Tag Archives: writing

Writing Through It

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At some point, my daily well-being got tied up in writing. I have learned through this weekly exercise of keeping a blog that I feel a lot better when I’m making words. The last time I wrote nearly as much was when I was in school. As a liberal arts student, I wrote papers about literature, literary theory, philosophy, and psychology. Getting some of those papers out – namely the ones about The Pearl, which I only vaguely understood – felt like passing a very large, hard turd (sorry Mom, I know you don’t like me saying that kind of thing). At the end of each week I felt like I had accomplished something, though, even if those papers had no original or succinct thought behind them. I had basically eaten ideas and then let them pass through me. I had nothing new to say about them. Some of my papers were the equivalent of Ex-Lax.

I have had kind of a hard week. I haven’t really wanted to write anything because I’ve been overly-critical of the words I might form even before I said them. While I was out walking with C today, I thought about writing about all the stupid t-shirts I got in Korea. Then my self-loathing kicked in right on cue and I hated myself for even considering the idea of polluting the hallowed ground that is my personal blog with such idiocy. I don’t know who I’m trying to perform for; my scarily serious grad school professors are now putting the fear of Derrida into kids nine years younger than me and I have no reason to try to impress them anymore. I’m now nursing a bit of a headache that may or may not be exacerbated by the ammonia fumes I inhaled when I performed an angry floor mopping after dinner. Don’t mop the floor when you’re already feeling dopey. Do something easier like light dusting. Or eat pita chips and York Pieces.

I am pretty much addicted to this things. Photo credit

I am pretty much addicted to these things. Photo credit

HOWEVER, I’m writing through my malaise. That last sentence? Part of the write-through-it. It’s the roughage. I don’t want to write, but I’m going to and I need to. I’m giving myself a pass on editing my words and judging them too much. Sometimes late at night when I can’t sleep I look at old things I wrote a long time ago. I totally do. Brad Pitt may not watch his own movies but I read my old blog posts because that’s just me. Sometimes I cringe at the things I wrote and I’m not kind to the Emily who wrote them. I’m done with that for today. I’m not here to impress anyone, namely myself. I am just writing because it gives me some leverage on my sanity.

That said, stay tuned for some funny shirts from Korea. They are totally coming.

My Office

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I am obsessed. I am obsessed with Anne Lamott’s wondrous book Bird By Bird. I am also obsessed with the word “wondrous” because I have used it no fewer than 65,936 times in the last week, and I have no intentions of retiring it from my vocabulary just yet. Lamott has given me the kick in the rear I have been needing to just write like a mofo and give myself away to words and things and the saying of the say. I’m in the middle of a spell of cognizant automatic writing right now. Since I’m a blogger, though, I guess you could call it Automattic writing.

*Crickets.*

Moving on.

The entire book is quotable. I have underlined nearly the whole thing, which totally defeats the purpose of underlining anything at all because there are maybe now two sentences left in the book that are virginal and unsullied by my markings.

One thing Lamott talks about is programming your mind to think and to write on command. She says that you have to train your brain to deliver that thought stream around the same time every day. Our stomachs consistently get hungry midday because we’ve organized our day around lunch, and in much the same way we have to carve out a specific, consistent time to write each day. It signals to our body and our mind that it’s time to get down to business.

That time, for me, is shower time.

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My office

Oh, shower time, how I have wrestled with you. The bathroom became my studio when I was pregnant. This post was very literally born there, making it the baby I birthed in the toilet. (I know, TMI. And gross.) I would get in the shower and just zone out and plan what I wanted to talk about. Then C came along. She accompanied me in the bathroom while I showered each morning, sitting in her little Rock ‘N Play. When she was tiny, the rushing of the water would zonk her out, but as her naps became more consolidated to two distinct periods of the day which did not coincide with my shower time, she would scream and yell while I lathered up. I would have to sing Baby Beluga for the entirety of my office hours, and I couldn’t let my mind brainstorm when there was a baby who was screaming at me.

Some people can slice up their attention like that and satiate dual demands. I am not one of them.

However, that magical one-year mark has remade my C into a child who plays amicably by herself during my showers. Much like the writer’s mind, she knows what to do when I deposit her in her playpen in my bedroom because she expects it every day. She knows it’s time for solitary play, and my brain starts firing on cue.

