Sometimes, the more I look at a word the more it changes. Or the more it can lose its power. In this case...it's both. I am just barely old enough to have heard, as a little girl,people still use the word "spinster." It was mostly uttered by those from my grandmother's generation and I don't even remember if I knew what it meant at the time. The tone, alone, though, perfectly conveyed that it was not something a woman should aspire to be in life.

Old maid never sounded that bad to me because I always thought of the card game instead..even if "old maid" was used in the same tone, with the same slightly snide implication that ending up one was a fate worse than death...and a cross between something pitiable and something hideous. 

My copy of the newly published and widely reviewed Spinster came in today and I'm looking forward to reading it, even if the front cover seems just a tad too trendy. I prefer the title page because it shouts out less (to me) that it's okay to be a spinster as long as you definitely do not look like one.

This quote from Pure Wow kind of says what I'm thinking:


Some readers may roll their eyes as Bolick recounts yet another dude who was dying to marry her (we get it: indifference is irresistible). But overall her writing is impeccable and her message fresh.

So, in my insomniac state that keeps me from focusing enough to read a book, but not from focusing enough to think and think about one little word, I am staring at the word "spinster" and the more I look at the word itself (not the picture of the girl on the front who probably never has had trouble getting asked out on a date) the more it looks kind of cute and harmless and totally non-bothersome.

Because, really, if people (including one's own parents) have trouble with someone not being married (and this "someone" is usually a woman and, by the way, how come men get cool words like "bachelor"?) that's their problem, not the problem of the person not married.

Sometimes I worry that my Saturday nights as an adult (staying home with books and music and tea) are pretty much the same as they were in middle school and high school.

And, then, that makes me worry that I'm the same girl I was then...which would be horrible, because not changing at all in almost thirty years would show a complete lack of personal growth on my part.

These are two articles I found on personality changes, one of which is more broad in scope:

 http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/


and the other directly aimed at high school and whether we really do change from who we were as teens. This one really interests me because it addresses why our musical tastes are often strongest when it comes to what we listened to in our youth:

"Our self-image from those years, in other words, is especially adhesive. So, too, are our preferences. “There’s no reason why, at the age of 60, I should still be listening to the Allman Brothers,” Steinberg says. “Yet no matter how old you are, the music you listen to for the rest of your life is probably what you listened to when you were an adolescent.” Only extremely recent advances in neuroscience have begun to help explain why."

 http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/

I'm sipping wine (a really good one that I'm sipping for taste and not relief) and wondering how on earth I managed to write over 600 pages double-spaced of fiction about nothing I have ever experienced in real life. I don't know if it's any good or not (it's good in spots, I kind of think, but the wine is really relaxing me so I may not be able to judge well) but I hate to throw it away because I've been writing it for three years now and the actual story itself means a lot to me.

I based some of it on truth (one of the characters is based a bit on someone I knew years ago and who meant the world to me before an irreparable rift changed things forever) but most of it is just things I imagined in my heart and mind. It's about getting past heart break and figuring how to tell the difference between what is real or what is not. 

It's also about how much crap we're willing to put up with from someone we deeply love and would even die for, someone who originally was 'runner up' to the love of the central character's life, but eventually becomes much more...the main love interest is someone I totally made up in my head, though when I reread it I kind of worry I somehow wove Blanche Dubois into her character... obviously, not as well as Tennessee Williams, and definitely not intentionally. But I do remember I was really in a Vivien Leigh phase and watching every production of A Streetcar Named Desire a lot when I first started writing.

Besides worrying about the actual writing I also wonder if you really can write about what you don't know, about things you've never done or experienced. I found some interesting articles online that offer some good advice and thoughts...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/08/dont-write-what-you-know/308576/

http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/why-you-should-write-about-what-you-dont-know

I even found (amidst a lot of rather, shall we say, coarse advice) some words on whether you can write love scenes without experience:

...To which I reply: If a writer had to experience something in order to write it, we wouldn’t have science fiction, fantasy, or most romantic comedies. Or most romances in general, really.

I wish I could make the past few years disappear and start fresh...but since I can't I continue to read Saint Augustine's Confessions and think of what Mother Teresa would do.

“Humility is the mother of all virtues1; purity, charity and obedience. It is in being humble that our love becomes real, devoted and ardent. If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are. If you are blamed you will not be discouraged. If they call you a saint you will not put yourself on a pedestal.”

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta

~Mother Teresa~

For more read here:

https://www.catholiccompany.com/blog/mother-teresas-humility-list

Sometimes it feels like your heart weighs a thousand pounds...whether you're extremely anxious or sad or trying to get past a broken relationship or one-sided love. Even though this article is from more than six years ago, I think it still has a lot to say about the broken heart. It gets it better than anything else I've read:


Heartbreak is more than just an emotional defeat; to some the pain is very real. At one point or another, everyone must experience this mind numbing feeling (unless you confine yourself to a house and never interact with even a pet) but that's not the norm and you're probably not reading this article if you've had that kind of sheltered life.

Heartbreak can be caused by many different circumstances and that's what makes this emotion easily recognized by nearly every person on the planet. It can result from the loss of a loved one, a partner, a friend and even a close pet. Or it can be caused from disappointment, betrayal or a change from known surroundings. It might not even be a loss at all but a sense of loss, or the realization that the love of the person you care most for is drifting far from where it had always been.

Love, in the same perspective as heartbreak, neither has a corrective definition nor specific amplitude implied by the physical word itself. There's a never-ending limit to the definition of love because there are so many things we love and in many different ways. There's friendship love, love for animals and possessions, love for music or hey, even food. Then there's that kind of  love that is so overwhelming perfect, passionate and meaningful, a love that you have never before been able to achieve. This is the love we're going to be talking about throughout this article, but before we can continue on, we must first understand why we as humans are constantly searching to fulfill this emotion.

A part of the desire comes from what we find most joyful in life. If you search for this answer, and look upon previous actions objectively, it's simple to say that we are satisfied by making others happy. We receive complete satisfaction from doing things for others, and this feeling increases with the intensity of love we feel towards that specific person or thing.  When you lose someone you love, you have lost the sense of purpose acquired by the relationship between them and yourself. You lose the purpose you felt when doing simple things to make them smile, and making yourself joyful in return. The cycle should continue endlessly, but as we know that could only occur in a perfect world, which this is not. Heartbreak happens, and it changes who we are for the better (in most cases) and so will it be for the rest of our lives and next.

"We of course equate the pain of loss to the intensity of the love, but that is not what is behind the pain. The more you love and feel loved, the greater the increase of your sense of purpose because when you do something for just anyone and they do not appreciate it; your sense of purpose is not completely satisfied. It requires seeing who you are helping, and their appreciation to make it complete." says personal developer, David Samuel.

Read more: http://www.science20.com/variety_tap/science_behind_heartbreak-33900#ixzz3Yv4dOrxJ




http://www.science20.com/variety_tap/science_behind_heartbreak-33900