snapshots of marital bliss - pt. 1

Great news! I discovered the perfect book to write. No really, this one is perfect.

So I told Lynn.

LYNN: That's great, honey. I'm going for a walk down to the souvenier shops.

ANDREW: Fine. Be dismissive, but I'll maybe, probably have it halfway done by the time you get back from your walk.

LYNN: Really. That's great. Really.

*portions of the previous dialogue may have been vaguely fictionalized to sustain the greater truth of the interaction.

(yes, i mean *my* truth.)

- axiom of the day - vacation update - getting everything done (in theory) -

Favorite Gloria - ism:

There are no bored people in the world. Only boring people.

My mother comes from two parents who are eminently quotable, poignantly axiomatic. And she is too. There's something that emerges from that kind of culture. At least I have an ability to articulate many of the base / core / deep-seated values that make me who I am. This is one of them.

There are several other great axiom that are in both of my parents' vocabularies which also explain some of the core Rudd-tendencies that are both my greatest assets (/resources if *assets* sounded too braggadocios) and yet bewilder me in such core ways too.

With the enneagram ? I don't like hearing that I ifnd it hard to let others be in charge - but on the other hand - I do find it difficult to believe that the average anybody else will give something the kind of treatment that I think it needs.

Is that a messiah complex?

Am I journaling out loud in inappropriate ways?

We're in Myrtle. Gary rented us a cottage and it has the most amazing screened in porch facing the wave. Nestled into a dune. Lynn's sunning on the deck next to me. It's a hard life.

Jaelyn took to the waves like a mermaid separated from an old friends. Addison (still trying to shake a 24 hour flu-ish thing) is more tentative. He likes it, but from a safe distance. But the digging of Hooles (his pronunciation) is enough to keep him happy forever.

I'm reading a book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play which is challenging. The author does seem to have a big box around the idea that individuals get to make choices for themselves (which Lynn identified as a modernist / industrial - corporate - male mindset -- I agree), but I also really agree with his analysis that we often choose to do things with less resistance (eg. blog) when we meet resistance in the tasks that are more core to the values that we have. His analysis? We end up with too much paper, feeling too stressed, always behind, never complete, and needing more time. His core idea? There's no such thing as time management. Only attention management. We can choose how much attention we give to tasks and issues but we only get the same amount of time everyday. Big problem? We don't get to choose our attention by ourselves.

Or at least we shouldn't. (says Andrew, not Forster) Such choices should be made in concert, in communion, in tandem with the communities we live with and in.

But I probably shouldn't throw out the baby (attention management -- attending more intentionally to our choices) with the bathwater (his modernist, corporate maleness).

Sometime I'll get into a blog / a thought about the western-ness of his preconceived individual. How an eastern WV might differently conceive of a person within the nexus of their relationships / expectations / heritage / resources / etc? And the other question that lingers for me there is -- to what degree is our choice-making, rational individual (championed by apologist Ravi Z. as a sufficiently worthwhile accomplishment of Christianity / Western Religion ? and some version of that claim is echoed by Daniel Boorstein in the creators) --really emergent from Christian theology (in opposition to Hindu / Confuscian ways of thinking-being) and to what degree is that a product of the modern ? western ? rational ? (mostly) Christian worldview that has shaped the culture I grew up in...

I know I can bait at least my brother (DJR) with that question -- can't I?

And what are the implications of all this thinking upon the metaphor underlying this blog? That our attention can be _back burnered_? I?m worried that these thoughts (you must seize the day! Be a choice maker! Choose your destiny!) may undermine my commitments to discursively BEING (present) in this realm?

peace~