Blogging Awards

Assorted vegetables from my garden

(the water was "dyed" by the bougainvillea)

July 2010

In January, Gelisa gave me a Blogger Appreciation Award, an award  that bloggers pass on to other bloggers. The process allows people to connect to new people, and to find out a little more about their current contacts through their reading interests and a stipulation that the bloggers granting the award tell a few (actually seven) facts about themselves.

By coincidence, I expressed appreciation last week for several blogs I read, and then, Linda also passed on two blogging awards to me.

And with that, I figured I should at the very least make an effort to thank them. You met Linda in my last entry, but not Gelisa.  Gelisa is an accountant, musician, mother, wife whose break with her mother's family sometimes haunts her. While her primary blog is in French, she also keeps a blog in English, which she updates a bit less frequently. Many thanks to both Linda and Gelisa, who not only thought of me, but also took the time to continue the chain.

As for the award, I'm going to take the lazy way out and confer it upon those I mentioned last week, and leave it up to them as to whether they choose to pass it on to others. And seven facts about me...

1. I am my mother's daughter and at my best somewhere between 5 in the evening and 4 in the morning. Needless to say, I hate mornings. I keep a notepad next to my bed, because I will invariably wake up in the middle of the night with a possible solution to some problem or some item I need to add to my list of tasks.

2. I work too much. Maybe it comes from my parents, who practically lived at their pharmacy, maybe it's because I began working for them as soon as I was old enough to wield a dust cloth without breaking anything too precious. I have been known to put in more hours on the job (in the office and at home) than most people and still be focused enough to be highly productive. The downside is that my identity is tied to my job, and now that I'm unemployed, I feel like a non-entity. I am nothing.

3. I'm a loner, and yet constantly lonely, even when with people. Try to figure that one out!

4. I lack self esteem and most of the time, I don't like myself. In spite of having been a high achiever, I have never been happy with what I've done or who I am. I'm incredibly insecure and have been known to push away those I care about the most in fear of being hurt.

5. I am one of the few middle-aged people on this earth who has never been married, never had children and never planned for either. I would love to be able to share my life with someone, but I'm not an easy person to live with, probably due to that self esteem thing, so I will probably spend the rest of my days alone, as well.

6. I dream about improving educational systems in underserved areas, which is a monumental task that I don't think I'm up to. People like to scapegoat the teachers in those schools, but the problem is way beyond a few bad teachers. It is a system set up so that more resources are diverted to compliance issues and administration than to direct student services, and home situations that often discourage scholarship and discipline. How do we combat that?

7. One of my big worries is the constant, gradual stripping away of citizens' rights and increasing  dominance by an elite few. The powers that be use crises, our own prejudices and partisanship, and even our need to be entertained to accomplish that, and we are falling for it hook, line and sinker. In a visually oriented world, we are most fascinated by those who speak passionately, using catch phrases and sound bites that don't add up to a logical conclusion but stir up strong emotional reactions. Somewhere in there, we forgot how to think for ourselves. And "they" are using this to their advantage, as well.

That's me. And that's seven. Please do take a look at my last entry and visit the blogs there.  Actually, take a little time to peruse my reading list. Everyone there is there for a reason.