OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Celebration

August 21st, 2007

So enough gets said about how nothing happens in poor holday-less August. It’s strange, my kids still have two weeks of summer vacation, even though it feels like all of our friends have gone back to school. And I’m not in any rush to have them out of the house again, we’ve got our rhythms down and are happily co-existing, trying to balance the electronic media with page-time, trying to find things we all like to eat that are not peanut butter and jelly, carving out time at playgrounds after dinner when it isn’t so hot and I can sit and talk to my husband… I’ve even managed to put out of mind the encounter early in the summer with a classmate of my eight-year-old’s describing the binder with her summer studies in it, a section for Spanish, another for German, one for anatomy and one for algebra, and they had just finished tennis lessons and why wasn’t I signing up X. for lessons? (went home repeating to myself “this is not a race. this is not a race. this is not a race.” and was reassured that another of his classmates has taken to calling once or twice a day to chat about Pokemon and computer games and a game for the Wii he saw an ad for on television that he thought X. would like). But the last week has been ever so amorphous, and maybe some structure in all of our lives (I say writing after midnight) will be a good thing. But no, uneventful is sort of good. In a nothing to write about sort of way. I am just going to have admit I have had a harder time getting myself to blog because I had been missing the unreliable narrator’s regular posting, and so to find two new posts tonight and be all celebratory about it… I push aside Barry’s The Great Influenza and the exciting history of medicine and feel inspired to put my own words up.

And it doesn’t have to be deep thought, the words don’t have to be perfect. I like when there’s an idea-reason for a posting, I have been thinking about the mixed blessing of the sort of desensitizing and acclimating we’re always doing, that we become accustomed to things that seem at first unbearable, or, on the other hand, grow to take for granted things that had seemed completely wonderful, and I understand at one level why things have to be that way, that you couldn’t walk around being amazed all the time at how bright colors are, how delicious some smells are, and so on. Like how your short term memory has to clear some stuff out to make room for other stuff (but which stuff and how seems more complicated than any simple model/metaphor). But at the same time, it makes it feel like pleasures come with expiration dates. There’s something I could write about.

Or about a conversation I had with a computer developer friend of Raven’s about technography, which he described as the translation of ideas into images, using symbols and metaphors to help facilitate communications, and musing how, as a person who swims in words, there are many things I understand better with a quick sketch, and how this has me experimenting with taking notes where, if there’s a list I break it out into a vertical list, and if there’s a clear metaphor of journeys or outgrowths or hierarchies or webs I try to put the ideas into relationship with each other on paper instead of describing it — and some things that I had felt stupid reading because at the end of four sentences I’d have to re-read to understand what I’d just read, became a little easier to penetrate, and so I wonder about being a visual person when I know I am a word person and wondering if that distinction matters at all.

I could write about the whole family going roller skating yesterday — the two older boys can get around just find on skates, the two younger ones, not so much, and were happy hanging out in the carpeted section where there were several arcade games (that they seemed to not notice weren’t really doing much without coins put in). The skating rink had a wurlitzer organ with a live organist playing old-fashioned music, giving it a transported-back-in-time feel, and there weren’t the pig-tailed, short-shorted skating divas I remember from roller skating in Dallas, the girl who was the limbo champ, who won every race…just a rather elderly man moving with surprising grace, a handful of pretty competent skaters, and then many who I tried not to be right behind when their arms started windmilling, small boys making up in speed what they lacked in control and hurtling across the floor and collapsing just in front of me.

But no, I am writing because my friend is back, and how unexpected and wonderful it is to have this friendship that is mediated entirely through blogging, that we wouldn’t know each other were we to bump into each other on the street, and yet, I am so grateful for the encouragement and so happy watching the positive developments in her life, and having that conversation gives me a sense of connection in a world where I don’t get to have conversations about ideas so very often.

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