Wordcount

One more thing you notice when you drag yourself to the journal every morning on waking is that while every day has been endowed with a standard number of hours, the number of words that you need to capture the twenty four hours since the last time you picked up the pen is highly variable. Some days it’s as though the pen cannot keep up with the words in my head, some days there’s a lot of staring into space, adjusting, fidgeting. And I try to figure out the difference, that the easiest or maybe simply the most joyful is the connection of things that becomes a new idea to me, or a recognition of some thought as an old idea in a new form. Some days there are emotions to be worked through, things that when I felt them I might not even have been able to...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 28, 2009 | 3 comments

What’s on my mind? Really?

Mara Leah Collins hears the thumping tail of expectation beating hopefully every time she opens email or Facebook. Mara Leah Collins is vaguely disappointed but cannot name what it was she was hoping for. Mara Leah Collins thanks you for playing. Mara Leah Collins is disturbed at her tendency to compose Facebook updates throughout the day, the clever completions to “Mara Leah Collins…” And I attempt not to bore you or myself with another exploration of my complicated feelings about social media though, yesterday I resisted the urge to put links on Facebook to the two radio stories — On the Media ran back-to-back stories on the first American Internet addiction treatment center and on a documentary about a guy who correctly guessed where the...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 20, 2009 | 8 comments

Repurposed

In my head is a long list of the various purposes a blog can serve: updating people who care about the things going on in one’s life, keeping a record of one’s thoughts and feelings in a more searchable version than the towering stack of notebooks, a way of curating the life of the mind, keeping a place open for drawn-out conversations with friends whom one might not have the opportunity to have many in-person conversations, practice with putting one’s more polished writing out for the scrutiny of others. I think my blog has taken turns with each of these, but the dormant blog is none of these, right? And the irony is that it is a positively received entry that sometimes scares me into silence because I imagine the next thing I write will be so...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 14, 2009 | 3 comments