Hell-O Again!

 I've been having lots of thoughts, just not ones that would help things by putting them in this public place, even though my readers are few when I don't post a link on Facebook. I know there are some people who just support me as a writer so will read whatever I write. When things are messy, confidential or confusing, I don't feel great about processing them in here where I have to be oblique and they aren't really understood.

Mom's anniversary of her passing came and went and I'm sad at how much acceptance I have of her absence. I expected to be more bereft and I suppose I feel guilty for not suffering more. That Catholic stuff runs deep. I would say I struggle with guilt and shame much more than any other emotions. I've taken in many super Catholic ways of making things worse for myself while I try to be saintly for others. As being a saint is impossible, it wastes a lot of my energy. I have discovered that a lot of my anxiety is simply worrying. I seem to be capable of worrying about everything whether it is really happening or not.

So my main strategy when it is not Jell-O Art Show time is just keeping to a quiet routine and exercising as much self-control as I can. I try to get outside when the weather is gentle and read a lot...I try to rest my body in between what I have to do and what I want to do. While I am accepting of aging, I do have problems with things going too fast for me to feel comfortable, whether that is traffic (I cope by hardly ever driving) or news (I do like to keep track) or the developments in my organizations which I feel somewhat responsible to monitor and attempt to guide if possible.

Letting go of trying to monitor and guide anything OCF has been quite a relief and while I still find it problematic as an organization, I have convinced myself that the pendulum will someday swing back to more elevation of personal and intellectual freedom and less control and compliance thinking. I may be completely wrong about that. I heard that the new version of DEI education and work, now called EDIB I guess, to include Belonging, has abandoned any work on cultural appropriation. I get why...it is really hard to identify cultural identity and thus the right to create identified art, but it still needs to be worked on. The impression I get is that the less work, the better. I know I tried to get help learning and discussing DEI work within my committee and was not supported by management (was supported by the old management, but that's old news) or peers in some cases. I still am committed to doing it on my own, but I don't think the Fair needs to work on belonging...that's really part of the problem. Everyone wants to have that club called Fair Family and be in it, but it creates a lot of othering and calling tens of thousands of people a family is just silly and I don't subscribe to it. 

I stopped watching the Board meetings and just read the minutes which helps my irritation level. I feel terrible for my friends who are still trying and I sincerely wish them peace and hope they can stay strong. Some things should ease up. People have shown who they are, and their values are self-limiting. Once they believe they have established full control (even typing that makes me laugh) they will turn their efforts to something else. I am still conflicted about what I do at OCF, and still allowing myself to make money, but I'm much more guarded. 

I'm troubled by Market things too, as I will probably always resist controlling behaviors and the types of thinking that don't build trust. I don't know if I agree that as we grow we need to have fewer personal solutions to our issues and more uniformity. I can see how that is more manageable, but I think it's a cultural loss. I'm getting closer to giving up my responsibilities there. I spend far too much time volunteering still...I feel needed, but also hated. I'm oversensitive to criticism and such a people pleaser, and I know I make things up, so I can advise other people to let things go and not take things personally but when it comes to me, it takes some time to lose my attachment. It's also hard to see change that I am not sure I support, when my duties of loyalty and care require my support. 

Sometimes not having a vote is hard...mostly it isn't. It's very hard to be one of the few people who has any detailed history about policies and how we've solved things in the past. I have a lot of fear about getting things wrong. I forget that most of the little things we do wrong are fixable and forgivable. I do try to identify when people are being overdramatic and making crises out of ordinary problems, but it's not a good position to take to tell people to chill and let things work themselves out. No one wants to hear that. 

Communication is a challenge as we grow and I expect that is true for all of us...we forget to tell someone, or tell the wrong person something we haven't thought through. I try to balance how much I speak up at the meetings, as I don't think my cautionary and sometimes lecturing tone is well-taken in general. I never like a tightening-up phase, but I really hated the chaotic phase that preceeded this one, so again, I am hoping for the pendulum to swing slowly back to a more relaxed acceptance and lessening of the control that people desire when things feel out of balance. We really are a strong organization and hard to break...people do get damaged when their efforts fail or they are misunderstood, or when their own damage gets exacerbated, but I like that at some point they can come back and renew themselves and their commitment and mostly be forgiven. 

That's one reason I am wary when people get rigid and think other people should be prevented from participating. I am much more comfortable working around everyone's weirdness than banning them from the organization. Eventually we figure out the keys to better relationships and if we can use our values of honesty and striving for consensus and balance, we can do fine with weird people. I've always said we don't all have to like each other, but we do have to work together. I hope we are building trust. We need to be, if we aren't. I miss how Vi used to say things like everything is happening as it should and all will be well. We need someone saying that when the drama is high. We'll get through it.

But this will be my last free Saturday until after Xmas, or that is the plan anyway. We'll see what the outdoor season brings. I know I am badly out of shape so I dread the first day...it might be rainy and I will just have to bring the least amount of weight I can and take care of myself as well as possible. I had a hard time walking at all last weekend after the Jell-O Show. I was on my feet too much for the three days it took to set it up, do it, and put it all away. I had to spend Monday doing nothing but sitting and reading. Since I just got my 2 boxes of shirts yesterday (well, some of them, with the rest due today) I will not have a lot of resting days next week or the next few weeks. It may not be easy but I feel like I can do it.

I hope so! Perhaps I will be able to write about at least some of it. Maybe it will go even better than expected and I won't worry so much. I try to remember to ask myself what is the best that can happen. It's always possible that expectations will be exceeded!

The Offseason Dilemmas

It's so pleasant to have Saturdays without Market for a stretch. I treasure the Fridays and Sundays around these Saturdays as well. After so many years without conventional weekends it's just fun to do what other people do...clean house, do yardwork, start weird projects from the never-ending list. Get three or four-day weekends every week if I want. Be a writer and a Jell-O artist. Stay out of the shop completely. 

