I click “Write” on my WordPress dashboard, waiting for the spinning wheel that is my brain to slow knowing that it won’t and that focusing on a single stream of steady thought on any one idea will seem impossible.
No, be impossible.
In 20 minute’s time, I’ve gone from thinking about working out a recipe for apple cinnamon nut ice cream, to worrying about the huge bowl of bread dough I have fermenting in the fridge, then mulling over tonight’s debate between Palin and Biden before reading through most of this Slate article and being completely distracted by a list linked inside that article. Or maybe it was somewhere else on the page…can’t remember.
I don’t normally spend my time reading these types of articles, but once in a while, one will catch my eye because the writing is good and it actually feels as if there’s a person behind that writing. Quite a concept, yes? Aspects of it will get me thinking, of course, and the entire time, somewhere hovering above it all (at least today) are Natalie Goldberg’s words about writers I scanned over this morning in the bathroom:
Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fast as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there’s another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives everything a second time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details.
Okay, so Natalie, I haven’t been “training” because that would imply that this living twice business is something I choose to do. You don’t choose it. “It” chooses you. For example, not only have I thought about what I’ve described just now, but I’ve thought about it many times since, and am now thinking about it again. And yet again when revising this paragraph. Still thinking…
I do this all day long.
It’s like watching myself live my life and even though it’s odd, it provides me quite a bit of time to think about how and why I do what I do. As much as I can say there’s a soothing (insane) aspect to it, unfortunately it doesn’t lend itself to improving my productivity. Bills are sitting in front of me, there are quite a few piles of recipes I’ve torn from magazines ready to be recycled sitting in the middle of my family room floor (where they’ve migrated after being on the kitchen counter for several days), and I need to get off my derrier to go for a walk today.
But I’ve arrived at the conclusion that the bloggosphere can be quite the brutal place — at times, what I imagine it would feel like to go through a carwash without my car, each spray of water or rotating brush pushing me first one way, and then another and never quite making it to the end.
I’m tired of it but have no one to blame but myself. I think much of it stems from the fact that who I am and what I have to say here doesn’t exactly fit anywhere. This conclusion isn’t earth-shattering, nor is it meant to be accompanied by a whine. I don’t whine. I have been known to climb up on a soapbox and metaphorically flip the world the bird, however — just not as much as I used to.
*sigh*
I am a middle-aged woman. That I enjoy who I am at this particular point in my life doesn’t really change the fact that I’m somewhat of an oddity in the Bloggosphere. Sometimes, it’s overwhelming to be surrounded by twenty and thirty somethings with toddlers, techies with jargon I never completely understand, snarling, snarking political junkies, celeb gossip mongers, and the increasingly less than attractive you-too-can-make-money-at-home crowd.
I’m an anomaly. And I guess that’s the most annoying part of this since I always have been, so why should my persona here be less so? One would think I’d get used to being reminded that I’ve always been a square peg.
I have no stories to tell about my toddlers, my Satanical boss, my commute, my gigabytes, and there is no way in hell I could ever sit down here and try to be funny every freaking day because people want a cheap laugh. But I’m also not going to wallow in the bathos of my life (liar, liar, pants on fire…), lamenting about mistakes and missed opportunities. No, really.
What I will do is continue to look in the mirror each day, and after taking more than the normal minute or so to scan my body and realize it doesn’t exactly look like it used to even five years ago, suck in my stomach, tuck in my ass, smile and know that I am me. Still.
Sounds like a warning, doesn’t it?
Heh.