The Thirteenth
As I prepared to begin this, getting into my website so I can recklessly (dangerously!) write using software that doesn’t automatically save, I realized I didn’t publish that last post when I thought I did. That is, when I came to my weird little website that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, I found a draft waiting for me, waiting to be made to the public.
But I forgot! I guess I was too busy, maybe? Too busy planning to publish stuff on Medium. I have no plans to publish anything there that I won’t also publish here, so if you’re not a Medium Person. no worries. Be whatever size you want! Not like I think anyone worries about missing my posts anyway, but you never know. People are strange.
Anyway, I’m making this little announcement, to mark either when I began to make a little money through writing or when I finally began to understand just how far away I was (am?) from meeting any financial goals whatsoever in this way.
I realize that most of the posts on this website center around the subject of writing. It’s not by choice so much as it’s just what’s on my mind. I like writing about writing (I’m even a fan of a FB group with that name) but at the same time, there’s something cramped and stifling about it. It’s too much like drinking stagnant water. Incestuous, almost. Or like performing improv alone, which is almost worse. (Shoutout to my idea of performing comedy under the name “I’m Provalone”.) It feels like there needs to be more. Call it a flow from an external source, a diversity of voices, or a deeper gene pool. But when the loop is too small, the poor results can become baked in the (in)bread.
It’s an idea we can’t get enough of!
I tried writing about books, but it’s not for me. Not in a way that I’m often excited about sharing outside of Goodreads. I think my reviews about books can be occasionally interesting, but I don’t necessarily want to get good at it. I like making notes about what I read, but polishing it up to make it something worth reading to the casual visitor to my site is beyond me right now. There are a handful of reasons why this is true, but suffice it to say I have a hard enough time feeling confident sharing opinions about things in general, I don’t need the extra pressure entangled with talking about someone’s book. I’ve never written one, but even the bad ones seem like they take a lot of work!
And while I have lots to say about my children and parenting, it’s a limited subject. The main problem there is my kids are people. Full-on actual people, with thoughts and feelings and everything else. Whom I love. And if I’m worried about hurting a stranger by saying something negative in a book review they’ll never read, you can guess how I feel about using my kids as fodder for blog posts. Yes, I do talk about them, but I need to be careful to respect their privacy. Especially now that they’re older and they, or someone they know, might come across these someday soon. It’s not likely but you never know— and they didn’t sign up to have their personal lives lived in front of an audience.
So I focus on what I do and feel being a parent, and less about what they’re up to. And when I do talk about what they’re up to, I try to be vague or change facts (though I am proud of our new whispy special little guy named Casper, whom we adopted from the 1930s— he just won first prize in a turnip eating contest!). But of course, injecting carefully-constructed lies into our lives diminishes the point of writing about them in the first place.
If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering: what is this post about? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s a reminder to myself that as I commit (once again) to write and publish more often I also need to commit to getting out of the house more often and doing something different more often. Even if I don’t want to.
