Blunt in the Bedroom

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Tech Musings: Homeschooling in a Pandemic

September 12, 2020 by Tricia Leave a Comment

Our homeschooling life has taken many forms as my kids changed from year to year, and changed their minds from minute to minute. I have learned so much about me and them and brains and neurons and history and science and love. We’ve always emphasized the experiential in our family learning life, textbooks be damned, mostly. No matter what assignments or activities we did as a part of our learning, one thing was always clear. What my kids did not want was to be told what to do.

I could have made them obey. But I was determined to earn it. I had to make what we were doing interesting and empowering enough for them to hop into the wagon. It didn’t always go the way I’d hoped. At first, I spent too much time on Pinterest and not enough time watching my kids. It turns out they are curious little creatures. And once I started following what they were curious about, I got curious too, and pretty soon we’d learn a bunch of awesome shit together. Sometimes by scrolling Pinterest, together.

But they still don’t like to be told what to do. So now I let my Moodle do the talking. Moodle is an open-source Learning Management System that can be built on your own website for free. I wanted to learn how to used the tool. Thank goddess I have Beard Man to meet all my IT needs…and so much more. I’ve had so much fun building classes with projects and topics to explore. Our site features a colorful custom background and uses Open Dyslexic font, designed for those who read in three dimensions, pictures, or just with a unique neurological path, like at least one of my kids. Love me some Moodle and HTML fuckery.

All of the videos, experiments, games, and even some reading gets called my curriculum and I plunk it into Moodle lessons. They access the website on their iPads, and together we look at what we have on tap for stuff to do this week. See, it’s not me telling them what to do, it’s the Moodle. That’s stupid logic, but somehow that’s the effect it has on their kid brains. And then we all have fun. Boom.

This year’s curriculum plan is tech and creative expression heavy. Now is not the time for rote memorization of meaningless facts and figures. The human brain is built for recognizing patterns – it is what has made us successful. I fully believe it is my duty as a parent and educator to provide my kids with as many rich and engaging experiences of every kind as I can, to connect them with big ideas and critical thinking skills. And MATH concepts. Their brains can do the rest. Our future needs brains with more connections than containers.

Shockingly, our summer of video-games-as-a-full-time-job has had some pleasant side effects. The kids are now better at recognizing their own screen time limits, and have asked to have a couple of apps limited through our parent settings to help them keep their balance. They asked for the limits. One kid had an organization revelation as she organized her digital world, and it spilled over into her physical world, growing her ability to manage her own belongings and coordinate more aspects of her calendar and social life. It has all been accompanied by a deepening self-awareness. The other kid discovered reading in a real way for the first time, gushing over what had happened by chapter 12. “The only time I can be still is when I’m reading a book.” Says the kid who plays Minecraft and Roblox for hours, laying or sitting quite still, it must be said. I acknowledge it must feel different to her body to be playing an interactive game with her thumbs than it does to imagine a whole book world with her mind. Her conscious connection to an activity that brings calm gives calls on me to recognize that she established this idea through the dopamine haze of an iPad. So maybe our kids are more doomed from our screen naysaying than they are from the screens themselves.

And also I’m certain I could produce a bevy of studies that would trounce everything I’ve just noted. There are no perfect answers. So take what works for you and leave the rest. Screens or no screens doesn’t likely make that big of a difference in the end, but how you as a parent administrate it, does. Do it consciously, with a connection to their development as a conscious human being.

We cannot separate academic health from mental health, either. Keeping the kiddos connected to people who enrich their lives is harder than ever. I used to go out and play with kids on my block, now my kids go online and play with kids on Roblox. Neighbors come to play in our Minecraft worlds from the real-life neighborhood and suburbs around us, from Silicon Valley, and a few small towns in the Midwest. Where I grew up, in a small Midwest town, many kids I knew were friends with the kids of their parents’ friends, because everybody still lived there. I appreciate that while it is different, that dynamic is present here – the kids of friends I am in contact with after 20+ years are new friends my kids have connected with in the virtual neighborhoods of Minecraft and Roblox.

My big kid says her online friends can cover about 80% of her people needs, so she knows she’s working at a deficit. Acknowledging that we are all likely at a social nourishment deficit helps us be gentler with ourselves and each other. Even the most solitary of us need a bit of people time.

Until the pandemic, satisfying our curiosity meant museums, parks, travel, and city adventures with friends. I am ragingly aware of my privileged position here. Our joyful explorations served every day to remind me of how much I have, something my contracted, but safe, pandemic lifestyle continues to do. Every kid should get to have as much fun as mine have. It isn’t fair, so feeling thankful is weird unless I acknowledge this truth and listen to those without privilege and support their initiatives for equity.

Much love to all the pandemic parents, rich or poor, supported or struggling. We are all in this together. We have to be.

Homeschooling in the Time of Corona

August 28, 2020 by Tricia Leave a Comment

2020 may or may not be the “Great Tribulation”, the apocalypse I’ve been expecting since I was brainwashed in a doomsday cult, but it sure is a shitshow. Those sworn to serve and protect are committing violence against peaceful protesters who dare to demand an equitable society. Meanwhile, COVID-19 slowly strangles the U.S., spurred on by science deniers, those people left ignorant by religious worldviews, our education system, and media clickbait culture.

Black Lives Matter. Science is real. No qualifiers needed.

I’m a white, middle class homeschool mom. I feel the weight of my privilege every day, and use it however I can to throw wrenches into the wheels of our white supremacist oligarchy through education. My homeschool curriculum is one of my favorite wrenches, and probably the only one I should admit to online. Social Studies class can expose institutional, systemic racism instead of support and perpetuate it, and Science, done right, promotes curiosity and logic, not to mention a firm grounding in objective reality.

A key failing of our educational system is the notion that getting something wrong is “bad” when, in fact, getting things wrong is how we become WISE. Then we take things further by ranking children according to their test scores on mostly irrelevant questions, as if rote memorization has anything to do with the contributions a child may someday make in the world. Make no mistake, the U.S. educational system was created to churn out factory drones who are knowledgeable enough to eek their way through life, but conformed enough not to question it being that way. Bad scores make smart kids think they are stupid, and someone who has been convinced they are stupid, will be, because they stop being curious. And they will grow up numb, or angry because they feel the indignity their own society heaped upon them without understanding how it happened.

If you are stressed out because you’ve got more responsibility for your children’s education than ever before, I get it, it’s a huge responsibility. Stop a minute and ask yourself if the system they are in is serving who they will be and the world they will inherit. Now is a pretty good time to take this terrible gift of a global pandemic and shift everything you took for granted. Stop trying to make things go back to normal. The pre-2020 world is gone. Fucking deal with it and get on with it. Change your kids’ world to change the whole world.

Also, maybe go demonstrate in front of the police station nearest you on the regular to demand police money be reallocated to community efforts that support BIPOC. Take the kids. And wear a goddamn mask.

Let’s Be Blunt

March 17, 2019 by Tricia Leave a Comment

I haven’t written since October 2018. That same month, my daughter was struck by a car. Those two things are most definitely connected.

While I was home writing a blog post, Beard Man was picking the kids up. He called me and I heard sirens in the background, but noticed them second only to the wailing of my 7-year-old.  The SUV tire had sheared gouges into her right knee and ankle, and the tire stopped between her knees, inches from her pelvis.

She’s ok. Nothing broke. Her backpack prevented any head injury. She even crosses the same street with ease these days. I’m still pretty fucked up though. Waves of what-ifs and could-haves still punch me in the throat when I just want to get on with it. I’ve felt a little sick anytime I logged on to write. The topic of better sex through weed, even as a vehicle of therapeutic healing, became offensive to me. How could I spend a moment on anything other than my children’s well-being? Their tomorrow is not guaranteed. I’ve tottered close to panic for months with this thought.

Logically, I know the dangers to my children haven’t changed much. Our family carries scars that bolster our risk-assessment skills for the future. We’re stronger, but I don’t often feel strong, yet.

I want to publicly promise myself I’ll get back to writing scintillating details of my sexual self-discovery, but my focus has widened. Awakening to my own pleasure is a mid-ground element in the landscape at the moment, not the sumptuous pollen-laden Georgia O’Keefe of the past couple years.

