OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Not too long or too deep or too edited…

July 24th, 2007

… we’re just keeping up a habit of blogging, if not daily, than more frequently than waiting for the perfect subject to hold forth upon and the time to edit and shape it and get bogged down in perfectionism. I endure the pain of seeing typos, homonyms that slip past the internal spell checker, though I correct them later when I find them. I remind myself that this IS hard, the singing loudly enough to drown out the internal censors, who natter away about how this really is not interesting to ANYONE and whom do I think I am fooling, exactly, that I OUGHT to be embarrassed to be putting this sort of practice writing out there for anyone to read, that everybody will read it, that nobody will read it, that this is but one more step to dying one day alone but for my twenty-four cats. That someday I’ll apply for a job and this will come back to haunt me: the particle physics theory of blog exposure, if I reveal my location, I must not reveal my velocity, and vice versa. I only decided after some internal debate I did want my name here, did want to be findable, don’t have deep dark secrets I’m not writing about, just a modicum of discretion, respecting the privacy of others in my life, that the only thing worse than being read was not being read. I think of the scathing attacks on on-line columnists like Anne Lamott or Ayelet Waldman for not having enough barriers up to protect their families from their writing, and wonder if the sort of disclsure involved in personal writing brings up a feminist question.

Anyway, it was one more successful day of the house not burning down, exceeding my low-bar expectations of the kids all getting enough to eat in the day, wearing clean clothes, and going to bed with clean faces — after we got home from a violin lesson and had dinner, we made fudge, and I read a chapter of HP7 aloud with Raven listening in on speakerphone. There’s a fine line with doing voices, it’s almost hard to avoid where she writes in dialect, but I’ve been caught off-guard, reading a line of dialogue in a hearty voice only to get to “the old man wheezed in an unexpectedly high voice.” I love reading aloud, love being read to, love that the boys have developed good reading voices, love that this is the seventh book my husband, older sons and I have enjoyed so together, all honor-bound not to race ahead. I am sad at the prospect of that ending.

Read More Comments (1) The ambivalent writer