bbb
Posted on 11 February 2010 | 4 responses
This week, in my little Internet sphere, a friend I have known only through blogging has blogged about blogging issues. Fresca is the creative person behind some cool videos (about things other than blogging). She is an author of geography books and someone who knows how to make her own books, if the situation calls for it.
Fresca did a post, here, about comments on blogs and one here about the blog rolls that many bloggers (including myself) set up in their sidebars. She’s posed extensive thoughts on how this blog phenomena has been expanding and evolving. If you’re interested in such stuff, it’s recommended reading, especially along with the comments people have left, sharing their own perspectives. A lot of thoughts are and will be thunk about this 21st Century activity.
What I enjoyed most about the ideas in Fresca’s posts is a sort of ditty that popped into my brain after reading them. Not wishing to pressure those dear “lurkers” who are fine with simply reading blogs, this is for those of us who like to participate in our quirky community:
To keep blithe blogger buds happy,
send a few comments their way.
Like crumbs in the park for a birdie,
your responses will brighten their day.
:o)
wednesday’s word: renewed
Posted on 10 February 2010 | 3 responses
Though on the outside, wasting(perishing, decaying, you fill in the blank),
the inward me is renewed day by day.
~Paul of Tarsus
What has renewed you?
hearty story
Posted on 8 February 2010 | 4 responses
My blog’s date is in the military (and faraway places) style, with the day preceding the month. I’ve tried to make it regular American, to no avail. But as Tim says, I should prefer it; it’s logical that way.
Tim was in the Navy long ago, when we were first married. I’ve written another online-accepted piece, this one inspired by events during our first married year, in a land not-so-far away but that might as well have been the moon, with two creatures alien to one another trying to navigate its craters.
You can read the tale here, at Long Story Short, where apparently it fits their Valentine sensibilities.
friday thought
Posted on 5 February 2010 | 2 responses
It’s not so much sitting down, composed,
saying, “What shall I write today?”
as it is racing, capturing
ideas
that surge, foaming, onto shore,
before they pull away.
wednesday’s word
Posted on 3 February 2010 | Comments Off
This week, another snip from my childhood. In second grade I learned this word: squint.
I found out I had been doing it. My dear teacher, Mrs. Love (I couldn’t have made that up), noticed how my face scrunched during math time, as I tried to make out problems on the board. She reported this to my parents.
There’s little doubt how it happened. Like most kids, I had a bedtime. For us first-generation TV children the schedule easily corresponded with programs. (I will always associate the closing music of some shows – Flipper, Get Smart, Bonanza, Lost in Space – with having to go to bed.) Before second grade we moved to a remodeled, older parsonage next door to the church, with an entryway and a grand (at least it was grand to us) staircase. Each night after TV I dragged myself slowly up the carpeted stairs to my room at the top landing. If I was lucky, I had remembered to close my window shades earlier; if not, there was blackness outside where an alien face might be lurking.
After tugging down the shades, slipping on my nightie, and rearranging a dozen stuffed toys on my bed, I was out with the light. Or was I?
The hall light remained on, comforting my brothers in their room. In its dim illumination I found my greatest comfort, reading the book from beneath my pillow. I knew I shouldn’t stay up reading, and so it was a thrill. I also dreaded the coming new day, because, despite Mrs. Love and the chalkboard smell and the bright green shrubs outside our class window, I had issues with school. It was a weird thing to do, going away from my home and my mommy and brothers each morning. Wearing a dress, as well, making every day except Saturday a bit of torture.
Stories kept my heart and mind alive; I couldn’t resist them. Later, after the optometrist fitted my first pair of glasses, my parents discovered my reading habits and gave me a bedside desk with a lamp. But I was already ultra-myopic.
Somehow, though, nearsightedness has helped me hang onto my own space and the thrill of being just me. It cocoons me at the swimming pool, where I still remove even my contacts before going under water. I know then what it would be like to be legally blind. And I’m not worried about it. Always seeing beyond my nose is overrated. Squinting doesn’t help, but still I do so, when my dear husband appears to be approaching. I like letting him into my world.
happy portion
Posted on 2 February 2010 | 4 responses
For a few years I tried to write prettier – to add flourishes that would astound. I guess I didn’t think I would run into that purple prose problem, because I had tended at first to write so sparsely.
Surely, I thought, I could only strengthen my prose by gazing often into gilded, trickled springs or at the azure sky with sadness.
Well, nope.
My problem was trying to flow my sentences like brilliance, and brilliant I am not. Not forced in that way. I love ideas and situations and the intricacies of people, relationships.
I love finding ways to express what I love, but I dig hard in the finding. I’m not a concert pianist, high-strung athlete, or dazzling, tortured artist. In this I can despair at times. But I am also learning to rejoice. I’m a little critter – a part of me has always known it’s so.
I’m seeing I can strengthen what I do have. In the idea-excavating of every day, I scrape a happy portion all my own.
to begin again, again
Posted on 1 February 2010 | Comments Off
We have bid farewell to the first month of 2010. I’ve started saying twenty-ten. I think someone told me to – I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s easier.
Our first decade had to turn out as the 2000s. While a hundred years earlier people could easily say nineteen-oh-one, nineteen-aught-two, etc., twenty-oh-one wouldn’t have rolled off the tongue. Twenty’s pronunciation is too complex, somehow. It makes the lips pucker, and so does saying “oh.” So we stuck with two thousand.