This past Saturday the 13th was what would have been my Dad's 100th birthday. He only stuck around until 46, so he's been gone for over 50 years, but still, you only get one real dad in most cases. I've mostly made peace with that part of my past, because some of the things I like best about myself came from him. He had a lot of curiosity about making things...wanted to try them out and see what kinds of problems there were to solve. He had a workshop in the basement and I spent a lot of time just watching him and probably asking a lot of questions, or maybe being intimidated into silence. I learned how to saw, for instance, by remembering the way it sounded when I tried it as an adult. He didn't teach me how to use tools. We weren't exactly close but I did model myself after things that were "boy things" in the 1950s. I had three sisters so this was partly just to carve out a different path for myself than what was available to young women then. It was basically limited to service to others, men mostly...you could be a wife, a teacher, or a nurse. Lower status jobs were in retail and clerks, like file clerks. You could be a secretary. He didn't offer any Dad guidance as he was sexist himself and had no idea how to mentor girls. I liked science so decided to study medical technology which I might have liked okay, but I really thought I should study to be a doctor. At some point in college I veered off into a whole new path which led to Eugene, Saturday Market, and who I am today, so I'm glad I did not study to be a doctor, but I did have to do it all without much adult guidance.Consequently I did not know how to offer my wonderful son, whose 34th birthday was yesterday, much adult guidance, but like me he was good at self-education and managed pretty well to become a good person and a productive worker.

What I am is often a Secretary, because I love words and reading and writing and being precise. These Secretary positions are ones of responsibility and the title is misleading, but that's usually my role in whatever groups I am in. Even for the Jell-O Art Show, for which I am an elected Queen, I take notes at the meetings and send them out to keep us all on track with our wild ideas. It's controlling the narrative, but I like doing it and get a lot of ideas in the process. Formal meeting minutes are less fun, but everything about the Jell-O Show is informal and really fun, almost all of the time, so I'm happy to be in the Jell-O Art season once more.

We're cooking up some silliness for this year. Writing the script for the performance and making the sets is so much fun for me I am a bit blind about collaborating. Working in consensus is a continuous challenge in all parts of life...it is always easier to be controlling and make things the way you are sure is best. The deeper you are into it, and the more you have invested in your vision, the harder it is to allow other people equal participation. It has gotten easier as I have learned the strengths of my collaborators...they bring skills that complement yours and all are needed, even the ones that slow down the process and raise objections. I've had my scripts thrown down on the floor and thoroughly rejected. Naturally it stung but it was a lesson in simplification and absolutely the rewritten script was far more successful and usable. It was important to see that person as someone who could cut through politeness and say what needed to be said, and important for me not to be personally invested in my golden words. Each person has their style of giving input and sometimes it is hard or annoying or distressing but it's worth the struggle to find what a friend once called the pearl in everyone.

That has taken me about three decades of sharing my writing to learn, and really what I've learned is to suspend my reaction until I get a chance to process the initial feelings and get to the point, which is to create better writing. It's part of me to react emotionally, to feel oversensitive or humiliated or unappreciated or insulted, but when I put that into my journal instead of saying it out loud, I avoid burdening other people with my irrational or unhelpful emotions. That's part of the NVC training or RC practice that has had lasting value. People speaking their own positions clearly depends on your ability to hear them and whenever you shut down your ability to listen non-judgmentally, you shut down any forward improvement or movement for everyone. Which is not fair and is not collaborative. It's like brainstorming, which you do open-heartedly without evaluating, and improv, where you say "Yes, and..." and never No. Hardly ever. I watch a lot of "Whose Line is it Anyway" and the ease with which Wayne Brady and the other more subtle improvisors pick up and run with things, bringing themselves along but not dominating, is eternally fascinating to me. It's an important skill in a lot of areas. Watching Key and Peele is also super and I wish they had done that show longer than they did.

Group process is tough. Allowing that everyone's ideas may be as good as yours is not natural to a lot of smart people. Being controlling is always tempting, but striving for consensus in an honest way nearly always results in decisions and policies that will stand the test of time. It is tempting to manipulate the process in the set-up, to only present the desired outcomes to be considered, to shut down divergence, and to push others along until they agree with you. It's insulting and dismissive to them...and they notice. Enough of it and you will be worked around...people will disregard your desire for power. I've been involved with membership orgs and group process long enough to see many examples of mistakes in power-sharing. We need a lot of types of people to really be inclusive. I'm currently reading a book about Radical Inclusion, because I recognize that I tend to include people I am comfortable with or already agree with on a lot of things, and that is not a true consensus-seeking process. I don't respect it when I witness it and when I engage in it, I don't like watching myself either. I get the tingling of warnings that something is being sacrificed for my comfort or that of other leaders.

Yesterday I dragged myself down to the Park Blocks to measure for some changes that must be made to fix the issues brought about by the additions of the stormwater catchments. We lost a lot of spaces and have to find more to replace them, or consider more radical changes like additional selling spaces, like in the streets or surrounding spaces that won't feel directly connected to the whole. We know people don't like being separated from whatever they think is the center of it all...the stage and food court for most people, but for me, the fountain and its plaza space. I've known for years now that the City wants to remove that fountain and replace it with an in-ground splash pad, which I have gotten used to imagining, with many reservations. The designs we worked with include benches for parents watching their kids play, of course, which look good on paper but impact our booths. The space I use to keep my bike and trailer safe is also going to disappear when the fountain does. I will be challenged to bring those into my 8x8, as there is not safe storage elsewhere for something that irreplaceable. I'm prepared to do that. So I'm able to not bring my self-protection up when we start discussing possibilities, and I even tried to stay off this Map Task Force, because I do not have to be there for every activity and decision the Market makes...I can't be, and need other people to pull the heavy weight as much as they will, as I am aging out and need to and want to. There were a couple too many of us yesterday and it wasn't consensus-based in the least. You can't keep people from creative visualization when they know they are good at it, so there was just a constant buzz of new ideas when really our task was to measure the spaces, not make decisions. But decisions were made. I didn't enjoy it and left as soon as I could. I just can't be involved in every decision the organization makes. I will do my agonizing in my journal and try to find a path to that duty of loyalty which requires me to support them. Whatever resentment comes up is my problem to keep to myself and make go away. It is not my organization to control...it is my organization to participate in. It won't always be on my ideal terms.