What is it about the shower that makes me get in that space of thought? It’s not the privacy, as C has made me wave the white flag of bodily discretion for the next several years. It is likely the monotony of my routine in there. Wash face, spit out mouthwash, wash hair, condition hair, wash body. I’ve been doing it this way for years and I don’t have to think about it. It’s cathartic and compulsory. I’m tempted to call it liturgical but that’s a bit too heavy-handed and showering me vetoes that word choice.

Office mates

Office mates

The walls of the shower are enclosed and the sounds of running water get me to that place where my mind can roam free. Since I can’t write down anything while I’m in there, the ideas that survive a thorough towel-drying are usually stronger. They are often the ones you see fleshed out here.

I am grateful for my bathroom. Have I jumped the shark by admitting it? Probably. Am I becoming insufferable by choosing to write about my shower? Most definitely. But it’s in the mundane that I am learning to take solace. It means something to me. I don’t live a particularly exciting life, but my mind can dream up fantastic things when I will it to.

The rubber duckies speak to me.

Revisiting MacRae Cemetery

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C and I have been going on a lot of walks lately. She gets into this strange baby hypnosis mode when we’re out exploring and sometimes for fun I wave my palm in front of her face to determine how zonked she is. She swats it away and is like, “LADY, I was in a reverie. Way to go breaking it.” Down the road and to the left of our apartment building is a small development of homes – one of those neighborhoods that looks like it was probably put together on a long weekend. Vinyl siding, no trees over six feet tall, houses that are basically the same but all have an arched second story window to hint at architectural originality. There are sidewalks over most of the development and there isn’t a lot of traffic, so that’s where we go.

A couple weeks ago as we were walking, we turned down an unexplored street and I saw a large, black, wrought-iron arch in the distance. As we neared it, I realized that it was the entrance to a small family cemetery. It was strange to see such an ancient, solemn space interjected among starter homes where I would not want to spend a lifetime.

Macrae Cemetary

View from inside

I parked C’s stroller and looked around. All the tombstones were quite old; the most recent marker was from a death in 1988 but it was definitely an outlier, as most of the stones were from deaths that occurred from the 1840s to the 1920s. Most were broken and toppled and the largest one – presumably the one for which the family cemetery was named – even had graffiti on it.

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The wind started gusting since it was a cemetery and that’s what it’s supposed to do, and C got fussy just sitting there while I sated my morbid fascination, so we turned back for home a few minutes later.

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Back home, I googled the cemetery and the only thing I could find was an old (by Internet standards) description of the place from 2001 that described the cemetery and its location. At that time, the subdivision was still just a glimmer in its big box developer’s eye so only a dirt road could lead you to it. And the writer of the description advised a four-wheel drive vehicle to get you to it should you want to visit it yourself. What struck me most was that it was described as “abandoned” even back in 2001. The description was wistful: “This cemetery is in bad condition with many broken headstones. I had to piece some of them together just to read them.”

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***

Thus ends the portion of the post I wrote a month ago and then abandoned, just like MacRae Cemetery. I have been mulling this place over in my head for weeks trying to pinpoint the exact thing about it that intrigues me. I want to find a message in this tiny forgotten cemetery down the road from me. I could talk about Death, but the hugeness of that topic overwhelms me. I could talk about the fact that C will never know either of her grandfathers, but that’s just too sad and fresh for me to visit. I’ll talk about that eventually, but I want those stories to be prompted by something less arbitrary than a random cemetery. I also played around with the idea of talking about the juxtaposition of something so old and precious with something so new and hasty. But mostly I just wanted to use the word “juxtaposition”. Juxtaposition, juxtaposition, juxtaposition. Now. You know that I know the word. So moving on.

Over the course of the month that I took a break from MacRae Cemetery, I did other things and countless other ideas blipped across my radar. MacRae got pushed aside but it persisted. What was I supposed to do with this old forgotten place? It was unfinished business that started nagging me to wrap up. I have this stubborn urge to neatly file away all my experiences in tidy white boxes that fit in the walk-in closet between my ears. I want to access them easily, and put them exactly where they belong, so it was driving me nuts that MacRae was basically tossed in a big pile labeled “pending” on my dinner table. Now that I’m facing it again, it is becoming more clear that the gloom and the one-acre can of worms I’ve opened is insisting that images and ideas persist across time. They have a life of their own (oh, and the irony that I just used the word “life” is not lost on me). Despite the fact that these tombs are old and forgotten, they still have meaning. Years after the funeral attendants of 1842 have died themselves, I am still grappling with the mourning and sorrow they felt over 150 years ago.

