If I hear/see that one more time, I’ll puke in my wastebasket.

What bullshit is this? Who came up with this? Who thought this was a good idea? Oh, Churchill? Right, him. The guy who was leading the charge in World War II before Pearl Harbor was a glimmer in our tears. He gets a pass.

You could come back at me and say:

“Changing your tactic isn’t giving up.” That’s true.

“Retreating now to fight another day isn’t giving up.” That’s true, too.

But maybe, if you are stacking up too many “nevers” to modify your “give up,” you should probably rethink your goal or at least think about it in realistic terms. Without context, platitudes and proverbs mean less than nothing.

Sometimes, giving up is simply breaking out of a jail you built for yourself.

So now that I’ve cooled off, numerous conservative tweeters apologized and deleted their tweets, Mike Cane and Aaron Worthing and Patterico came to my defense, and Fox News didn’t completely trash me, I feel like I can stand down.

What I should’ve said was:

or some variant thereof that was still sarcastic enough to get the point across.

(The “What if she’s next?” part is me displaying my mad Pshop skillz.)

Do I really think conservatism is dead? I don’t know. I struggle with it on a daily basis, and have for several years. However, the many tweeters who sent me nastytweets (save one, who apparently wanted me to sign away my citizenship), who then listened to me, then apologized, retracted/deleted their tweets with my name, and were willing to spread the word made me rethink it.

Despite my tagline, I really don’t often talk politics here on the blog. I leave that to my characters to do for me. But now that you know who I am and where you can find me, maybe you’ll stick around a while.

And I’m pretty sure y’all can find my Twitter name…

I’ve been accused of having wished for Sarah Palin’s death and/or threatening her life because of this tweet:

So...will everyone be satisfied then when Palin is assassinated? You know she's next.

January 8, 2011 4:45 pm via Twitter for BlackBerry®ReplyRetweetFavorite

@MoriahJovan

Moriah Jovan

Now. Anybody who knows me, has read my books, has read my blog, has read my Tweets, has breathed the same internet air I breathe knows I’m a Reagan-conservative-moving-swiftly-to-libertarian Mormon with a side of objectivism to spice things up.

Thus, it didn’t occur to me that my tweet, made in conversation with someone else, in response to my utter disgust with the immediate blaming of Sarah Palin for Saturday’s shooting of a Congresswoman would be taken as a threat against Palin and/or a wish for her death.

It smacked me in the head last night when I was tweeted that I was “scum” who had threatened her, with a link to a YouTube slideshow of a collection of tweets that actually DID wish her dead. Mine and one other tweet were vague enough that they didn’t belong in the collection in the first place. I’ll not defend the others except to say that my first reaction on seeing them was, “They’re blowing off steam like everybody else.” Which is, I think, a reasonable thing to conclude.

Let me tell you what I was doing Saturday when I was watching all the Palin-blaming go down on Twitter: I was at a packed roller rink with my kids, in the middle of loud music and people-chaos, barely listening to their whining, looking at my Twitterstream for news on the Congresswoman’s status…and crying.

For the country. For what it means for political discourse when some nutjob pops his cork for no reason other than he’s a nutjob. For “my” side, which is being blamed for everything from eating their boogers to nuclear winter.

But mostly I was crying for Congresswoman Giffords, who was out doing her job and a guy with a mental illness decided to kill her, for the six innocent people including a 9-year-old girl who died, and the other 18 wounded.

If you are coming here because you saw that video or saw whatever random tweet in which some nutjob on “my” side put me in that list, and you actually are taking the time to find out who I really am, know this: The people who made that video and who are blindly tweeting make “us” look bad.

There is nothing that will kill an ideology or a movement faster than the nutjobs co-opting it: Because the reasonable people who can disagree without being disagreeable, who can let the slings and arrows go by like mature people, who can get “our” things accomplished, who can discern the nutjobs on the “other” side—people like me—will simply walk away quietly because they don’t want to deal with the nutjobs.

And in reference to my tweet in particular, even taken on its face: If you don’t get it, you need to learn nuance, sarcasm, irony, hyperbole. Buy a clue, rent one, steal one, I don’t care. GET ONE.

This is not conservatism. This is its formerly disenfranchised nutjobs peeing and shitting in its swimming pool.

God help us all.

UPDATE (2011-01-12 10:00 a.m. CST): Mike Cane has documented the conversation that led to my tweet. Thanks, Mike.

