2001-08-16
feeling kinda
birthday countdown: 3 days.
there are days where i blog like a madwoman. doing it in fits and starts like that seems to defeat the purpose of a blog. and i started thinking about why it seems to happen that way, one big blurt rather than capturing snippets of each day.
there are two reasons, i suppose. one is that there are scattered notes, made all thru the paper journal, in margins and asides. and walking around, thinking more and more like a writer, i file all sorts of images away. i'm not a good enough writer yet, because i don't weave them together into a theme or a story. so i sort of slurry them into the blog, hoping to see some spark of genius, or a story that just emerges ready made for me. (i'm still waiting.)
the second reason is that keeping a paper journal wreaks havoc with my idea that i want to be posting here daily. i stow away ideas, and stack up thoughts. and i want to post every day (witness the Every Damn Day ring that i run). but life happens. and then i want to go back and document each day, for a lot of reasons. i want to document each day as it happens because i want to find that dedication and discipline. i want to paint a map of my life. i want to go back, months later, and reread things in order, and see where my life was at that moment.
i worry that the paper-to-electronic transfer loses too much - if i don't write stream of consciousness (the spit/glance/upload method of journalling), then maybe i'm not being 'true'. sometimes i'm able to write out an entire entry on paper, so the paper-to-electronic is pretty seamless. but more often than not, i scribble cryptic ideas or phrases. then again, if i digest things for a day or two, or write on paper in some scribbly way at the moment and then craft the words later - is that more or less true?
so i end up with days worth of entries on paper, or sort of on paper, and i panic. and i blog. :) and then i go back and try to write honest entries. the thing is, posting after the fact and backdating the entries feels vaguely dishonest to you, gentle readers. what do you think? what do you expect, as readers? write and tell me. i'm curious to hear what your side of the journalling experience is.
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ooo, the brain is a bit of a pinball tonight. i was rereading my Dear X entry about my Aunt Sally, and trying to do the math. my image of her is frozen in her early 20s. she'd be somewhere around 50 now, give or take. mostly give, i think, but i really have no idea - when you lose your memories of someone at 5, it's hard to have a frame of reference. she was younger than my mother, but i'm not sure by how much. and i'm trying to imagine who she would be now. i'm squinching up my face, eyes closed, trying to paint an image of what she might even look like. i'm not coming up with much.
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and yet another carom... i'm thinking about real estate. this was sparked by a convo to my left at the bar; the guy sitting next to me pulled out a spec sheet for a house in Stow, which i surreptitiously read over his shoulder. ChicaBeanie and her girlfriend are thinking about buying a house now, as it turns out they aren't going to be going to Florida, not this year anyway. [small segue - this is both bad and good. i feel badly that they spent so much time trying to make the move work, only to come to the conclusion that it just isn't doable. on the other hand, i'm not heartbroken that she'll be closer to me. :) ] and my brother and sister-in-law just bought their first house. a couple of other friends have bought or sold recently. so there's a lot of real estate going on around here recently.
and all of this makes me feel like i'm somehow behind. shouldn't i own by now? rent means that everyoen else fixes the issues, and owning means that every problem is yours, which is kind of a downer. but. but if you own, it's your space. and you can do whatever you want with it. *sigh* it's freedom v. freedom - the freedom from worry, of having others solve the problems v. the freedom of truly having your own personal space in the best sense. it's a hard, hard issue. and i just managed to buy a car, thru a stroke of good luck. so will the house be luck? i've been gifted with so many things at the right time, maybe the house will be the same way. maybe so. rather than trying to wrap my brain around a humongous purchase for which i feel woefully underprepared, perhaps i should just wait and see what happens.