Just because things fade from memory and are replaced with houses teeming with more relevant activity and life doesn’t mean that they were all for naught. The gravestones are broken, but that adds to their story. Those lives that were lived and mourned over a hundred years ago are not stuck in the past like a mosquito in amber. They make up the experience of mine and my child’s life. They are the details that give our walks patina.

To All the Words I Haven’t Written Yet

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I was thinking about you tonight as I gave the baby a bath. She squirted me with her rubber duck and babbled an incoherent phrase, and my mind went to you because even though you don’t exist yet, you will soon enough and you will be as big a part of me as this girl who I am a willing slave to.

Some of you will be easy. You will commandeer my fingers and trick me into believing that I am wholly responsible for you. You will be neat and clean and minty and we’ll get along well because you’ll never ask me to help you move, but even if you did I’d be there at 8:00 AM on a Saturday morning with the truck.

Some of you will be hard. You will seem like a good friend when I first think of you, but then I will invite you for coffee and learn that you are completely cracked-out and that when I went to the bathroom you took my wallet from my bag. You will seem like a good, lost soul though and I will become patient with you and keep you around against my better judgment. I’ll eventually publish you in a misguided effort to pawn you off on someone else.

Some of you will be serious and intense. I will develop a crush on you and want to be around you all the time and drink you in because it is with you that real change will be made in the world. I’ll grapple with you and try to impress you, only to spit out ideas that merely hint at your hugeness. You will make me wear a black beret and shirk off tomfoolery and just focus for once on something that has depth and meaning. You’ll take me to rallies and motivate me to say things that triumph Truth and Dignity.

But then I’ll cheat on you with your twin brother: words that are funny. I’ll meet you funny words on the sly and admire my ability to recognize you in nearly everything that’s ever happened to me. I’ll be ashamed to admit that you were there at every funeral I’ve ever been to. Don’t you have any sense of decency at all? Couldn’t you have just realized your place? If you weren’t so likable you’d be a menace.

Some of you will get really popular. Everyone will like you because they know you too. I will briefly become popular by association. I’ll be your date when you get elected prom king. The only thing is, I won’t be elected prom queen. Someone else with poofier sleeves and fifty pounds less girth than me will get that distinction. But I’ll still be proud of you because I know you’ll be leaving with me. I gave you strength and resonance and taught you how to wax on and wax off.

Some of you will not be as popular but you’ll be OK with it because you are secure in who you are. Your grace and eloquence are inherent, and you will take stock in your depth. You will love me for me, laugh at my inside jokes, and allow me to cry and vomit you all out in a messy but necessary way. You are patient and delicious and your soul is old.

Some of you will be a mess of the hotness variety. You will look like you applied mascara and drank a blue Slurpee while participating in a rodeo. People will humor you because you mean well but they are all really wishing you’d just go away and leave them alone and stop raving that the moon is made of rubber bands and that Cap’N Crunch is the lovechild of Thomas Jefferson and Zsa Zsa Gabor. I’ll bring you home, sober you up, and take you out for breakfast the next morning and tell you to get your act together for goodness sake.

Some of you will be long. Some of you will be short. I will regret saying some of you. I will be proud of myself when I say others.

I will love you all. You all will be important. You will help me continue creating a world that makes sense to me. You will grow up with my own fleshandblood child and help me be a better parent to her. You will complete the story I’ve already started writing.

And one day when I’m gone and one or two people are trying to pin down just who I was, they’ll call you up and invite you for coffee. You’ll both laugh and talk and cry and think, and in some way I’ll know of your meeting and be happy.

I should probably write a blog.

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I have a few extra minutes. I’ll write a blog post.

*Logs into WordPress.*

I should check out Freshly Pressed. It’s been a few days. Anything good? HEY! My blogging friend has been FP’d! I should read what they wrote.

*Reads post. Feels dumb because overlooked it when first saw it in reader several days ago. Writes substantive comment proving that I really did read it and didn’t just check it because it was FP’d.*

OK, so a post. Should I write something serious? Meh, I wrote something serious last time. I don’t want people to think I’m depressed. Am I depressed? I’m a blogger, so I’m probably depressed. Or I have ADD.

Speaking of ADD.