For me, “I can’t” is the most freeing phrase in the English language. Because I’m backward like that.

Not a week ago, I despaired of an emergent situation that had a deadline of 3 weeks, and wailed at Dude, “I can’t!” Yet here it is, less than a week from when I said that, and…the crisis is almost resolved. (Dude doesn’t really know this yet. Shhh.)

I got to thinking about how I felt a week ago versus how I feel today, spurred by Mike Cane’s post “The Universe is Made of No” and a following comment by Bob Mayer:

The world is full of no outside of us. If we believe it. The key is if someone internalizes no. Then the NO becomes real. Most no’s start from within. Then we hear it echoed around us. So YES starts from within.

That’s nice. If you’re normal.

I’ve never been able to resist a dare (and I shall not bore you with my more embarrassing successes). To me, “I can’t” is a dare, a catalyst, something my twisted mind takes and uses as fuel.

I have to be feeling pretty desperate to use it. The last psychological stop for me is usually “failure is not an option.” It’s useful, but it’s more to meet a long-term objective. The first time I ever felt desperate enough to use “failure is not an option” I succeeded—wildly and for many years. The second time… Well, I’m still rolling on that wave of success, which continues to grow.

“I can’t” is the last resort—a barrel of gasoline thrown on a spark of will.

You may have noticed I haven’t been here much lately. There are a few reasons for that, but I’ll spare you. Following is a series of picture galleries chronicling the project that A) forced me to admit that Bob Vila lied and B) released me from three years of guilt I didn’t know had weighed so heavily upon me. Out of my humiliation came peace and a life-changing epiphany.

I did not do this myself!!! I gutted most of it myself and couldn’t go on. Dude knew who to call to finish the job. It was a Mike, although it wasn’t (*sob*) Mike Holmes. Roll over the pics with your mouse and it’ll tell you the story.

OCTOBER 2005

APRIL 2007

SUMMER 2007

MAY 4, 2010

The beginning of the end.

MAY 10, 2010

End of week 1.

MAY 15, 2010

End of week 2.

MAY 22, 2010

End of week 3.

MAY 29, 2010

End of week 4.

JUNE 2, 2010

Almost there…

JUNE 3, 2010

And…victory. At last.

Next month…our front porch.

Lisa at Feminist Mormon Housewives had asked Giselle Galen about her creative process for a series of compare/contrast posts for fMh, and Galen kindly brought me into the conversation of creating art; more specifically, art as a form of worship.

This coincided with a post on AML wherein a novelist/publisher wondered if God cared about our art or even wanted us to cease making it.

After using Galen and Theric as a sounding board, I wrote a bit for Lisa, and figured I’d share it here, too:

I’m a novelist. I write Mormon characters (in varying states of grace with the church) who have sex. On the page. While I’ll admit that can be seen as gimmicky, it’s really not. I write what I want to read, and I want to read characters who are like me and not The Other, The Freak, The Cultist, The Satan Worshipper, The Molly Mormon, The Longsuffering Sister, The Polygamist, The Weird Neighbor, The Prude.

Other than writing what I want to read and expressing myself in my chosen art form, my broader goal is to plant our culture and traditions and jargon into the national consciousness the way Catholicism and Judaism permeate it—a common vocabulary even if one doesn’t believe or practice that faith. Everybody knows what a rosary is and what it’s for, what mass, diocese, parish, and priest mean. Everyone knows what a yarmulke is and what it symbolizes, what synagogue, Passover, Hannukah, and bar mitzvah mean. Nobody knows us by anything but our magic underwear. They don’t know what sacrament meeting, stake, ward, and bishop mean. If we don’t define ourselves for the world, the world will define us for us, and they do. And it sticks.

I’m also an active, practicing Mormon with a pagan streak a mile wide. If it weren’t for the belief that we can become gods and spend the eternities creating, I wouldn’t bother with the church at all, and I probably wouldn’t even bother with Christianity. I am willing to jump through whatever hoops I need to just in case what I believe—what I hope to be true—is, in fact, true. If it’s not, it won’t make any difference in the long run because I refuse to believe any other alternative. If I burn in a lake of fire, so be it.

That forms the core of my artistic philosophy: Creating art is practicing to become a god.

Specifically, creating paper people with souls, intellect, and free will is practicing to become God.

(Most days when I watch the news, I wonder if the Creator we worship isn’t still practicing and just hasn’t gotten it right yet. If that is so, I like to imagine we’ll all get an abject apology.)

