Chasms of Time

New Information!

2022-09-02T13:18:00.003-07:00

Please see my page Genealogy, History, and Patriotism where I highlight the various projects I am working on

This Week's Goals! (December 8-14)

2014-12-08T18:33:00.001-08:00

For the last couple of years, I have sorted my goals as they relate to "who I am". This holds me accountable to all my roles and responsibilities.

Weekly Goals

1. Get a shopping trip on the calender with my Mom (Daughter)
2. Throw the best birthday party a 2-year-old could ask for! (Mother)
3. Movie night with the hubby (Wife)
4. Memorize Matthew 6:33 with the kiddos (Christian)
5. Send out information to my Aunt Lois that she requested about her great great grandparents (Family Historian)
6. Finish Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (Reader)

Other

I'm going to my very first kiddo concert - the 4-year old preschool class will be singing Christmas Carols this week at a special evening concert.

Grocery shopping

It's Monday so laundry and personal finances are done for the week!

December's Goals
(I'll make SMART goals related to these as the month goes on)

Buy thoughtful gifts for all my loved ones and wrap them beautifully with love!
Spend more time at home
Play with my new genealogy software (Roots Magic 7)
Have a clean office by Christmas or bust!
Learn the Gummy Bear dance with my 4-year old (Kid Dance Party 2 - The Gummy Bear Song)
Family photo shoot

Minimalism & Me

2013-01-29T17:40:00.002-08:00

I do believe that unlimited choices are inherently problematic and cause discontentment. I can see in other people when they are pulled in too many directions whether professionally or personally it causes them stress and unhappiness.

My variety of interests will never go away. But I can choose to have only a limited number of true passions. At this point in my life this isn’t really an “option”. With Ava and one on the way, the time I have to devote to personal pursuits is limited.

One option is to concentrate full-time on being a parent and full-time on being a CPA. I think that everyone deserves something that they can call only their own so I think also having one personal passion is acceptable and worthwhile.

I have one career, one family, and one passion.

Easy enough.

That said, picking that “one passion” is pretty tricky. (Family and career, not so much.)

I’ve been in this place before and have strayed back and forth. I think I choose a lot of hobbies not completely because, but partially because, I see them as worthwhile, or socially acceptable, or almost obligatory (reading classics? working out? volunteering?) None of these are bad things and while I enjoy them, if I can only have one passion then it will have to be something I am 100% invested in for me, not for anyone else.

Eliminating hobbies will also help me declutter my house. I love having less stuff. Minimizing my possessions has been a process that has unfolded over the last two years. It has definitely reduced my stress and increased my satisfaction with my home. I know that the less stuff “in my way” when baby shows up the better I will be able to handle the stress that comes with a newborn.

Now I am cheating a bit. Being a CPA and being a parent comes with some required skill sets that can only be achieved through lifetime learning and process improvement. A lot of my hobbies will remain intact as they apply to those two parts of my life (entrepreneurship, cooking, etc). I will still have to read and meet new people and discuss ideas related to those two roles. However, I do need to keep those extracurricular activities in check. They need to directly improve my ability to parent or work. Cooking classic French cuisine really provides no benefit to Ava or Adam who would much rather have oven nachos for dinner then anything I may learn from Julia Childs.

So, what should my passion be?

Ideas that have been eliminated:

Crafts – I am really terrible at crafts. I do enjoy having a creative outlet but the end result is a disaster. This hobby also takes up a lot of space in my home. It produces clutter. I also don’t like how commercialized the crafting industry is. It shouldn’t cost me more to make something that looks worse than something that is manufactured. Who is benefiting there? Michael’s and Joann Fabrics. Obviously this doesn’t apply to crafts I will do with my daughter for her benefit.

Scrapbooking – I feel that scrapbooking and picture taking is an obligation of a good parent. We are the custodian of memories for our children who will want to grow up and see pictures from their past. That said, the scrapbooking industry is a joke. Notice the term includes the word “scrap”. So why does it cost $50 to put a photo book together? Because no one uses scraps – they use fancy paper and stickers and rubber stamps and have Cricut machines and fancy printers to print the pages. That and… I tried it and I’m just as terrible at scrapbooking as I am other crafts. I have a solution to this though which I’ll post about at another time.

TV & Movies – This is easy. I don’t like TV at all. I feel guilty after wasting away in front of it. I hate all the ads on TV. I don’t want my daughter watching it (she doesn't). Movies are fun but pretty easy to eliminate as well. I will definitely still catch the occasional flick with my hubby. Oh and football. I love to read in front of the tv when football is on.

