White Xmas 2005
(Warning multiple rewrites)
Thanks Rebecca for shooting the wee album cover pic on on the right, she did it this morning with her new swanky Powershot. I'm wearing my new Christmas Henderson.
It is blue. It is 7mm thick. It is darned warm and sweaty after twenty minutes or so.
Maybe I should have recolored the background in Photoshop & tagged it as a blue Christmas? This weekend, holiday or no, is finding me simultaneously both delighted and melacholy and it's all related tangentially to a conversation I had a few nights ago about what does and does not show up in people's blogs....
As with so may things around here, it revolves around my return to the world of being unambiguously single. And what I've been doing about it namely, getting out more, developing my internal emotional life, my external social life, and dating. And it seems to me that this last part is almost always the stumbling point for personal bloggers, because it straddles privacy issues that envelop not just the blogger but other people. It's one thing to be open about your own life (or at least to pretent to be). But what about hers? Or what if you want to be open but you don't want her to read it? What are the limits of full disclosure, of any disclosure, or coming off as a genuine, thoughtful person versus some vampiric jerk? Maybe online life isn't really as open as we'd like to think it is and can be.
I have no doubt that others have written on this issue, and done it better than I. I don't know them, so I'll just keep going here. Having a few hints tossed my way couldn't hurt.
I suppose there are a few tactics that could be deployed. One would be to ignore it. But if it's consuming all your free cycles anyway, then it's not as if it won't have an effect on the blog.
Another is to just write everything. Expect some people to have a real problem with that. I suppose I could wear an "I'm blogging this" tee-shirt constantly, but that sounds like a tough obstacle to intimacy to be dragging around.
I could write in acronyms and initials, but that feels either twee or impersonal. Or both. Or use elliptical reference like Min-Jung occasionally does, with names for people that sometimes I think I recognize but sometimes I wonder if there aren't multiple real people being folded into the prose persona. We are all writing personal fictions every day, no? We make up stories and we try to fit our lives into them.
Or maybe it doesn't matter because I almost never seem to go out with bloggers anyway though the address for this site is on my little introduction cards (If you've come here from reading one: hi).
Whatever. Right this second I'm up late fretting over a series of unreturned phone calls even though I've gotten surprise calls from five or six other women during the same three or four days. Every one of them interesting and interested. I've had my kids with me and all our time and gifts have been great. What the hell is my problem, anyway?
No doubt a host of armchair would-be shrinks would be glad to tell me that I'm afraid of commitment, or maybe afraid of lack of commitment, or excessively flinchy about the slightest hint of rejection, or too concerned with being cool, or polite; that I'm excessively buffered, or too needy of contact, or just trying to prove something to my guy friends, or afraid of letting anyone ever really get close even though it's what I most crave. Yeah, yeah. You're all correct. I'm getting better, I promise. My own actions & feelings still annoy the crap out of me, however *. It would be easier to not care. And more boring.
I feel a bit like I'm on my own Underground Railroad, moving through the hands of strangers from location to location, hopeful for some yet-unseen destination. Have to just keep moving north.
* Annoys me at the moment, that is amuses me later. Miyazaki-san once said that in his mind humans were very silly creatures. And since he was one too, it allowed him to love them all and himself as well.
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