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Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Archives for January 2011

Do I Look Busier to You?

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So I said I was lost in fiction, working on a novel I plan to finish by this summer. This is true. Then I started blogging more here because I have so many words inside me that I need to get out.

I still blog Wednesdays at the Parenting Post because it is for fun.

And starting today I’ll be blogging all education all the time over at Parenting.com’s Mom Congress blog. I love Mom Congress. It’s Parenting’s education advocacy initiative. Each year 51 moms from across the United States are selected to come to Washington, D.C., talk education policy and GET IT DONE. These are strong, powerful women who are passionate about making a difference in education.

I’m really excited to glom on to their hard work and initiative and learn and contribute what I can. If you have any great ideas for topics I can cover in education, I’d love to hear your thoughts. It would also be lovely to have some friendly faces come visit me over there on my first day.

State of the Union – Sure, but do we have the money for that?

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The SOTU always sounds so pretty. Giving all kids the chance to succeed in their education, helping build businesses, constructing new roads, expanding light rail, which in some cases is faster than taking an airplane and doesn’t require pat-downs. (President Obama didn’t have many good one liners last night so little moments like that packed a big punch.)

I liked all of these things. I liked the Chilean miner stuff, the Allen Brothers’ Solar Panel stuff, lots of good things, things that make me happy to ponder upon, things that make me think, “I want to live there. That sounds like a dad-gum awesome country.”

And as much as there have been snickers about Members of Congress sitting together, purposefully integrating the two parties as an ineffectual symbolic gesture, I liked it. I like symbolic gestures. I think they’re a good starting place. When I’m sick and Dan buys me flowers, I know they won’t cure me, unless they’re some stinkin’ special Tangled-style magic flowers, but knowing that he wants to help (or even that he’s willing to help when asked – sometimes I ask for flowers) is comforting to me.

So I say, “Good Job Members of Congress! Thanks for playing a bit nicer last night. Let’s take that ball and run with it. Pretty soon you’ll be giving each other mani-pedis and fixing Social Security together.”

I think my favorite line from President Obama’s speech last night was near the end when he said forcefully, “If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it. I will veto it.”

I turned to Dan and said, “REALLY?!? That is awesome. The President is going to veto all bills with earmarks. Really?!? Doesn’t that mean he’ll veto all bills?” I hope he does and I hope things change but this has the ring of “Read my lips. No new taxes,” to me.

Earmarks and crazy amendments to bills are just the way business is done in Washington. They’re the reason I am very reticent to join a campaign in favor of any bill. It doesn’t matter how awesome the bill looks on the surface, I rarely come out strongly in favor of one because who knows what’s swimming down below?

It may be a bill for better education funding… that also buys a congressman a fleet of ponies, and outlaws the polio vaccine in favor of an over-the-counter polio remedy that some pharmaceutical lobbyist thinks we should be selling more of, and sends all McDonald’s Franchise owners to Disneyland where they will learn how to infuse Big Macs with methamphetamines.

I wish the process could be simplified. For all the talk about helping the average American, they sure make it hard for us to figure out exactly how we’re being helped.

Also, I don’t think we have the money for any of this. I’ll rephrase. I know we don’t have the money for any of this. Did the President just say he was going to find extra money by doing a massive re-org/layoff of departments of the federal government because that’s what it sounded like. That is a good starting place.

Whenever I suggest to Dan that we buy a fleet of ponies or plan a trip to Disneyland (with or without illicit drugs), he asks me if we have the money for that. And I check and then we usually don’t do the thing, although ponies are SOOOO awesome, because we’d have to go into debt.

Going into debt isn’t even the issue right now in our country. We’re trying to slightly lower the amount by which we get deeper in debt every month by a few billion dollars here and there. I can’t even wrap my brain around the immensity of the problem.

I want to plug the entire federal budget into YNAB and then start slashing things, things I like, things I use, things I care about. We don’t have the money for that.

I recently got a call from a political pollster who asked me questions like, “Do you favor a massive increase in taxes or would you rather kill old people?” and “Are you a democrat or do you hate children?” Eventually I just stopped the survey because the options were so ridiculous.

Maybe we just need to wipe out the entire budget and start from scratch. A certain amount of money for old people, a whole bunch for children, throw some money at education, health care, job creation, road construction. Heck, I don’t even mind if you spend a little something to defend our country. But I don’t need a pony until the deficit is gone. I can wait.

