So it turns out that, in all my long years of solitude, a few things with which I have always been perfectly content are actually subpar, which apparently you only notice in the context of dating someone. (Crap, that sounds like backdoor bragging doesn't it?) I've always, for example, been quite fond of my couch. I didn't even have a real couch until I moved back to Erie from South Bend; for the first half-decade of my adulthood I made do with a brown-orange-and-white floral 1970s relic loveseat covered in a beige sheet, leftover from my college dorm room days. But upon returning home, I was given possession of my grandmother's couch. As a sofabed, it weighs approximately as much as a piano, and its blue and gray upholstery matches nothing but faded jeans, but swathed in a stellar green slipcover it looks perfectly respectable, and is, I always fancied, quite comfortable.
Enter a boyfriend.
I invited Chris over a few weeks ago for dinner and movies. Dinner went easily enough, sitting side by side on the couch bent over our plates on the coffee table. But then we pushed the dishes aside and went about settling in for movie-watching cuddling. After twenty uncomfortable minutes of fidgeting and shifting like unjointed tinker toys, I faced an uncomfortable truth: My couch actually sucks. Narrow, hard and unyielding as a slab of sidewalk, it makes cuddling practically impossible in any arrangement.
Also my TV is way too small. It's maybe 19", and until you spend a lot of time with someone whose TV is 42" (now 50"), you don't realize just how postage-stamp-sized that is. It never bothered me all that much, but now there's that awkwardness that creeps in when I invite Chris over: "Heyyyy, wanna come over...and...watch....um...movies?" and I imagine I can practically hear him making mental comparisons with prison cells and Super 8 motel rooms.
Fortunately he comes over anyway. I love my apartment, and while I scratched my finances into better shape this year, I still don't have enough for a new couch or TV. Which is a shame, because I try to avoid the wall of TVs every time I go to the superstore, but while Christmas shopping I discovered the utter, stunning, intelligence-draining beauty of 4K Ultra HD (thankfully there's no reason to buy one yet since there isn't a ton of Ultra HD content available).
Some day, Gussie Mouseheimer. Someday...
In the meantime, I have a spartan couch and television screen. Because at thirty-three I am still poor and roughing it and almost all of my things are secondhand. (And my couch and television were both free.)
Monday, December 29, 2014
reboot
Over Christmas I found myself hunting back through the archives of this, my (almost) first blog (Remember Xanga, anyone? Oh god. I'm old now), seeking out my original sonnet composed in honor of William Had a Headache Day. It took a little maneuvering as I'd never really used the mobile version of Blogger, which led me to perusing past quite a number of my old posts. It made me nostalgic. Once upon a time, I was a writer. Once upon a time, I recorded the flotsam and jetsam of my whimsical, funny little life and tossed it up on the internet like so much debris on a beach. Once upon a time, I loved doing it.
It's been a long, long time since I've written anything beyond private, handwritten journal entries. I stopped calling myself a writer this past year because writing is something you have to do to call yourself a writer. I've missed it terribly, but the drive, the compulsion to the craft has been just...gone. Sure, writing is mostly hard work à la the tired adage about 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, but that sliver of inspiration matters. The brainstem comprises a small part of the brain, but without it, all the functionality of the cerebrum counts for exactly jack shit.* So here I've been, for the last six years, with everything working in my creative brain but the part that keeps the whole thing going.
I don't know why it stopped working. I have hypotheses but that's all they are and I can't test them. I guess in the end it doesn't matter why, all that much; the end result is what really counts, and the end result has been no writing. I've tried jump starting it several times to no effect.
But goddammit, I want to write again. At least to keep track of the funny things that happen to me, and the interesting people I meet, and the thoughts that flit across my brain.
I took this blog off the public spaces for several reasons, but those reasons are gone now. Well, most of them. The one that remains is the vast difference between the girl who used to write here, and the girl who is now coming back to it. A lot has changed in six years, and a lot of that change occurred extremely rapidly. (One of my hypotheses as to why I stopped writing is that I just haven't been able to keep up with my own quantum leaps - how do you write about becoming what you've become when you're not entirely sure how you became it?) I don't believe most of the things I used to believe. My entire worldview has shifted. And...I'm different, too. Not in the fundamentals; personality is, from what I understand, somewhere between fixed and fluid, so my basic temperament is what it always was. I'm still me. Just, maybe, more so. And I don't know how to explain it. I don't know how to write or talk about it. Where I was and where I am are worlds, light years, dimensions apart, and I don't even know how to trace the journey.
But maybe that's exactly why I need to come back to where I left off. Maybe it's time to bring the old blog back again. It's messy (because it was started in the days before Blogger had labels, oh god, so many posts without labels; and when I did start using labels I created and maintained them with all the planning of a five-year-old messing about with Risk). Parts of it are probably embarrassing (I haven't read any of my old writing since I stopped writing it). There are old hurts and hopes and fears and dreams, realized and unrealized, woven throughout all these old posts that will probably make me acutely ashamed, and a little bit sad. But that's growing, isn't it? And I've learned to look back on the old me with compassion. Tying the old and the new together might be interesting.
Also, if any of my old readers are still floating around out there, and this old blog blips back on a few people's radar, that's a readership, and that's one of the reasons a person writes. So, to any out there who might find their way back - hello! Welcome back! Give me a shout, if you like, to encourage me to take my work back up and keep with it.
