Wednesday, December 31, 2014

New Year

Happy New Year's eve, everyone.

As promised in previous New Year posts, no big resolutions or pronouncements of change coming from here. What will 2015 be like? I suspect we'll all acquire a few new good habits and maybe some that aren't so good as well. But I know we'll muddle through somehow. Which is totally enough. More than enough.  If you think about it, flourishing and blossoming and soaring are all great, but how much of your life is made up of these soaring-through-the-clouds moments? Not very many. The majority of the time, we're muddling through. And we should give ourselves credit for being such damn good muddlers in a busy, complicated world. So I guess there's my New Year's message. Go forth and muddle through. Muddle through like a motherfucker.

I feel like maybe that should be on a t-shirt.

In other news, there were some great feminist moments in 2014. Plenty of other feminist sources have compiled lists, so I'll leave it to them. And I'll leave it to you to go find these fabulous lists.

Today in baby animals, there's this:

baby orca with mom
Baby orca born to endangered whale population 

and this, although this story is not actually about baby manatees, but it is an excellent excuse to post a picture of one:
manatee calf with mother
Manatees died in lower numbers in 2014

and this, although he is most definitely not a baby, he is the coolest dwarf elephant ever of all times, and he kinda look like a baby, so...

dwarf elephant
A Dwarf Elephant With Outsized Attitude


And finally, today in things that are true:
Giving someone your full attention is every bit as valuable as giving them some material thing.

Exhale into cat, inhale into cow.

Happy New Year

7 comments:

  1. Anonymous12/31/2014

    That elephant is amazing!

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    1. Jennie1/02/2015

      And, from what I heard on NPR, it's the first known instance of an animal with dwarfism surviving into adulthood in the wild. So cool.

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  2. Cecilia1/02/2015

    Totally agree about the muddling. Sometimes I think it's a part of the good mom/bad mom mythology. Good moms are never just muddling through. They always have their ducks in a row. So measuring ourselves by this standard is a rigged game, because nobody has all their ducks in a row all the time. That's just not life.

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    1. Agreed. Sometimes after I drop off my kid at school I realize that I feel so disorganized and not picture-perfect-momish by any stretch of the imagination. But then when I think about it, she made it to school on time, with a healthy homemade lunch, her homework, her gym shoes, her swimming/basketball/soccer stuff for after school, and I made it to work on time with my lunch and my shit. That's a major accomplishment! Maybe it wasn't the most well-orchestrated morning you've ever seen, but we muddled through successfully and came out the other end with all the ducks included, even if they weren't in a neat and perfect row. Success.

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  3. Delilah1/08/2015

    I find that spending too much time on pinterest and the like looking at all the cool things other people are doing, and how organized their homes are, and how crafty they are makes me feel less OK with my own muddling through.

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    1. I used to experience that too. But now I think that all the cool cooking posts and all that are not necessarily representative of every single day in that person's life. If I took pics of all the best things I ever cooked or made and posted them, I would look like I had my shit together 100% of the time too. It's selective representation.

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  4. Anonymous1/08/2015

    {manatees}

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