blogging

#1000


One thousand posts. And it only took 3 years, 2 months and 30 days. Not to mention, a dead husband, a new love, quitting my job of 20 years, emigrating, remarrying, being an immigrant, pursuing a new career and all the details in between.

How many words is a thousand posts? If I average them to about 600 words that’s 600,000, so in author terms, I’ve blogged roughly six novels.

Let’s stop and be impressed with me for a moment, shall we?

Rob pointed the impending milestone out a few weeks ago and asked what I might do to mark the occasion. Aside from pointing it out to you, my dear readers, I haven’t any other plan. My 500th post was a link to a piece I’d written for the now defunct Moms Speak Up. The only time I’ve acknowledged a number milestone was when Rob sent me email #500 during the LDR part of our relationship. It was equally low-key, so this quiet acknowledging is in keeping with me and my blog.

In a way, my blogging has been memoir-ish, which is fitting I suppose. Someone emailed me recently and asked if I didn’t have the blog in an ebook form. It would easy to read that way. I am working on that.

This last week has blurred by, and I think it might be setting an early tone for November. Sometimes when life is hurtling past me from every conceivable direction, I wonder vaguely if I am missing the bigger picture. Will I look back like Emily Webb and lament not having taken the time to savor? And I wonder what, if anything, is the point or picture I think I am missing.

New job is hectic, and very journalistic, which is an odd thing for an op-ed person like me. I think though that it is a crucial step on my journey to … something I am supposed to do … so I am as pleased as I am a tad overwhelmed and frightened of falling squarely on my slightly off-center nose. I am in the process of writing three separate pieces. Interviewing and gathering facts and links. My editor sent out a style sheet for everyone today and I am still trying to pin down the proper browser/WP program because formatting snafu’s make me crazy. It’s exciting to be in on the ground floor. It’s amazing that I have done this myself – networked and written myself to this opportunity. I have felt that my writing career was levitating with all the wheel spinning I’ve done in the last year, but it was purposefully after all.

“Now you will have to stop dicking around and work,” Rob noted.

And so the memoir progresses. I finished my revisions for the appendix to Suzy’s paper back book edition- I will let you know when it is released, and I will put up the Proust questionnaire she asked us (me and two others from the book) to answer when it hits the stores. It was fun in the introspective way that writers have fun – sometimes.

No one has H1N1 here – yet – and hopefully, it will stay that way because as of now our decision on vaccination is still to do nothing and our holiday is booked for November and flu would dampen the experience. Dee and I haven’t see the Pacific, traveled by ferry, holidayed on an island, and I don’t want to miss any of it.

When I started the first version of this blog in July of 2006, I was adrift. Believe it or not, I had a plan that I followed with a scary amount of precision through my late husband’s illness and after his death. But it only took me through July of 2006. Really, it did. Blogging was a multi-purpose endeavor meant to get me back to writing – which I had discovered through my pursuit of my education masters was really my true calling – and to help me sort out my feelings and find redirection. I guess, judging from how things have turned out, I can call the whole blog thing a success, wouldn’t you agree?

Blogging from the Charmin Washroom


This is something The Bloggess would get picked to do because she is weberatti and because she believes public washrooms are zen zones, but apparently Charmin is looking for unknowns to spend the weeks leading up to Christmas manning their Grand Central Station washrooms* and then blogging, tweeting and otherwise letting the known universe in on the wonderliciousness of it all.

This is how toilet tissue is sold in my native land and one more reason to not admit I am from there when we move overseas. That and the whole terrorists might kill me thing.

“It’s pays money,” I told Rob.

“But you have to live in the bathroom, right? It’s a 24/7 thing.”

“They’re paying $10,000,” I repeated the money thing because I didn’t think he’d heard.

“To live in a bathroom that thousands of who knows where they’ve been people are walking in and out of to take care of any private function you can imagine every day for five weeks!”

“For $10,000,” I said – again – “And you get to blog about it and tweet and make YouTube videos.”

“In a bathroom where people piss and shit,” he was really stuck on the negatives. “Do you have to eat in there too?”

“Well, I would imagine they give you breaks,” I said, not really knowing and not really sure. It’s in America after all where “reality” is carried to extremes.

“You want to do this, don’t you?” he asked.

