Archive for the ‘Metablog’ Category
September 16th, 2007
So what do you think?
Raven realized we could host my blog on the server where he’s hosting his other stuff for just a small amount more, and since I am finding I am more into this as time goes on, rather than less, and committed to it and everything, he stayed up late last night moving everything over, and it necessitated a new theme, which is hopefully even a little more readable and eye-friendly.
Trying out MarsEdit instead of ecto for composition, still not sure I like it any better.
It’s a strange gift, being married to such easy fabulous tech support, since the computer skills I was so proud of before marriage have atrophied tremendously, but I’ve been saved such a multitude of headaches and he has found so many easy solutions for the things I want technology to do in my life, so that I can live rather on the surface of it. Part of me screams out “Be careful! You’re getting too dependent!” but, to be honest, our lives have become so symbiotic and intertwined and so on, that depending on him to tweak my blog really is the least of my worries, and I can just be grateful, because he is so amazingly supportive and it manifests itself in a hundred different ways every day. And hey, he depends on me for a few things, too.
September 15th, 2007
I hate spending more time on how my blog looks than on what I have to say but I am irate that wordpress is destroying all of my paragraph breaks… This has finally driven me to compose in ecto, but I’ve been lazy figuring out how to insert links with ecto. Final straw this morning was just going back in to add a tag on an old post and that edit including, against my will, the destruction of the carefully constructed paragraph breaks. Going to have to call in tech support on this one, but if you’re reading this, I am doing my best!
August 25th, 2007
…but all of my writing energy went into my (sorry, a little derivative) list of fifty things you might not know about me, set up as a page off my really boring about page, and, dammit, that’s what you should read if you’re going to read something I’ve written today. If wordpress even lets me publish it. Wordpress did unexpected server maintenance last night and has done funny things when I try to save this this morning. We’ll see.
The exciting news is that I am typing this sitting on the new sleeper sofa that just got delivered, out in my studio, so now we are ready for people to come and stay with us. Of course, we’re still at only one bathroom. And there are six of us. So you might not want to stay for a really long time. But I like the sofa well enough that I am considering letting my husband and kids have the house and moving out here by myself.
August 23rd, 2007
Regardless of my determination to disregard my blog stats, I do find the search terms entertaining, like these from the last twenty-four hours:
hallmark breaking up cards 2
hire a potty rainer 1
pleasing my husband 1
chutes and ladders 1
glossy magazines are good for kids 1
and I can only imagine how disappointed these searchers must have been, because what I have to offer in any of those areas is so… limited. If, on the other hand, you want advice on firing your violin teacher, I’m your woman.
August 21st, 2007
So enough gets said about how nothing happens in poor holday-less August. It’s strange, my kids still have two weeks of summer vacation, even though it feels like all of our friends have gone back to school. And I’m not in any rush to have them out of the house again, we’ve got our rhythms down and are happily co-existing, trying to balance the electronic media with page-time, trying to find things we all like to eat that are not peanut butter and jelly, carving out time at playgrounds after dinner when it isn’t so hot and I can sit and talk to my husband… I’ve even managed to put out of mind the encounter early in the summer with a classmate of my eight-year-old’s describing the binder with her summer studies in it, a section for Spanish, another for German, one for anatomy and one for algebra, and they had just finished tennis lessons and why wasn’t I signing up X. for lessons? (went home repeating to myself “this is not a race. this is not a race. this is not a race.” and was reassured that another of his classmates has taken to calling once or twice a day to chat about Pokemon and computer games and a game for the Wii he saw an ad for on television that he thought X. would like). But the last week has been ever so amorphous, and maybe some structure in all of our lives (I say writing after midnight) will be a good thing. But no, uneventful is sort of good. In a nothing to write about sort of way. I am just going to have admit I have had a harder time getting myself to blog because I had been missing the unreliable narrator’s regular posting, and so to find two new posts tonight and be all celebratory about it… I push aside Barry’s The Great Influenza and the exciting history of medicine and feel inspired to put my own words up.
And it doesn’t have to be deep thought, the words don’t have to be perfect. I like when there’s an idea-reason for a posting, I have been thinking about the mixed blessing of the sort of desensitizing and acclimating we’re always doing, that we become accustomed to things that seem at first unbearable, or, on the other hand, grow to take for granted things that had seemed completely wonderful, and I understand at one level why things have to be that way, that you couldn’t walk around being amazed all the time at how bright colors are, how delicious some smells are, and so on. Like how your short term memory has to clear some stuff out to make room for other stuff (but which stuff and how seems more complicated than any simple model/metaphor). But at the same time, it makes it feel like pleasures come with expiration dates. There’s something I could write about.
Or about a conversation I had with a computer developer friend of Raven’s about technography, which he described as the translation of ideas into images, using symbols and metaphors to help facilitate communications, and musing how, as a person who swims in words, there are many things I understand better with a quick sketch, and how this has me experimenting with taking notes where, if there’s a list I break it out into a vertical list, and if there’s a clear metaphor of journeys or outgrowths or hierarchies or webs I try to put the ideas into relationship with each other on paper instead of describing it — and some things that I had felt stupid reading because at the end of four sentences I’d have to re-read to understand what I’d just read, became a little easier to penetrate, and so I wonder about being a visual person when I know I am a word person and wondering if that distinction matters at all.
