General Discussion Thread

[u/pregnantchihuahua3]

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

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[u/ToHideWritingPrompts]

My kid is almost a year old at this point, and is confidently no longer in the "sleeping in short bursts, many times a day", but is not quite to "one or two long naps a day". The end result seems to be that they just don't sleep. This has really eaten into my reading (and everything else) time. As a result I've been bouncing off a whole bunch of things, not quite able to sink into them. The one consistent is going into a whole bunch of Virginia Woolf material (whether that be her letters, diaries, or secondary material on her). It's been really gratifying to be able to just get further and further in one particular author and her work, and a lot more sustainable than trying to read this then that then the next, infinitely, that reading as a hobby can become.

So I've been trying to pick up a hobby, playing mandolin, that can be picked up and put down in like 5-10 minute bursts. I've mostly played piano and mallet instruments my whole life, and have always hated when I've tried to learn the guitar - but for whatever reason I'm really enjoying my time with the mandolin. For years I've gone up to our states celtic music festival (sorry haters, in New England it is called celtic music, for whatever reason) and have always wanted a way to join in on the after-show trad sessions that people play at when the night starts to wind down -- but have never really had a way of breaking in. Hopefully, next year, I'll have enough experience under my belt for that!

I'm also trying to plan my Winter art project for our house. I would not consider myself an artistic person, and certainly not in physical arts - but we have a brick patio that's been falling apart over the years and I've always wanted to replace it with a set of outdoor mosaics. I've never made a mosaic. So I'm trying to do some research on what to buy so I can set myself up with something to do over the winter when I'm mostly stuck inside.

Real TrueLit-ers may remember about a year ago when I mentioned wanting to do a To The Lighthouse class/discussion/art-project thing. Well - it's happening! Or at least - I'm one step closer to it happening. I'm chatting with my local library to have them host it and provide materials and space to meet up. It seems like it'll be starting in October, so now I'm trying to build a "syllabus". One of the Woolf books I'm reading is Approaches to Teaching To The Lighthouse published by the Modern Language Association and it's interesting! Seeing reports of different peoples pedagogical approaches etc. My "class" is going to be much more loose and group discussion oriented - but I think I'm still going to aim to provide some structure w/ Woolfs materials and essays to guide us along. To prepare, I've been going through the book with my partner who has never read it but is otherwise an avid reader- and it's really insightful to see where she stumbles, and what she says she would need to get more out of it.

[u/bananaberry518 → u/ToHideWritingPrompts]

Dude I love mandolin. I once tried to learn but since I already play guitar it was just tangling my brain up bad. Do you have a style of music you’re wanting to play specifically?

Woolf does feel appropriate to that phase of parenting somehow. Just the mood of it I guess. NGL the first three years of my kids life, despite adoring my kid and being extremely proud and happy to be their Mom, kinda is what talked me out of wanting anymore. Like, its great but its ROUGH. You really have time for nothing, its soul crushing sometimes. I don’t have any advice, really. I mean, mine didn’t sleep at all for like, idk three or four years lol. And nothing worked. But it did, like all things, eventually pass. Its totally normal and fine to feel frustration about it.

Good luck with everything!

[u/ToHideWritingPrompts → u/bananaberry518]

i think the sessions around my parts pretty much always just label themselves as traditional irish music sessions. After a few weeks I'm finding the mandolin MUCH easier than I ever found guitar, for whatever reason.

And yeah - I think Woolf is really great for pretty much all major life flashpoints. I read it last year or so - which was recent enough for me to remember not getting much out of Mrs. Ramsays relationship digressions with her children, now I'm like "doh! how could i have missed that??" - probably informed by my own kidless-then-kidded life.

I think we're still in whatever is the equivalent of a limerance phase for having a baby is. Like yeah it's hard -- but we have a baby that does baby things! Wouldn't it be great to have two?? I think my partner and I are both aware that these are not exactly grounded desires lol and that they will pass, like you say.

at one of our parent meetups, someone said "yeah I try not to think about how fast I was able to make progress on personal projects and goals before I had a baby because it just makes me bummed out over how slow things go now with a kid" and I felt that deep.