On my WonderWeekly, I wrote about the lure and sparkle of gold stars. We want approval. We crave recognition.

But how much does it really give us? It’s a sort of subtraction stew. The more you get the more you want.

At what point do we…oh, wait..do *I* get over it? i’m trying to get over it.

But I see it in other people and I realize what a trap it is.

This scenario happens so often:

Hey, Jane! I like your hair.

You do? I don’t really like it. Do you think it’s okay?

Or:

Ashley, your house is beautiful! Thank you for having us over.

No, it’s not. I think your house is so much better.

I have started to respond to these ladies, “Do you want me to agree with you? Do you want me to tell you that you are right, that your hair/house/project is crap? Why are you arguing with me? Are you calling me a liar?”

Women seem especially susceptible to this error.

We want to be voted in by the WHOLE group as homecoming queen.

We want to be recognized, stand out of the crowd, and be pointed out as special and extraordinary.

But I’m discovering that the only person who counts when deciding who is special is the self.  I have to tell myself what I have permission to do. I have to tell myself that my hair looks good, and that I have the right to ask for that particular day off or even that salary in the job interview

It counts far more than when someone else give it to me. When I recognize myself, that’s when the gears engage and I can get things rolling.

I dont’ want to be dependent on someone else to believe in myself. It’s time for me to get over that.

I like being appreciated. Who doesnt’ love a compliment? But I have to have my motivation engine inside me, not located somewhere I can’t always get to.

I read a blogpost from a writer who was describing a leap of productivity she had managed to attain.

She had figured out a way to write 10,000 words a day.

Ten Thousand words a day!

WOw. If I could achieve that sort of productivity, I would be able to be a prolific writer.

I had come up with my own ideas about how much a writer could writer. But this woman describes some really practical ways to make it possible to write like crazy.

hm.

Now all I need is to figure out what story I want to tell.

heh. Yes, there is that.

Reading Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

I’ve thought many a time that if I had time to do nothing but write, I would blog the books I’m reading as I read them. My opinions and discoveries in the books change a lot over the course of the reading of them.

Right now little Carol is having a hard time adjusting to life as the wife of a small-town prairie doctor. Her struggle at this moment is having to ask her husband for money every day. Money to EAT.

The lack of freedom and autonomy in such a system leaves me chilled. Here is the reality:

Refrigerators and other food preservation techniques were in their infancy. If one wanted to eat meat for dinner, it had to be purchased that day and eaten that day. Leftovers were very tricky. Not tricky because they were boring and unappealing. Tricky because they might POISON you because they had turned bad overnight.

Credit cards and ATMS were far in the future. The 20s version of credit cards was having the storekeeper keep a tab for you. In Carol’s case, the grocer didn’t give credit. So.

The lovely graciousness of having a servant and a parlour was more than mitigated by having to ASK HER HUSBAND FOR MONEY EVERY DAY.

EVERY DAY.

TO EAT.

And the forward-thinking solution to this degrading dilemma?

The husband should give her an allowance

Oh ladies. Ladies, ladies, ladies. Let us never forget.

less than a year ago, I’d been celebrating my son’s first birthday, and his wife Julie had smiles for him.  He was about to be promoted. THe promotion came and Julie went.

There seemed to be no telling with life. You get lucky, but not everyone agrees that you get to keep your luck.

Julie said she wouldn’t stop him if he wanted to move across the country to be near her and the boy. But it wasn’t his idea of a way to start a new life together-but-not. ‘Come on along! I won’t set the law on you!’

Operations manager of the drugstore, though, he’d had higher hopes for that. Because it was only one step away from store manager, and store manager was the way to go. That was a darn good career.

Operations manager was a lot more responsibility, which meant he had a reason not to go home. Because home wasn’t much to write home about. Heh.

Wasn’t work supposed to be the best part of his life? But here was death in the breakroom.

Of course it had to be my birthday.

I was 25, sucking a marlboro alone in the drugstore breakroom. Can I borrow that lighter? he asked

I handed it over before I looked. But then I saw him. The grim reaper was bumming a smoke. How does a skull smile? I suddenly knew.

“Thanks”

“Mother of God!” I said before I could help myself. I wanted to ask what he was doing there, but as soon as I formed the question I already knew the answer.

“It’s not yet, is it?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ve got years yet.”

My years in armored vehicles during deployment had given me familiarity with this drill. I knew this hooded skeleton.

“THen why are you here?”

He dragged full on the cancer stick. Oh, I guess for him it wouldn’t be. “It’s nice to have a place where I am known and where I know how it’s going to be”

So we were friends now. “But why now? ”

His draped shoulders lifted “It’s your birthday. YOu seemed like you could use the company”

Damn. My life had abandoned him so thoroughly that even death felt sorry for me. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

So, as I’ve written extensively, I’m on a fantasy fiction reading marathon. I finished all those recommended to me from my dear friend, the last of which was the ill-fated Game of Thrones series. That was not satisfying.