*Checks Twitter. Retweets a bunch of stuff. Remembers that I have unfollowed people for retweeting as much crap as I am retweeting now. Tries to think of a good tweet. Can only say snide things about Caillou. Self loathing commences.*

So, a post. All the unfunny I just spewed on Twitter has cleared the way for the real funny. Should I write about the baby? People seem to like the baby. I like the baby. I probably shouldn’t make fun of her on the blog. That’s a good way to ensure she’ll give me hell in her teenage years. But at least I’m recording her childhood? She won’t be mad that I told everyone about her raisin poops because I also said all those nice things about her. I should just make fun of Facebook. It’s already scarred for life.

*Logs into Facebook. Sees that the blog’s Facebook page gets way more action than personal page. Personal page is the kid with headgear that smells like soup and liked Saved By the Bell before it was ironic and hilarious to do so. Blog page doesn’t know it exists. Personal page wishes it could get to second base with blog page.*

I should really write a post.

Maybe I should read some posts first? The first step to successful writing is successful reading.

*Scans the reader. Reads some posts, all good, as I have excellent subscribing taste. Likes them. Realizes that I should probably comment too or people will think that I’m one of those obnoxious people who only Likes and never reads. Writes magnum opus in the comments section of several blogs. Uses up all eloquence that could have gone to a decent blog post.*

I should respond to all those comments people left on the blog over the weekend. How dare I write a new post while I still have unfinished business! I am lucky to get any comments at all.

*Checks comments. All way thoughtful, all deserving real answers. Responds with Arrested Development references and LOLcats links instead.*

*Glances over at empty glass of water on the side table. Refills it and eats some crackers in the process, in order to nourish self for all the Very Serious Writing that is about to take place.*

Until Klout. How is my score? WHAT. Why is my score going down??? Why do I even care? I haven’t gotten a new perk in almost a month!!!! This website is broken!!!! WHY WHY WHY? Where am I?

*Logs back into Facebook. Messages several people to join Klout because it’s “totally awesome” and because doing so will push up score. BECAUSE THE INTERNET IS THE MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL THE THINGS. At least I don’t play Farmville?*

*Toggles back to WordPress. My novella-length comments have been answered. But soft, what is this? New followers! Eats more crackers to celebrate. They’re all bots BUT CRACKERS AND FOLLOWERS ARE YES.*

I should check and see if anyone read the post I put on BlogHer. I need to dominate BlogHer. BlogHer needs me.

BlogHer doesn’t need you.

Oh right. Twitter needs me.

*Remembers funny thing husband said that morning. Tweets it and passes it off as one’s own. Wonders if plagiarism counts if the person you copied is your spouse.*

*Waits for stars.*

*Waits for retweets.*

*Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.*

Yeah, I didn’t think it was that funny either. Unfunny husband.

*Glances at clock. Baby has five minutes of nap left. Realizes that no blogging will be done today. Decides to write book. That sounds like a fantastically good idea.*

*Tweets about my upcoming book. Sets up Facebook fan page for novel that has yet to be written. Chooses super-flattering picture of me wearing my smart people glasses for the profile pic.*

The baby’s waking up. What an afternoon well spent. I love blogging.

***

You may have noticed that I linked The Waiting’s Facebook page above. That was my polite way of indicating that you should probably “like” it. Now I’m just straight-up begging. Here it is again. I’m three likes away from 100 and it sure would be nice for me to have something to toast this weekend besides a fulfilling life, my health, a beautiful child, and the utter devotion of the other 97. Because priorities. Please and thank you.

It’s learning time.

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Learning time

Learning time

C got this little kitchen set for her birthday from my MIL Sidney. It is a talking and singing toy, and unlike all her other talking toys that sound like a grocery store PA system that hasn’t been updated since 1973, you can actually understand what it’s saying, and therefore it doesn’t make me want to abdicate the Throne of Mother whenever she makes it sing the alphabet song thirty-two times in a row. It basically has Bose speakers inside it. Score one for Wee Cee and Bubby.

There is a switch on it where you can toggle between four settings: Learning, Spanish, Music, and Play. The joke’s on the kid though because she is going to learn no matter what setting it’s put on. Shapes, colors, manners, the function of a faucet. All these *critical* skills and concepts are imparted to her via the singing refrigerator even if she only sets it to Music. Muahaha.

