Saturday, July 30, 2011

The Books are Here!

Our books have arrived! Well, almost all of them are here. I’m still waiting on one backordered item. But what a relief it is to be done.

I’m usually really excited whenever books arrive, but as the kids get older, I just get more anxious. More books mean more clutter, and very often, more work for me. I think the one item that’s been inducing more than a little of this anxiety is this bad boy right here…


I’m consoling myself with reminders that Korean is said to be one of the easiest Asian languages to learn. I hope that’s true! E’s enthusiasm over all things Korean has kind of spread on to her siblings, so now they’re all clamoring for it. I searched and searched, and this program seemed to have gotten the best reviews. Fingers crossed that it’s a good fit for us! While E is certainly old enough and motivated enough to wade through it on her own, I’m not so sure the younger two are, so it looks like I’m in on this one as well. Yikes!

Here are some other shots of our book booty.

We’ve got Euclid’s Elements. Under that somewhere is the Art of Argument, and some other goodies.

Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, a book with tips on how to improve study habits…

Lots and lots of stuff. I could really use a few extra bookshelves!

Weakness Leaving the Body


Yep, that's me. That photo was actually taken several months ago, shortly after having earned our orange sashes. And now just last weekend, we all earned our blue sashes. It feels like it's all going by so quickly.

The benefits have been many. For starters, I've lost twenty pounds! I was kind of disappointed for a while there, as I seemed to plateau with the weight loss, but I know that I'm also building muscle, so I'm trying not to get too discouraged.

Some other benefits...

My breathing. I think the tai chi especially has helped with that. I feel that the deep, steady breathing has increased my lung capacity. Obviously, I can't say for certain that this is the case, only that it certainly feels as if it is.

My strength. I just generally feel stronger. You know that heaviness you feel when you're getting out of a pool? Well, I used to experience something similar to that just going up steps and getting out of bed in the morning. I can't remember the last time I've felt that.

My back. For about a year or two before starting Kung Fu, I experienced mild, intermittent lower back pain. This kind of freaked me out, because back problems seem to run in my family. Up until I started feeling the aches myself, I thought I had been spared. When I started Kung Fu, the pain just gradually dissipated. It got to the point that I had completely forgotten I had ever had it, that is until I got sick and missed an entire month of training. It's alarming how quickly one can fall out of shape. When the aches came back, I realized just how much I had improved with the Kung Fu, and it kind of renewed my resolve to stick with it.

My stamina. It hadn't occurred to me how this had changed until I spoke to someone else, who expressed disbelief over my having taken several back-to-back classes. It was a Saturday, and we had all taken a record five classes, four of which were taken in a row. We're usually at the school all day on Saturdays, so it just makes sense to take advantage of all of the available classes while there. It didn't register with me at the time however, that just one short year ago, I had trouble making it through just a third of a single class. Progress!

And last but not least, I can't articulate how fun it is to be involved in all of this with my family. Really, I never even fathomed our finding one common activity we would all enjoy this much, especially now that the kids are getting older, and that their interests and hobbies have become so varied. We always have willing practice partners, so that's just an added bonus. Because we're able to practice so much, I really feel we're all getting the most of this experience. And while our tiny apartment is over-run with sparring gear and practice weapons (five of everything!), it's been more than worth it.

Friday, July 29, 2011

“Give Me an Occupation, Miss Dashwood!” or Chasing That Sense of Purpose

I know I've written before about how unstructured days can be very productive, particularly from a homeschooling standpoint. I still believe this to be true, and it’s one of the things I really love and appreciate about home education. But I am the product of traditional schooling, and a post-school nine-to-five mentality. I still struggle with scheduling and find that too many unstructured days, at least for me, can be deleterious to my emotional health. Yes, it's true. Note that I'm speaking for myself here. I'm not attempting to make a broad statement that I find relevant for everyone. I get depressed and even moody when I have loads of open time laid out before me. But I don’t mean to suggest that over-scheduling is the answer either. It requires more of a shift in paradigm—a redefining of purpose. At times it’s almost as if I’m waiting for someone more knowledgeable than myself to come in and give me a task to fulfill. This reminds me of that line from the film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, when Colonel Brandon implores, “Give me an occupation, Miss Dashwood, or I shall run mad.” Yeah, that’s not too far off from the truth. I sometimes think it’s a remnant side effect of having been traditionally schooled my whole life. At school, I was given an assignment, and my task was to complete it. There was nothing to puzzle out for myself there. My purpose was clear. It was to impress my teacher and please my parents. And I did it consistently all school year long, every year for fifteen years. I kept busy, then came the first day of summer vacation, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I went from super structured days, to nothing. It became an annual withdrawal ritual. These periods were almost always followed by intensive bouts of depressive frustration.

I think that as a child, I experienced this sort of thing more often than my own children ever have. Going from periods of highly structured time to highly unstructured time was the norm for me. My parents couldn't afford summer camps, so they were unable to recreate the same level of structure and activity I'd get accustomed to every year at school. There were no activities, or family vacations (other than two vacations to Florida when I was in my teens). The beginning of every summer was met with this seasonal bout of frustration. And by the time I had gotten past the frustration, and had regained a sense of purpose, one I had come up with all on my own, without the framework of school to guide me, it was already time to return to school in the fall. Then another period of re-assimilation would ensue, also often met with the same sort of infernal depressive frustration, but in reverse. As weird as it sounds, I think that after so many years, I've been inexorably programmed to still go through these phases every year. I find myself in the same predicament at the start of every summer, and then again at the start of every fall. Weird indeed, and I've tried to explain this phenomenon year after year, and this is all I can come up with. Only now, it’s more like a phantom frustration, as there’s really no “structure” from which to detox, or re-assimilate. Our levels of structure don’t fluctuate so greatly as to warrant any of it, so it’s all especially odd. Some people get seasonal depression. I get end-of-school-year and back-to-school depressive episodes. Again, it doesn’t make sense. I’ve been out of school for eighteen years! But old habits die hard.

