live authentically and not conform

I am going to be making some more hard decisions soon on what my next steps in my career will be. I am coming to the realization that I am the type of person that will always be evolving my idea of authentic, fufilling work. There will never be a final answer to “What do I want to be when I grow up?”, because there is no one path that will satisfy me for 30 plus years. (This is in deep contrast to the rest of my life choices, where I tend to find one way and happily stick with it, but I guess that is one of the interesting quirks that makes me myself- monomaniacal about somethings, always wandering and searching about others).

I have a path that I can take starting in January, but I want to make sure that it is the right path for me, and not just the path of least resistance or a path that isn’t authentically me. I have a lot of thinking to do in the next few months, as I decide what direction to move in my career. But I do know this: I am not staying still.

I am using all my courage now to make a decision that is right for me, no matter what other people think. It is scary, and it is a little sad sometimes to take the road less traveled, but it is more important that I live to my own ideas of what is right. This includes compassion for myself for mistakes I made, and realization that it is alright to be a little selfish sometimes. In fact, the will to act a bit selfishly in this instance, and to see the word selfish as a positive, not a negative, is part and parcel of being kind to myself and growing into the person that I want to be.

I will hold onto this courage, and nurture myself through a difficult, but ultimately rewarding decision. My authentic decision that is right for me.

(Did I mention that this takes a hell of a lot of courage? I’m scared. But I know that I am doing what will ultimately help me live authentically, and that is important for me.)

I am continuing my singular campaign for dandelion-filled lawns. Apparently, I am the only person on earth that enjoys dandelions. They are bright, cheerful, yellow flowers that contrast so nicely against a green lawn. And when they mature to spread their seeds, they turn into wish-makers. What’s not to like?

Frogette and I went out on the front lawn last evening, and we picked handfuls of mature dandelions and blew the seeds off, making wishes. Frogette wouldn’t tell me what she wished for, because she said then it wouldn’t come true. One of my wishes was that the neighbors wouldn’t run me out of town for encouraging dandelion growth on my lawn.

I’m at this stupid thing that my boss wants me to do, and it is completely misaligned with my passions and ambitions. I feel so inauthentic now. If my career weren’t at stake, I would walk out. I hate being so inauthentic.

I think that if I was really living with full authenticity, I wouldn’t wear any makeup.

I don’t like taking the extra time to put it on in the morning, and I don’t put it on very well either- I am always concerned if I put on too much or too little, if I have the right color to match my skin, I never touch it up when it needs it, etc.

I don’t even wear a lot of makeup- just face powder makeup to even out my blotchy skin tone, mascara (sometimes), and tinted lip balm.

I should really use liquid foundation for my blotchiness, but it’s too much hassle, and I don’t know how to do it without it looking fake to me.

So part of me would like to just ditch the whole thing, except for this:

1. I secretly worry that my natural face minus makeup would send everyone screaming away from me (only some exaggerated joking here), and

2. I know that my boss and her boss think that without makeup, I don’t look as professional. (I suspect that most people feel that way in the business world.)

And right now, I don’t know if I can take on either of these points. Feeling a little ashamed of myself for not living up to this goal.

As I prepare Frogette to enter the United States educational system, I think more and more that part of me just wants to homeschool her.

I don’t think that this is a viable option for our current family lifestyle, and I actually have a whole host of issues with homeschooling as being unpaid labor that usually falls on the woman, and feel that there should be an alternative to the options of conforming with the stifling, beauracratic public school system and/or depending on a potentially stifling unpaid labor lifestyle.

I don’t think that private school is an option, because while it might be marginally better for Frogette, my civic duty calls me to remain in the democratic public education system and not abandon other children to the stupidity while saving my child.

But I also don’t feel that I will have any effect fighting the deadening, beauracratic nature of the public education system, because it is too entrenched in its own makeup. There are the stupid things like zero tolerance drug rules which then make it a crime to bring a tylenol for school, arbitrary curriculum decisions by the Bush administration that suck all the joy out of learning how to read, the test mentality that reduces all learning to a single (and educationally unreliable) test, etc. And these are really society things, not just school things.

Since I don’t feel I can really go about homeschooling now, I suppose I should just make sure that I am my child’s advocate, and lay down the values at home that I think are important: creativity over fact-memorization, true learning over test scores, decisions based on conscience and morality rather than decisions based on arbitrary authority, etc.

Dandelions are so beautiful- the contrast of their cheerful yellow against the green grass is stunning. But apparently I am the only one on earth that thinks so.

Will I give in to the peer pressure of surburbia and kill the dandelions on my lawn? Will the neighbors come with pitchforks and take me away for ruining their property values? (Dandelions spread like crazy from lawn to lawn.) Stay tuned for the next installment of “Rose Wilder wants to live authentically and not conform”!

Sometimes I wonder. I saw a beautiful woman in Harlem today, wearing a fully beaded, fringed, brightly colored one-piece outfit of the kind that you never see worn on the street. I’m sure she got lots of strange stares, but I thought it was great to look at.

I never wear truly unique clothing, the kind that really deviates from the norm, and although it is not really a goal of mine to start doing so, I did start wondering what my true taste in clothing would be, given the lack of limits with which this woman was comfortable. Do I really know what I like outside society’s standards? While I certainly am not concerned with what is in style or what other people say is fashionable, I don’t really make my clothing choices out of the realm of what others may think either.

If I didn’t worry about appropriating someone else’s culture, I would wear saris. I think they are the most beautiful clothing I have ever seen. But I suspect this might be frowned upon by those who actually wear it.

So now, we have to come up with a name for child two. Husband wishes to name her after his recently departed grandmother, which is fine with me, since she is the in-law that I liked the most. So we need a G name.

But so far, I can’t find many G names that fit the criteria (i.e. simple and reasonably short to match well with our long ethnic surname, and no long i sounds because the surname has one) that I like!

I’ve always loved the name Galit (Hebrew, pronounced Gah-leet), but it seems unfair to give a Chinese baby with Caucasian parents now living in America a Hebrew name.

I kinda like Genevieve, but the poor child would take forever to learn to write such a long name given that her surname is long too, and she would never be able to fit all the letters of her full name on standardized tests

And I liked the name Grace; it satisfied all the above criteria, but now I’ve been told that all the fundamentalists are naming their baby that, so that turns me off big time.

So, people of the internets- I challenge thee:
Given the criteria of simple, not too long, nothing that will clash horribly obviously with her ethnicity (Chinese), starting with a G, and no long i sound (or we might as well name her “I’m a whiner”)-

What should we name baby number two?

Long before husband and I adopted child, we picked out her name. It was my great-grandmother’s name, and the name of my favorite radical/socialist/free-love advocate/labor organizer. It was also simple, a necessity for a transnationally adopted child with our long Jewish surname.

But then that damn TV show Friends named the baby MY baby’s name, and then, like good little sheep, everyone started naming their baby my baby’s name. But it was too late- we had already bonded with the name, and giving it up would be like giving the child up.

So now there are so many children named this name that you can’t spit without landing on one of them. And husband and I look like fools without any originality whatsoever. Damn.