But it turns out that I am the only person left with a complete grasp of the remodel plans and how hard we worked to preserve certain elements of our autonomy and survival and fortunately, I documented everything about that four-year, now 8-year process. It started with the public market proposal and the study that the New York-based Project for Public Spaces consultants did for the city. This was brutal, and began with a thorough media campaign to trash downtown, which was in bad shape. The biggest difference between then and now is that it was all in the RG multiple times, the lead-in, the foreshadowing, the discussion, various opinions from the citizens and experts, and the conclusions and results. Now we see none of that, and that is one reason we absolutely need the Eugene Weekly to come back and help us with this more hidden phase we are entering now. I have albums of news articles that we still need and don't have. I have other albums of emails that I have printed out and will never supply the whole picture, as texts and in-person meetings are rarely documented and decisions are not always inclusive or collaborative. Efficiency has taken away some of that. Fortunately the City is rarely efficient and is required to do a lot of public statement before they move on anything. The challenge is finding out where they are doing that, keeping up with them, and being there to respond. I spent some hours reviewing City Council agendas since I stopped listening to every meeting and public forum but I am going to have to pay more attention to all of that, because the people who do, often speak in ways I would like to counter or correct with real information instead of self-interested speculation.

The money that was ready to do the Park Block remodel was about half of what was needed, and right before the pandemic had its effects, that money was pooled with the farmers' money to get their block built. The land swap, the demolishing, moving the farmers for two seasons to 5th St, and now making the pavilion work have all sucked up a ton of resources. Saturday Market was ignored and shelved, and we were kind of happy about most of that, except that the dangers of the lack of maintenance on our safety increased. We asked for concrete repair and we actually do need a bigger food court that can accommodate mobile kitchens, and we need a better stage, and so do all of the other park users. The Pavilion has terrible acoustics (those are expensive) and is not very usable by smaller groups who prefer to be outside anyway. All the gravel surfaces are hard to use. It's working pretty well for farmers' market and met some goals, but not all of the goals for the what was called Town Square and now doesn't really have a name except Downtown. It looks like the City is proceeding with implementing some of the parts of the vision that included the two southern blocks. We got the curbless streets, partially, and will get more of that this season, and likely for the next five or so years.

It is super hard to work on all of those problems at once. Everytime the FSP comes up at City Council, it is obvious there that no one on the council or staff knows a thing about Saturday Market and no one knows how to find anything out. We have gone through too many managers in the last decade to seem approachable, though they are gradually learning that we have an engaged manager now. However, I am still the person who brings the history and continuity, and because I do that as a volunteer, it is just not respected. I'm hoping that archiving the materials, which actually go back to the 2000s, will help. It helped a little during the remodel...at least they attempted to show that we had history, although it was generally incorrect, like the whole thing of the farmers being 100 years old. They became LCFM in 1979, after the Saturday Market revived them, but nobody really wants to hear me tell that story again. It's not that important right now, like the story of how 5th St. got started with hiring our manager and taking 75 of our best artisans over to make an indoor space that ultimately got gobbled up by Obieland. He has all the power now and he has tried to marginalize us the whole time, rather successfully in fact.

But now we seem to have the ear of some City staff and we may be entering a new phase of being understood and respected. The present power structure within our organization is doing well with building relationships but I would not characterize them as inclusive. I'm concerned but don't have much power to do anything about it. As an old lady from the past I am not often listened to with real openness, though as I turn out to be right I regain respect. I know our membership. I know just how annoying and self-interested we tend to be, and how that presents to bigger entities like the City. They deal with that kind of energy in everything they do, and have their work-arounds, which I have seen in their naked forms and have learned to accept as inevitable. Yes, they do public engagement, but it is scripted for their desired outcomes and it gets ugly when the people try to change the course of development. These times are the worst for that...corporate power is not honest and the battles are dire...witness NWNG, student housing, and the 5th St Market District and its connection to the Riverfront, which was supposed to be the 8th Avenue Willamette to Willamette Great Street program. Won't ever be now. It's all about what 5th St. wants.

And since Obie hates us, there's no way we will find a relocation solution that will work for us when the big parts of the remodel happen. We saw our season flounder with the 8th St and Oak and Park Street construction all summer. It was harsh and took so much staff time, policies that had to be tossed together and a loss of cohesion in our membership as self-interest prevailed. We know that our honor system of payment is often not enough to motivate fair payments when people feel their situation is not fair. So we know we didn't get honest fees from everyone. Some of us made big donations. My personal merch program donated over $2000 to the general expenses and I am not the only person who gave or bought equipment or gave excessive volunteer time. That's what we do when we're needed. But for people to give, they need to really feel a part of all of it. The reasons why they may not feel included are many and complex, but we need to figure out how to motivate people. Inclusion, where they get to speak for themselves, is essential.

I've always fought against fines and punitive policies because they drive people further away. As an org we seem to be going closer to that territory, as OCF has as well. I quit volunteering for OCF as I knew my voice would never be heard in the present atmosphere, and that is a relief for me to stop flailing. Now I will choose to comply or quit. I never want to be in that position with Saturday Market, and don't plan to be. It is my retirement plan, my sustenance, and my key to the future survival of my little world. I owe it to my history and my survival to keep trying, to learn how to increase our inclusivity and fight against our tendency to tighten things up when it gets hard. We used to be able to craft a lot of individual solutions for our very individual concerns, but we may not be able to continue to do that in a world that is less honorable and more life-threatening. Fighting the tightening up is hard to envision and hard to do. No one wants to hear about fears and will dismiss what presents as fear. That is always the first defense used against little old ladies. It's my job now to reframe concerns as logical and visionary rather than trying to protect what we have known. After so many years of that with the city, I am not sure how much I can continue to learn better ways to do that. I'm annoyed that I have to. 