Whatever we call it, there’s a new decade under way. Despite my inherent melancholy and the world situation, I am glad I’m here. Nobody told me to be. I think I’m just a sucker for mornings, fresh calendar pages, and trying again.
Happy February.
posty note
Posted on 29 January 2010 | 3 responses
This week, you may have noticed, I posted five times.
Last weekend I decided to try writing things ahead and then utilizing the blog’s “schedule post” feature so they would magically appear, as if predestined.
This has been a trial run but not a trial. I’ve kinda liked it. Schedules in my world are always for flexing, but this one may last a while.
Also this week I finished an essay. After long months of existence in various forms, it became ready to send out. Not that I hadn’t already sent it, receiving rejection upon rejection in return. But now I know it’s better, stronger, having received confirmation from a professional, whose good critiquing service I availed myself to.
Lisa Ohlen Harris is an amazing writer. Her essays have been published in numerous journals (she even knows which journals are respectable enough to warrant a try at publication). She has received recognition in Best American Essays 2009 and Best Spiritual Writing 2010. What I care about, though, is her awesome editing and teaching skill. She even blogs now, too, and you can read her posty expressions here.
Well, I’m off, for a weekend of sleeping in (possibly till 7:00, whoo hoo!), treadmilling, even going outside to breathe deeply near the river, and jotting thoughts in my notebook before the start of another working-at-it, word-filled week.
cursing the cold and dark
Posted on 28 January 2010 | 5 responses
I stare at the fire near the end of a winter day. The house over-warmed for a while, but these glowing coals are still welcome.
Ten years ago, I journaled about the cost of healthcare beginning to soar. I framed it in January ‘00 as an actual problem discovered in the new century. Remember the concern, leading up to that new year, about Y2K? Computers, people worried, might not be able to recognize the proper dates once the millennium turned. But the geeks and experts figured things out in plenty of time.
Now we’re coming up on 2012, a date people worry about as the end of things (I might see the movie this week at our discount theater). It’s becoming a joke, as Y2K did, and rightly so. We never see the big things coming. There are always signs, but not often an accurate announcement.
I read a heartbreaking essay, by a woman who taught high school English in Los Angeles. She longed to encourage, even protect a boy who could write well. There was no way to do either, where the system is in complete chaos.
The author admirably includes herself with the whole culture that has failed. Her students refuse to list what they think they will be doing in 10 years. They’re sure the world will end by then. Their poverty is not one of abject starvation and want, because they receive aid from the proper agencies. Their lack comes from an impersonal society where no one really cares and there is nothing left to hope in.
Am I fostering a world in which kids don’t have hope, when I keep the wheels turning that allow them a bare respite from physical suffering? What I mean is, I hate to think there isn’t enough hardship in the world to fight against, to give us hope.
Staring at my fire I sometimes forget to turn on lights as the day grows dark, and then I realize I don’t want to. I bring out matches and light our oil lamps and candles. In their glow I become less tense as anxieties lift.
If there were no electric fixtures, my existence would be harder. But would I, dwelling closer to reality, hope for more? Perhaps I would give more of myself to others in this life. (Probably, I would need to receive a lot more from others in terms of help to survive – maybe not a bad thing.)
I’m not saying electricity’s the problem, or the only one, or that we should or can go back to “simpler” times. Maybe, though, what those kids from L.A. wish for is a bolt from heaven that would take out the rush for funds in bureaucrat-heavy schools and snatch away prevailing adult distractions from their sundered families, so they could come together, even in darkness. If only they could live unafraid to write down good stories and recite them of an evening by a candle’s flickering light.
wednesday’s word
Posted on 27 January 2010 | 3 responses
May I have a word?
I thought I would start featuring one tasty morsel of language per week – like a Hershey’s kiss for the mind. Of course, these will have something to do with me, this being the place where I go on and on about me. But if anyone wants to add their own word that is a favorite, brings back memories, captures a story’s glimmer, or something, feel free.
Today’s word: trek.
I knew the meaning before fourth grade, having come across it in dog stories, I’m sure, but if I’m remembering right, the year I was nine we discovered Star Trek. Uncle Tim visited our home. He was the coolest uncle because, all of fourteen himself, he paid us attention. Uncle Tim urged us to watch this great space show with a neat alien guy who had pointy ears and green blood.
After we became Trek fans, I owned a new reason to feel superior. No one else in fourth grade could say the show’s name. They thought they could. “Beam me up, Scotty, like on Star Track!” they’d call across the playground. I smirked. They were idiots.
If this had been first grade, I would have lorded my correct English over them, as I had in Oklahoma, trying to teach neighborhood boys where we lived not to say “ain’t.” But by now I recognized it was pointless to put yourself out there. People, I was learning, didn’t care in general about using language correctly. They also were likely to call me names. Smarty pants and so on. I had become aware of the crowd, the uneducated masses, and I respected their power.
It would be more than a decade before I decided it might have been nicer growing up to live in a less high and mighty bubble around other kids. Maybe I could have been more friendly, less off in my imagination despising my fellow humans. By then I guessed I hadn’t followed the Star Trek spirit very well. And I struggled, like that alien guy with the pointy ears often did, to try learning to play well with others.