When you set it to Learning, the first thing it announces is, “It’s learning time!” Oh good, now I will pay extra close attention. Let me just put my serious learning face on and take out my notepad. What’s that? The cow says “moooo?” Got it. Will that be on the exam?

I am slowly comprehending that Learning Time is all the time. Learning just happens, whether or not I put on some arbitrary “thinking cap.” I never much liked the idea of a thinking cap anyway. When I was a kid, I always felt like when adults told me to put it on, they were saying that I wasn’t trying hard enough to be smart when in fact my mind was going full tilt. I am still not a fan because the idea of a thinking cap implies that ideas and learning only come when you will them to, which isn’t true. My brain is always going whether I want it to or not. Despite my best efforts to read, write, and observe the world with sincere intention and to force inspiration, the learning I do is organic and largely passive. It is within and without me, like heat radiating from me and filling the space surrounding me. Since having C, I have become more attentive and aware of life in general and I am pretty sure I have become a better person. Learning is exhausting and tedious but it just naturally occurs if I open my eyes, relax, and humble myself.

I still force it, though. I click the button onto Learning and impatiently wait for it to just happen. I read read read and I write write write and I pore over the details of a walk down the street, all for the express purpose to get inspired and to be a better, more useful human. Sooner or later, though, I realize that by constantly looking closely at everything contained within this vast sphere and hunting for that one thing that will enlighten me, I have just overwhelmed myself. I get angry that I just made a bowl of cereal and nothing about the experience taught me something. Damn you, bowl of cereal! You were supposed to nourish me and inspire me! A strongly-worded letter to General Mills ensues, and all the eloquence I could have channeled into writing something more useful is then spent. Sometimes I feel like my good words are as limited as a carton of milk. They are quantifiable and I can run out of them, and making them come back is far more complicated than just walking down to the store to get more.

But then it occurs to me without me even forcing it that I cannot be inspired by ALL the things. You cannot focus on everything. My eyeballs and my brain are not equipped for that kind of work. I can barely maintain my Twitter account. And just like that, the bowl of cereal tricked me into learning, right when I laid off of it.

This is basically the story of my life: getting pwned by a bowl of cereal. Being tricked into understanding. It’s reassuring that I can rely somewhat consistently on these little serendipitous distractions to teach me something, all while I was focused on learning something more “substantial” from a book or a moment of massively concerted thought.

I am at play, toggling up and down the dial of a baby toy. Miraculously, I make sense of some of it.

Happiness is a small rabibit in your heart.

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If someone tells you that that they lived in Asia but didn’t have a few laughs over the proliferation of Engrish there, they are way too serious, and likely also lying. I loved being surrounded by Konglish when I lived in Korea. English deserves to be taken down a few pegs. Once I found this bag laying around our school. I had the smart idea to take a picture of this message on it:

rabibitThere was another caption on the bag that serves my purposes more aptly today. I didn’t take a picture of it, but just trust me that it was there. It said:

Happiness is a small rabibit in your heart.

It stayed with me. Maybe it was just the rhythm of the sentiment or the fact that it made no outward sense, but years later, I remember that sentence.

In the last couple days, there have been several small rabibits in my heart. On Sunday, I was lurking around the corners of WordPress I seldom explore and decided to check out the Recommended Blogs. Behold my surprise when I found my own little blog included in the Recommended Family Blogs section, along rockstar blogs I truly enjoy. Me? Really? This was a small rabibit.

The next day, I randomly submitted the post I wrote on Monday about baby shower gifts to the BlogHer Family section. An hour later, I received an email saying that the post would be featured on the site that day. Wait, what? Sunday’s small rabibit now had a playmate in my heart.

Now, Ashley and Amy are on deck to be Freshly Pressed. My heart is just bursting with small rabibits. Please get them some carrots! Recently I have been struggling with the pertinence of my writing, and more specifically, my blog. What am I trying to do here? What steps should I take to follow my passion and become the writer I want to be? I have been trying to write for content mills over the last couple months, with little success. The desire to see my name in print is not so strong that I can fake caring about breastfeeding pillows and making homemade foot scrubs. However, I am learning that I am apparently doing something correctly by persevering in the writing I’m doing here and just being myself. I have a long way to go, but if those small rabibits can just turn up occasionally, I will be satisfied.

My blog summary on the WordPress Recommended Page says,

Emily moved to Chicago, got married, moved to Korea, moved back to the States, and became a mommy. This is her life.

