There’s stuff I don’t talk about with anyone. Some of it is festering; some of it is just the froth and bubble inherent in having a brain; some of it is me stolidly processing events and patterns. Some is preverbal. Most isn’t – I try to put everything in words.
There’s stuff that only the people it happened in front of know. It never gets written down. It’s ‘Hopi art’ or a coloured sand mandala.
There’s stuff that only goes in a little hardback diary; I make an entry maybe once a month – more often when my love life, such as it mostly isn’t, gets more interesting. I try to make it as much like Mary Astor’s diary as possible, you know, breathless and candid and o so girly…. although I have no George S Kaufman. (Darn! he was quite the, uh, provider of exclusive, quality adult entertainment, or so Mary’s diary recounted).
There’s stuff I put in the locked on-line diary at livejournal, mostly stuff that’s bad and I want to remember the date it happened later. Almost all of my entries are friends only.
Then, there’s this stuff. There’s an inherent bias towards good news, because, after all, my mom reads this. There’s also a bias to not whine, although I do. So consider this a virtual whine, because, by golly, I really feel like bitching right now, and what prevents me from doing it is knowing that in a week I’ll have completely forgotten what I was cheesed off about. That has been the overwhelming takeaway for me as a result of keeping an online diary for four years (yup, I started in April 2004 but lost everything prior to August of that year). As bad as things may be, whining doesn’t help. Good news longs to be shared, and urges to whine should be entertained at a halberd’s distance. I consider whining and recounting ugly facts to be two separate things; it’s the absence of adjectives that denotes serious efforts not to whine. Also, I swear more when I’m whining. Or ranting, which is whining spun into entertainment, at least as I care to practice it.
I light a candle for folks dealing with allergies; for the lonely; for the sick; for the hopelessly confused and socially awkward. I light a candle for the unemployed who wish to work.
PS. The World Series is actually very good baseball. I was enjoying it immensely when I watched it last night. It was the first time I actually got an idea of how a superb pitcher plays with the strike zone to mess with batters’ heads.
A special shout out to Mike McG, who opened a phone conversation with, “Hey, wordsmith!” and made my world a better place thereby.
A special shout out to Marc, who answered my email about visiting headquarters in France with a brief and charming email. The upshot is I am welcome, but nobody is exactly sure WHERE to roll out the welcome mat, as apparently they are moving! I would post notes about the integration but it might limit my future employment opportunities.