But that's today. It's my day off. Maybe tomorrow I will get back into problem-solving. Really what I should do today is make some Jell-O. It always works. Also there are sticks to pick up. I'm super tempted to take my saw around the corner and help the neighbor who has a tree blocking the sidewalk. It's a street tree, so the city is responsible, and I am not, but it needs to be dealt with. Probably not by a little old lady from around the corner. I want to do it though. 

Irony is Not Dead

 Not amusing to hear the narcissist speak about supporting orgs started in the 70s which struggle with things like embezzlement. 

Give back the money.

Still work, just different work

 I was so relieved at the end of Holiday Market, where I masked almost all of the time. It seemed to me that people were grateful for that rather than avoiding me...I'd say about 20% of the population both internal and external was masking. I know I felt safer. I had one quickly suppressed sore throat episode and got exposed to Covid, but I didn't get sick. I felt safer on Xmas Eve, and didn't mask much that day. I tried not to hug anyone but I did a little. It's emotional to end a season on a holiday that is kind of fraught for me, although I weathered the emotions well I thought.

 When I went on the 27th to load out, I didn't mask, and also went downtown to the library and grocery that day, masked inside. About six days later, not having seen a single human, I came down with what I think was RSV. I didn't have a fever, just a lot of congestion which caused a cough. It has lasted a week and isn't quite over. I tested negative for Covid twice.

My respiratory distress is always linked to particular foods for me, dairy and citrus, and I did push the limits of that around Xmas, because everything has butter in it and I love satsumas too. So it got kind of bad, not restricting my breathing or anything, just gross mucus and a lot of coughing and sneezing. I believe it was a virus and it has almost gone away. I figure I got it from touching something downtown...door handles, whatever. RSV persists on surfaces for a few hours but it was also possible it was some other virus. I have isolated and taken care of myself but it wasn't fun and I still can barely eat anything without reacting to it. It will be a long time before I have any dairy. I put all the cookies and things in the freezer.

So not a fun start on vacation time but the upside was I didn't really do any work to speak of for the last several weeks. Right now I am obsessed with sorting through papers that I've saved for various reasons and books I am most likely not going to read. Books go to the Little Free Libraries and papers are just recycled or saved in smaller units for a little longer. 

I'm a lot better at letting things go but recognizing the feelings of loss that come with that. I'm wrapping up my OCF volunteer experience and letting go of being an insider on the issues and gossip. I always like to know what is going on with everyone but I figure over time I will probably hear the important stories, and it's too many people to keep track of anyway. Lots of things I might rather not know. I worked really hard at increasing communication for members of OCF, particularly crafters, but as I went through my records I felt like there will be no net gain over time for the time I spent and things I put in place. My work will be erased or supplanted by the efforts of others, some well-meaning and some not, and that's just the way it goes. OCF is giant and never stays the same, whether that is good or bad overall...it's not possible for one person to have much real effect on any part of it. 

I'm proud of my efforts and glad I tried but also relieved and happy to be out of the way of it now. I don't feel obligated to respond to anyone or monitor any FB (except for Negative Shit) or lead or even follow. I was just an observer and complainer for a long time and while I may try not to be a complainer I will still be an astute observer of all of the ways of a membership organization and can do that from somewhat of a distance. I'm disciplining myself to care a lot less about it all. At some point I will stop watching the Board meetings, maybe soon. 

As for Saturday Market and the Kareng Fund, not leaving. I was named Volunteer of the Year, 

which generated a lot of nice compliments and appreciation from my fellow members and staff, so that felt very good and I'm proud of my efforts and what is at this point, kind of a legacy. I still have a lot to do there, not the least of it being the archives, which I think about all the time but have not really gotten to. I'm using being sick as an excuse. I will get a big chunk of it done though, as I realized I don't have to take notes on the materials from the last few years in detail, as I have all the Board packets and documents saved in electronic form, and the newsletters are posted on the website. So I will likely drop back into 2019, which is nearly finished, and move to the present before I go back into the old stuff. Soon.

I feel like I am running out of time to get every part of my life in order for the inevitable end of my ability to do this kind of work. If I'm going to write any books I can't just put it off that much longer. I doubt I will write any fiction. I had a period of that and will collect all of it in a form I can access easily if I want to go back and edit it, which would be needed. A friend gave me a copy of a story I had written about her 20 years ago, about an incident that was meaningful for us both, and she was still moved to tears by it, but frankly, it left me kind of cold. It was over-the-top emotional and dramatic. I am absolutely no longer that person so it gave me insight into why I got a lot of confusing reaction to my writing back then, and to some of my actions as well, so it set of a period of self-examining with a different perspective than I've had before.

Last night I went through things I'd saved from John's school career and it was actually pretty depressing for me. In many ways I was not a good parent. I was self-involved and had a lot of work to do both to keep us alive and well and to process my own issues, so I was not emotionally nurturing in the ways I would see as important now. He was on his own to a large degree and I can see that in his behaviors and attitudes...at the time I wasn't able to do it any other way I suppose. I think I saw it as letting him have the freedom to develop as a person but more guidance and structure would have really helped. Single-parenting has some definite drawbacks. He had good teachers some of the time and he responded to that, but by high school they didn't have much time or ability to influence him and neither did I. I was present, volunteering and working at school, but I think that made it worse for him as home wasn't different enough to be a sanctuary and he experienced me as part of the system. When he quit he wouldn't even discuss it. Our struggles were harsh.

I can track his anti-progress as he developed a personality and resistance to the systems, which both of his parents transmitted to him somewhat unknowingly...I mean, I can't get behind the systems without my own resistance so I wasn't selling him on it properly. Once I realized that math and science achievers were going to get channeled into oppressive militaristic channels, most likely, I wasn't as willing to push him into that, though I did support his interests and tried to get him the resources. We were poor, though, so I had to ask for help and that might have kept him out of some things. I don't think he got to go to computer camp and even Culture Jam refused us a scholarship because people thought I could afford it...I did afford it, but it was hard. People didn't see the truth of what looked like financial security because I looked like a successful crafter and we had that big business for awhile (which left me with little but debt, which I kept private as it was embarrassing.) I got $200 a month in child support. I was remodeling a house for us so he could have a room that wasn't on the way to the bathroom. I had to work multiple jobs and that meant all the time. I still feel misunderstood with my poverty consciousness. Getting something like dementia or a disability terrifies me. I won't even buy myself a new vacuum cleaner or consume much of anything outside of food.

