Topic 110: On Knowing When to Stop

Carol:

Stop in the Name of Love   

 I guess I have a problem with not knowing when to stop. Frankly, I didn’t consider it a problem until other people started complaining, mostly …well, mostly my daughter. I spent quite a few years doing whatever I wanted before SHE was born.
 

 My husband was easy going and had his own interests in the pre-kid years. So, it wasn’t a big deal during summer vacations that I might start a book, not get dressed, not cook dinner until I had finished that book. Who could put The Exorcist down in the middle, or The Omen or even The Amityville Horror? Marc would arrive home, greeted by the promise “ I just have a few more pages, then I’ll get up and make dinner.” He would usually laugh, shrug and make a sandwich. 
 

After I gave up horrifying myself into insomnia, I was introduced to videogames at the Belly Up Tavern on the weekends.  It was pretty exciting when we bought a Pac-Man for our new television so that I could play as long as I wanted without having to hang out at a bar.  We set up the TV in the spare bedroom, which also housed our clunky stationary bicycle, and I soon perfected the technique of cycling and playing Pac-Man at the same time. I was getting the best work-out of my life because I would get so excited gobbling up the power pellets in the videogame maze that I would pedal faster and faster.  Marc would head off with his stack of running magazines after I promised, “One more game, then I’ll come to bed.”
 

Things changed when child #1 came along. Megan was so much more demanding than my patient husband.  When she was six weeks old, I decided to re-start my Pac-Man/bicycle schedule and laid her on a blanket on the floor while I exercised. Just as I was getting into the rhythm of the game, she began to whimper. I couldn’t stop then, could I, just when I was racking up the points for a new record? Fifteen minutes later, I was pumping full-speed on the bicycle when she escalated the whimper into a full-out tantrum. I looked down at that sweet, little, puffy red face  and promised, “Just 5 more minutes, kiddo. I’ll feed you when I get to the next level.” Neither the love in my eyes nor my soothing tone satisfied her. Volume and pitch of the screams went up another notch. This kid just didn’t know when to stop.
 

It has pretty well been that way ever since. When we bought the Game Boys for her and child #2, I had to try out the Mario Brothers, didn’t I, to see how long the batteries would last? She got soooo cranky after the third hour even though I promised her, “Just one more level, kiddo, then you can have your Christmas present back.” I did have a few years of peace when she moved to England. Marc and I got back into our comfortable, pre-kids routine. I would spend 6 or 7 hours at the computer working on my family history book.  He would head off with his stack of motorcycle magazines after I promised, “Just 20 more minutes and I’ll have this section finished.”
 

Megan doesn’t throw screaming tantrums anymore, but she gets this tone in her voice when she thinks I’ve been working on something too long and she wants to go to the movies, or eat dinner, or post the daily theme. She hates it when I break a promise. My daughter just doesn’t know when to stop.  Here she comes now. “Megan, I promise, just 5 more minutes and I’ll be done with essay 110. I just need one more perfect sentence to…..”

Megan:

On Knowing When to Stop

I don’t know whether you noticed but I added a search bar to our site yesterday. I could say I did it for your convenience, but really, I did it for mine.  Some of these topics are so similar, I’m starting to repeat myself. I think. I’m not sure yet. I need to go through and re-tag all the entries, which will also make navigating easier. And then maybe we can add one of those word clouds where the key words get bigger depending on how often we mention them. I am 100% sure that the biggest word will turn out to be MILO, followed closely by Prison.

So, I added the search bar so I could see if I’d written about why I quit working at the prison.  I got 8 pages of results – each page having 4 entries, and I’m not really in the mood to read 32 essays right now. Also, I’m writing this from a coffee shop, using their internet and ISP, and every time I click on an entry, it inflates our stats. Those numbers go up enough from my mother’s visits (on days I’m particularly funny, she will revisit the site several times to read the essays. I know this because I can hear her crying laughing). Anyway, I’m pretty sure I’ve alluded to quitting several times, and talked about some of the bad things and now that I think about it, I don’t really have a “why I quit working at the prison” story that would tie in to the topic of knowing when to stop.

I still have my ups and downs about leaving the prison and England, lately more downs than ups. This is probably because I still haven’t found a job.  It has been 8 months. I have been trying to take some of the advice I got from the conference last month by increasing my professional online presence. I’m now on Twitter and try to tweet at least once a day about something library or information related. I have 8 followers, which is the same as the number of people who subscribe to this website (different people though). Sometimes I forget why I’m there, and I spend most of my time laughing at my favorite celebrity tweeters (Steve Martin, Sarah Silverman, Stephen Fry).  I’m also trying to be more involved on LinkedIn – keep meaning to involve myself in some of the discussions happening there. The problem with that is that for some reason, CILIP (England’s library association) is far more active than the ALA, so all the stuff I’m reading about has to do with England and then I get a little sad.

While all that is going on, trying to be more involved in the library world, I am also thinking about giving up and trying another career. Yesterday’s ideas involved becoming a nun or a mortician. I don’t really want to be a nun and the mortician idea is ridiculous because of my phobia of all things dead, but for a second I thought maybe I should just face my fear. When I was little I was afraid of wolves, so I decorated my room with posters and pictures of them and got over my fear. Maybe becoming a mortician would be the same thing. Probably not though. I saw The Rite yesterday, that’s where I got both those ideas… and it was the 4th movie I’ve been to in the last week, so I thought again about being a movie critic. But all I can think of to say about The Rite was that it was not very good.

So, this essay is once again all over the place and only semi-related to the topic. I’ve never been very good at knowing when (or how) to stop. Mom complains I rarely have a good conclusion. Usually I just look down at the word count and think, crap, I’ve gone over the limit by 164 words.