OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Lapsed

March 13th, 2008

I’m not going to poll my friends to confirm this, but I suspect if they were all in a room together they would start grumbling about how bad I am at keeping up my end of the telephone relationship. It starts with a bad week when small people and their various activities demand all of my attention from the time they wake until the time they go to sleep. And at 10 at night in Oregon when they’re all settled in, the kitchen’s cleaned, the laundry’s sorted, and I’ve caught my breath and I am thinking “A minute to myself? What should I do?” I am not fool enough to try calling Texas, where it is midnight. But that’s not a good enough explanation because I will happily drop almost anything I am doing to answer the phone. No, I have a secret conviction that they are all (both of them!) busy doing important things and my phone call will be an interruption, slightly annoying. And then there’s the issue where time starts going by and I am embarrassed at having not called and that makes it that much harder to pick up the phone.

What’s worse is starting to feel that embarrassment at not keeping up with the blog. I’ve got this list of excuses. Because when I absolutely cannot write I can always make a list!
1) Feeling like if I cannot say something nice I shouldn’t say anything else at all, and thus ending up out raking the yard instead.
2) Unabashed use of the text box in scrabulous to carry on conversations sustained over weeks that are getting all of the thoughtfulness left in me after long dialogues where I am corrected in everything I think I know about dinosaurs (Rainer knows no greater thrill at the moment than correcting us, so I try to get my details off now and then just to make his day). And many of those scrabulous conversations are on blog-worthy subjects, but it would be wrong, it feels, to just re-cycle them into blog entries, even changing names and incriminating details…
3) The fact that our days are right now filled with a sort of sameness that makes it hard for me to believe anyone would want the details — surely everyone is tired of hearing about my kids’ music lessons and how I think one of the things that made me most proud this week was listening at Aodán’s lesson when several attempts to control a particular bow stroke had to be a little a frustrating he was able to laugh at himself while staying focussed and solving the problem — prouder even than I felt when he got to sit first chair in his concert at the fancy schmancy concert hall concert Friday night. And I still am startled to look at his forearms and hands and they don’t look like a child’s hands any more and that shouldn’t startle me but I still feel compelled to remind him that at one point he was completely unable to get around by himself and only got from one place to another strapped to my chest and his legs were these ridiculously useless appendages and his feet weren’t even shaped like people feet, stubby little things almost as thick as they were long.
4) I am fasting and too lazy to find a quick link to the reasons why Bahá’is fast, but I’m in the middle of 19 days of not eating or drinking between sunrise and sunset and it’s a way of spiritually recharging before our new year which starts on March 21 with the spring equinox, and for many of the last twelve days just getting through the day with everyone intact has felt like accomplishment enough without having to write about it.
5) Even in my daily journal writing I’ve felt a little blocked and frustrated and bored with myself. I have this suspicion that one of my answers to feeling blocked is constraints. It’s like this: if you’re playing scrabble you have all these word possibilities you think, if you could just get this one letter next draw, or if your opponent just hadn’t used that space there. But if you have all the letters and the board and can make any word you want? Really, really boring, and you cannot think of a single word. So it seems like my options are to invent arbitrary rules to myself, entries not using the letter E or starting every sentence with M until I am bursting with what I could write without arbitrary rulage, or else adopt a completely different metaphor, and realize that I’ve been writing like a small and timid animal that likes to scurry along the walls, the constraints about what I can and cannot say, what voice I can use, whether or not I am at all funny and whether or not it’s intentional, and figure out whether I am frightened of leaving the wall and getting hopelessly lost or if I am more nervous about raptor’s eyes on high spying me swooping down with outstretched talons.

Or something. I’m not going to promise to start blogging a lot more regularly, but if you were wondering if I was alive because I haven’t, um, called you in a while, and the blog had a week’s worth of newspapers on the front lawn and the grass hasn’t been cut in apparently months, well, here I am! I’ve missed you!

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