Meme: 5 things
Feb. 19th, 2009 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ailbheFrom ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
biascut:
1. autodidacti ... cism (I keep getting to the end of this word and getting stuck!)
2. your-children-not-being-you
3. having lots of sisters
4. decorating
5. community
Autodidacti... cism
I had to look this up in Wikipedia to make sure I had a starting point, because truly it is all things to all men. In a nutshell, I think people are very good at learning the stuff they want to learn, either because they enjoy learning it or because learning it will help them achieve something they actually want to do, and that coercive learning isn't necessary and might in fact be counterproductive. I started writing a Home Edding Ed Phil a while ago but never redrafted it; I am still interested in comments on it.
For me, a lot of what's needed to let my children do this is to hurry up and wait. So I like the ellipsis in the middle of the word as given to me.
my-children-not-being-me
They're not me in several different ways. They are unlike me, in that they think differently and respond differently and have different interests and desires and aptitudes (though actually Linnea is very like me in several ways, but that's beside the point). They are not me and therefore I cannot live vicariously through them - I can't make up for the bits missing from my life by making sure they have them, especially if they don't want them. I'm better off living vicariously through my friends real and fictional (Y HALO THAR BUJOLD).
It's plain to me that I am not my children - there's more to me than my relationships with them, little though that may be apparent to the gentle reader - and that they are not me. We're not even symbionts. They are not anyone else either. They are just themselves. I can't see how to go into this in more depth without repeating myself, but I'm happy to answer specific questions you might have on the topic.
having lots of sisters
I'm not sure - in many ways I only had one sister, because there was 1966D, 1967O, 1969G 1978Me, and 1981N, and because of the nine-year age-gap and the fact that in my family we leave home as soon as ever we're able, at least until after the parental separation, I hardly knew my older sisters. In some ways I still hardly know them. There has been a lot of Family Politicks, so now we're trying, as adults aged 40+ to 28, to create some sort of family feeling. I'm not feelin' it, mostly, which is sad. I think my older sisters feel more of it, because they were a more cohesive unit (much less isolated as children, had neighbours locally to play with, did things together a bit in spite of normal sisterly killing-each-other stuff) and felt more connection to us as babies than I did to them as great big girls so much older than me.
One thing about it is that I never had any idea that girls couldn't do stuff, growing up. I knew that the outside world thought girls weren't supposed to do some things, but also that this was nonsense. Even my father didn't limit us to gender stereotypes as children, which might have happened had there been sons involved.
I do find that women who had no sisters, especially women with brothers, can have some peculiar ideas about what sisters might be like.
I kinda hope my daughters will be more sisterly than my sisters and I are.
And maybe one day my sisters and I will be, too. (Let's talk about Assigned Familial Roles another day).
decorating
I like decorating. My mother loves it. But it costs money.
One of the things that's making it hard for me to decorate, now, is that the house is full of stuff we don't want and didn't choose - stuff we bought from necessity or because we couldn't justify the expense of what we really wanted, or gifts. I have some great ideas and some total failures, and several half-executed great ideas which therefore look like total failures.
I like doing things I haven't seen other people do.
We really, really need to build custom-fitted wall-mounted shelving for the front room. It's orange walls with some navy blue shelves and curtains and windowseat, now, and dark green wing chair and wing-sofa. We call it the Library. And I was scanning in book covers to hang on the walls in the gaps between shelves, at one point, but Rob gave the scanner away because my PC crashed, so that was that - I might finish the project sometime. There's a Rothko print on the wall which I spotted in Tesco and Rob bought for me because the colours went so well - some people have thought we decorated the room to match the print. The mishmash of hasty unfitting unpainted shelving on the other walls really ruins the look of the room, though. Which is a shame.
The master bedroom was lovely too before it filled up with junk and children drew on the walls and we painted over with unmatching paint.
Decluttering is my interior decor statement of 2009. Great things may ensue.
community
I find they have to be made, tapped into, and maintained. It's very hard work for me because I'm actually, and I wish people would stop assuming that just because I can act as though this isn't true it's not true, very shy. I think precisely because it's such hard work I take it very seriously, and the effort I put into making myself known and useful within real-life local communities has really, really paid off, and I'm glad of it.
I didn't grow up as part of a community in any sense I can think of; most of the time I didn't even have access to one, and when I did I was fairly firmly in the misfit box. Until I found Fibbers et al, when we were all SO WEIRD AND MAD misfits together, in black velvet. That's a simplification, obv.
I really, really want my children to grow up with a choice of communities around - and we are involved in some local ones and some online ones, so it should be doable. Neither of them is as shy as I am or as introverted as Rob is (he's not shy at all, just introverted). I'd like them to have that sense of belonging and acceptance and shared effort and shared ideals and mores.
Fake it til you make it, I suppose.
biascut:1. autodidacti ... cism (I keep getting to the end of this word and getting stuck!)
2. your-children-not-being-you
3. having lots of sisters
4. decorating
5. community
Autodidacti... cism
I had to look this up in Wikipedia to make sure I had a starting point, because truly it is all things to all men. In a nutshell, I think people are very good at learning the stuff they want to learn, either because they enjoy learning it or because learning it will help them achieve something they actually want to do, and that coercive learning isn't necessary and might in fact be counterproductive. I started writing a Home Edding Ed Phil a while ago but never redrafted it; I am still interested in comments on it.
For me, a lot of what's needed to let my children do this is to hurry up and wait. So I like the ellipsis in the middle of the word as given to me.
my-children-not-being-me
They're not me in several different ways. They are unlike me, in that they think differently and respond differently and have different interests and desires and aptitudes (though actually Linnea is very like me in several ways, but that's beside the point). They are not me and therefore I cannot live vicariously through them - I can't make up for the bits missing from my life by making sure they have them, especially if they don't want them. I'm better off living vicariously through my friends real and fictional (Y HALO THAR BUJOLD).