So, as that drew to a close, I was just about ready to give it up and go back to the literary writings I have always loved.

But, someone recommended a new series, and I’m ripping through that now.

I feel almost as if I’ve opened a bag of candy corn and I can’t stop the bite-bite-bite.

This one is good though! Not like the horrible George R.R. Martin series!

but as I find myself unable to put down yet another fantasy trilogy…I am reminded of something from long ago.

I was a very young teenager when I discovered Louisa May Alcott. Little Women was the first, but she had quite a few more books. I read them all. Jo’s Boys was not one of the best, I liked Rose in Bloom.

But I remember Jo struggling to become and author, and how she fell in love with a German professor. He told her she was better than just a writer of “sensation” stories.

How was a 14-year-old supposed to decipher that? What in the world are “sensation” stories? I could only assume they were bodice-rippers…but they seemed a little more complicated than that. Plus, Jo was not particularly ‘fast’.

But as I try to make sense of why my literary canon is different from these genre fiction page-turners, I am thinking about Professor Bhaer. I think he might call these fantasy-magical stories beneath Jo’s talent.

Maybe they are.

Not that we must always be striving for our best in every darn moment of every day. Escapism has it’s place for sure.

But I wonder. The other anthology-type reading had more grist to it. More literary vitamins.

I don’t know what dragons have to tell me about facing my everyday moral dilemmas.

My dashboard tells me this will be my 1,318th post.

I have posted a lot of blogposts, haven’t I?

There is a part of me that wants to hurry up and make it to 1500. Maybe I”ll have a littls party on my log when I get there.

I should have commemorative t-shirts

!

HA!

self-promoting t-shirt.

ain’t the internet grand?

okay, that’s a tortured metaphor/pun.

Writers are always talking about “finding your voice”

But I have recently heard about a super cool voice recognition software. This article tells about an author who uses it to writer her romance novels

She’s written a lot of novels.

I am slavering over the idea of spending the many many many hours I drive to compose new works.

Novenber is national novel writing month. Maybe I could turn my commute into the great american novel.

It could be a return of the e e cummings style of writing, no capitals or punctuations. that would be something, alright

I have been discussing the right to be right on this blog for a long time. Since the beginning really.

It’s come up again with a friend in the process of finishing her PhD. Genius Girl and blessed with an honest lucidity of expression.

She is hitting the wall in her study of education. How do we fix the education of young people in America? It’s broken, and we know how to fix it. But we don’t know how to start putting the fix into place.

I talked with her some about the old tropes of this aged blog. Who has the right to be right? Who get to bar the gates to the engine of power, and most importantly, the engine of change?

I think I’ve learned a couple things in the nearly ten years since I started this blog. I hope so. And I think I’ve been looking at that question all the wrong way.

Here’s the facts:”

We are endowed by our Creator with the unalienable Right to be Right.

And in America, we get to be right. We get to pick whatever we want to do, with a limited book of restrictions. Therefore, I have the right to be right.

And I have the right to be wrong.

But that wasn’t really what the Right to be Right is all about. The question implies that someone else has to grant one the right. And what would that granting consist of?

It would be an agreement. “Oh! yes! That’s right!”

If we are talking about buy-in, or agreement, or FOLLOWERS…well…that’s a whole other thing altogether.

It’s really being a leader, then.

Who gave Steve Jobs the right to be right? Nobody. He took it, and he was proved right by getting followers, getting customers.

Who gave Hitler or Ghandi the right to be right? One was far more right than the other. One was far more destructive. But their ability to enact their ideas about what was right was granted them by their followers.

So the right to be right has nothing to do with the ‘correctness’ of an idea.

Don’t we cube-dwellers know that all too well.

it has to do with whether it has popular appeal.

Now we are back to the education system. GirlGenius-PhD-to-be tells me that all the answers have long ago been discovered about how to fix what’s broken. They are safely stored in journals in libraries.

What we don’t have is a machine to get those fixes to the students that need them.

That’s the question:

one hand holds the problem, and all it’s parts

the other hand hold the fix, and all it’s details

How do they meet?

It might be called Middleware. What hardware or software or widget will get those two together?

..I dont’ think that widget is well understood. I have ideas. But I’m not so good at getting popular appeal.

We’ve hit the wall as a culture. We don’t know how to do this part. Not really well.

All the answers lie in plain view.

Across a deep chasm. Where are the bridge builders?

Kindle says in 72% done with A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire.

I’m ready to throw it out the window. I am almost certain that this 5th book in the series is not going to pay back the effort I’ve invested in it. I am almost sure the author is not going to make good on all the stories he began to tell.

SOME authors do. Dickens was famous for it.

But George R.R. Martin is no Dickens.

I may be wrong. I’ve been wrong before. But I am only finishing this book of duty now.