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This week’s Objectivist Round Up is sitting out there, waiting for you, in the Titanic Deck Chairs.
And just in case there is anyone out there who only reads the Round Up on my say so, you can find last week’s edition at The Playful Spirit. Last week was Rachel’s first time hosting so you might want to go check out her blog if you’ve not seen it yet.
The vacation was really a bust for me. We did have some fun times, though, and I think the sun did me good. Adam and I also had a date night on our last night there, which was nice. We ate mussels and crab and lobster, all in one meal!
Lest you think I am defeated, I must let you know that we have two more vacations already planned between now and July, and we’ve just started planning another one! The hilarious part is that just after writing that my dream vacation would be one in which I did not have to clean up any poop, we were invited to join our friends on a farm vacation. You know, the kind where you do farm chores, which must include some poop cleaning somewhere along the way. I’m a glutton for punishment, I guess.
I still have no time to do any real blogging, so here are a few pictures from our trip. More can be found here.
Airport fun
First time using her own backpack
Nice day at the beach
She loved running through the ankle-deep water
Cutie pie
Another easy blog post, courtesy of formspring.
I was 16 or 17 when I became an Objectivist. At that point, I believed in capitalism, at least implicitly, I was almost an atheist (but still wallowing in agnosticism), I was a great man-worshiper (meaning I was already in love with the accomplishments of humans throughout history), and I was an implicit individualist (and suffering greatly in not knowing what that meant). I think I was a pretty typical teenager, except for the godlessness. Ayn Rand spoke to me in the intro to The Fountainhead when she said that the novel is “a confirmation of the spirit of youth, proclaiming man’s glory, showing how much is possible.” Hold your fire, indeed!
So far, the hardest thing to understand has been the idea of the arbitrary. I even wrote about it on my blog a little bit:
http://www.amymossoff.com/ideas/723/arbitrary-aliens/
But right now I’m struggling with the idea of duty versus causality (in ethics, not metaphysics). I’m finding that I don’t really have a clue what it means to be selfish. Well, I have a clue, but I’m certainly not acting selfishly as much as I would like. It was easy to understand in the abstract, but it’s not so easy to implement.
The easiest…hmmm. I hesitate to say any part of Objectivism has been easy to understand, now that I’m realizing how shallow my understanding of selfishness is. I guess I’d say that the trader principle (in the political sense) was easy for me – or, to put it negatively, that you can’t get something for nothing. Of course, a better understanding of the trader principle might help me to understand selfishness better, so I probably don’t understand it in the spiritual realm as well as I do in the material, or political realm.
It’s all integrated.
One that does not require me to clean any poop.
Ok, it’s not that bad, but it sucks nevertheless.
I guess we were due for a bad vacation. The last 4 or 5 have been wonderful. But this is beginning to rival our trip to Disneyworld, when we could not get out of the hotel room. No, ok, it’s not even that bad, but it sucks nevertheless.
I am now holed up in my bedroom while Adam and his parents enjoy the evening and the hot tub. I have no desire to be around people or to make the effort of getting my bathing suit on.
Sam will not stop pooping in her pants. She pooped in her pants 7 times today. I am not exaggerating in any way. She also peed in her pants a few of those times, and there was one independent peeing incicent that brought the total accidents to 8. I only brought 8 pairs of underwear with us, and I’ve already thrown 2 away. We just put her very last clean shirt and pants on her to sleep in. Thank god she wears a diaper to sleep at night or we would have been completely out of underwear. We’ve done a few loads of laundry prior to today and I don’t even know how many we’ve done today because Adam took over at some point. We’ve changed her clothes on city streets without thinking twice about it. Poop has fallen on the floor and I’ve simply forgotten to clean it up any further than to pick it up with a tissue and plop it in the toilet. She pooped in her swim diaper on Friday (and I wasn’t planning on needing any swim diapers since she is supposedly potty trained) and as I was tearing it open, the diaper slipped and poop flew across the room, including into my face.
This reminds me of those newborn days, when you just seem to be swimming in feces all the time.
Speaking of swimming, that is supposed to be what we are doing here, but Sam is now banned from the pool. After her 5th (I think) accident today, she promised that she would not poop in the swim diaper, but she only lasted about 10 minutes before she did.
I’m losing my freaking mind here. I don’t know how much poop can possibly be in there. I mean, it’s literally like, the moment we clean her up, she does it again.
I am not enjoying my time with Adam’s parents because all I can think about or talk about is the poo. There have been a few times where we had a few problem-free hours, but even then, I’m just waiting for the next series of accidents.
We have one vacation day left. We’re planning to go to the beach tomorrow. Sam and I went to the beach, just the 2 of us, on Friday, and had no problems. We went to the beach yesterday and she was fine, even through dinner at a restaurant afterwards, where she used the potty. So I’m hoping she will be fine again tomorrow. If she pooped in the ocean, I don’t think I’d really care, as long as she doesn’t do it in her bathing suit.
I have 3 theories about why this is happening. First, I regressed into occasionally asking if she needed to use the potty. We were in airports, and heading out on long trips to the beach, so I felt like I had to give her a heads up that she needed to think about going. We had just started making progress at home with me never, under any circumstances, saying a word about going to the potty. She even had one accident free day! So the reminders probably kicked off the problems.
Next, when I am on vacation, especially when I am staying at somebody else’s house instead of a hotel, I have a very hard time with the logistics of life. Where do I put the poopy baby wipes? Which trash can should I use to throw away the underwear? How many different piles of dirty laundry are there and where are they and should I do a load now or wait for the inevitable next accident in an hour? So I’m getting extremely stressed out by the accidents. At home, I know what to do and how to clean up. Here, each accident seems like an hour-long ordeal. I’m at the point where I’m saying things like, “What is wrong with you?” and “You’ve got to stop this, you are driving me crazy!” So Sam is getting the negative feedback which I think is the main cause of this whole thing.
Finally, we have dropped our routine since we are on “vacation.” Sam is eating what I consider to be junk food (cereal, crackers, fruit, and desserts), she is not sitting down for regular meals, and she has missed a couple of naps. I so badly want a break from our routine (which is the relentless work of a professional parent) and there are 3 other adults around to take up the slack, that I figured I could just let things happen. Sam could eat what and when she wanted and if she missed nap, no big deal. Well, I’m paying the price now.
I guess if I want a vacation, I have to line up someone to actually take care of Sam, not to just be around as backup. It’s the same problem at home. I look forward to Adam being home because I figure I’ll have a break, but if I don’t physically leave the house, I’m still on duty.
I really just want to go home. I want to write off this entire experience as a total loss and get back to work on this problem at home. What a terrible waste.
We were at the beach and Sammy made a friend who told her that it was ok to pee in the ocean. Sammy stood up in the ankle-high water, pulled down her bikini bottoms, and peed like a boy right into the water.
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