 I couldn't get him private music lessons when he might have responded...things like that. We didn't socialize with people with money and resources. He didn't have much privilege, which is kind of a good thing in retrospect, but he internalized being poor and lost his enthusiasm for trying somehow. Somehow he found out that extra effort would not be rewarded and wasn't worth it. I'm sure being poor was hard on him. I got all of his toys at Goodwill. Health care was a nightmare...I would put off taking him to the doctor in a way that shames me no end now. Poverty is serious, and people you know are suffering from it. Fortunately at this point, I am not, really...my hard work paid off, but that doesn't mean I will ever feel safe in this world.

No doubt I am missing a lot by just looking at these school-related artifacts but he didn't give me a lot else to get to know him with. I didn't know how to draw him out, and he didn't share a lot of himself with me. We were right on top of each other in our little house and I was working on the other house from when he was 5 to 16...my goal was to give him a room with a door on it that he could lock and he never did get that. As a builder I was self-taught as I am with everything and there was something about the way I hung his bedroom door that made it not close properly. So even after he got some real private space, it wasn't enough. I was always there, which I suppose is why he learned to close me out. 

I was 39 when he was born, which was good and not so good, as my forties and fifties were full of some radical self-improvement and it was clunky. I was in therapy, co-counseling, learned NVC (kind of) and spent a ton of time writing, going to meetings, and having my very necessary adult growth spurt. I left him pretty stranded when he was a teenager, and his Dad was even less help. He survived it, and had good friends, but it was a lot less than I would have wished for him. It's not something he wants to talk about yet, though I keep expecting that part. I know I went through it with my own pretty self-absorbed parents. My dad abandoned us when I was 20 (suicide) and my Mom was always distracted with having too many kids and too much work to do. I felt loved, and my son feels loved, but there were things I blamed them for and for which they were guilty. So I expect him to have some resentment and blame. I think that is not something he will want to address unless he becomes a parent and starts to pick it apart...which I don't think he is planning. I try not to feel like that is my fault. It's hard to imagine anyone not feeling reluctant to reproduce in this world, though someone did tell me once that the reason they could do it was that they believed in life. 

I believe in life, because the natural world is something I pay a lot of attention to, but I am not sure how much I believe in love. I am a-romantic and can't really get into anything celebrating those areas of human interaction. I participate on some levels but I do not gush and that story reminded me of how far I have gone away from all of that. I regret pursuing whatever I was pursuing in my fifties when I was on OK Cupid and trying to get this one guy to be with me. I'm grateful to him for refusing me, as painful as it was. I learned a lot from just that and he pointed me toward many useful resources that did help me. I suppose I had to go through that. But I wish I had spent that energy being a better mom of a teenager. His needs should have been what I was thinking about (I was...) and his future should have been more in my goals list. I guess regrets are important to, so we can do better, but today sucks.

Not that much I can do to fix it, but I am a very supportive mother of a 34-year old, within the limits we are fenced into now. His birthday is coming up. As always it is bittersweet, as all the holidays are, when I compare my life to the mainstream lives online and TV (I know, don't do that) and I try in various ways to do better with him. I will keep trying with whatever good time we have left, and I will try very, very hard to not burden him with my aging self. So I will not text him my feelings about his report cards and all the things I did wrong. I'm telling you few people who enjoy my drama and bullshit for whatever reasons...I'm glad you get something out of it and I carefully don't really want to know who all of you are, for the most part. I'm writing this for me, because as I found out when I was in my thirties, and am still finding out, I am a flawed and selfish person. Not the only one, but it's not something I can really hide. I'm glad people can appreciate me anyway, even though what I do is hide it with hard work. I will work hard for the common good. I will work hard. I will work hard for you, albeit tangentially. I know how to work hard.

I don't know how to not work hard, but once I sort all of these papers, maybe I can work on that. (*bitter laughter*) Happy New Year!

As a follow-up, now that I have gone through all of the school papers, I found out there were some good years when things went just right, and all along I did have a lot of involvement, whether that was really good or bad. I just had to pull back sometimes. It's forgivable.  Here's a photo from kindergarten.

Quiet Foggy Days

 First Christmas without Mom and I'm trying not to care...she always said she preferred Thanksgiving anyway, so first Thanksgiving without her. But I don't really celebrate either day too much...just enjoy a day off and sometimes cook something. It's hard to live without pie so it's usually that. I will think of her when I make pies and eat, and watch birds, and read books...I think of her often. I miss her, even the bits of her that kind of fell away over the last couple of years. I might have gotten over actively needing her but there is still an emptiness where she used to be available as a person I could reliably love.

Holiday Market takes up all of the weekend time and the weeks go by fast with little accomplished. Retail is exhausting even with the fun of the dress-up theme days and seeing people I enjoy. Just focusing on selling for two or three days in a row is a pretty hard gig, though I should definitely not complain as at least I have a good way to make money. And then I can actually take the offseason to do other things, which are also work but more on my own terms.

This winter I will try hard to really get the archiving accomplished, at least the Saturday Market part although I will probably not get far on any of the others. It's mission-type work that I feel I have to do and then I have to find places for these archives, or people who will take them in for the next phases in which I may not be available to participate in. No guarantees on living...just keep doing it until you can't, I reckon. Mom set a good example of a relatively graceful way to do that.

I definitely suffer from SAD in these foggy and darker days. Sunshine cheers me up and there is always work to do outside so I can generally navigate it adequately with some effort. I eat a lot of bread and meat in the winter. I wish I did have a fireplace to sit beside. I actually built support into the living room wall so I could open it up and put in a hearth and chimney, but I know I won't. I still have some ants in the walls from the chimney I removed and have absolutely no desire to open up any walls.