This is my life. I am so thankful that writing and blogging is a major part of it. I am so glad YOU are a part of it. I am glad that there are people who care about me and B and C and who make time to follow my nonsense here. These are the small rabibits in my heart.

What is your small rabibit?

 

Playing Nice in the Blogosphere

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Last night I was reading one of my favorite blogs, which I don’t get around to visiting too often because it’s so good that I need to allot at least an hour to just to catch up. With 10,000+ active followers, it’s one of the big blogs where the comments are usually as funny and smart as the posts themselves. The blogger who runs the site admits that although she does profit a bit off the ad revenue that it generates, she has a day job that has nothing to do with the subject she writes about. The blog is mostly for her own fun.

While reading the comments on the latest post, I found one where a commentor complained that the blogger made too big a deal out of the topic of the post. The commentor criticized her (albeit rather politely) for essentially making a mountain out of a molehill when she chose to blog about a specific topic and for using an undue amount of hyperbole. Whether or not the commentor was correct in saying that doesn’t really matter; depending on how you interpret it, she could have been right or wrong. However, the blogger – who does not reply to every comment since doing so would be a full-time job – did come out of the woodwork to defend her words. In the process, though, she pulled out a considerable amount of snark towards the reader, who probably meant no harm at all. What ensued was a comment war of the worst kind where other readers started criticizing the blogger for being too sensitive and hyper-vigilant about the slightest criticism. It was painful to read. Seeing a blogger you like get criticized on her own blog for losing her cool is a lot like being 10 at your best friend’s house and watching her get yelled at by her parents.

Right about now, you’re probably like “Well, what is this blog you’re talking about, Emily?! I want to see too!” To that I reply that it doesn’t really matter. This is only the most recent occurrence I’ve witnessed lately of people dumping all over online writers who are just doing their thing. Hang around the Intertron long enough and you will see it:

It hurts even when a pink bunny says it.

It hurts even when a pink bunny says it.

A self-published author puts his/her book up on Amazon and the reviews are nasty, angrily chastising the author for wasting the reader’s time with their “drivel”.

A writer of a small blog gets trolled for being “too boring” when recounting how she spent the weekend with her family.

A Twitter user takes personal shots at fellow tweeters who gave one too many details on their inane daily activities.

Each time I run across comments online that skewer bloggers who write for free (or nearly free, as self-published writers often give away copies of their e-book free of charge or heavily discounted to drum up readers), it frustrates me. Next time, it could be me who is criticized for minding my own business online and writing a blog that someone takes the wrong way or doesn’t like.

The fact is, it has been me before. Although it rarely happens, I can easily recall the times when I got comments that were hurtful and where strangers personally attacked me for what I said here. To be sure, these comments were never from regular blog visitors. They have always been from people that dropped in to tell me I suck and then never made a reappearance. One of them commented when I was only five days postpartum. I was sleep-deprived, hormonal, and already thinking that I was a horrible human being for not loving motherhood. The commentor didn’t like it when I wrote in one of my pregnancy posts that babies who wear glasses are really cute and that I hope my baby has poor eyesight like me so she could wear glasses. I thought it was an obvious joke, but the commentor certainly didn’t think so because she wrote that she felt sorry for my baby for having me as a mom. I can spot a troll a mile away and she wasn’t one; while most trolls strive to protect their anonymity, this person was a blogger herself who I could track down simply by clicking her Gravatar image which linked to her own URL and email. Would she have said those things if she had known what a horrible day I was having? Was she just shooting her mouth off because she could? Ten months later, I’m sure she probably doesn’t remember what she said, but I certainly do.

I want to take responsibility, though. I could have just as easily gone down to a store and purchased a blank book to write in, but I have chosen to record my thoughts in an online format and then made them available for everyone to read. I have opened the comments. So have many other bloggers, vloggers, tweeters, and Facebook users. We are allowed to say pretty much whatever we want on our blogs, so can we really be all that angry or surprised when someone uses their voice to condemn the quality and substance of our words? I often wonder if I gave up the right to be offended the moment I started blogging.

