Futility

I've been thinking about priorities lately. Reading books like Organized Simplicity inspires me to start up another round of un-stuff-ing, freeing my mind from the mental clutter as well as the physical tripping points. Increasing demands upon my time require* that something must go, and it's always a balancing act to keep my perspective grounded.

I want to spend more time with my children. Time invested in their lives is really the best spent, whereas all the busy-work of running the household has a peculiarly fatalistic quality to it: catch-up vacuuming and laundry is only marginally more time-consuming than the everyday variety. So I tell myself, and yet I really can't let the dishes and laundry slide too much. And ultimately, it just doesn't matter.

Ha! No, I'm not just being calm and accepting of less than perfection. It literally doesn't matter whether I think I'm caught up or not, because before the dishwasher or washing machine finishes the cycle, there will be more dirty dishes and soiled laundry. Just like Almanzo's fleece from Farmer Boy, I can never really keep up. And yet I keep trying.

The little incident that sparked all this introspection? While lately feeding the baby, I felt a suspicious warmth seep across my lap. I had just settled another load in the washer and graduated the last batch of soaking stains from the bin, and there was the momentary adrenaline rush to consider whether I should make a mad dash for the laundry room, strip all affected articles and stuff them in the washer in time to join the last cycle. And then I decided that it just didn't matter.

The leak was of the clear variety, not the yellow kind. It won't show. It doesn't stink. It will dry and the clothes will be good for another wearing.

People keep asking how life is with four children. I think this will be my new equilibrium - not waving the white flag of Surrender, but clutching the pragmatic handkerchief of Enough.

* Or is it requires? Is it the demands themselves (and therefore plural), or the increasing-ness of them (and therefore singular), at work here? I think there's an exchange in a play somewhere or other (Gilbert and Sullivan comes to mind, but that's not it) where this dilemma comes up, and a character deftly turns the matter aside by winding up with something like, 'Why, what a singular quandary,' and that's that.

Peace and quiet

This and this, among other things, are why it's been so quiet around here lately. There were several other thought-provoking articles that had been tilting me toward the notion of giving up more computer time, but I can't remember where I stumbled across them and won't bother to look them up right now. If you're reading this, then you probably already know all about wasting time on frivolous computer chatter. =) I haven't made any resolves and I'm not officially closing up shop, although I suspect that this is the way the blog ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

Critical mass with disambiguation bonus

While 'critical mass' is first and foremost a scientific term having to do with nuclear fission, I've always used it in the social context, to designate that arrival at a sufficient level of jollification which is achieved by any number of independent factors. In reference to a party, for instance, critical mass would occur with the arrival of whichever guest really kicks things off. It may not be a characteristic specific to that particular guest, but rather an inevitable happening considering the other guests present and that particular concatenation of events. (I've just begun reading the Foundation Trilogy aloud to Michael, so I'm feeling rather psycho-historic, vague, and inevitable these days.)

On a far grander scale, I'm beginning to realise that we are in the process of achieving critical mass within our own family, and it's a thrilling and delightful discovery. For many a day after the arrival of Jane, the avoidance of collapsing into a blue funk of drudgery and boredom was a chief concern, to which end I sought out adequate outside activities sufficient to divert us without running us ragged. The logistical difficulties of pursuing such interests with three children in tow had been a bit of a worry, but I'm finding more and more that Jane and Ella provide their own diversion, both to me and to each other. Their activities are more independent and self-contained than ever, their conversations infinitely more amusing, their intellectual rapport growing ever more engaging. If I go for days without experiencing much adult conversation, as the cliche goes, my psyche hardly suffers anymore, because the precocious child conversation is almost as stimulating. Food, money, and other economic considerations prevent us from dropping out of society altogether, but it's nice to know that we're well on our way to forming what could be, in a pinch, an independent and self-sustaining society for rainy days.

(On a side note, I couldn't remember whether the term 'critical mass' had to do with nuclear fusion or fission, so I popped onto Wikipedia to find out, and found myself on some page describing a cycling movement. The 'critical mass' term that I was after was found on a different page, all such pages tagged with the appellation 'disambiguation.' I love reading interesting articles with lots of hyperlinks, for this led me down a charming rabbit hole of rhetorical metonymy, Naive Bayes Classifiers, and Yarowsky Algorithms. This is as close to mathematics as I get.)

