A Letter to my Dears

As you know, I am due at the end of July. I went to the doctor today and he informed me that I am at 1.5 cm and 50% effaced. (The 1.5 could be the result of 3 other deliveries or it could be that I'm actually making progress.) Whatever the case, he felt as if I might have fewer than 5 weeks. Music to my ears!

To My Faithful Followers

Thank you! Thank you for still subscribing even though I have flaked out on the blogging world. Between 3 part-time jobs, being a stay-at-home mom, church responsibilities (for those of you who are LDS think primary president), and being 14 weeks pregnant, I'm lagging behind on my blogging duties.  I need the blog.  I love the blog, but in the wake of all else it is getting severly neglected.    I will post sporatically, but no promises as to when or why or what unprecicatable pregnancy mood swing might unhinge me altogether and inspire a mass venting blog holocaust.  

I do have ideas (and who can resist a post with Coraline being released in just a couple short weeks?) I apologize for my flakiness and would refer you, in the meantime, to my favorite blogs.

Peterman's Eye

Cake Wrecks

Antimoicrobial Resistance

Social Explosion

You just can't like them better than you do me.  You already do?  Oh, man!

Blogging about Blogging

I once edited a literary magazine. It was a small production so my staff and I couldn't afford to be too choosy about which submissions we would accept. Because our magazine considered submissions from all literary genres; we did have to be somewhat discriminating. Anyone who has ever worked on staff for a college literary publication knows all that post entails: occassionally striking gold with some refreshing, unexpected submission, but more often than not, slogging through manuscript after manuscript of overwritten, cliche. . . crap.

Poetry is definately the greatest culprit for crap contribution in the annals of rejected college submissions. Some of my college chums and I have a running joke about our most hated poetic theme: dead babies. There are a surprising amount of dead baby poems submitted to college literary magazines for some unknown reason. (Though I must defend Elizabeth Bishop whose "First Death in Nova Scotia," I am quite fond of. There are, as we know, always exceptions). Dead babies aside, our second most hated poetic theme was writing about writing (which actually William Carlos Williams pulled off with aplomb; also an exception, but hey, it's William Carlos Williams, so are we surprised?)

So even though I know I am breaking my own rules, I am going to blog about blogging because I ate hotwings last night (a big mistake) and, as a result, am not sleeping. Instead, I am obsessing which is something I am prone to do in the wee hours. So like all new bloggers, I ask, "Where is everybody?" "Is anyone actually reading this?"

Admittedly, I perused several popular blogs during my nocturnal foray on the internet. I discovered that some of them are better than mine. Some are not. Some are, as Tracy, my blogging consultant, pointed out nothing better than really bad reality television. So I ask myself, is there a place for me in blogging? Can I build a fan base beyond my own friends and family? (and by the way Mom, could you please disguise your name with something like Annie Dillard or Edward Gorey or Carolyn Keen so people don't know that I have to recruit family members to leave comments?) Anyway, whether there is or not, I have staked my claim on this little slice of cyberspace and, like all squatters, I am not going anywhere without putting up a good fight. Ignore me if you will. See if I care.

Having voiced my blog insecurities, I now realize why people HATE reading poems about writer's block and I now present the final quesion "publish or delete?" "publish or delete?"

Re(inventing) the Wheel

I have always been guilty of making my life far more difficult than necessary. This is largely due to a tendency to hold myself to impossible standards. In some ways this has served as a motivator, however, more often than not, my conviction has landed me in a few overwhelming messes.

I think my problem is that I keep trying to reinvent the wheel. For instance, in college, my professors, trying to encourage their pupils' sprouting creativity, would assign essays with a list of topics or, inevitably, the wild card (make up your own.) For some reason, it made perfect since for me to make up my own. There was always the clause attached to this option that our topics had to recieve instructor approval before we wrote on. My professors never shut me down (though I wish they would have). Professor Aton let me go ahead and try that essay in which I compared Huck Finn's narrative voice to Daisy Miller's. It wasn't an easy topic and what he failed to mention was that it was plain stupid. Once again, Professor Cook let me take on my great topic, "The Invention of Childhood" as if I would actually do the months of obvious research this would entail and write a mini Masters' thesis. I ended up dumping the topic altogether and scrambling to write anything on Jane Eyre the night before the paper was due.

Obvious failures aside, maturity (what little I have) has taught me a few skills (which is only fair because I have paid dearly for them.) I have finally learned what 99.9% of all the other students I attended school with already figured out: you can write a darn good essay on teacher-assigned topics. There is nothing wrong with exploring irony in Huck Finn, again. There's always something new to say or at the very least a fresh light in which to cast it. It may even be worth risking cliche in order to save oneself the punishment of reinventing the wheel.

Perhaps the trick is learning to accept one's own limitations. I no longer feel let down by all that I can't do; instead I feel liberated by knowing that I probably shouldn't even go there.