"He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances."
--Jack London, To Build a Fire
My Mom has always said that she worries about me least when she doesn't hear much from me. Many mothers may assume that not hearing from their young daughter is a red flag; a cause for concern about potential ditches on the sides of roads or lunatic stalkers outside windows or a run gone wrong in the rugged Front Range wilderness or even some twisted JonBenet shit (I do live in Boulder after all), but my mother sleeps best when I don't call. Not calling is a sign that I am happily busying myself with the things of life. So, this blog started at a life intersection where it is easy to get lost--displaced amongst the things. Not quite as lost as the frozen dead dude in Jack London's above quoted story, but I was certainly directionally flummoxed and unsure where to turn at the corner of Hate My Job Avenue and Painfully Single Nearing Thirty Street. While the frozen dead guy had nobody but a dog to turn to for advice (who it turns out the dude really should've listened to cause the dog ends up neither frozen nor dead), I had massive modern outlets and I was using them all...frequently.
I was calling home quite a lot to get appropriate directions towards Happy Fulfilled City so as not to detour down the lane that leads to Bitter With Too Many Cats (And Maybe Even a Bird or Ferret That You Weirdly Carry in a Pocket with You In Public to Avoid Interactions with Actual Humans) Cul-de-sac. Dissatisfied with my job and struggling to make myself pleasant company in social settings, I found blogging to be simpler than womaning up to the real world. And so it is that when my blog began the posts were reliable because I was miserable. The ebbs and flows of life's day-to-day minutiae felt more like title waves and droughts with each shift creating tectonic impacts worth writing about. However, now that the plates of my life have become stable, it has had the reverse effect on my blogging.
While I wish I were a better blog abuser--one who's every daily action from the mundane to the extraordinary is immediately transcribed in her head as a post-worthy story--I find that I am still struggling to acknowledge the significances in all my things of life. This is somewhat ironic because in my eleventh grade classes I am currently teaching memoir writing and a large amount of instruction time is spent reminding students that often the seemingly simple or boring parts of our lives tell the best stories. I'll try to be better attune to the stories I may be encountering everyday, but in the meantime I'll give you the looks:
I was calling home quite a lot to get appropriate directions towards Happy Fulfilled City so as not to detour down the lane that leads to Bitter With Too Many Cats (And Maybe Even a Bird or Ferret That You Weirdly Carry in a Pocket with You In Public to Avoid Interactions with Actual Humans) Cul-de-sac. Dissatisfied with my job and struggling to make myself pleasant company in social settings, I found blogging to be simpler than womaning up to the real world. And so it is that when my blog began the posts were reliable because I was miserable. The ebbs and flows of life's day-to-day minutiae felt more like title waves and droughts with each shift creating tectonic impacts worth writing about. However, now that the plates of my life have become stable, it has had the reverse effect on my blogging.
While I wish I were a better blog abuser--one who's every daily action from the mundane to the extraordinary is immediately transcribed in her head as a post-worthy story--I find that I am still struggling to acknowledge the significances in all my things of life. This is somewhat ironic because in my eleventh grade classes I am currently teaching memoir writing and a large amount of instruction time is spent reminding students that often the seemingly simple or boring parts of our lives tell the best stories. I'll try to be better attune to the stories I may be encountering everyday, but in the meantime I'll give you the looks:
