Stay

Poor Excuses

I'm not blogging because:
I forgot the cord that connects my camera to my computer, so can't upload photos.
It's a whirlwind down here, of Big Life Decisions and Major Moments
I'm writing and processing a lot of the above Big Life Decisions and Major Moments privately, which scratches the itch a little bit.
I miss home.  But being with NBT is home, too. 

What I'm Thinking About

Besides the constant thoughts about wedding planning, I'm thinking about blogging.  I'm also thinking about writing, but the two are different.  Thinking about writing is thinking about story and craft and audience and narrative.  Thinking about blogging is thinking about audience, and the instant reaction that your writing may or may not garner.  There's something fundamentally interactive about blogging, and that makes it different than other writing I have done.  There's something quick about it, too, and raw, which is both compelling and also problematic. 

I miss Stay of Execution.  I don't use this blog in the same way.  That's deliberate, and on the whole it is good for me.  I live much more in my actual life, and less in my imagination, as watcher and observer and thinker and commentator.  Of course I have another blog, an anonymous one, that isn't connected to my real, persistent, professional identity, where I still write every day.  And I find that daily urge to blurt about what is happening with me, to process my feelings and my thoughts, has not diminished.  I have paper journals going back to 1986 containing the same sort of writing: self-absorbed and full of questions.  Navel-gazing is a long habit of mine.  But conversational navel-gazing is what blogging is, and I got sort of addicted to the practice of trying to watch my own world and share it with an audience in a way that felt meaningful and authentic and inviting. 

I learned a lot by trying to walk the line between intimacy and appropriate distance: how can I write something that is honest and real, but that I would be comfortable having Google connect to my name for any possible interested person to find with a click?  There are things you have to leave out in such an exercise, just as you don't tell the stranger on the bus or the acquaintance at the office party about how anxious you are about the tests the doctor recommended. I met my future husband because of my blog, and I trusted him initially because I had read his blog.  Being honest in public is a good practice, I think -- good for individuals and good for the world who witnesses honesty. 

It was my new years' resolution this year to make my life smaller.  Make no new friends in 2007 -- that was one explicit goal, at which I have already (happily) failed.  Stop trying to engage the whole world in conversation.  It was the right decision, I think.  I'm watching another blogger struggle with the pull of that engaged conversation and the energetic toll it can take, and it's got me reflecting.  When what I should be doing is planning a wedding.

I'm Blogging Elsewhere

I'm lucky enough to be spending the early part of the day transcribing a conference about climate change in the northwest Atlantic.  There are smart people here, asking good questions, and I'm learning a lot about science and fisheries and economics by listening carefully and trying to summarize on the fly.  Follow along here, if you like. 

Without a Voice

It's like the perfect justice.  I don't blog for a while, and I literally lose my voice.  A rather vicious headcold has left me with a faint whisper/croak.  At a store yesterday I asked for a piece of paper in order to write a note asking the clerk where to find the item I needed.  At practice yesterday I would call out to a kid a few steps away with his or her back turned and they wouldn't react, not hearing me.  It's a bizarre kind of invisibility.  Haven't really been able to talk to NBT on the phone.  I'm here, but I'm cut off. 

I'll be back soon -- this crazy busy spell will be easing up shortly.  It has to. 

I'm Not Dead

Been writing a lot, but elsewhere.  Been dashing around, tending to my sailing team and to my dog and to this wedding and a few other projects, while trying (and failing) not to get sick or run down.  It feels like I'm doing that circus gig where you have plates spinning on poles and you have to zip from one to the other to give them a bit of a push and then dash back to the wobbliest one to make sure it doesn't fall down.  Non-essential things like laundry and grocery shopping and even essential things, like taking morning walks and looking at the beauty all around me, get shoved to the side for now.  Fighting off the end of a head cold; the worst of it is over and now I'm in the frogvoice, sneezealot stage.  Waah waah waah. 

A neighbor did a good job chronicling the big storm and the damage it did to our town.  I had a leak in my kitchen roof, and a flooded basement, but came out a lot better than many neighbors and friends. 

What I'm Reading

I have been reading and thinking about this talk, about people and what they do with technology at different life stages.  I'm fascinated by the ways that the tools we all have access to are being used differently by demographic groups, and the social implications and new norms that are coming from the new shape of conversations. 

I've also been on a chick lit feast of late, perhaps because of the spate of airplane travelling I've been doing.  I have been thinking about the narrative arc of chick lit, it's predictability, it's variations, and what makes a chick lit book compelling and what makes it fail.  (Of the books above, some are failures and some are successes, and one, although well-written, wasn't what I wanted or expected and so didn't scratch the itch that the genre fills for me.)  I've been thinking about what I want when I grab a chick lit book and why I'm embarrassed about enjoying them.  I think it's the same thing.  I SHOULD want novelty and originality and luminous writing.  And I do, of course.  But I'm also intensely interested in some pretty conventional things: relationships of adult daughters to their families, how people fall in love and hold it, or fumble it, female competitiveness and support and the tension between the two.  Loyalty and achievement, appearance and reality, vulnerability and resilience.  Chick lit tends to cover these subjects in a pretty tight circle, and usually with a tidy and satisfying resolution (or else it doesn't get the snappy pink cover). 

I've also just read Night, about as far from chick lit as you can get.  Am halfway through Anna Karenina but didn't take it on the plane with me because it's too heavy for convenient carrying.  And on my pillow, waiting for me to finish with the New Yorker (why did I subscribe? I can't keep up!), is The Aspern Papers.  This is the obligatory paragraph intended to boost my credentials as a reader.  I'm reading these things, but what I'm thinking about is chick lit. 

A New Pal, or A Few?

The last time I met someone in person who I'd gotten acquainted with through this weblog, I decided to marry him.*  So I'm looking forward to meeting Megan in person, since I can already tell from her writing and the snappy and heartfelt emails we've exchanged that we're going to be Real Good Pals. 

Want to meet us in Austin for drinks and conversation next Thursday night?  Megan's the boss, go email her and I'll be tagging along wherever and whenever she tells me. 

*Upon closer examination, I realize that's not true.  I've met some other blog friends after meeting Mr. NBT.  But you know what I mean.  Why let nitpicky details stand in the way of a good story?

What I'm Reading

I'm really fascinated by this series of posts (by the authors of this compelling magazine article) about how praise is bad for kids.  Which I think is the same as being bad for people, not just kids.  This strikes me as both true and sensible and extremely wise and also counter-intuitive and world-changing and awful. 

I'm also reading Anna Karenina.  And I'm thinking, for some reason, about Gilgamesh, and might have to read that again next.