Ideas that still have potential: Reading, in general

Genealogy
Local politics
Feminism
Consumerism
Vegetarianism
Languages
Computer Science
Information/Library
Science
Cooking
Fashion
History
Art
Hiking/Outdoors
Working Out
Beauty
Mythology
Writing

I conjured that list by looking at my Goodreads to-read list, my Google Reader blogroll, and my email that has been piling up over the last week as I approached the 9/17 deadline at work. This might take awhile to figure out. I’ll pay close attention to how I choose to spend my free time in the following weeks.

Realism & Balzac

2012-04-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

The questions below are posed by Professor Katherine L. Elkins in her Modern Scholar course, "Giants of French Literature: Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, and Camus." The answers are my own.

1. Why are [Balzac's] novels often called realist?

I'll discuss what makes Pere Goriot a realist novel, as I have not had the good fortune of reading any other Balzac novels as of yet. To start with, I'll attempt to define "realism". The Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory by Penguin Reference defines realism in literature as "the portrayal of life with fidelity. It is thus not concerned with idealization, with rendering things as beautiful when they are not, or in any way presenting them in any guise as they are not..." This portion of the definition comes after the author's opinion that the term realism is "often ambivalent and equivocal..." and "... is a term with many now feel we could do without". Balzac is often credited as one of the first "realist" novelist. This is largely in part because he wrote about the "common people" and not just the aristocrats in France, as most previous authors had done. The sense of realism is also displayed in Pere Goriot through its characters as not one of them was free from flaws, either in the eyes of the other characters, or the narrator. Even in today's literature (despite the Dictionary's argument that we can do without the term realism), we are often presented with infalliable characters unlike any person we would meet in reality. The characters in Pere Goriot were not like that. They were real, complete with misgivings. Even the main characters, the ones you'd most want to bond with throughout the novel, had obvious problems.

Cuddon, J.A., Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, Penguin Books, 1998 ISBN: 0-140-51363-9

Eklins, Katherine, Giants of French Literature: Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, and Camus, Recorded Books

Art of Reading by Joseph Luzzi

2012-02-28T19:19:00.000-08:00

The questions come from Modern Scholar's Art of Reading by Joseph Luzzi. The responses are my own:

Lecture 1 - A Fig Tree of One’s Own: The Worlds of Reading

Why can one refer to literature as a human “diary,” and what can it reveal that other
forms of artistic expression cannot?

a written record of life’s inner workings and mysteries, reanimated by the contact
between the reader and the page.

- not only what people are thinking, but how they process their thoughts
- art shows a moment in time, not a stream of consciousness, no development
- longer than a song

Professor Luzzi states that literature can be referred to as a human “diary” because it is a written record of life’s inner workings and mysteries, reanimated by the contact between the reader and the page. Another important distinction between literature and other art forms is the timeframe in which they refer to. Art and photography can depict a love, desire, fear, or concern of its creator, but it can’t depict the process in which the artist came to their conclusions. A piece of art does not develop whereas literature can show not only the emotion of the writer at the time, but the stream of consciousness that moved the writer to their current state.

The contact between the reader and the page plays off this development. While a photograph can certainly illustrate the intangible that the artist is trying to convey, the lack of development does not allow the user of the image, to recognize flaws or nuances in the artist’s thinking.

The ideas expressed in literature, like ideas formed in real life, are based on experiences with past events, moods, surroundings, mindsets that can be blatantly expressed in literature. Other art forms lack this ability, and cannot revel the inner workings of a person’s mind.

2. What is the role of reading in St. Augustine’s famous Christian conversion, as described in his Confessions (397–398 AD), and what does it say about the power of literature to change our lives?

St. Augustine in his Christian conversion was struggling with his inability to give up early desires, particularly lust. During a very emotional moment, St. Augustine heard a child’s voice chant “pick up and read”. Taking this as a sign from above, St. Augustine, at that very moment, read the first passage in the Bible. The passage was the encouragement he needed to no longer fear his inability to give up pleasures of the flesh, and he moved forward with his conversion to Christianity and celibacy.

In this way, literature changed St. Augustine’s life. It pulled him from the depths of despair and help me achieve something he was afraid he could not do.

3. What would you add to my list of four “common qualities” to good reading,
and why?

Professor Luzzi cites four common qualities to good reading. They include:
Passport to alternate worlds
Marriage of form and content
Humanity’s Diary
A fig tree of one’s own

I could add two more to this list. Good reading should also be about pleasure and education. If one doesn’t feel any pleasure from reading a particular book or from reading books at all (after a worthy attempt), there are other activities that would better suit the person then the pursuit of reading. As for education, Mortimer Alder talks about the “Great Conversation” that has taken place for ages through literature. While education can take on many forms, capitalizing on the centuries of knowledge, observations, and discoveries of writers of great works gives the reader an edge in the pursuit of knowledge. Reading classic literature makes an individual part of this Great Conversation and allows them to intelligently apply their learning to new experiences.

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