Cheers to my baby blog that empowered me to tell the world (perhaps even dozens of people!) how I am working through a childhood of shame and how I am using cannabis in my personal sexual revolution. I won’t stop talking about the bedroom, weed, or the scourge of fundamentalism, but there’s a whole lot more to be blunt about.

Have a question? Got something to say? Register in the forum to start a blunt conversation.

Clitoris Sparkles: Unpacking the Junk

September 27, 2018 by Tricia Leave a Comment

“Oh yeah, I have to turn the rest of my clitoris on.”

That’s the thought I had right before my most intense, self-induced orgasm in memory. I focused inward, behind the lips of my vulva, and consciously connected the pleasure receiver in my brain to the long legs of my clitoris, called the corpus cavernosum, and deeper, to the vestibular bulbs, which surround my vaginal opening. I shivered as I recognized pleasure messages from my whole clitoris at once, and pressure started building. Once I tuned in to the right body parts, I could tell I was already quite swollen. As I felt electricity tumbling into my clitoral organ, the sensations spiraled up, each moment heightened by the last in a positive feedback loop. I eased into my release, an empowering moment for me as I gently reassured myself that it was OK to feel so good.

Intense orgasms have not always come so easily for me.

A few weeks ago, before sex, I had some high-CBD cannabis (14% CBD, 6% THC) through my vaporizer. I spent a few stony minutes lazily, nakedly musing, waiting for Beard Man to get back from the bathroom. I visualized the full shape of the clit, and focused on feeling it within my body. Zing! It was like electricity sparkled through the clitoral legs and vestibular bulbs. Not an orgasm, but an energetic flow, a crackle of firework tentacles curling through my soft tissues. Something had ignited. My orgasm tangibly emanated from from my full clitoris that night, and not just the little bud, or glans. For a deeper understanding of the whole clitoris, check out this post.

Why couldn’t I feel my full clitoris before? For one thing, I was ignorant of its existence. “Vagina” was used frequently in my childhood home, and while I am grateful my parents avoided euphemisms and pet names for genitalia, “clitoris” and its pleasurable possibilities were a talking taboo. At the age of eight, my mother told us we’d have a new sibling, baby number four. Dad had always said we kids were “Eeny, Meeny, Miny, and no Mo’!” Get it? So when we found out about “Moe” I was confused. “I thought you were just going to have three kids,” I told my mom at bedtime one night. She told me the new baby had been an accident. “An accident? What do you mean, did Dad roll over on you in the middle of the night, in his sleep?” I understood the mechanics, kind of. Mom explained that people had sex because they are married, and married people like to do that. Sex wasn’t just for making babies.

Ohhh.

Secondly, my body was not mine to touch, anyway. It was for my future husband. My parents’ prohibition on body self-exploration stifled my burgeoning sexuality in ways I’m not sure they could have understood, unless that was the intended effect. I touched myself in shame through my pre-teen years, discovering varied sensations and eventually had an orgasm from the glans of my clitoris. That was as far as my hidden shame would let me go – rub hard, fast, and surreptitiously, to come with a quick burst that hopefully even God wouldn’t notice.

Fast forward to early marriage. Beard Man and I were married in our evangelical church, where we served with deep dedication and conviction. We’d gone through premarital counseling at church and read Christian books with sex tips like: female orgasm is not required, and women are often satisfied with the sensation of fullness. So when we had sex on our wedding night, I was fully prepared to expect…nothing. Beard Man was always savvy enough to rub my clitoris glans, but when tiny pinches twinged deeper within me, I subconsciously had to choose whether I would accept what my body could do. Wading through a quicksand of social morays and conditioned fears, I believe I shut off the possibility of more pleasure because my internal conflict was too great.

A few years past our awakening out of religion, Beard Man and I had let go of most of the trappings of that life, but I still carried the shame. Things changed when I brought cannabis to our bedroom. While high, I can remove the mental filters that separate me from my body, and consciously experience orgasms from my whole clitoris, the G-spot, the A-spot, and my cervix, provided I remember to turn them on and connect.

 

 

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