Butterfly Mind

Chocolate and chili

August 19th, 2015

I’m ready for summer to be over. I’m tired of being hot. And since we don’t have anything planted yet, I’m tired of being overrun with weeds without even having a pretty garden to weed for.

Plus I want the season to change to fall. We’ve seen and felt our house in summer, with green everywhere outside, and birds chirping, and ceiling fans and air conditioning.

Now I want to see the leaves color to gold and red, and the squirrels to gather acorns, and I want to throw the windows open and smell the crisp air rush in. I want to hear the rustle of dry leaves in autumn winds, and know that they herald winter.

And we will stack wood, and make chili to warm ourselves on fall nights. I can start the crock pot in the morning, and in the evening make cornbread while our kids are at sports. When they return from the pool and the turf, they’ll change into jammies, and we will eat steaming bowls of spiced beans that will warm us from the inside out. Night will come early, and the windows will be black before 7:00 pm. We will light a fire and it will crackle, and we will drink hot chocolate while we play scrabble on the warm hardwood floors. My husband and I will pour Baileys in our hot cocoa, and we will be cozy.

I’m ready for summer to be over. I’m ready for fall to begin.

Thank you to Fabulousness Unleashed for the prompt “Chocolate and chili” (though upon re-reading her prompt I see that it says “Chocolate and chill.” Oops.)
August soccer

August 18th, 2015

The SUV stinks of sour shin guards and sweaty soccer jerseys. The boys are splayed on the seats and the floor in the back, napping between games at the tournament while we sit in the parking spot, trying to cool off. I look over at the mom my son and I are carpooling with, and she smiles slyly. She she digs around in the console, then pulls a new air freshener out of a package. Spent fresheners litter the cup holder area. She pulls the old one out and clips a fresh one on the air conditioner vent, and we aim them at our noses to try to clear the stench. It doesn’t work.

I expected stinky diapers. But when planning for children, I didn’t really think beyond the small years, when of course there would be spit-up and pee and vomit and poop. I didn’t think about foul feet and smelly soccer socks. When I glance back at the boys in the back, I expect to see stink waves coming off of them like in the cartoons.

All day sweat has dripped in rivulets between my shoulder blades and down my chest. My bra has gained 2 lbs from the perspiration, and it’s smeared with suntan lotion to boot. This thing, and our son’s shin guards, are going straight into bins of soapy water when we get home. When he pulled his uniform over head this morning, after wearing it in two games yesterday in sweltering August heat, our son squenched up his nose and said, “This doesn’t smell very good.” I guess we could have looked for laundry facilities in the hotel. Oh well. Maybe next time. But probably not.

I don’t know how the boys play in sun and in this heat. Back out on the sidelines I sit with my arms and legs out, making sure no part is touching any other part. Even in the shade, sitting still, I feel vulnerable to heat stroke. And there our sons run in the sun and sweltering heat without even hats or sunglasses. Their red faces give the strain away. The beads of wet on their upper lips give the strain away.

The sour stench of boys in the back seat gives the strain away. And they are only 11. How will August soccer weekends smell when they are almost men?
Barred window

August 17th, 2015

Cool window, Winston Salem, North Carlina

Our son and I took a walk Sunday morning in downtown Winston Salem, North Carolina. We stumbled across an outdoor amphitheater, where ruffians slept off their hangovers on the stepped seating in the sun.

Nearby was a brick building that our son and I explored the exterior of. I loved the creative way the windows were protected from mischief, with sculpture instead of bars.
Buying guide for pillows

August 16th, 2015

A coworker, Elizabeth, posted once about how difficult it was to buy herself a Nice Thing that wasn’t food or alcohol, and that didn’t require a substantial outlay of effort to maintain or support the Nice Thing. She finally found something, though – an indulgence that truly worked out for herself that she didn’t regret later or think, Why did I bring this thing into my life?

Her purchase? A pillow. A pillow that she loved so much, it inspired an entire blog post.

I am jealous of her pillow. She adored this pillow. Though she didn’t go into details about the things I’m about to write, I have filled them in based on my imagined perfection of this pillow. It was just the right firmness, had just the right fluff. It gave enough for her comfort, so it wasn’t like laying her head on a stack of newspapers, and it wasn’t so soft that her head sank all the way through the down to her bed, with pillow closing in on either side of her face.

I have not found a pillow that I love so well. Our pillows are like the bears’ beds in Goldilocks. One is too hard, one is too soft — only there’s not an option that’s just right.

I want to find the one that’s just right.

When we shop for pillows, I never know how to buy, how to test, what to look for in a pillow. I’m probably looking in the wrong place. Maybe Target isn’t the best venue to search for the perfect pillow. I remember buying a pillow once from JC Penney, and rather than displaying pillows with a bed nearby to test them on, the pillows were packed in plastic bags and stacked on shelves or tossed in a wire cage like beach balls at the grocery store in summer. I picked them up and listened to plastic rustle as I squished the pillows between my hands.

