8.27.2007

In Lieu of My Writing...

...go check out my friend's new book and help send her up those bestseller lists.


(click on the photo for a link to her website...)

8.22.2007

It Started as a Letter

I worked through the first two weeks of my editing job, and now I'm on hiatus for three weeks until I dive back in till the end (supposedly three weeks.) It's bizarre to be back in the editing room realizing I have these skills that I seldom think about, realizing how disconnected I am in many ways from the work I did for years and years. And now, here I am, time off, able to write if I choose, and not so inspired in that arena. I think I'm just a wanderer and explorer in my soul, that all these other things I do are just things I do.


Things I do. The things I do. It’s odd to have this sensation of passing the time (and to encounter the ‘v’ key on my computer refusing to depress unless I assault it harshly with repeated stabs. Maybe completing my words is simply what the ‘v’ key does, not what resides in its soul.) Some people – fortunate souls, perhaps – connect with the life they lead. They wander into the day they call community. They exchange tidbits with friends about the progress and amusement of their kids’ lives. They strive to move upward in a career, in a passion, in a framework carefully crafted and nurtured.

I find them a mystery.

I live life as if I’ve been dropped here from a passing spacecraft, deposited to do a job of observation, taking notes, analyzing data, all the while wondering when my ship will return and take me back to a home I don’t remember but that somehow I believe must exist. It exists here for others, so mine must, too, but just not here.

So I pass my days doing things of sweet interest. I disappear joyously into assembling those horrendously addictive photo books one can create through iPhoto. I stare at my dog and try to crawl into his brain to imagine his experience of sunshine and a carelessly tossed towel that becomes his well-designed bed after tugs and molding. I shuttle my teen around wondering where he will be in thirty years and if any of my current thoughts will be his. I suspect not, though, because I believe he is of this earth, less peripheral than I, and he will find his way. His current angst only emerges in spurts due to a shot of hormones and too many late nights strung together. He is not waiting for his spaceship to return.

As I leap from blog to blog – most recently in the mode of drive-by, sorry – I marvel at the growing communities and the cheerleading comments. I wonder where the dissenters are, wonder if they fall into the category of the silent lurkers, or if they just don’t read there. It’s not possible for everyone who comments to have such common feelings. Have comments just become one giant cheering section? Is that the etiquette? It that what people want? Slap me, but I miss the discussion that goes beyond, “Good on you.”* (I’m sure I’ve just opened the door to scathing words in my own back yard. Let me step away to adorn armor. I’ll be right back.)

But I digress from the opening letter, from my drifting in and out of assorted identities, at wondering whether I’d rather be a storyteller or a photographer (which is really just a storyteller with pictures over words) or an on call computer tech nerd for those who respond to my help with, “How do you know all this?” or a dog rescuer or a person with just a backpack and no permanent address.

Then again, I am a parent, so I must assume some degree of concrete foundation, for my son does not desire the untethered life that I do. For him, I will remain solid and here, but I will still wonder, wonder why I don’t understand the world around me, wonder why I don’t feel so tickled by the things that others work towards, wonder why while I crave gadgets all the time in my admiration for technology I have no relationship with shopping and consumerism (that alone makes me an alien in this current societal structure.) And I will wonder when my spaceship will return.





*picked up on an overseas job amongst Aussies in Sydney many, many moons ago...

**allow me to tag that this was not crafted or thought out. (uh, did I have to tell you that?) This was my version of an online coughing up of morning thoughts and a partial explanation of my recent silence here that goes beyond, “I’m working.”



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8.07.2007

Either/Or

I am not dead. I am not gone. I am earning money, and by the time I walk through the door at the end of the day I spin around looking for a horizontal surface to call home.

This will not last forever, but it will make me appear to be off on some kind of exotic vacation. And it is kind of exotic, barreling through hours and hours of Moroccan footage and filmic bits. The downside to this creative enterprise is that little remains of what I affectionately refer to as ‘my brain’ come night. Ten hours at a mystery job, two hours of accumulated commute, a weak stab at parenting…I suspect humans were not constructed for this.

I will pop around here in fits and spurts over the next couple weeks. I may even return with a tale up my sleeve.

Meanwhile, enjoy the sunshine on my behalf…and leave me pearls for sustenance...


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