I'd like to bring blogging back into my life in 2015. I'm not much for New Year's resolutions per se, because they almost never work, but I have gotten pretty good at reaching goals, and this is a goal that I've been wanting to tackle for awhile. I used to have a lot of fun recording the weird little things from my weird little life - creating a scrapbook of words to look back on and think, yes, this is my life, this is my story. Over the past six years I've had all these grand ambitions with my writing (I'm going to blog about atheism! I'm going to blog about skepticism! I'm going to blog for a cause!) but it always just falls apart because a.) I'm interested in too many things to stick to one subject for very long and b.) I really just like talking about myself.
So I'm going to try to make personal narrative writing a regular feature in my life once again. I'm happy to be airing out my original blog, returning, as it were, to my roots. Dunno if that'll make a difference in the motivation to keep writing, but it feels good to bring it back. (Hey, Lazarus. How's it hanging? The world's all different now, you're going to love it.)
So! Happy New Year to the ether and those who might read my little scratchings on its walls. I'm going to see about doing a reboot here, and taking up my digital pen again. There's too much shit crammed into my head to let it just sit there anymore. And I miss having a voice, however little and unfocused.
It feels tentatively, cautiously good to be back.
_______________________________________________
* Evidently I forgot everything I ever learned in twelfth grade human biology, because I thought that the cerebellum was in charge of things like heartbeat and respiration, which reminded me of that one person's case of being born without a cerebellum. But she still has a brainstem. Derp. Anyway, good brushup for me.
It's been a long, long time since I've written anything beyond private, handwritten journal entries. I stopped calling myself a writer this past year because writing is something you have to do to call yourself a writer. I've missed it terribly, but the drive, the compulsion to the craft has been just...gone. Sure, writing is mostly hard work à la the tired adage about 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, but that sliver of inspiration matters. The brainstem comprises a small part of the brain, but without it, all the functionality of the cerebrum counts for exactly jack shit.* So here I've been, for the last six years, with everything working in my creative brain but the part that keeps the whole thing going.
I don't know why it stopped working. I have hypotheses but that's all they are and I can't test them. I guess in the end it doesn't matter why, all that much; the end result is what really counts, and the end result has been no writing. I've tried jump starting it several times to no effect.
But goddammit, I want to write again. At least to keep track of the funny things that happen to me, and the interesting people I meet, and the thoughts that flit across my brain.
I took this blog off the public spaces for several reasons, but those reasons are gone now. Well, most of them. The one that remains is the vast difference between the girl who used to write here, and the girl who is now coming back to it. A lot has changed in six years, and a lot of that change occurred extremely rapidly. (One of my hypotheses as to why I stopped writing is that I just haven't been able to keep up with my own quantum leaps - how do you write about becoming what you've become when you're not entirely sure how you became it?) I don't believe most of the things I used to believe. My entire worldview has shifted. And...I'm different, too. Not in the fundamentals; personality is, from what I understand, somewhere between fixed and fluid, so my basic temperament is what it always was. I'm still me. Just, maybe, more so. And I don't know how to explain it. I don't know how to write or talk about it. Where I was and where I am are worlds, light years, dimensions apart, and I don't even know how to trace the journey.
But maybe that's exactly why I need to come back to where I left off. Maybe it's time to bring the old blog back again. It's messy (because it was started in the days before Blogger had labels, oh god, so many posts without labels; and when I did start using labels I created and maintained them with all the planning of a five-year-old messing about with Risk). Parts of it are probably embarrassing (I haven't read any of my old writing since I stopped writing it). There are old hurts and hopes and fears and dreams, realized and unrealized, woven throughout all these old posts that will probably make me acutely ashamed, and a little bit sad. But that's growing, isn't it? And I've learned to look back on the old me with compassion. Tying the old and the new together might be interesting.
Also, if any of my old readers are still floating around out there, and this old blog blips back on a few people's radar, that's a readership, and that's one of the reasons a person writes. So, to any out there who might find their way back - hello! Welcome back! Give me a shout, if you like, to encourage me to take my work back up and keep with it.
I'd like to bring blogging back into my life in 2015. I'm not much for New Year's resolutions per se, because they almost never work, but I have gotten pretty good at reaching goals, and this is a goal that I've been wanting to tackle for awhile. I used to have a lot of fun recording the weird little things from my weird little life - creating a scrapbook of words to look back on and think, yes, this is my life, this is my story. Over the past six years I've had all these grand ambitions with my writing (I'm going to blog about atheism! I'm going to blog about skepticism! I'm going to blog for a cause!) but it always just falls apart because a.) I'm interested in too many things to stick to one subject for very long and b.) I really just like talking about myself.
So I'm going to try to make personal narrative writing a regular feature in my life once again. I'm happy to be airing out my original blog, returning, as it were, to my roots. Dunno if that'll make a difference in the motivation to keep writing, but it feels good to bring it back. (Hey, Lazarus. How's it hanging? The world's all different now, you're going to love it.)
So! Happy New Year to the ether and those who might read my little scratchings on its walls. I'm going to see about doing a reboot here, and taking up my digital pen again. There's too much shit crammed into my head to let it just sit there anymore. And I miss having a voice, however little and unfocused.
It feels tentatively, cautiously good to be back.
_______________________________________________
* Evidently I forgot everything I ever learned in twelfth grade human biology, because I thought that the cerebellum was in charge of things like heartbeat and respiration, which reminded me of that one person's case of being born without a cerebellum. But she still has a brainstem. Derp. Anyway, good brushup for me.
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