What’s on my mind? Really?

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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 Internet was going, how our usage would increase, but also who cracked up attempting to life his life entirely exhibitionistically on-line. The filmmaker urges us all to hold something back.

The update on my first week of having Rainer in school is that it slowly dawned on me that the number of things I have to get done each day, the loads of laundry, the meals, the running and emptying and reloading and running again of the dishwasher, has not diminished at all, and if I have ambitions for Getting Something Done while the house is quiet, I must be strict with myself about using the Internet, which will take as much time as I will feed it, but sometimes doesn’t leave me feeling any more deeply connected. Which, I don’t know what I mean by deeply connected, but I think it has to do with thoughts that don’t fit neatly into 140 characters.

For instance.

September 20 is my half-birthday, the earth as far as it gets from the position it was in relative to the sun when I was born. Not that the solar system has ever returned to the place it was when I was born. Not that I think my mind really does well trying to grasp absolute cosmic distances or place as something fixed. I am pleased my desk is right where it was yesterday.

But if you think about it yesterday is all relative too. On day to hold a washing of sheets, a bringing myself out to write, too much time on Facebook, even. Yesterday as a spin of earth on its axis in addition to its moving nearly another degree on the arc of the ellipse it travels around the sun, which is traveling its own lonely cosmic path out from the center, the dance going on even when we cannot hear the beat. Yesterday the first rehearsal of the season for Aodán and Xander’s orchestras, Raven patiently chauffeuring while I got on the elliptical and listened to podcasts.

Yesterday was crowned with dinner with friends, but its vividest moment from today was when I squeezed out some time to read James Wood’s How Fiction Works and paced the house looking for a quiet place to read, with Raven working upstairs and the younger boys playing video games in the living room, so I sat at first against the wool by the back door, coats and backpacks hanging from hooks around my head, but eventually sprawled on my stomach in front of the book, reading about use of detail, and Flaubertian tricks of taking in details that couldn’t all be happening at the same time by one person, the encompassing repeated actions of women yawning and street sweepers sweeping, dirty children fallin and crying, and the discussion of ‘significant’ details and the ones that lounge about for mere verisimilitude, citing some Roland Barthes.

At this point I lay bathed in an ocean of details, the reflected boundary line between trees and sky in the rainwater on the porch boards as I looked out the cat door, water filling the tarnished copper bowl fireplace with the charred wood in it starting to float, puddles on the cushions of the seats on the chairs, chips in the painted floor of the hall, fresh new skin growing where blistered skin peels off between my thumb and forefinger, souvenirs of last weekend’s yardwork. And at the same time, I am pricked by the need to whip out the iPhone and add Barthes to my goodreads reading list. And also a few other books run into in other places, discussions I habitually lurk at the edge of, wary of contention and being overly-sucked-in.

And when I finished reading Wood and went upstairs, opened the computer — there in my blog feeds pops out, from a friend of a friend’s blog Barthes again, lovely, copied into my journal. And I remember another Barthes link from a friend’s Facebook page a week ago. Mercury in retrograde, or whatever. Last week I wondered if I was being haunted by John Keats.

If I look up from reading and writing I get discouraged by all that I do not know, the unread canon, the knowledge that there is no catching up. And I suppose that, absent a systematic approach, one really can do worse than to trust the serendipities that thrust the same name in one’s face three times in an hour. Yesterday evening at dinner with friends, I’m telling her how Wood’s discussion of ‘free indirect style’ helped me understand something that was wrong with what I was writing, and I suddenly remember her husband was an English major, and I blush that things seem like big revelations to me that he can take with an “of course” attitude (not that he is ever anything but gentle and courteous, it’s all me and I feel so underqualified).

But before the conversation moves on there’s this moment of talking about having always read for pleasure, without paying particular attention to how things are put together and how they work, I have sometimes a fear that a newfound attention and knowledge will diminish the pleasure, like knowing how a magician’s tricks work. No, no, we agree, knowledge of what a writer is doing in a passage can only enhance our appreciation. But I think about it more today. What if it were like having perfect pitch and suddenly finding poor or merely out-of-tune performances intolerable? I remember a stage in playing violin when my own insecurity made me listen mostly for other people’s mistakes. But my listening seems to have grown again more generous, perhaps from the daily work with the boys, and I find I have more of an appreciation for other players exactly where they are at. I don’t know to what degree a magnanimous appreciation is based in knowledge, in disposition, or in willingness to be generous. In any case, I hope I am read generously, kindly. I rely upon it.