ramble on (again)

i'm cutting back on caffeine this week...green tea in the mornings instead of my usual half caff coffee. so this may be more pessimistic than i really think i feel. but there are so many things bumping around in my head that i promised myself last night i'd get up and blog this morning.

i'm going to do this ala lanatron...

homeschooling... our co-op is on. and i'm excited about it. but i have less than a month to prepare for it, and i'm a little nervous, i guess. i am really grateful for the opportunities it's providing for my kids and their journeys. i was getting kind of worn out trying to meet all of their needs educationally, particularly since little bit is five today and starting "kindergarten" and going to have his own needs to be met. (well, he always did, i realize, but now he's ready to really be a part of things, you know?)

i waver a lot between believing that my guys are where they need to be and anxiety about what if i die and will they transition well to school? ok, i don't really worry about dying. but i do worry if they're "measuring up"...but then i remind myself about the yardstick they're being measured against and, while i don't embrace it totally, i can't deny is the pervasive yardstick. so while i'm feeling good about things, it is that time of year where, as i prepare for next year, i can't seem to help but reexamine all the reasons i do this and make sure my guiding principles are still working for us. which is a good thing, i realize, but not so very productive when you have these syllabuses (spellcheck says it's not syllabi...) to be creating, so is also kind of stressful.

intimacy... i think this is what was captivating me in those vampire books. meyers has a pretty terrific hand at capturing the energy of intimacy with her words. and the books are clean...none of the usual bloodbath/orgy typical of vampire books. i mean, they aren't blood-less or sex-less, but she focuses more on the energy of things than the mechanics.

anyway... i mentioned my almost fourteen year old was reading these. and we talked a little about how she captures the feelings involved in sex without describing the details of it. (we also mentioned that the characters didn't actually do it until they were married...i'm sorry, i couldn't help myself, i am a mother now...) but it's kind of weird to think of my teen reading something that i felt was pretty heavily threaded with such intimate energy... partly because i know he is craving it, whether or not he thinks of it that way. partly because i don't always know how to meet my own needs for intimacy. there's just so many different ways to do it... like parenting (myself?), where you have so many options available, you often fall into a rut of a few different things, getting frustrated when they don't work completely, forgetting how many different ways there are of doing things, looking at things, shifting things... i know i'm getting vague here. but it's mostly because i'm trying to say what i mean without listing all the things i don't mean...and it seems that's about all i have on this one.

mystery... since i was talking about parenting and since i think it's a part of intimacy, too... this is another aspect of life i've been thinking about a lot. i'll be thinking about stuff, life, whatnot...and working through my thoughts...and there is often this feeling like i should be able to figure something out...arrive at some definite conclusion, answer, life lesson. but lately, it often comes down to the fact that there is just some mystery to life, things i am not meant to understand in my head and that i need to work on my confidence in understanding in my heart. and while i feel frustrated when i bump into this mystery sometimes, i know i wouldn't wish the world to be different. ok, well, there are some things i would probably wish different...and regret later...but the mystery part? no...i wouldn't wish that away.

oh! and politics....but really, it's the internet... my mother has been sending me these anti-obama emails lately. not like personally written emails, imploring me to turn away from the dark democrats, but forwards....and i rarely read forwards to begin with, but i find political forwards particularly distasteful. i realize people are passionate about politics. but taking some small fact and turning into something totally irrelevant and barely true just to create a negative emotional response to something, well, it pisses me off. it's fighting dirty. it gets people so stressed and is just a general waste of energy. sheesh. can't we choose one candidate without villainizing the other? but mostly, i just wish my mom would chill out about this stuff or leave me out of it. i finally responded to one of her emails and she almost bit my head off, telling me what a long-standing, proud member of the republican party she is and how rock solid her opinions are...how i'm just sore because hillary didn't get the nomination, but how all the democrats would screw the country up. geez.... i'll hit delete on the rest of her forwards, but why does she have to send them to me in the first place? i get tired of people assuming if you're diplomatic that you aren't passionate, too. but it's fine...i'm working on letting it go...

running... my next half marathon is in november. but my spouse's schedule is funky this month and doesn't leave me much time for training. it's a drag. i think that the energy i am not letting go with running is going to make me a nervous, crazy wreck. but that's just my opinion. i should've run this morning. it was seventy-five degrees here this morning. i don't think we've had a temperature that cool since april or may... and i blew it blogging. well, i also laid on the couch with the sliding glass door open and enjoyed the temperature for a few minutes. i can't wait for fall...

ok...ramble off (again)
peace