“Well, no.” Okay the money, the blogging and the attention would be interesting but there is the whole toilet aspect to consider. He had a good point there. If I were 22, homeless already with no immediate job prospects, this might sound like a better opportunity.

“I’m not going to live in a bathroom in Grand Central Station for 5 weeks,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s a family thing,” I said.

“So you want to go to New York for five weeks by yourself?”

Already I can’t picture Rob and Dee for five weeks on their own with me checking in via an iPhone. I think this kind of technological upgrade would be necessary in order to pull this off when you are not a homeless 22-year-old college drop-out without prospects but the Charmin people would have to foot the tech bill or that $10,000 would be eaten by the expense. Which I guess is why they are looking for bloggers as we tend to work for free when we aren’t paying people for the privilege of providing Google with content they can turn around and sell.

“No, I can’t be gone for 5 weeks,” I said, although in the corner of my mind where all outlandish ideas are given more than a cursory once over, wheels are spinning. The three of us in a washroom? Living in Grand Central Station? Better than Balloon Boy Family tv. And it reminds me of one of my favorite childhood novels, The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, where two kids run away to the Metropolitan Museum and live there for a while. I wonder why Grand Central Station? Why not the Met or MOMA. I could live for 5 weeks in a Museum.

In the end, I decided that even with my allergy reduced sense of smell, I couldn’t live in a public washroom for any length of time. Not even the luxury Charmin potties.

*Updated-Times Square. Luxury porta-potties in Times Square. My bad. Check the link though because they look pretty up-scale. Still, outdoors? They must be looking for people willing to camp. Can you camp in Times Square?

Sure Is Monday


Been stressing all weekend about the new blogging gig at Care2.

“You should never stress about work,” Rob said when I finally voiced my concern that I wouldn’t be able to find a topic for my first post.

“But I can’t work and not be perfect,” I said.

Herein lies my problem, I was raised with a work ethic and the expectation that if I am being paid to work, I need to be damn perfect in the execution of my job – whatever that might be. I have carried this load of crap since the first paying job I had when I was 12 and I was forced to mow our anal retentive neighbor’s lawn two summers in a row. My father, who couldn’t have loathed his job more, believed that there was no half-assing in employment.

I think this must be specific to my particular generation because I haven’t encountered it in those who aren’t technically considered my peer group to the same extent that we seem to be afflicted with it. Maybe it was our parents or something in the food chain or a freakish configuration of planetary bodies, I don’t know, but we are miserable perfectionists. Miserable because we can’t seem to help ourselves despite knowing what a waste of our time it is.

“The hardest thing I ever did was giving up perfectionism,” Rob assured me, but he is the same “reformed” perfectionist who is busily working himself into a knot renovating our home into someone’s dream home because we have no plans to return here after the overseas assignment he is maneuvering towards comes to its ultimate fruition.

Of course I worried to no end. I stumbled across the perfect article in my old home town newspaper this morning which provided the inspiration and link I needed to write my first post – currently awaiting approval. Working for money again has also supplied me with fodder for 50 Something Moms, so blogging is good all around. It was a silly thing to knot up about as it is about as easy for me to not find ideas for writing as it would be to blank my mind and not think. Writing ideas nearly assault me in their quest to be word on screen. Trying to keep pace is more of an issue than anything else.

Oh really, you say. Then why the blog black out over the last week here?

I’ve been writing. That’s why. Blogging is awesome and I don’t think I could ever give it up, but it is a time suck and the sucking usually comes from my off-line writing. I can’t spare it if I want to meet my deadline for rewriting the beginning chapters of the memoir. And while I am on the topic, writing about the dead husband and other related stuff is rather involving. A time suck on the magnitude of black hole.

Things will get back to daily here once NaNoWriMo begins because I am committed to daily doses of fiction, but after that I can’t say. I am literally a hand’s worth of fingers away from post #1000. That’s a lot of blog. Rob thinks I should do something to commemorate the post. I did make note of #500 when it happened, but I haven’t been much for blogversaries and such. You see 1000 posts and I see all the days I could’ve written something in the past 3 and 1/2 years and didn’t. Damned work ethic again.

Today I am exhausted and still have writing and housewifely stuff to do before putting in time on the Dance Mom beat this evening. I haven’t felt this since I stopped teaching – this Monday thing – this weekend lag. Interesting.