My dream job, which should not surprise regular readers of this blog, would be an author. I am an author now; the difference would be that I actually received enough money from my writing to live on.
Making a living as an author is difficult, especially when one is an indie author. The indie writers I know who support themselves write romances and publish several a year. I will never be that prolific, although I’ve had years where I’ve written two novels.
The odds of my being able to support myself as a writer are infinitesimally small. The only way I will write full-time is after I retire. I have accepted this.
If I could un-invent something, I would un-invent weapons of mass destruction. I would just eliminate them from the earth. I would un-invent mutually assured destruction, the arms race, the nightmare of my childhood during the Cold War.
I remember reading a science fiction series where the premise of war was that the only weapons you could use were those that brought you to arm’s length from your opponent — in other words, swords and spears. With the books, this was to prohibit psychic warfare, but it makes sense to me. Weapons of mass destruction kill thousands, even millions of people while keeping one’s hands clean.
One could argue that this would eliminate all area bombs. I’m fine with that. If it gets rid of assault weapons, even better. I could get rid of all weapons, but I think hunting is a legitimate use of weapons (I am not a vegetarian).
What would war look like if we could get rid of looming threats? I hope it would be shorter. And less lethal.
Right now, I would eat any snack that came my way — even durian pudding! I’m hungry and I have to fast for a blood test, so I’m obsessing a little about food.
I used to think I wanted to live a lengthy life. As a child, I joked that I wanted to survive to the US’s tricentennial in 2076, so I could help them avoid all the tacky memorabilia I remembered from the bicentennial. I would be 114 in that scenario.
Nowadays, I wonder if living that long would be tenable. I have some kidney damage from a medication I used to take for my bipolar, and I don’t know where that’s going to go as I get older. As it is, I am forbidden from all the good over-the-counter pain meds and a lot of the prescription meds. I’ve got a couple ‘wait and see’ issues in a couple of other places. I don’t want to live a long life if it’s only going to be pain and illness, unless it gives me enough wellness to write and visit with people.
I feel my mortality right now. I’m 61, and I know I will not live forever. I’m fine with it.
I learned about mission statements as a professor, when an assignment I inherited was to make students write professional mission statements. The source I found said that mission statements should be short and explain what one wants to accomplish but not how. I use that definition still.
I believe in mission statements. I think it’s motivating to have a statement to look at that gives direction and inspiration. Unlike a motivational statement, a mission is tailored to the individual.
I don’t have a personal mission. I think this is a bad thing, because it means I drift from day to day, doing what I need to do. And in a way, I think that is true. Perhaps it’s because I’m over sixty, or because I don’t feel driven to do things the way I used to. Perhaps it’s because I’m being treated for bipolar. At any rate, I have no personal mission.
I do have a teaching mission and a writing mission, however. Maybe it’s because those are things I do rather than who I am. My teaching mission is togive people the ‘Aha!’ reaction. Notice it’s short and sweet and does not talk about how. It’s my responsibility to make the ‘aha’ part of how I teach. My writing mission is to make fantasies romantic and romances fantastic. As I write fantasy romance and romantic fantasy, this is an accurate mission, even with the wordplay.
I still think I need that personal mission. I don’t want anything trite or false. I want a catchy mission because I like words, or as a friend once said, “words like me”. Maybe something like to make my life an ‘aha’ experience. That’s close. Let me think about it.
I have only attended one university for my education, and that is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
University of Illinois was an excellent school. I didn’t pick it because of reputation; I didn’t think that way as an undergraduate. I picked it because I visited Champaign-Urbana with my dad once and fell in love with the towns. Like in many other parts of my life, I fell into a good decision.
In academia, it is strongly discouraged to attend the same university for graduate school as for undergraduate. However, my undergrad was in a significantly different field than my graduate degree, so the intellectual stagnation of such a move wasn’t an issue. My undergrad degree was in Foods in Business, a food industry-focused major. My graduate degree was in Family and Consumption Economics, which is about people and their decisions about money. It involves everything from decisions people make about whether to move to take a job to things we can tell about a country by what they buy.
I was recruited into graduate school. I was taking family economics as an elective and fell in love with it. Family economics is a class about financial decisions a family makes, from who has the say in purchasing decisions to family job migrations to child support. After class, I asked the professor if there were graduate degrees in the field, and she escorted me down the hall to the department office and introduced me to the chair.
In the 11 years I spent at University of Illinois, I became familiar with its spaces. I ran across campus to get to my classes, napped in the South Union (with many others), drank coffee at various places in campustown, and moved into my own office in Bevier Hall eventually.