I have noticed that a lot of parents face this "how-to-keep-the-kids-busy" dilemma at the beginning of every summer. Camp is still an option for those who can afford it, but if not, as was the case with me, the kids will be left to their own devices, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think we’re just programmed to believe that we must stay super busy and super scheduled to be happy, and we've carried this over to our children. Some of us even mistake “busy-ness” with purpose. But they are not one and the same. There are studies showing that many people die shortly after reaching retirement age. Perhaps to several of these people, a job, or any such externally structured lifestyle that keeps them busy, is synonymous with purpose. Lose your job, and lose your purpose. How awful is that? I don’t want that for myself, or for my children. So what if you're bored for a little while. It's good practice to wade through these down times. Eventually, it will act as the impetus to try new things, and you may discover new interests that were drowned out by all of the noise of the busy-ness around you.

Come to think of it, I do believe it all comes down to noise. We're seduced by it. And there’s a lot of it out there. Lots of bells and whistles. And when the silence of down time hits, it makes us feel uncomfortable. We don’t know what to do with ourselves. My catechist, years ago, told me that when silence rears its ugly head, it’s God telling us to spend that time prayerfully contemplating our purpose in life. She didn’t suggest running out of the house, looking for external things to do to keep me busy. Those things are just band-aids. And while I'm sure she was speaking of purpose in a spiritual sense, I think what she said applies to many areas in life. But yes, ultimately, it is all spiritual. What keeps us engaged and happy often adds to our spiritual well-being, so I'm of the belief that if you can address your spiritual needs first, all else will follow. And the ability to sit in silence with yourself, is no easy task. There's sort of an ascetic quality to it, I find. It's easy for our minds to wander, and the chatter continues, only this time it's inside our heads. I know that my mind immediately goes into listing things I either need to do, or should do. It's seldom just open to the silence. Trappist monks observe long periods of silence, foregoing all idle chatter. They surely do speak, but all their speech is purposeful. Can you imagine that? Oh, to have that level of spiritual refinement. To be at peace in silence. Now that's something I'd welcome right about now.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Sick of It

It was pretty late last night when we got out of our Kung Fu classes, and we had just missed going to Trader Joe’s by a few minutes. We LOVE Trader Joe’s, and decided a while ago that it was to be our regular go-to spot for nearly all of our food shopping. We still head out to Whole Foods from time to time, to pick up some of their bulk grains and legumes, and the occasional bottle of kombucha, but aside from those few items, we still prefer Trader Joe’s for everything else. It’s much more reasonable, especially compared to Whole Foods. It does my heart good to read their labels and not see a laundry list of ingredients we can’t pronounce—primarily icky dyes, additives, and preservatives.

But TJ’s was closed last night, and I needed to go food shopping. I had only a few ingredients on-hand, but not everything necessary to prepare a complete meal. “Not a problem,” I thought, “we’ll just go to the regular supermarket.” Oh, but what a nightmare experience that turned out to be! Not only was there no organic produce, the regular produce was exorbitantly priced. The two aisles devoted to healthy alternatives were just awful, too. I mean, their products were just fine, but they were marked up so much, it was ridiculous. One gluten free cereal we usually purchase at TJ’s was a whole $2 more expensive there. I figured we’d try our luck elsewhere in the store. By then I had already given up on purchasing anything aside from what I had been craving all day—potato salad. Generally, I would prefer to make it myself, but with the lack of organic options available at the store, I was dangerously close to just caving and buying a little container of the premade stuff, just to tide me over. Frankly, I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t tend to think clearly when I’m craving something as intensely as I was then. So yeah, I was dangerously close to succumbing, but only until I took one look at the ingredient label, listing items such as high fructose corn syrup and sodium benzoate. And those were only the couple I recognized and remember at this writing.

And frankly, those ingredients were bad enough, with HFCS increasing risks of obesity, diabetes, and liver damage, and the Sodium Benzoate being a potential carcinogen, causing an increase in free radicals all on its own, and a proven carcinogen when combined with ascorbic acid (Vitamin C). Considering this, it’s ridiculous that Sodium Benzoate is added as a preservative to many fruit juices, jams, and jellies—foods more apt to contain ascorbic acid, and products often marketed to children. Also on its own, Sodium Benzoate has been shown to contribute to mitochondrial damage, causing neuro-degenerative diseases—Parkinson’s is one. It’s also been implicated in ADHD.

This kind of stuff pisses me off so much. Actually, I’m holding back here. It more than pisses me off. This is the stuff that keeps me up at night. I keep thinking of children developing ADHD or any other condition, and then having some doctor diagnose them, and insist on their taking medications that can lead to other health problems. It’s such a HUGE freaking domino effect of awfulness. And we’re doing this to them. And the FDA allows it. It’s absolutely disgusting, and a social justice issue that needs addressing BIG time.