My favorite thing to imagine is that one day, Father or Mother, whichever one likes the detail work, looked into the ocean and said, “Hm. Those could use some color.” He or She picked up a brush in one hand, and a dory fish in the other and went to town.

I like to think Father was doodling in His lab, doing some structural calculations, sketched something out and said to Himself, “They’ll call that the Fibonacci sequence and I’ll laugh my butt off while they try to figure it out.”

I express my spirituality not in small part through sexuality. I think once one starts down the path of the Mother, then pagan philosophies, it winds up there anyway. Hello, Beltane.

So I like to think Mother was sculpting in the afterglow of some really good sex and sculpted anthurium to hold onto her lover when He was off doing something else. Galen phrased it “a dildo fit for a goddess.”

Because sex is where creation begins with human beings. We created offspring before we created the tools to hunt, before we learned to farm. We started off with the Tree of Life, not the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but we needed to eat of the Tree of Knowledge to understand the Tree of Life.

But then the doubt sets in and leads to: Are we created in God’s image or are we creating God in ours?

Does it matter? For better or worse or whatever reason or by whatever mechanism (why are creation and evolution mutually exclusive?), we’re here and we’re living our lives and there’s no getting out of it and no finding out the truth until we’re released from the bonds of mortality (or choose to take the bolt cutters to it ourselves).

When I form people and their worlds, and their characteristics, beliefs, and philosophies, then set them loose to see what they’ll do when I give them a particular set of circumstances, I am not worshipping God.

I am God.

From the movie Shine

It was one of those little moments in life where everything becomes crystal clear.

Years and years ago. English 400-something. Summer course. American Lit. Very…strange…professor. Lemme talk about her for a sec.

I forget her name. I forget what she looks like. I remember a whole lot about her:

1) In the span of one year, she had been violently raped in her home by a stranger. Twice. Not the same stranger. And yet she was…

2) …annoyingly cheerful and filled with joy.

3) She was a complete ditz.

4) She was an evangelical Christian who got married in the Loose Park rose garden in a Buddhist ceremony.

5) She had a completely random way of teaching. If you could call it teaching.

6) One of the first things she said to the class (with great exuberance) was “I want to fuck your minds!”

7) She taught me one of the single most important lessons I have ever learned, so whatever I don’t remember about Prufrock or Leaves of Grass (and surely don’t care a whit), it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the life-changing thing she taught me.

I don’t remember the text under discussion. She rarely used it, anyway (goodbye $90 for yet another Norton’s). She made the shocking proposition (prompted by some discussion of Judaism that had nothing to do with American lit) that Eve may not have sinned by eating the apple, and that they had to eat the fruit for them to have children, to know good and evil, joy and sorrow, and that Adam was just too chickenshit to do it, so she took the initiative.

It was like the sun came out. My quiet contempt of her scatteredness vanished. I was so excited I went all Horshack OOOh OOOh OOOh!!! Mistah Kottah!!! Mistah Kottah!!!

I blurted, “Yes! That’s it! That’s exactly what happened!”

Suddenly, she was all business, totally sober, like an English professor should be. She stared at me and said, “No, that’s what you believe happened.”

I was embarrassed. The class was silent, but not looking at me. There were no contemptuous snickers at me, even though I probably deserved them. I suspect it was as much a teaching moment for a lot of other people as it was for me. How had I gotten to be a senior in college without having learned this? How had any of us?

Life-changing? Exaggeration? No. She distilled an entire lifetime of being told this is the truth and there is no other truth, and those who don’t believe this truth are worthy only of our contempt and then shattered it.

(As it happens, my playlist popped up with the soundtrack of Shine: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, hence the name of the post and appropriate track.)

Yesterday I happened upon a post by a well-educated adult who, for all her proclamations of learning empathy through fiction, displayed none for a flesh-and-blood woman. She proudly told of her shock and horror at this woman’s lack of understanding of The Truth, drew several condescending conclusions from what little the woman had told her, and then went on to pity her. I guess that’s the empathy part.

Yet she didn’t actually ask the woman why she did not buy into The Truth and made no effort to understand someone else’s point of view. Whether the author of the post agreed or not was irrelevant; it didn’t occur to her to ask why the woman felt that way. It didn’t even occur to her to think up possible reasons for the woman’s viewpoint.

I still believe that my truth is The Truth, but every once in a while I get shocked out of my comfy little philosophy by someone who thinks her Truth is or should be everyone else’s.