Dressing the Part

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dan-tieFor our anniversary this December, I got Dan a bowtie, a real bowtie that you have to tie yourself and that you can pull lose at the end of the day and it hangs down on either side of your neck, a man’s bowtie.

It was my version of giving him anniversary jewelry. Plus I thought it would look hot on him. Plus it reminds me of the beginning sequence of Up, the sequence that makes every woman in America cry her brains out, where the couple grows old together and can never have kids and then (SPOILER ALERT!!) she dies and (DOUBLE SPOILER ALERT!!!) he ends up wearing bowties.

I thought it would be a sweet symbol of my wanting to grow old together with Dan and (SPOILER ALERT!!) eventually die, but mostly just grow old together and he would look all hot and distinguished and such while we were doing it.

He loved the tie but neither of us knew how to tie it and we didn’t take the time to get our YouTube on and figure it out until a couple of weeks ago.

It just so happens that on the Sunday we learned to tie it and he wore it for the first time, they announced in church that he would be the new choir director. He’d never worn a bowtie before and it looked suspiciously like he was wearing it as some sort of uniform for his new job. Little did everyone know, he was wearing it as some sort of uniform for romance.

Then this weekend Laylee and I walked down the hill from our house to buy groceries. I packed some reusable sacks in our little red wagon and we went on our merry way, holding hands and talking with very little carbon footprint.

On the way back up the hill, or as I like to call it, THE CLIFFS OF INSANITY, we got hot and sweaty. We got so hot and sweaty that my lungs nearly exploded and I had to restrain myself from showing Laylee how to dial 911 if I passed out on the side of the road. Let’s just say the wagon was a teensy bit heavier now that it contained 3 gallons of milk, several pounds of produce and a couple of loaves of bread.

I was stopped for one of our many rest breaks and I got to thinking about how the two of us must look, carting our groceries home from market, Laylee’s hair blowing uncombed behind her, our wagon full of organic milk and vegetables in their cloth sacks. “I’m totally playing the role of earth mother today.”

Then I looked down and noticed I was wearing a tie-dyed shirt, a tie-dyed shirt that I made myself with a group of neighbors under a tent outside last summer, all communal-like. The perfect touch.

Sometimes you dress the part without even thinking about it.

Hands as Soft as a Mom

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I got a wicked blister this week from peeling too many potatoes and carrots. Dan says I must have soft delicate computer programmer hands like him. And that’s funny.

The problem is – I am not a computer programmer. I am a mom. Shouldn’t a mom have calloused hands, worn tough from performing good mom-ish works?

This reminds me. It’s about that time of year anyway. I should check to see if the bathrooms need cleaning… and then add that to Laylee’s chore chart.

Lost in Fiction

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Someone asked me recently if I’d gotten lost on Facebook because this blog has been a ghost town the past few months. Twitter and Facebook have changed things for me to some extent.

In some ways I think they bring me closer to the people I care about. In others I think they put a wrench in meaningful communication. I’ll see a tweet about today being the best day ever, accompanied by a picture, only to find out weeks later the blurb on Twitter was meant as a wedding announcement.

I’ll go a week without checking in on Facebook and find I don’t know what’s happening in my friends’ lives. Someone will say, “Oh, you know what’s going on, I put it on Facebook,” and I’ll think, “I’ve seen you three times in the past two weeks and you didn’t even tell me you’d changed jobs because you’d put it in a status update.” Weird.

In the past when I had an interesting little nugget to share, I’d sit down to write the one sentence and it would turn into a 400-word blog post. Now it remains an interesting little nugget, just a few characters long. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. It’s concise.

But no, I haven’t gotten lost on Facebook or Twitter. I’ve gotten lost in fiction. I’m working on a novel that I’m really excited about and I find that I pour all of my writing energy out into imaginary characters whom I love watching come to life on my computer screen.

I’ll keep you posted and I’ll keep blogging. I miss it.

For the past few months when I’ve gotten a bad case of writer’s block on the novel, I’ve just stopped writing and blogging altogether except for my posts over at Parenting.com. Then the longer I go without writing, the more I start to believe it’s because I’ve lost the ability to write at all. Like a castaway living in silence on an island with a volleyball named Wilson, I lose my words.

So my plan is to blog when the fiction world grows too thick to slog through. Whenever I’m not here, you’ll know I’m a step closer to delivering my project. Mom, I’m talking to you. You’re still reading, right?

And yes, this post will appear in my feed on Facebook.