Moving on

Yesterday's post was hard to write for a very long time, because it was difficult to strike the right balance between solemnity and cheerfulness. Write too darkly and it sounds hopeless, and might even seem like fishing for sympathy; write too optimistically and it sounds superficial. So I waited until the right opportunity came to craft the perfect post, and it never happened. At last I decided to just write it out, so I could get back to posting already.

My mind imposes random statues of limitations on reasonableness, as it were, of response, and when I am in danger of running them out, my thought process tends to paralyse. So I put off writing thank-you notes until I can do it justice, and the longer I wait, the more spectacular the card has to be to make up for its tardiness. In the same way, the longer I let this blog lapse, the more impressive I feel that the eventual posts have to be, or else I shall just have to stop blogging altogether. But I don't want to do that, as how else can I dispense cute baby pictures and Focht family clevernesses to the adoring masses?

Yes, we've been going through a lot of late. But life moves on. Baby pictures to follow.

Dangerous cheapness

It's been growing on me lately, as our cost of living has gone down while our standard of living seems to be going up, that free stuff has a sinister side effect. It seems like the perfect win-win situation, the ultimate symbiotic relationship between manufacturer, retailer, and consumer (and can a symbiotic relationship even go three ways? -or is it strictly a two-party deal?): the producer gets name recognition and product awareness, the retailer gets business, the consumer gets free (or cheap) stuff.

But ponder a little while (and I am willing to ponder anything late enough at night) and it becomes apparent how the ready availability of free stuff can erode morale. It's a known fact, of course, that we prize highly that which costs us dearly. Scarcity, or even the appearance of scarcity, causes us to hoard resources, while abundance encourages us to live it up. And even my efficient nature is struggling against the impulse to grow callous and lax in the face of apparent plenty. It's becoming harder and harder to wrestle with extracting the last few dregs of toothpaste from the tube when there are two dozen fresh tubes in the drawer, and last week I tossed out half a spoiled loaf of bread with far less gnashing of teeth than would have occurred if it hadn't been free to begin with.

There are a couple of reasons why I still won't give in and be a totally wasteful consumer. For one, I'm not sure how long this spate of feasting will last - I keep thinking that the deals must dry up sooner or later - and I don't want to have gotten too comfortable at an unsustainably high standard of living when reality sets in again. For another - well, I still don't like wasting things, even if wasting free stuff hurts me less. That's just my personality, and quite possibly those feelings would erode entirely given enough time - many people seem to have no qualms about tossing away things which cost them little effort to acquire.

I wonder whether this is an attitude that we're seeing challenged and shaken up by the recent climb in grocery prices. Perhaps American consumers were getting too spoiled by low prices of
cheap goods, and that had a lot to do with the wasteful consumerist mentality that ran so rampant. So is this rise in gasoline and milk prices really a blessing in disguise? An unwanted lesson in character development?

I've also been re-thinking a lot of my opinions on the importance of maintaining a low cost for goods and services. Well, my evolving opinion on Wal-mart is a post for another day, but in short, I've come to see the value of high-priced, quality merchandise. As Ma Ingalls would say, 'Enough is as good as a feast.' All other things being equal, and in a free market where the end price is a natural result of supply and demand, why shouldn't it be just as good to spend a given amount of money on fewer but higher-quality food items that will all get eaten, as to spend the same amount on far more stuff half of which ends up going to waste?

(I had to toss in the remark about the free market as an expression of my irritation at the ongoing farm subsidies, which make corn syrup so cheap to produce and hence so readily available. So now cheap and deadly high-fructose corn syrup is in everything, but it's an artificial construct, because it really wouldn't be that cheap otherwise.)

Reflections

Ten years ago this year I left Oregon.

My oldest younger brother, now twenty, was ten when we left. That means that he's spent half his life in Oregon and half in Virginia. The others, still younger, have spent most of their lives in Virginia. For some of them, Oregon - my childhood home and all my growing-up memories - is but a distant memory.

The children I used to babysit are now old enough to babysit my children.

And here's the real kicker: as of next month, I will have lived as long in Georgia as I ever lived in Virginia!!