1. Finish Magdalene.

2. Make some pretty things.

a) An afghan (Tunisian crochet, the only kind I like) for XX TD.

b) A Hobbes doll for XY TD.

3. Get better at the ebook formatting thing.

a) Continue self-tutoring in SVG so I can get The Fob Bible completely digitized (text, no problem, but it’s graphics heavy).

b) Give more priority to embedding fonts.

54. Shamelessly rip off RJ Keller’s 2010-in-photos idea.

65. Get my foyer, living room, and dining room decorated and my art up on the walls, including my kitschy matadors ~1950 and my cheap bought-out-of-a-car-trunk-in-a-parking-lot-but-expensively-framed Pissaro.

76. Expose my real identity to you all (in case you haven’t figured it out already and no, my real name is not famous in the least bit) and my artsy-fartsy business because I think you might like it. But to do that, I need to work on the super-outdated website.

87. Get The Fob Bible into college curricula, where I think it belongs best.

98. Implement some fun ideas I have for The Proviso et al.

109. Get back on the low-carb wagon, exercise, and load up on the probiotics/coconut oil.

110. Sit down and relax, watch a movie with Dude once a week or so.

There. I fixed it.

Wendy Drolma

I don’t know this woman from Eve. What I do know is that everything about her online presence screams master craftsman and überprofessional.

Got a scene? A masquerade party? A Labyrinth con? A Venetian extravaganza? Mardi Gras? Need some sleep? Want something exquisite to hang on your wall? This is only a sampling. Visit her gallery to get the full effect.

Then buy something from her. This kind of exquisite craftsmanship needs to be rewarded.

(I may make this a regular feature.)

I am constantly struck by the idea that writers “give up.” What does that mean, exactly? They stop writing? They stop submitting? Or they stop writing because they’re so disheartened by the submitting? My bet’s on that.

Keep on submitting and you will get published.

By “writer,” I mean good, unpublished novelists who don’t, for whatever reason, catch an agent and/or editor’s eye. I’m not talking about the people who don’t hang out on agent and editor blogs, learning every query trick in the book (some of which are flat wrong to some agents and golden to others). These are the writers who assume that the problem is with them, not with the odds.

Write a better book next time.

Oh, fuck that. It’s odds, folks, whether you want to believe it or not—and the odds get worse every week. And that write a better book bullshit? How do you know the one you just wrote is bad?

You don’t.

And then some of you will crack under the discouragement and say, “I write crap.” And you’ll stop submitting. You may even stop writing.

I did that.

I didn’t write crap, per se. I wrote slightly off-tick that didn’t hit the romance formula bullseye exactly right. Yeah, I said it. There’s a formula. I couldn’t hit it, and the misses were near enough that it was sickening.

This is not an anti-traditional-publishing rant. This is about writers, about you and your work and how much faith you have in it.

Why are you basing your goals on decisions someone else has to make? And, by extension, why are you waiting for validation based on odds that aren’t in your favor? And why are you acting like a job applicant?

You’re not powerless.

But somehow the idea of taking control of your work and presenting it to the public/the readers/the (gasp) curators is “giving up.”

Because “money always flows to the author.” Fuck that, too.

Yeah, you’ll have to assume some risk. Deal with it.

It pains me to see good writers on agent blogs talking about “when I’m published someday,” because “it will happen if I submit enough and don’t give up” and “I just have to write a better book next time.”

Stop thinking that way and start believing in your product.

Stop thinking you have no power.

Stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like an entrepreneur.

Go make your own damned job.

Update: To clarify, I’m using the term “curators” to describe the self-appointed task of the people who consume the work, like it, and recommend it to others, i.e., the readers/fans, the people who make being The Lone Artist all worth it. I’m not using the term as it has been tossed around the internet for the last year.

I didn’t say it. Someone who shall remain nameless said that to me, and it started me thinking about The Lone Artist.

I’ve been to New Orleans, Paris, Venice Beach, New York, London, Amsterdam, and other places where The Lone Artist sets about attempting to earn a living or at least approbation from a crowd of strangers walking by.

In Paris, it was the Ecole des Beaux-Arts students drawing Mona Lisa in pastels on the sidewalk, their hats out for coins.

In New Orleans, it was a pair of pre-teen boys tap dancing on a street corner, under the watchful eye of their mother, a trumpet player on a corner down the street, and an artist setting up shop in the middle of the St. Louis Cathedral courtyard, right under Jackson’s shadow.