It's plain to me that I am not my children - there's more to me than my relationships with them, little though that may be apparent to the gentle reader - and that they are not me. We're not even symbionts. They are not anyone else either. They are just themselves. I can't see how to go into this in more depth without repeating myself, but I'm happy to answer specific questions you might have on the topic.
having lots of sisters
I'm not sure - in many ways I only had one sister, because there was 1966D, 1967O, 1969G 1978Me, and 1981N, and because of the nine-year age-gap and the fact that in my family we leave home as soon as ever we're able, at least until after the parental separation, I hardly knew my older sisters. In some ways I still hardly know them. There has been a lot of Family Politicks, so now we're trying, as adults aged 40+ to 28, to create some sort of family feeling. I'm not feelin' it, mostly, which is sad. I think my older sisters feel more of it, because they were a more cohesive unit (much less isolated as children, had neighbours locally to play with, did things together a bit in spite of normal sisterly killing-each-other stuff) and felt more connection to us as babies than I did to them as great big girls so much older than me.
One thing about it is that I never had any idea that girls couldn't do stuff, growing up. I knew that the outside world thought girls weren't supposed to do some things, but also that this was nonsense. Even my father didn't limit us to gender stereotypes as children, which might have happened had there been sons involved.
I do find that women who had no sisters, especially women with brothers, can have some peculiar ideas about what sisters might be like.
I kinda hope my daughters will be more sisterly than my sisters and I are.
And maybe one day my sisters and I will be, too. (Let's talk about Assigned Familial Roles another day).
decorating
I like decorating. My mother loves it. But it costs money.
One of the things that's making it hard for me to decorate, now, is that the house is full of stuff we don't want and didn't choose - stuff we bought from necessity or because we couldn't justify the expense of what we really wanted, or gifts. I have some great ideas and some total failures, and several half-executed great ideas which therefore look like total failures.
I like doing things I haven't seen other people do.
We really, really need to build custom-fitted wall-mounted shelving for the front room. It's orange walls with some navy blue shelves and curtains and windowseat, now, and dark green wing chair and wing-sofa. We call it the Library. And I was scanning in book covers to hang on the walls in the gaps between shelves, at one point, but Rob gave the scanner away because my PC crashed, so that was that - I might finish the project sometime. There's a Rothko print on the wall which I spotted in Tesco and Rob bought for me because the colours went so well - some people have thought we decorated the room to match the print. The mishmash of hasty unfitting unpainted shelving on the other walls really ruins the look of the room, though. Which is a shame.
The master bedroom was lovely too before it filled up with junk and children drew on the walls and we painted over with unmatching paint.
Decluttering is my interior decor statement of 2009. Great things may ensue.
community
I find they have to be made, tapped into, and maintained. It's very hard work for me because I'm actually, and I wish people would stop assuming that just because I can act as though this isn't true it's not true, very shy. I think precisely because it's such hard work I take it very seriously, and the effort I put into making myself known and useful within real-life local communities has really, really paid off, and I'm glad of it.
I didn't grow up as part of a community in any sense I can think of; most of the time I didn't even have access to one, and when I did I was fairly firmly in the misfit box. Until I found Fibbers et al, when we were all SO WEIRD AND MAD misfits together, in black velvet. That's a simplification, obv.
I really, really want my children to grow up with a choice of communities around - and we are involved in some local ones and some online ones, so it should be doable. Neither of them is as shy as I am or as introverted as Rob is (he's not shy at all, just introverted). I'd like them to have that sense of belonging and acceptance and shared effort and shared ideals and mores.
Fake it til you make it, I suppose.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
community
Date: 2009-02-20 01:22 am (UTC)wow. I could have written that. especially here (relatively small part of the ex-pat community), I really need to build and nurture community. if I don't do it (with a couple of other women I know here, and have roped in) there would be no community.
i hope my/our efforts pay off too.
Re: community
Date: 2009-02-20 01:28 pm (UTC)Making them singlehanded is incredibly hard.
Re: community
Date: 2009-02-20 04:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 03:28 am (UTC)(You don't have to give me a set. I just wanted to say something along the lines of "this is very interesting.")
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 08:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 01:24 pm (UTC)Thank you!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 02:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 04:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 05:05 pm (UTC)The SANE website is the place to check for Linux compatibility.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 05:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 10:12 am (UTC)Oh, good grief! How very true is this? And how long did it take me, with 5 sons (aged between 41 and 24) to learn this?
I wish I could have had your profound insight into 'my-children-not-being-me'-ness all those years ago! :-(
Kudos!
Elaine
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 10:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 01:26 pm (UTC)1. Well-travelled parochialism
2. Feminism
3. Smoking
4. Spine-growing
5. Femininity
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 05:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 05:30 pm (UTC)I didn't ask for clarification on any of mine. I think you just cheated. And I helped you. Poot.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 05:33 pm (UTC):P
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 07:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 01:55 pm (UTC)Caring
Hearts
Cars
Chaos
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 07:23 pm (UTC)As a woman with brothers but no sisters, I have no idea what sisters are like. When I was little, I said to my mother that I would like a sister, and she said "No you wouldn't; sisters fight all the time." (And she was speaking from experience as she had six sisters.) Since my brothers and I fought all the time, I couldn't see a difference. Now I have no idea what having a sister would be like.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 01:55 pm (UTC)Linnea and Emer are finding out though.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 10:47 pm (UTC)Can you spare five things for me, pls?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-23 12:59 pm (UTC)privilege (these two may be related)
perfectionism (which may be the opposite of confidence)
art
being really clever