I did manage to cut down the holly tree and still feel good about that, as it gives me wood to manage outside too. Holly is good wood so I kept the logs though I have no real use for them. I collect sticks like some people do books (okay, I collect books too, and "good boxes" as well) as I find them beautiful and fascinating and like to use them for supports for plants and things like grape arbors. My yard is messy and so I have a lot of birds and even a regular possum or a few, and probably raccoons. I rake the leaves of two neighbors so I will have lots of messy mulch. Everything is wet today and the fog isn't lifting, but I was out yesterday filling up the stick tote. Today I'm just trying to stay warm and keep getting ready for the HM load-in tomorrow. 

Despite having sold at EVERY Holiday Market I still get anxious about the set-up. I will fill the available hours. It used to be 9 hours, and this year is only 7, so I will be going in early on Saturday too. I will not be bringing t-shirts though, so maybe it will be a little easier. 

There will be an exception to that rule. I will be attempting to sell off the Saturday Market t-shirts I made, as I did last year. They didn't sell, and I had plans to make more in better colors but...they didn't sell. I can't fit them in on Saturdays so this will be my big chance to liquidate them. My plan is to make them $10 each (maybe even $5) and donate the funds to the Kareng Fund. I've been donating 50% to the Market all year for my bags and hats (the SM logo ones) but the Market finances seem good and the KF is a bit short compared to previous years. Plus the need for the KF keeps increasing and the donations seem to have slowed. 

We will probably not have the Art Bingo event this year, although we will discuss it. What we need is a really splashy fundraising campaign event that will draw a lot more people. None of us are really the right kind of promoters to pull off such an event so we may try to find someone who can do it for us, or with us anyway. It's such a small organization with a narrow mission that I find it hard to promote. I know there are people looking for ways to give, though, so I try not to get in the way of that. Anyway I will see if I can drum up some dollars with my merchandise.

Two of the subjects I want to write about are sensitive, and I am sensitive about them, so I'm doing some circling around trying to figure out how to write about them. One is the OCF...I quit my volunteer job of being the scribe and member of the Craft Committee. I've gone to my last meeting though I still have some tasks to complete to pass on my work in hopes that at least some of that work will continue. This is really the first time I have pulled back my support from something I do still care about, so it has been interesting to navigate. There is certainly relief, but at the same time it kind of tarnishes my commitment to the handcrafting life and I have to process that. Crafters need support in many ways and I am still going to be acting in many of those ways, but just not in a formal group discussion way for OCF. I did a lot in my years there to support what was already in progress but it's time for other people to step in and do their parts. I hope they do. I'll be annoyed if they actually get the diversity training I asked for since 2020, but whatever. It's unlikely, since diversity is all fixed now if you ask people still there. Or, you know, not as important.

I hope not a lot happens with their hijacked Board that I feel I have to do something about, as I have no more energy to do any of those possible things. I don't trust people who feel they should manipulate elections and fellow members for their selfish ends and I am not confident that damage won't be permanent from the last iteration of that. A false narrative was spun, disseminated, beat into the culture and is now prevalent. I'm not going to forget what really happened. It was galling to listen to the last meeting and I may not watch another. It was not amusing to hear that OCF is now "walking its talk" in promoting to leadership one person who stepped on, vilified, and drove away a whole, active group of marginalized people whom he could not gaslight and dominate until he spun a fiction and mobilized supporters for it. A lot of us witnessed that and we're not in the mood for some hippie bullshit phrasing to hide the reality that OCF talk is cheap. White supremacy culture encompasses more than just racism and dominant forces I am starting to call Me-supremacy are well in place to push it along. Obviously this is not new culture and it will always try to dominate, but I am not interested in building that selfish reality. 

I don't know what is so hard about working toward a world where war and domination is not the automatic action for different opinions. I suppose the great monetary value of weapons and power and ownership of land and property is the driving force that is seemingly so unstoppable, because the common people rarely want war as they are always the victims of it in one way or another. People want peace. People embrace a multicultural world where everyone can contribute...but obviously not all people, and my own me-supremacy asks these innocent questions as if the answers were not complicated. They get complicated because the real truth is so rarely told. Weapons are made to destroy and control. Control is the problem, forced control and compliance. Dehumanizing control. 

Like many I find these subjects overwhelming and draining. At a time when my emotions are going overboard, I have to try to use my methods of self-control, to maintain what I have committed to. I don't post political things on FB because almost all of my friends there already agree with me, and I don't want to argue about politics if they don't. I'm not big on arguing. I try to stay informed enough to have my opinions and actions more or less clear to me, but I don't want to convince other people. 

There's pressure for healing, however, and I may be interested in helping with that. I like digging down into my own emotional blocks and fissures and maybe I can help others by example. I've ventured a few comments here and there. Mostly I dislike the algorithms too much to want to put my opinions on FB. Mostly I just want to stay home and journal and read and eat bread and listen to my kitty purr. 

Might not get a lot of that in the next few weeks, but I will try.

Horrors

 I've never liked getting scared for fun...can't watch horror movies, hate zombie costumes, don't even like Hallowe'en or Day of the Dead. I used to be able to explore dark subjects, but now I am not even finding that interesting. Real daily life is actually much more horrifying than I have ever noticed in the past, and that is plenty.

I first started to notice how fearful old people were as my Mom aged...not her, but people in her writing group. They seemed to have protected lives, dependable husbands, expensive houses in good neighborhoods...all the constructions white people of means generally put in place early in their lives for their personal safety. But of course no one is exempt from physical breakdowns or accidents or all of the many random things that come to us...and my Mom was brave because she had seen some of the hardest up close. I saw some of those...and I suppose it was the randomness of mental illness and alcoholism that made me fearful from a young age, though I was good at dissociation and forcing myself into situations that were riskier than I was willing to admit.