In Amsterdam, it was the scantily-clad prostitutes in the plate-glass windows along the canal. (Okay, as “artist” and “lone,” that one’s questionable, but it’s vivid, ain’t it?)

In London, it was the—what is this guy? Is this classified as pantomime? Definitely performance art. (Shut up. I like mimes.)

In New York, it was the oddball music played by street musicians.

In Venice Beach, it was a dude who charged $5 to create origami magic with one strand from one palm frond. I knew it was a living sculpture that would die in an hour, but I bought it anyway because it was so different and . . . unexpected.  I admired that he could do it in seconds right in front of my eyes, I admired the work itself, and I kept it for the hour it lasted, then threw it away. That $5 was very well spent.

In a lot of ways, I like being a lone artist. When I go to authors’ websites and read about the difficulties they have working with a publisher, I’m glad. When I go to readers’ websites and read about how sad they are when a favorite author gets cut off mid-series, I’m glad. When I sit down to write and realize that I can do anything I want without having to account to a sales staff, I’m glad. When I know that the readership I’m gathering one by one, to whom I am ever so grateful, now has enough faith in me to go where I take them, I’m glad.

There is one respect I really don’t like it. I don’t like the near absence of distribution. But . . . that’s about the only way I can think of that I don’t like it.  After all, a street performer can only play to the audience that walks by.

It’s not easy. Some days it’s damned depressing. I count on the readers to talk to me and remind me that there is something of worth in what I do, and believe me, I remember it. I count up those emails and screen shots and snippets of conversation here and there, and I keep them, put them in my hard drive bank like coins in my hat.

So when bedtime comes (if it comes) and I fall in bed exhausted from everything I have to do to be a lone artist, it’s the good kind of exhaustion.

Howard Roark laughed.

Yeah, the joke’s tired. Sue me.

Anyway, 3-almost-4-year-old XY Tax Deduction and I went to Hy-Vee for lunch to kill some time. I love Hy-Vee’s salad bar (best grilled chicken EVER!) and XY TD loves their pizza. And canteloupe. On the same plate.

It has been my observation that on weekday mornings at Hy-Vee, there is a large number of post-retirement gentlemen sitting around, eating their farmer’s breakfasts and gossiping shooting the breeze, cussing and discussing. They seem to be mostly together, but because of tables and space, they self-select their table companions.

It has been my observation that on weekends when we go see my in-laws in southern Missouri, and we go to the local cafe for breakfast, there is a gathering of four to 10 post-retirement gentlemen sitting around, eating their farmer’s breakfasts and gossiping shooting the breeze, cussing and discussing.

It has been my observation in re-reading the Little House books for the purpose of writing Stay, Pa Ingalls, in the winter, would head out of the house and across the street to the grocery where he would watch off-season farmers play checkers and, I assume, gossip shoot the breeze, cuss and discuss.

Women have these little conclaves, too, but other than in a church-and-crafts context, I can’t think of anything comparable to men-and-their-morning-cafe-routine.

Every time I witness this, I think, “This is the internet before there was the internet.” And it still seems to be going strong. I love it. I think it’s profound in a lot of different ways, most of which I can’t articulate.

Too bad you have to be retired (or in the off season) to have it and enjoy it.

On power:

You have to come to it on your own, through hardship and fear. You have to know who you are and what you believe and you have to take stock of that every day. You have to walk barefoot through fire on broken glass. You have to stand up to people who frighten you under conditions that terrify you. You have to be honest with yourself about what you really want. You have to be willing to fail.

Power is acquired, earned. You’ll have many opportunities in your life to earn bits and pieces of it. You’ll make bad choices; learn from them and do the best you can with them. Do not, under any circumstances, dither over what the right choice might be every single time you’re presented with one. It won’t teach you anything and you’ll be a bore at cocktail parties.

Acquiring power is a never-ending process. Every day you have to wake up and prove to the world all over again that you deserve it. There should never come a day when you wake up and say, ‘Okay, I’m powerful now; I’m done.’ Never.

June 22, 2009

I’ve been pondering a weighty topic for the last week or so, wondering why a couple of Christian concepts seem to be mutually exclusive, and, moreover, how shall *I* reconcile those?

No, I’m not telling you what they are. I ran across a passage in a book that spoke to my questions (although didn’t answer them, precisely). So I’m just going to post the passage. Character names are left out, as I want it to stand on its own without any preconceived notions.

[The man] smiled. “What does this look like to you, Miss [ . . . ]?” He pointed around the room.