This is not just an issue of online etiquette, although that does play a part in it. Since I started blogging, it has been my personal policy to not comment elsewhere if I’m incapable of saying anything civil. No one has ever seen a snide comment regarding something they posted on Facebook and said, “Wow, what a valid point. Please tell me more about how stupid I am so that I can change.” I’ve disagreed with things I’ve read, but if I don’t know the blogger, I’m not going to rip the person to shreds. If I do know the blogger and have a constructive relationship with them, then I will respectfully explain why I disagree. The other day I saw a tweet that was meant to be humorous where the tweeter admired a 12-year-old girl who told a boy of the same age to “suck her d*ck”. I came close to asking her how that was remotely funny, but instead I just unfollowed. Obviously, I am not her audience. I love a good joke but that one was not for me. No commentary needed.

But the ubiquitous “unfollow” and “unfriend” sometimes doesn’t pack that whollup. I am a blogger, and I want to be heard. I want to tell people why I disagree or disapprove of what they’re saying. I want to be snide. Kindly backing into the shadows does little to no good when you read something that incites violence or promotes negligence and ignorance. I often wonder, if I really cared about the world I write about, wouldn’t I want to defend it when others pollute it with hate? Wouldn’t I use my words to stand up to these people, rather than just unfollow them? What about the times when they don’t necessarily say something inflammatory but something that’s just dumb? Should I just close the window and walk away?

I will never close the comments to my blog. (And I promise that that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I wouldn’t even know how if I wanted to. That’s a joke for those of you who were wondering if I was even going to make even a lame attempt at humor today.) I value the opinions of the people I regularly converse with here too much to ever let the meanies or the ill-informed spoil this blogging experience for me. But I do often wonder whether I really did waive my right to be offended the instant I started writing here.

What do you think? By making ourselves “vulnerable” in the Digital Age, are we basically saying we can deal with whatever the people behind those screens throw at us?

Some thoughts for Friday. Because it’s Friday already. I know, I’m shocked too.

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This is another installment in the “Emily doesn’t really have a theme to her blog right now but that’s OK” series. In related news, I am enjoying my relaxed hold on blogging. Treating this space more like the diary I originally intended it to be feels right. I am, however, working on a piece on one of my favorite books from when I was a kid. It should be a bit more topical. I’m excited! Really!

So the jobs. B and I have been waffling over whether our decision to quit his job and move this year is still a good idea. And for today, at least, it is. A deal is in the works to sell off our portion of some family real estate. The idea is not to live off the money that we would gain from selling it but instead to put it towards helping B’s mom purchase her home, which we would eventually inherit outright. This is a long term plan and I’m not entirely sure how it fits into our present situation, but it all seems to be related in that even if he can’t find a teaching job for the Fall right away, we would at least have a place to live while he continues to search. All will be OK. I’m learning that. Granted, I’m learning it by waking several times in the night and worrying for good measure. But the panic attacks are few and far between.

I was reading a post that Lisa wrote recently about the new year. She was talking about the things that she wanted to leave behind in 2012. (Side note: I loved 2012 because it was The Year of C but I could do without everything else. The Sandy Hook tragedy alone cancelled out any positive feeling I could have mustered for the year. I’m still sick when I think about it, especially since the NRA is being so predictably horrible in their response.) Anyhoo, Lisa is basically my Blogga Mama and I am going to be sticking by her side as she confronts a host of challenges this year. Her post made me think about the New Years post I wrote at the beginning of last year, and how my values and mindset have changed. As I read it back, I see a pregnant woman who has no idea of all that is coming. I’m glad that 2012 was a year of personal growth for me. I suspect that 2013 will be the same, and while I fear the challenges that are coming, I relish the opportunity to give my family the best of me. I can only become that person by putting myself through the fire and refusing to worry about things that are so transitory.

So if you pray, say one for us. It doesn’t have to be long or ornate. I don’t think God minds if your words aren’t all King Jamesian. There’s one job in particular that I’m thinking specifically about that may or may not make B into the coworker of one of my favorite people on The WordPress. So for the posts that would come out of that situation alone, keep us in your hearts.

I’m kind of a big deal.

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Today, I technically have nothing for you to read on my blog. Howevs, I WAS asked by Ashley of Ashley, Etc. to write a guest post! This means that I have arrived, as people are actually asking me to write for them. It’s only a matter of time before JK Rowling asks me to write a guest book for her too.

Ashley is my blogging buddy, so I wrote about the beauty of online relationships. Please check it out. Oh! And subscribe to Ashley’s blog while you’re at it if you don’t already read it. You will be glad you did.

Click here to read it.

Happy Wednesday!