I used to do a thing of engaging a character named "General Bravado" when I wanted to travel alone or go to a bar or do all the adventurous things I felt compelled to do in my twenties. I'd look in the mirror and gear up and throw my fate to the winds with his imaginary protection. This almost amuses me now, but I was a product of the 1950s suburbs, a house with a deed covenant, a mostly segregated school system, and all the white supremacist system around me to limit any input or empathy I had for people with other life experiences. In my world, women were discriminated against, and of course I observed racism and had racist assumptions, but my life was important over anyone else's and I completely bought into individualism. That still persists. 

Once I got my own house (with the partial dependence I allowed myself with a man) I finally really felt safe (once he was out of the house) and I was able to raise a son and run my business and feel generally self-protected as long as I could hide out in my little safe neighborhood. I could be vulnerable and explore emotional territory but was still a chicken and stayed in my comfort zone. I considered myself traumatized from my life previous to age 40 so was pretty self-protective. I felt vulnerable every week selling at Market but not so much physically, just emotionally. That phase is over.

I had been an activist for peace and justice but found once I had a child I could no longer go to demonstrations, and even after he was grown I found my emotions too obtrusive to engage in protest. The Occupy movement and then the Black Lives Matter movement on top of the pandemic took away my illusion of safety for the most part, as I learned about the real US history of human trafficking and dehumanization and my silent complicity. I watched livestreams and cheered people on and read a ton of books and articles and did as much work as I could to make some small change...within the limits of my lack of real courage. Gradually I accepted that courage could include fear...it wasn't the absence of fear, it was the determination to set it aside to do what was right.

So I rush to the sidelines of marches and encourage and express gratitude. I support and try to amplify others, and I try in a limited way to engage "in person" as we do now in meetings and groups. I get to do it from my safe kitchen. I rely on my privilege and do whatever small things I feel I can handle, and it never feels like enough. I tell myself my priority is just staying alive for a decade or two more and figuring out to sustain what I have built, alone and with others.

It's getting harder. My son visited with the idea of helping me cut down a tree and that was fun. I use hand saws and it makes me feel powerful and strong and he got that. He enjoyed it too. I think a lot of things I should have taught him and I did kind of convey that you can do everything and may not need to jump through all the hoops that seem to be necessary...I remodeled my own house mostly by myself but I also did a lot of things kind of inadequately...so we talk about that as I have to redo them now, fifteen or so years later. I did it mostly before the internet, with library books for research and some help from men, which was pretty problematic but I did get it mostly done. My motivation, as I recall, was to get him a room with a door on it (he slept in a pass-through room to the bathroom) and I did accomplish that in his mid-teens, more or less. It was almost good enough, and better than many single moms did. I worked very hard. Work was always my priority and we didn't travel or do a lot of the things other families did. I passed on some flawed thinking, but he went farther and can now teach me, which works. We love each other. He will be of some help as I really age, though I am trying to set it up so that will be bearable for him. Independence and individuality is still the strongest undercurrent of my life, as it serves me, but I am lucky enough to have a huge community which I sadly mostly take for granted. 

So I have some challenges about giving back, maintaining friendships, being compassionate, and not isolating. I wouldn't say life looks easy going forward. But at least I am not really alone, and have opportunities to engage much more as I shed my self-importance and am more humbled.

Yesterday gave me some new respect for people who keep selling at Market when they don't make much in sales. It was my all-season low and actually lower than several seasons, and yet I made what many others would have thought to be a great day. I was bored and mostly just went over to farmers and bought things for winter as there are only two more weeks for me to shop there. I have stopped collecting crafts as I have to get rid of things now, not get more, so food is all I buy. I used to go around and make sure people who weren't doing well got some of my encouragement, but I just can't bring more things home. 

The end of the day was scary. A Free Palestine march came through, a very passionate group. It was not anti-Israel or anti-US, just anti-genocide and violence and promoting freedom for this oppressed population. To me it is obvious that the Palestinian are the victims of the violence and although the US is making a small effort to help them, the majority of our aid is oppressive death-dealing weaponry. Our world has changed and war with it...targeting citizens is blatantly a tactic while it used to be pretended that ordinary people were just "collateral damage." Now everyone is at risk. I suppose this was always true but our news coverage allowed us the imaginary view that ordinary people are generally safe. Like they are here in the US, right? Not now. 

Cars were backed up behind the march. There were a couple of groups of bike cops on the sidelines watching but they were not escorting at the front or back to protect the marchers. That was done by the courageous group of people we see in all recent marches, who watch and protect and make sure it stays fairly safe. I've benefitted from these guardians several times as angry people tried to engage me in arguments on the sidelines and they silently stood near me, ready to assist. This time I instinctively walked to stand behind the bikes but as I was doing this they yielded and the angry drivers were able to go down 8th for half a block, where some tried to go down Park or Willamette and others just got madder. One truck went on Park the wrong way and others just went around the block to harass some more. Trucks with "patriotic" flags and yelling men at the wheel, cars blasting horns, people convinced that their right to drive on a public street "trumped" (so ironic to say that) a large group of people exercising free speech to defend justice and the right to live in peace. They must have a nuanced and dissonant argument about free speech and liberty, not that I want to hear it. 

For me, my mind went to our recently developed active shooter plan, which I doubt will help me as I just fawn in crisis and will no doubt try to crawl behind a tree and cry. I didn't even get out of the street until a truck came by with two extremely menacing dogs in the back, free to jump on me and tear my throat open. As it turned out, somewhere on the march a truck forced its way through and the driver menaced with a gun of some type. He was arrested about a block from us, with more guns, it is rumored. Needless to say there was no business happening for the last hour of our day. I support the marchers, if that isn't obvious, and deplore the angry people who followed them. I don't know if I will feel safe for awhile. I am not going to feel safe about Hallowe'en next week with all the opportunities for people to display disturbing images and hide themselves behind masks and characters. I hope it is all Barbies and Kens because I may have to stay home.

I don't think it is unrelated to the noose with the black doll in overalls that was hung briefly in Springfield. That is certainly not the only place white supremacy culture is displayed around here. We overlook it all the time. We spread it ourselves in our ignorance and refusal to learn. We deny our complicity and fail to do the scary things to even discuss it in our communities. We close our eyes and hide out. 

