My Blog is Like Throw-up

Guess what's happening at my place? Vomit, among other unpleasant emissions, which I don't dare mention by name. We've passed it around all weekend: first my husband, then our oldest, then the youngest, now me. The middle child somehow escaped. He likes to think he's sick when other people are though, so we plan on telling him that he got it in the middle of the night and doesn't remember.

I started my Blog in an attempt to maintain some ability to form sentences. As a mother, I've been known to say things like, "No, no, sock...no outside...no...shoes." Luckily, my kids understand me, when they feel like it. I started the Blog because I was out of the habit of writing. At first, I tried to keep a written journal, but Baby J kept grabbing the pen and trying to eat the paper. I'm determined not to care too much about how or what I write. If I think about it, I won't do it.

My mother, who loves us very much, believes that all of her children are untapped geniuses. The other three may very well be, but I'm not. She read my Blog and told me it was great and I really needed to figure out how to get paid for it. Although she has good intentions, even thinking about that makes me cringe. First of all, it seems there are a few people on the internet who had the same idea, but better. They're real writers, with real stuff to say and they're consistent. Second, I know that if I felt like I had to be entertaining, I wouldn't be. I would say one out of ten entries on this Blog is interesting to more than one or two people (humor me). Some of them have potential, but I don't want to do anything about that. If I decided to take an entry and tweak it instead of publishing immediately, I might never write another. I'd get picky about every word and I'd start to imagine the reactions of everyone I knew (none of whom would probably read it, bu that's neither here nor there). And it would never be good enough.

There are plenty of days when I've sat down at the computer, vomited up whatever it was I was thinking at that moment and felt done with it. Kind of like a stomach virus. When I was in school, I was really energized by putting things off until the last minute (well, I had to be.) I wrote most of my papers without ever doing a rough draft; I despised teachers who asked for a rough draft, because then they would know I never did any revisions. You get some really interesting ideas when you're in a crunch. I wrote a paper about King Lear once, in high school. I put forth and defended, not too shabbily, the theory that Goneril was a metaphor for gonorrhea. A quick trip to Google tells me that I'm not the only person who had this idea, but there was no internet available to me back in the dark ages, so the idea was all my own. And it was fun. If I remember correctly, I got an A for that one.

Gotta run. Baby J is waking up and needs to be cuddled. I love how babies are even cute when they're sick.

Namasté, y'all!