“This?” She laughed suddenly, looking at the faces of the men against the golden sunburst of rays filling the great windows. “This looks like . . . You know, I never hoped to see any of you again, I wondered at times how much I’d give for just one more glimpse or one more word—and now—now this is like that dream you imagine in childhood, when you think that some day, in heaven, you will see those great departed whom you had not seen on earth, and you choose, from all the past centuries, the great men you would like to meet.”

[ . . . ]

“Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves—or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“And if you met those great men in heaven,” asked [another], “what would you want to say to them?”

“Just . . . just ‘hello,’ I guess.”

“That’s not all,” said [he]. “There’s something you’d want to hear from them. I didn’t know it, either, until I saw him for the first time” —he pointed to [a third man]— “and he said it to me, and then I knew what it was that I had missed all my life. Miss [ . . . ], you’d want them to look at you and to say, ‘Well done.’”

June 19, 2009

A little while back, I posted on the sentimental value I hold of the 1960s ranch. Today, I’m rethinking 25 to 30 years’ worth of self-indoctrination.

Obviously the reason it holds so much appeal to me is that it was, in my teenage mind, the unattainable. I didn’t live in a house that nice, although I didn’t begrudge what I had. I liked it fine enough that I was proud to show it off to my friends, totally unable to see that what niceness I had was only that way because my mother worked so hard to make it nice with what little she had to work with. And on hindsight, I’m not sure my friends (from more chichi neighborhoods) were terribly impressed.

(You can tell my obvious slant toward the steep-roofed “French Provincial” style ranch.) Anyway, what I was doing when I was a teenager was aspiring up. That’s good to do. But somewhere, the adult me got lost in my teenage wants and conflated that to the end-all and be-all of existence.

Lately, Dude and I have been despairing over the state of our house and its issues, almost all structural, almost all of which will suck money right out of our bank account, with nothing aesthetic to show for it. Now, I’m all for infrastructure, but geez, that still doesn’t make my lawn dandelion-less. It also doesn’t account for the innumerable walls covered with crayon drawings that I would have to continually repaint to make the spaces halfway decent.

Thus, I have come to hate my house. This is a very difficult admission to make, especially when one considers how ecstatic I was over it in the beginning, and we moved in with the intention that we weren’t moving again. EVER.

A few days ago, a friend told me about a party she went to in a chichi neighborhood of L.A. and described the splendor to me. It shocked me that my first thought was, “Real people live like that?”

Today I saw a post over at The Red Brick Store about readying a house for sale. It was a gorgeous 4,000 square foot house, and the post led to pictures, which led me to search myself for flaws in my thinking. I didn’t covet the house, but it did make me wonder if I should dare to desire it at all.

Then I went to realtor.com and put in my favorite zip code (not telling which one it is) because it embodies my best childhood memories. Let’s just say it’s a rundown little village-size town in a rundown corner of a rundown state (not Missouri), and for the first time, I saw through my own little bubble of childhood memories and thought, “Am I aspiring to this? It’s 100 times worse than what I’ve got.”

Then I thought about the 1960s ranch across the street from me which inspired that other post. It’s beautiful, with lush lawn, kept immaculate at all times and with great care (care that it takes time and energy to spend, which we don’t have). You know what? Even aspiring to that is aspiring too low at this point in my life.

That gets me to thinking about my mother and what she did with what she had.

Which she hated.

Every day of the 18 years we lived there.

Knowing that we could have had something better if she and my father weren’t sacrificing a good chunk of money every month to send us to a private school.

After I revisited my childhood memories, I looked up properties in my own zip code, and thought, “THAT is what I should be aspiring to.”

We live in a neighborhood that retains its property values no matter what because A) Kansas City seems to weather recessions/depressions fairly well, even without Boss Tom, and B) the elementary school we have is one of the best in the state. People move into this neighborhood and within the school boundaries expressly for their children to attend that school. Believe me, we aren’t going to have to send our kids to private school for an excellent education, so there’s one obstacle conquered.

This has led me to some conclusions.

1) I’m far more happy with what I have right now. (That may wax and wane.)

2) We need to work on making it as good as it can be within our limitations.

3) We need to build a plan to get out of here and move up once we have accomplished #2. And I want a swimming pool.

Whether we attain #3 or not . . . well, I just don’t know. I’m still somewhat dubious of our ability to do that.

However, if we don’t make the attempt, it most assuredly will not happen at all.