I'm not having the pleasant day off I was looking forward to. I'm hypervigilant and in a weird way glad I have some kind of redneck neighbors with guns, because I think they would help me if I needed it. They are actually the most unsafe and least understood people on our street, but they call me hon and I rake their leaves. I'm kind of glad they have barking dogs. My illusions are tarnished, as they well should be. None of us are safe from hate.  

As Things Shift

 More thoughts on making changes in how I use my time in my last couple of decades in this body. She is tired...more aches and pains and I feel the responsibility is all mine to work with her so that I have choices about what I do. Now I totally get why "our health" is the main topic of conversation for old people. 

I'm still having a lot of emotions about making the break with my OCF volunteer position. We had our October meeting and I still did most of my tasks and felt such a sense of loss about the ones I didn't do. I used to email a list of interested members with our agenda and a meeting reminder, and since I stopped doing that, our momentum of involving more crafters in our discussions has essentially been lost. I'm in the process of emailing the people who were and were not awarded permanent booths at that meeting. We awarded four, but had sixteen applications...and I feel all of them deserve personal responses. I feel that anyone with whom I engage doing Craft Committee business deserves a personal response. It's always so entirely frustrating to email any concern to any group and not even get an acknowledgement. 

We announced our Town Hall which will be on Sunday Oct. 29th...and got some emails on the subject...which I answered. Today, on my day off, when I told myself it would not be healthy for me to resume the emailing tasks (I only got five done on Friday and Thursday was a shop day so I got none done.) I know prioritizing my own needs is the right thing to do and the core of my struggle. OCF will eat you up with the endless need for improvement. But I know all those people want to know what decisions were made.

So, after my 12-hour workday on Saturday, I had to skip the light parade downtown, as I knew my body wouldn't take it and by the time I had finished, it had already started anyway. But I did tune into the OCF Annual Meeting despite my visceral disgust and the difficulty of listening to a few people whom I consider to be deceptive and working against my interests. I was interested to find out that the ED had five goals, which turned out to wrap about twelve goals together, but at least there are some plans, however vague. Despite the item that received the most feedback being the absence of the artisan directory in the Peach Pit, that wasn't in the goals, nor was any artisan-specific goal, except that the improvements to the wifi were kind of wrapped into the first goal, a 5-year plan for replacing the water system. It didn't sound like any work in the ground would happen in year one, and although it wasn't explained, my theory is that the reason for wrapping them together is to string some wires underground in the waterpipe trenches for better internet. So nothing in the short term, but something in the next phase, maybe. At least the wifi was mentioned in the ED's speech.

No one else addressed any artisan issues, but I didn't expect it. Diversity was mentioned a few times of course, but increasing diversity in the artisan sector usually translates to getting more "diverse" people to apply and we are not really suffering from lack of diversity in the applicants. Adam made the improvement of giving people a way to identify their ethnicity in their work so at least they wouldn't be rejected for cultural appropriation, which was a small fix and did help. But the big Booth Rep system was not addressed of course, and our gentle and gradual efforts to improve it have not done a lot. It's a big thing to tackle, and involves a lot of education first, and despite a promise to provide DEI training to committees, that has not happened and from my experience when I crashed the coordinator training, it won't help anyway. People have to educate themselves, and there isn't a lot of time in the committee meetings to really do much of it. Our committee itself is not very diverse, except in LGBTQ++ people, and we didn't put in any process for making more diversity happen. Maybe it will when they replace me as a member. Just not picking another old white Booth Rep may help. Hope that happens.

It's really hard for me to grasp that I am walking away and will no longer have any influence on what is said or done by the committee. I doubt I will even have the heart to complain. As an admin of the Neg shit site I don't feel great about posting my complaints in there. Almost all the feedback I have gotten about any of my concerns amounted to "you shouldn't complain, as a leader and as someone who has been treated well by OCF...." and that just rankles. I have not been treated exceptionally well at all. I have learned to not complain...have learned to work on solutions quietly after introspection about what more I could do to solve my own problems. I have learned not to ask for anything. I have learned that what I give does not translate into what I get, which is fine, and I don't think it should. I value equity, not rewarding individuals for their efforts for the common good. I still totally value volunteering and working together for solutions. I have just lost faith that any of that work will have satisfactory results.

So the financial info was also interesting. Since the artisans were all told to attempt to reduce the number of passes we buy to help reduce the internal population, apparently we bought 600 fewer passes, and now we will be rewarded by a price increase (I heard from $100 to $120) for those passes. To me that is a $160 increase (again) for the people who help me do my work out there, as I pay my workers for their expenses, including their vehicle stickers, day passes, teen passes, whatever they need to help me make my sales. I will have to eliminate one worker and go back to doing their job myself, be that selling, loading, driving my inventory in, or booth maintenance or however it plays out. Six hundred booth passes is a lot...saved OCF a bunch in infrastructure costs and I am proud of all the people who did that intentionally. However, I guess it wasn't helpful to ask artisans to pitch in that way. Another mistake I won't be making again.

What I'm observing about myself is that I am not willing to be organization-positive, and absolutely that is a good reason to step aside. I cringe at the salutations of Fair Family, "peaches" or the horrid "yes yes yes." I feel like anyone who thinks they are cared for like family is delusional and I won't engage in that. My family members don't lie to me or try to manipulate me. They don't just keep assigning more work to me when clearly I am working hard. They support me and honor my work and help me do that when possible. I don't have those same feelings about the org. I do have them about some of the individuals I have worked with, and I feel terrible about pulling away from our mutually supportive efforts to make lasting and helpful change. 

So yeah, I'm still in enough to care but out enough to not care quite as much. Fuck it. If my work was as important as I think, someone will pick it up from where I left off. If not, it will fall by the wayside like the work of so many others. Maybe the truth is that there were 600 booth people who stopped wanting to participate. Maybe there was no one who wanted to replace them. Raising the price on everyone else isn't going to fix that.

Okay, day off.