I went back to Champaign-Urbana a few years back, and I hardly recognized the place. The campus town now features tall buildings which give the streets a claustrophobic feel. They are filled with high-end apartments for students, whereas the undergrads in my time lived much more modestly. I do not feel at home there anymore; I could not take a nap in the South Union anymore, as the lounges have disappeared. The cafeteria is now a food court. I know it’s a natural thing to be disappointed in the places you once dwelt because of changes, but I didn’t believe it until I stepped on campus again. It had been over twenty years, however; time flows on.
When I was ten years old, my mother made a denim cap, the type with several segments and a button on top, very fashionable at the time. She made it from scraps of denim, so that the colors were all subtly different, and there were pieces with a segment of pocket or a rivet. It was lined with red bandana material. The hat was 1970s cool. This hat below, basically, but in denim:
Much to my mother’s frustration, I couldn’t be parted from it. She made it, but neither she nor my dad wore hats. I fell in love with the hat, and if they didn’t want it, I did.
I didn’t wear the hat to school, but I wore it everywhere I could. It became my hat, even if it was a little big for me at first. My sister was quite tired of it. My parents asked if I was thinking of getting married in it.
The hat went to college with me. By then, it was starting to show wear. The elastic in the band gave out and the denim on the band was wearing thin. Yet it still came with me and I wore it, although I wore it less often. By graduate school, I wore it only occasionally, and the band was threadbare. I couldn’t bear to throw it out, but it was too worn to wear.
I finally threw it away when I moved to Maryville 24 years ago. The cap lasted 25 years, longer than expected for a garment. I have seen store-bought caps like it, but none of high enough quality or panache. It was a one-of-a-kind item, and I miss it sometimes.
My biggest challenge is my bipolar disorder. Right now, I’m on an even keel and have been for a long while. No rages, no glitches in judgment, no loss of conscientiousness, no desire to sleep all day, no weepiness. None of this despite a change in medication. But I feel like I’m overdue. Maybe it’s just superstition.
Hypomania scares me more than depression; I have gone to work despite deep depressions in the past. I can work through hypomania, but I’m more likely to do something I find embarrassing. One time I CC’ed an email when I should have BCC’ed, which sounds minor, but I broadcasted the mailing list for an anonymous survey. And I did it again to apologize; the apology itself bordered on emotional meltdown. The reverberations went all the way up to the Board of Regents and I had to go through a disciplinary action (some training and a “Don’t Do This Again”.)
My bipolar could be so much worse. As a Type 2, I don’t have the level of mania that truly disrupts life, but I have all the depression. That’s bad enough. The hypomania is bad enough. It’s the biggest challenge in my life.
The music of my childhood makes me feel nostalgic. I was born in 1963, and my childhood was the 60s and 70s, with high school graduation in 1981.
To be specific, though, it’s not just any music of my childhood. The Beatles, surprisingly, don’t make me feel nostalgic, nor does hard rock or disco. The Top 40 radio format doesn’t make me sentimental, nor does easy listening. 80s and later music doesn’t make me nostalgic. Specifically, it’s singer-songwriter music from the 60s and 70s, as defined by Apple Music, that makes me nostalgic.
Singer-songwriter music comprises folk music and rock well-known for its lyrics. Its instrumentation often involves acoustic instruments, sometimes augmented by instruments like harmonica. Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Janis Ian, and Judy Collins are examples of the genre. Not all singer-songwriters give me nostalgic vibes — I was not exposed to John Prine or Leonard Cohen as a child, for example.
If I had to pick one song that makes me nostalgic, it would be Helpless by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. The song is about nostalgia, so that makes sense. Neil Young’s voice keens over the fiddle and piano singing about his childhood and how “the chains are locked and tied across the door”, because we can’t go back.
In a way, I literally can’t go back. I have aphantasia, or an inability to visualize in my mind. Visually, my memory is a series of snapshots which I only get to look at for a split-second, and they’re blurry. I remember from a narrative, where I tell myself the story, and by the feelings in my body. Nostalgia is a clutching of my heart, a longing.
I met him on the stairs in the hall. I hadn’t seen him in forever, wizened man, twinkling blue eyes. He held his arms out for a hug; as always, nothing could make life any better than that moment.
He told me he ventured out to visit his other family, whom I had heard of but didn’t know. I watched him Out the door, into the cold.
Only then, I remembered we had buried him years before.
Words Like Me 