I could write about the whole family going roller skating yesterday — the two older boys can get around just find on skates, the two younger ones, not so much, and were happy hanging out in the carpeted section where there were several arcade games (that they seemed to not notice weren’t really doing much without coins put in). The skating rink had a wurlitzer organ with a live organist playing old-fashioned music, giving it a transported-back-in-time feel, and there weren’t the pig-tailed, short-shorted skating divas I remember from roller skating in Dallas, the girl who was the limbo champ, who won every race…just a rather elderly man moving with surprising grace, a handful of pretty competent skaters, and then many who I tried not to be right behind when their arms started windmilling, small boys making up in speed what they lacked in control and hurtling across the floor and collapsing just in front of me.
But no, I am writing because my friend is back, and how unexpected and wonderful it is to have this friendship that is mediated entirely through blogging, that we wouldn’t know each other were we to bump into each other on the street, and yet, I am so grateful for the encouragement and so happy watching the positive developments in her life, and having that conversation gives me a sense of connection in a world where I don’t get to have conversations about ideas so very often.
July 30th, 2007
it just isn’t happening. SO I think I should leave you with my favorite youtube video of the moment. I want a hurdy gurdy, I tell you. Except that the video of one being played badly (not this one, you’ll have to look for it yourself), oh, downright scary.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DwUqKbqIA4]
June 29th, 2007
I just barely had poor old Mama Chronicles up and running and separate from rinzai.com, which is really and truly my husband’s site, when I just found myself dragging to write it. Part of the reason had something to do with the title — somehow it feels like there should be some soft focus pastels with my kids saying adorable things and doing the darnedest things, and, shoot that’s just not who I am. I mean, my kids say cute things and do darned things in the superlative, and sometimes I want to write about it. I’m with them all the time, and so they do get prominent real estate in my mind. But that couldn’t possibly be who I am, or even how I really want to present myself to the world. Maybe my blog title is the victim of my frustration at the conflation of being something and doing something — polite small talk with a stranger at a party “And what do you do?” “Um, I’mhomewithmyfourchildren…” “I beg your pardon?” “I said, um, ‘I stay at home with my four children’”… “Ah, well, you must have your hands full!” and then the conversation dies. It’s not unlike being in school and people would ask how long until you graduate and what will you be doing then? and, yes, the philosophy major, interesting, so, um graduate school? and the conversation trails off. Which I guess is better than being a doctor and having strangers ask you to look at this rash — “Oh, a philosophy major? Hey, I have this existential crisis, would you just take a peek at it and give me your professional opinion?” (and what would they ask a mother? “I have this really tough piece of chicken, would you cut it up for me? Or, can you name all of Thomas the Tank Engine’s friends? Explain the difference between a digger and a backhoe? Identify this dinosaur over here?”) Yeah, I know the cocktail party is like the cliche of stay-at-home mom whining, truthfully I haven’t been to an all grown-up party in…maybe 8 years? He wants me to get a babysitter for one in a couple of weeks, and maybe I will, maybe I will. But lie about what I do for a living. I just can’t say I blog because, well, were someone to actually LOOK at my blog, it just might make them giggle at my pretensions.
Anyway, identity and roles (and if I put on a mask, a secret identity? Maybe? I have buried in some journal somewhere some thesis about the differences between Batman, who puts on costume to protect his Bruce Wayne identity and Clark Kent who puts on glasses to protect his Superman identity). And while I brushed my teeth I composed an introduction to this blog entry that went more or less: I am not the sort of person who thinks that everything was better in the time of Jane Austen, but when I read an Austen novel, I love that characters at a party NEVER ask each other what they do for a living. Of course, maybe that’s because instead of being defined by what one did one was defined by what one had, which is probably ten times more atrocious (unless we ask each other what we do in a more circumspect attempt to unravel the much more complex language of having and class — and where did you go to school?). But in any case, it seems like we all ought to resist kicking and screaming the little boxes we are always being put in, except it does make it so much easier when you do, back at the proverbial cocktail party, bump into someone who says, “You know, this reminds me of this funny thing I just read…” and skips the polite, disinterested questions altogether, to recognize that rare and precious kindred spirit.
Did I not, however, title this blog “Moving blogs?” Have I gone and buried the lead? I think I was trying to move away from blogs that read like the sort of essay my 12th grade English teacher really liked, with an introductory/thesis sentence and supporting details, the formulaic outline sticking out like and anorexic’s ribs, so I am going to 1) not go any further with that metaphor however tantalizing it seems, because, dammit, I have self-control and 2) in my efforts to blog stuff I would read if I weren’t me not go revising and editing and perfecting and re-writing when all it is is just, you know, a web log, and besides, despite my best efforts, embarrassing spelling errors sneak in 3) finally get to the point… I have gone and staked out a tiny piece of cyberspace with www.oleoptene.com. Now, if you look up oleoptene on-line apparently all you will find is “see eleoptene” which is, in chemistry, “the liquid or volatile part of an oil” from the latin oleo — oil, and the Greek Ptenos — winged. But at some point I had seen it defined as “having wings” and it struck me as a cool word. And apparently only me, since it was available as a domain name, see? And I’ve used it as a screen name, and it’s NOT related to my reproductive status at all. In any case, right now it has a dorky wordpress theme and the generic first entry “Hello world” “edit or delete this entry” (but the password is no longer password, I tell you!) so maybe, since it’s late and I really want to go read The Great Influenza by John Barry which my dad left for me before I fall asleep, I shall paste these words in there and they can act simultaneously as a closing of Mama Chronicles and a starting point for oleoptene.com?
April 4th, 2007
Facing down a block.
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