Keep my mind fluid and magical

is actually helping me be MORE fluid and magical in my thoughts!

to do data analysis. Sounds fishy, I know. But statistics requires a lot of flexibility and sometimes just dumb luck. I had a very flexible and lucky afternoon, happily working on a dataset…

would work better with fewer crises!

but not writing much about it. It’s a useful way of being. Sometimes the fluid gets dense, like cold molasses, other times it’s virtual quicksilver. And on those days of perfect clarity, it’s glass (also a fluid).

When I think I’m stuck, I simply need to remember that I’m not. It’s only an illusion.

when I’m explaining the wonders of science to the undergraduates. Who knew undergrad teaching could be such fun? With such a large and captive audience, I feel like I can do anything just to hold their attention….and so I do. It’s like performance art.

Having great difficulty focusing, and moving forward….just as things pile up. It’s been a very demanding week. Hang in, self, and be kind to yourself. It’s not easy to juggle, though it looks easy from the outside….

my mind moves like this—fluid and magical, drifting, alighting on one thing after another. I know there are people who can pray in a structured way, and I admire that, but I can’t do it.

For me, prayer bubbles up insistently from someplace inside me. It is emotion without words, an urgency I can’t express. Maybe I’m afraid to talk directly to God—how could I dare to do this? So I wish hard: please take care of Josh….Boy-child safe…help me focus at work…the war in Iraq…. who is going to run the country…my child in India… please love my parents….please love me.

It’s not very organized, but I feel heard, nonetheless.

I have been meeting with Ex and his New Wife weekly for several weeks now. I go to their house, to make it more convenient for them, and sit in their well-appointed living room (with the grand piano that used to belong in my house), trying not to be distracted by their Stuff.

We talk about how the kids are doing, and an amazing process is developing. It is clear that New Wife is even more upset about the situation with the kids than I am. Small wonder: She has to live with Ex’s not supporting her needs every day.

I suspect that until this reached a crisis, she didn’t feel she could even express her feelings. I seem to have enabled her to do that, and what I see isvirtually every argument Ex and I had.

Briefly, son is misbehaving, not following her rules. She makes an issue of it, and wants Ex to back her up, and Ex responds by having little father-son chats with son. These are low key, and sound much more like a pat on the back than discipline. As if he is explaining how to get along with her, rather than explaining that son did something wrong.

She is confronting him, over and over. He did only about 1/4th of the things he had agreed to do for this week, and she looked at him with a steely eye, and asked him pointedly when he was going to do them.

And as I watched this unfold, I felt profoundly sorry for this well-dressed, pretty, slim woman who replaced me, because she is playing a losing game. Once in a tug of war with him, she will not win. His relationship with his mother was characterized by passive-aggressiveness; he sees women as carbon copies of her mindless interference, no matter how successful and independent we are.

And I realized what a long way I have come, to have made my life separate from his, so that he cannot limit my life anymore. And I would not be in her shoes for all the money in the world. Because I know this man has very little true love to offer. I hope they stay together, for the kids’ sakes, but it doesn’t look good.

Too bad it’s so hard to recognize a guy like this on the front end, when his energy is going into being charming.

are all more possible with rest and an adventure or two. Hurray for London!

I feel so blessed, for what God gave me, for what I didn’t earn. My work, it comes so easily to me, and working with students, I can see that it doesn’t work like that for everyone. I’m blessed with a brain, a good one for my work, one that didn’t get too smushed in my fall after all. And even if I did smush it a little, I think the ability to design research and analytic methods is now in my brainstem, not my frontal lobes (any more).

It is a wonderful thing to have chosen work to do that uses the best skills you have. It is insurance for happiness and long-term creativity.