But what does squishing a plastic covered pillow between my hands tell me about how the pillow is going to feel against my ear? How the down is going to poof under my head? Whether my neck is going to hurt in the morning.

I need to lay my head on the pillows, and lay my body on a bed. I need to test the pillow. How do I choose? How do I know what kind of pillow will work for me? I need a buying guide for pillows.

Thanks to LRose for the “buying guide for pillows” writing prompt.
Practice makes progress

August 15th, 2015

I’m dusty. After my #aprildaily burst, when I posted a ten-minute write every day during the month of April, I fell off the writing wagon. I’ve been lying on the side of the road ever since.

This week, I creaked and groaned to a standing position. I brushed the dirt off my composition book and started scratching words on the crusty pages. Since I started writing again, I’ve been fascinated by how noticeable my lack of practice is. My word choices are vague, I don’t pull thoughts together coherently, I read what I’ve written and think, “Wow, that’s pretty bad.”

But where I previously strived for perfection — I wouldn’t post anything to my blog unless I had proofed and polished and gotten every last word, every last punctuation mark, as close to perfect as my skills would allow — perfection is not my goal anymore. Progress is.

Posting a ten-minute write every day in April was liberating. With a full time job and full time family, I didn’t have time for endless editing, so every day I wrote for ten minutes, then I closed my eyes and hit Publish. My pieces weren’t perfect — far from it — but they got me writing, they got me publishing, and in practicing, I improved. My words came together more gracefully. Pressing Publish became less scary. I wrote fiction for the first time.

While I write non-stop at work, which I LOVE about my job, the writing I do is mainly communicative: helping customers with their WordPress.com sites, joking around with coworkers, and conveying information across the company via internal blogs. This week, I found myself needing to write more creative type pieces — a pitch for a conference I’m helping organize, a blurb for a WordCamp speaker application. I needed to get my mind in that imaginative place: I needed to start free-writing again.

So I did. I started ten-minute writes again this week. Most of them weren’t great, and I thank you for bearing with my brain dump yesterday. However, whereas “Wow, that’s bad” writing used to make me feel awful about myself, this week I feel awesome. I feel awesome because even if the words aren’t perfect, my creative juices are flowing again.

I’m shaking off the dust. I’m loosening up my joints. And best of all, the free writes not only helped me write two pitches that I feel good about, but I’m writing again. I don’t need to be perfect. I just want to practice — and progress.
Half-full

August 14th, 2015

I’m reading Stumbling on Happiness for my work as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, and from it I have finally learned the truth about lobotomy. In books and movies, lobotomies are this scary thing that removes all brain function and turns people into vegetables. One of my favorite novels involves lobotomy, but I won’t name the book because naming it in combination with talking about lobotomy would give away its secret sauce.

Anyway, the topic I pulled from my prompt box today, “half-full,” got me to thinking about happiness, and whether optimism and pessimism (which the “half-full” idea tries to pin down) play a role in happiness. The author has not mentioned optimism and pessimism yet. He has begun the book with the idea of looking to the future like no other species does. And I don’t mean instinctively “plan,” like animals do when storing food for winter, but cognitively plan: via imagination.

We imagine futures for ourselves, and often imagining those scenarios is more pleasurable than actualizing those scenarios. For example: having a crush. It’s fun to fantasize and daydream. But if a relationship with the crush comes to fruition, reality, with all its flaws, is often not as pleasurable as the dream. This makes me hypothesize that setting low expectations is a key to happiness. We will see what the author says.

On the flip side of the daydream is anxiety. Whereas a daydream sets the future in a golden light, anxiety is when we foresee dangerous or frightening events. Like fantasizing good things, imagining bad things is controlled by the area of the brain responsible for imagining the future: the frontal lobe. The portion of the brain removed in lobotomies.

Lobotomies fascinate me. In large part because of that novel I won’t name. I’ve always thought they turn a person into a non-functioning walking coma. But they don’t. Lobotomized patients function normally in every way — except when it comes to thinking about the future. At least according to this book I’m reading.

The frontal lobe of the human brain is the portion of the brain that has grown most rapidly in our species’ recent evolution, and it is the portion that differentiates human brains from those of other animal species. Because it controls our ability to imagine and and plan — and therefore is the portion of the brain that is responsible for anxiety — when removed, anxiety disappears.

And so does the ability to daydream.

Thank you rinadiane for submitting the prompt “half-full (as opposed to half-empty).”

Photo credit: “Turning the Mind Inside Out” Saturday Evening Post, 24 May 1941.

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Chocolate and chili

August soccer

Barred window

Buying guide for pillows

Practice makes progress

Half-full