapioca pearls at the mall or sitting across from me at Peet’s or riding BART into the city enters my life like a momentary shooting star and is my best friend at least while they are in my presence, even though we may never meet again physically, tangibly, they have my full attention now. I’ve had conversations on near-death experiences, God, sex, unconditional love, divorce, heartbreak, art, everything under the moon with complete strangers on a weekly, and damn near daily, basis of late.

So-called strangers, momentary shooting stars, kindred spirits, while not counted among our 2.08 confidants, give me the felt sense that if time and space were unbounded, every being in the world could become my dearest cherished friend.

—Everyone’s Famous to 2.08 Friends

Evelyn also comments on the trend among her blogging community away from trying to track the hundreds of great blogs daily. It’s true for me as well. I am religious about checking on about one dozen blogs on a daily basis. I track many more via Bloglines, but I sometimes wait until a number of posts accrue before I visit. There just isn’t time to read them all and actually live my life. Evelyn notes, “p.s. You don’t track your friends.”

As for the concept of momentary shooting star friends (a wonderful metaphor!) is admit that I am often closed tightly to these opportunities. Yet I have longed to be more open, and when I was younger, I often was. What prevents me from encountering people in this way? Compassion fatigue? Fear of too much (whatever that would be)? Selfishness?

—
It’s a slow day at work when I am writing this post. I am alone in the office. The phone rang. An elderly woman who doesn’t drive, whose son died in March, and whose husband has cancer was referred to Hands On Bay Area from another agency because she needs transportation assistance. That agency clearly doesn’t understand what we do, because we don’t provide a service like that. I explained, and she said, “I guess they just told me this to get me off the phone.” Being the knowledge geek that I am, I quickly searched the web for Meals on Wheels, because I remembered the one in Austin had a transportation service as well as a grocery shopping service (they didn’t just deliver hot meals). Apparently the Austin agency is the only MOW that offers this. I felt for her, so I took her number and said I’d do a little research on her behalf. She sounded so relieved. She’s been calling number after number without success. A Google search reveals a paucity of services in the Peninsula (or if services exist, they require needle-in-a-haystack searching). She lives less than 8 miles north of the MOW in Menlo Park, but they don’t serve Belmont. Calling the alternate number on their site for her area got me to another agency that also doesn’t serve Belmont, but I was given another phone number that might prove fruitful. I will call her back and give her the information and hope that one of them will be useful. She sounded worn and overwhelmed.

An entire generation of people will create a canyon of need in just a few years, and communities are woefully unprepared to help home-bound and low-income seniors navigate life in a car-based culture.

—
It occurred to me as I wrote the vignette above that I just had a “shooting star” type of encounter. Perhaps by slowing down, observing, and opening my heart just a bit more, I can have more of these without being overwhelmed.

Another reason this is all a-stir for me is that I’m reading a marvelous (and I mean that!) book given to me by Cicada (thank you, dear woman) that focuses on slowing down and truly seeing one’s life, and recording it in illustrated journals. It’s called The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to be the Artist You Truly Are by Danny Gregory. He wrote another book I’d love to read, Everyday Matters; it’s a visual memoir. His stance is that the ordinariness of life is chock full of riches and wonder if we just pay attention and take a little time to record what we experience. He has a wonderful blog as well, which features a group called Everyday Matters where people participate in weekly drawing challenges; people post the images on Flickr. When I encounter such books encouraging people to embrace the concept of being creative themselves, my gut flutters with a sense of urgency, a recognition that I too want to nurture people’s creativity. I don’t know how or when, but I do know it’s becoming imperative, a calling of sorts.

The trip to Austin was a clarifying experience for me. It made me realize that I must let go of the idea of returning there to live. We moved here tentatively and I put my therapy profession on hold but kept my license. Attending the continuing education courses required to keep my license active reminds me of the fact that I cannot practice my profession here, and my energy and time could be used otherwise. Holding onto this vestige of my profession is one factor preventing me from living fully in the present. I’m going to contact the Texas licensing board and find out what I need to do to put change my status and put my license on hiatus (I was told that’s possible). Someday perhaps we’ll move to another state that does offer reciprocity, and I can return to that. But not now. And this job ends in October, which means opportunities abound. Whatever is next will include creativity somehow. I’m trading in one license for another…