OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Posting for the Sake of Posting

October 15th, 2008

No, really, I respect you more than that.

I mean, myself. I respect myself more than that.

It’s just that if I go even a little long between postings, then there’s this building pressure that I must make up for it by writing something at least marginally better, making it even harder to write again. Only I feel like I spent September in soul-scraping mode, and while it’s cheaper than therapy, a little goes a long way.

So let’s see if we can just go a little lighter this morning, maybe even entertaining. Or since many of those who I know are reading are those who I could, ostensibly, if I were a picking up the phone and calling kind of person, pick up the phone and call, I could pretend you have called me, and you have politely asked how I am doing, even though I was the one initiating the call, and really, I want to hear how YOU are doing.

The funny thing is… (oh, how has “the thing is” construction crept so steadily into my writing? I am annoyed by it this morning, but also suspect it’s about wanting to sidle up, crabwise next to want I want write about rather than diving right in). Trying again.

When I don’t blog, this little narrator voice starts trying to crop the experience flowing by for a blog entry. Good days, he sounds like the stage manager in Our Town. Bad days he sounds like the announcer in a toothpaste commercial. Freaky days, he sounds like David Attenborough doing a nature documentary.

The narrator voice would have you know, that having failed to master programming the fancy digital thermostat, I dress like a bag lady in the mornings to write morning pages in my chilly house, layers of pajamas. Also, I adorn my fingers with a silly number of rings, entertaining/distracting myself instead of getting uncomfortable trying to unearth deep truths while writing. And I listen to the Jacques Loussier Trio version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations louder than strictly necessary.

Raven is flying Austin today. He’ll be back tomorrow night, but Saturday morning will be flying across the Atlantic for some assortment of conferences and meetings in London and Spain that he has explained to me, but, that I am afraid I processed only partially, requiring sometimes diagrams. Sometimes the art of marriage seems to involve listening and absorbing the information you truly need, and providing the appearance of listening for the information your partner mostly needs to process out loud. And sometimes the art of marriage means not giving your partner a pop quiz on what it was you’ve been telling him for the last thirty minutes. What Raven’s flying out of town means to the person who calls to ask how I am is that I notice a tendency towards irritability wondering how I am going to manage until he returns next Friday. And I would advise someone else facing the week of solo parenting to do a little preparation work, have meals planned, treats and movies lined up as small rewards for each day gotten through, but, honestly, I am taking my life more or less hour by hour and day by day right now.

I might also take the opportunity of having you on the phone to whine about the cold that has flattened me for the last week, and express my great surprise that snorting Zicam no-drip liquid nasal gel has provided a measure of relief, which is a little startling considering my reluctance to put anything in my nose. (And: haven’t lost my sense of smell yet!) (now wandering around looking for things to sniff just to make sure).

Lovely thing about the cold was feeling excused to rediscover the joys of reading — Raven and I each raced through Ken Grimwood’s Replay in less than twenty-four hours, which is unusual. And I’m three quarters of the way through Sittenfeld’s American Wife which I mostly picked up because I loved Prep. Only, I am surprised to realize that reading this has given me a sliver of sympathy for a president whose administration has seemed to be disaster compounded on disaster. Or at least sympathy for his wife, whom I know feel compelled to think of as a real person carrying the weight of being a symbol of all sorts of things. Also, having slowly and carefully, often wincingly, made my way through interview after interview after glowing memorial to David Foster Wallace, I’m glancing, sidelong, at Infinite Jest wondering if I have really been missing something. But reluctant to plunge deeply right now since I’ve gone and committed myself publicly to doing NaNoWriMo again this year and probably won’t read at all during November. (Hmm, went to the library website trying to figure out what I had just finished reading so that I was free to start the Grimwood Friday, and you have to opt in to have a record of what you have been reading. Yay privacy rights! Boo holey memory!)

Yesterday Rainer and I raced a series of short sprints on our walk to pick up his brothers from school. And in this state of un-self-consciously addressing him, being completely there with him as we carefully each of us avoided winning and beating the other by more than inches so we could again and again declare a triumphant tie, I caught the eye of a woman walking in the other direction on the other side of the street smiling at us, and had this freaky momentary realization that to a certain degree Rainer is, if not a stranger to me, inevitably becoming someone who is a stranger to me. Not that we’re going to end our acquaintance or anything, but you hear about adults talking about their inner five year olds, and it occurred to me that as he races ahead of me on the sidewalk, on this trajectory to becoming someone completely unknown to me right now, he contains within him the thirty-five year old he will one day be, as strange to me as the unknown person smiling at me from across the street. I of course didn’t have more than a second to think like this because I had to race to get to the corner before he ran in front of a car or something, but I was thrown, for a second at how motherhood can be so completely consuming, and still, not enough.

Oh, I had a picture to append here, only the only way I know to reliably get it the size I want for my blog is emailing it to myself as a small file from iPhoto, and attempting to do so I have realized I cannot receive email on my poor little MacBook Air, which is, no doubt, the first manifestation of the household’s response to Raven’s absence wherein random things mysteriously stop working (we still don’t have electricity if half the outlets in my kitchen despite repeated flippings of switches in the fuse box, all of which happened the last time he went out of town). I try not to bewail my helplessness nor berate my own dependency, we have specialized in our marriage because it’s more efficient. Except when it’s not.

So I end here, gracelessly, as I might have to if we were on the phone, my son’s forbearance finally used up for the morning, but promising not to go too long before we talk again.

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