Not forgotten

Dear blog,

No, I haven’t forgotten you.

I thought of trying to explain to you why I wept as I did Tuesday night and decided that it was like trying to explain to my kids why I was crying. I was grateful they didn’t have to understand. I mean, they got that it was historical and all, but I couldn’t explain to them that regardless of what our new president does or is able to do, I was crying because we live in a country where enough people believed in him and believed in a hopefulness I had held myself back from feeling to vote so overwhelmingly for him, I cried because he was able to stand up and give an almost-Bartlett-worthy speech and call for things like humility and service and sacrifice and I’m grateful to think that maybe such virtues are not hopelessly passé. I was crying because even though I was experiencing this history in my own living room with two children asleep on the couch and floor and two nestled up against me, I was experiencing it through Twitter with acquaintances I may or may not have met in person, through Facebook with friends across the country, and as I listened to the happy parade passing a block away, I wasn’t alone.

I thought of trying to share my enthusiasm with you for Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends, my delight in someone saying “Hey, we read and we write for entertainment, and there is nothing wrong with valuing entertainment” my delight in his essays on Sherlock Holmes and on the His Dark Materials trilogy and on The Road (I have mentioned that I just finished reading the Road and I’d procrastinated reading it for a year and so was shocked at being a little blown away with it?)

I thought of trying to sort out my appreciation for Virginia Postrel’s TED Talk on glamour but she says it all so well, I don’t suppose I have anything really substantive to add.

I thought of sharing with you the catalogue of the pleasures versus the indignities of being corporeal that took up all of my morning pages this morning and my surprise at how I keep bumping up against things I find taboo (but I am so matter-of-fact and open-minded, I wail!) as I try to write even in the privacy of my own journal about them, and wondering at how taboo and modesty and shame seem braided impossibly tightly.

But really, I should be spending my writing time trying to pump words into my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project which is exhilarating and terrifying and exhausting and consuming and which I seem to be able to do only by focussing endlessly on the numbers and sticking my fingers in my ears and humming loudly whenever a little voice pipes up with judgement of what I am writing. I’ve now written 11,907 words towards my goal of 50,000 and every day I am sure I have only one day’s worth of writing more left. I have written enough to get things set up, to have a sense of where I am going but it feels like driving at night on a very dark highway and being able to see only the area directly ahead of me illuminated by my headlights, and quite honestly, I’m terrified of what may be lurking in the shadows.

Finally, I share this from Norton Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth, which I started with the younger two boys last night. Milo has gotten trapped in the Doldrums and is having a conversation with the native Lethargians, explaining why thinking and laughing are against the law:

“At 8 o’clock we get up, and then we spend
“From 8 to 9 daydreaming.
“From 9 to 9:30 we take our early midmorning nap.
“From 9:30 to 10:30 we dawdle and delay.
“From 10:30 to 11:30 we take our late early morning nap.
“From 11:30 to 12:00 we bide our time and then eat lunch.
“From 11:00 to 2:00 we linger and loiter.
“From 2:00 to 2:30 we take our early afternoon nap.
“From 2:30 to 3:30 we putt off for tomorrow what we could have done today.
“From 3:30 to 4:00 we take our early late afternoon nap.
“From 4:00 to 5:00 we loaf and lunge until dinner.
“From 6:00 to 7:00 we dillydally.
“From 7:00 to 8:00 we take our early evening nap, and then for an hour before we go to bed at 9:00 we waste time.
“As you can see that leaves almost no time for brooding, lagging, plodding, or procrastinating, and if we stopped to think or laugh, we’d never get nothing done.”

This sounds disturbingly like my day as I note that I have only an hour left before I must retrieve my older children from school…