From an Ellen Goodman column on the first female president of Harvard:

“There is talk about too many pressures and too many choices. It’s as if the success of feminism was to blame rather than its unfinished work. Indeed it took Mary Cheney to offer bracing words at a recent Barnard College gathering: “This notion that women today are overwhelmed with choices, my God, my grandmother would have killed to have these choices.” ”

Amen.

Looking back on my New Year’s Resolutions:

I think my decision to stop buying yarn was very good for me, creatively speaking – it let me stop thinking about buying, and focus on creating. I think I may extend it to cover all fibers. I have plenty of yarns on hand, and it’s time for me to focus on doing something with what I’ve got, rather than collecting more things I won’t use. Ditto fiber.

Budget: I’ve created a budget, but because I was traveling during January and February, it’s been hard to evaluate how well I’ve kept to it. I’m going to keep tabs in March and see how I’m doing. But I have a budget, and that’s a start.

Priorities: I’ve decided to get rid of AIDS Lifecycle and the book, and concentrate on the Death Ride, weaving, and maybe some lace shawl design. This feels like a manageable amount of stuff, and I’m happy with the decisions I’ve made.

B.: We’re getting along better than ever, and in fact we’re moving in together sometime in the next few weeks. We’ll keep my place and simply bring his stuff in. This will be neat, partly because it will save me a lot of money (so I can pay off debt faster), but mostly because I love B. and look forward to living with him.

So all in all, I’m happy with my New Year’s resolutions after just two months. WE’ll see what happens over the rest of the year…

Been twiddling around with knitting samples for my entrelac lace travel shawl, trying to figure out what yarn and needles I want to use.  I’ve also been weaving a bit on my loom, but sort of half-heartedly.  I feel like a lady-in-waiting: the next big thing is coming up, it’s just not clear (yet) what it will be.

I haven’t decided what to do about the book, or AIDS Lifecycle for that matter.  I’m once again torn between really wanting to get rid of this albatross and being not…quite…able to get rid of this baby.  I’m also not sure whether I’ll ride ALC this year.  If I do ride, this will definitely be my last year.  But do I want to ride?  I don’t know.  Some part of me wants to be done with the whole mess, some part of me wants closure.  It’s hard to walk away!

And yet I feel that it’s the right thing, that there’s something waiting around the corner for me, something new to dive into.  I just don’t know what, yet.

One interesting “something” that chance has put into my way is a variant on Habitat for Humanity.  I got an email from the Project Management Institute’s mailing list saying that  the local organization that builds houses for low-income people is looking for captains to help supervise/coordinate building buildings.  This seems like it would be fun, and also a potential venue to finding “the next thing”.  I may sign up after my return from Ghana.

Isis and Astarte are gone, both to a gentleman in San Jose who has extensive experience with snakes.  I feel guilty at having parted with them, mostly because I have no idea what will happen to them now, but I also feel relieved.  I did do a fairly extensive interview with the guy before agreeing to let him take them, so I am fairly well convinced that he does know how to care for Brazilian rainbow boas, and that they’ll be well-treated where they currently are.  I just wish I could attach a note to their nonexistent collars saying “If you ever decide you can’t care for or need help with medical bills etc., call ______”.

Well. That’s done.

I am thinking about how I want to shape my life next.  B. is a big part of it – I’ve never been in a relationship with anyone that I thought might last for a lifetime (certainly I never expected my (brief) marriage to last forever), so that’s a big change for me.  Another big change is thinking about having children.  Never really thought seriously about that before.  Not in the next few years, certainly, but over time…?

Partly I’m thinking more in the long term.  Previously, I’d thought mostly in the short term, partly due to just being young, but partly also because of the uncertainty of how long I would live (or would want to live).  Lately I’ve started thinking that I might live a natural lifespan (primarily because the bipolar medications have been working very effectively for a few years now), so I’m starting to think I might reach my “golden years”.  B. is part of that as well…with a partner I’m much more stable than without one, and the fact that he thinks in the long term encourages me to do so as well.  I can see being with him forty years from now.  Wow, that makes everything look totally different.

Anyway, we’ll see how that shapes out.  Meanwhile, I wait, explore, and ready myself for the next Big Thing.

Well, let’s see.

Today I sold 2 big plastic tubs of spinning fibers to a woman in Virginia, bringing me down to one big plastic tub of fiber. Suits me just fine: the stuff I sold was all relatively replaceable (a pound of white angora bunny fur, a couple pounds of suri alpaca, some silk, etc.) and I haven’t been spinning much lately. I kept the truly rare stuff, the stuff I wouldn’t be able to replace if I started spinning again.

My last yarn orders arrived ““ 2 lbs of a beautiful pearly gray (“silver fox”) cashmere/silk blend, 2 lbs of a noil-y silk/wool yarn in shades of blue and gray, 3 bags of variegated ribbon yarn, and some worsted weight angora yarn. That’s it. I’m buying no more yarn this year, or until I run out, whichever comes first.

I’m considering extending my moratorium to fabric. I have lots and lots of it, and I don’t sew that much outside of my AIDS Lifecycle costumes. In fact I am thinking of extending my moratorium to most craft supplies, but am being a bit cautious there. Right now I’m in a conservative phase. I know myself well enough to know that at some point I’ll get really into something (it doesn’t matter what “something”) and when the next big thing hits, I’ll go headlong into it. I’m not a fan of making New Year’s resolutions that I’m simply going to break, so I don’t want to make one that isn’t realistic. Still, it seems to fall in line with the general idea of “don’t buy lots of new stuff”.

Tonight I’m going to start working on developing a savings plan. For the past year, I’ve pretty much spent whatever I felt like whenever I felt like it, which I could pretty much get away with since I make a good bit of money and also get generous quarterly bonuses. However, most of my “big-ticket items” (like car insurance, holiday travel, gifts, and so on) got paid out of my bonuses, and I’d rather save those to pay down debt. So I’ve drafted a budget and am going to use multiple (free, high-interest) savings accounts at eTrade to automatically save for the big ticket items. One savings account per large expense, which sounds like a huge number except that there really aren’t that many of them: auto insurance, auto repair, vacation/travel/holiday gifts, and personal training packages, among others. A small monthly withdrawal into each of those accounts, and I’ll automatically be saving, and since each savings account is earmarked for a specific kind of expense, the temptation to draw it down for another expense won’t be as strong.

I didn’t come up with this idea, of course; B. showed me the system he’s using with ING Direct, and I liked it enough that I’m going to try copying it. Only I’ll probably use eTrade since I already have an account there due to Adobe’s stock purchase plan.

I’ve made the difficult decision to give up my snakes. I have to get rid of Astarte because he and Isis can’t share the same cage, and I don’t have room for a second cage. It occurred to me at the same time that I haven’t really enjoyed having snakes for a long time, probably five or six years, and as a result Isis and Astarte haven’t really been getting the attention they deserve. So I’ve found someone who is very “into” reptiles (a former board member of the Bay Area reptile society) to take both of them. He comes by to pick them up on Saturday.

I’ve made the even more difficult decision to mothball the book. It belongs to a phase of my life that has now passed (or is passing), and I don’t have enough interest in AIDS Lifecycle anymore to put the phenomenal effort into finishing it. I may write another book, but I won’t write this one. Next time I stick to “easy” stuff like regular fiction or straight-up nonfiction, not narrative nonfiction.

But I feel pretty liberated, all told. It’s a new year, and I’m going into a new phase of my life. Out with the old, in with the new. I don’t know what comes next, but I’m looking forward to it.