Entering the Home Stretch (and perhaps signing off)

Somehow, without meaning for it to happen, I went a month and a half without posting. It's not that I haven't had any thoughts or observations to share, particularly with regard to the biggest change in my life at present -- pregnancy. I guess I'm still not inclined to share them with the outside world. Indeed, if this large a gap goes between today's entry and the next time, I may just discontinue this blog.

Brent has been posting. Not with any ferocity, but what he lacks in frequency, he makes up both in terms of posting heartfelt messages and, more to the point, posting several of them when he does post. In contrast, I'm just not particularly motivated to do so. At least more often than not. But my contemplative husband's recent posting spree at least prompted me to check in with the blogosphere.

So hi. What's to tell? Well, in the last nearly eight months, my body has turned into this:


Yeah. Says a lot, doesn't it, that picture?

And it's not like I don't have any thoughts on it -- it's nearly all I can think about (or talk about or write about in e-mails to friends and family) -- it's just that I don't know where to begin when it comes to putting it down for the world outside to consume and digest. I'm nearly 90% through my first pregnancy, and the experience is so much greater than the sum of its parts that to kvetch about discomforts and complications (backaches, gestational diabetes, etc.) or to rave about the upsides seems so dismissive of the entire experience. I'm growing a person. I wish for her sake I could explain what it's been like. But the more I think about it, the more I feel like this isn't the proper venue in which to do it.

I've always said that the best way to piece together the various goings-on in my life is to read my personal e-mails in chronological order. I've never kept a diary. I'm not much good at this blogging thing. Virtually no one really writes letters longhand any longer; I certainly don't. While I certainly have every hope of describing for my daughter to be what this pregnancy has been like, assuming it ever occurs to her to ask, and while I'm certain that I won't remember it accurately if I don't write it all down, I haven't gotten to the point where I want to publish what I'm feeling. Not on a daily basis, and not even in weekly or monthly retrospectives.

I certainly express myself more quickly when I type text than when I write it out. I usually express myself more clearly when I type than when I speak. I certainly process (and remember) the written word more easily than I do things told to me. But just because I prefer to communicate by tapping keys on a keyboard does not mean I have no choice but to blog.

I'm entering into the end of one significant period in my life -- a pregnancy -- and about to embark on something so much bigger. I just don't know that I have any desire to share it yet. The fact that I haven't been motivated to post more than I have (and, God knows, when I'm motivated to do something, it gets done; just ask Brent) tells me that this isn't for me. At least not now. Reading blogs? Sure. Discussing them? Absolutely. Writing one? I just don't know.

I don't think that blogging is like trying to ice skate uphill. At least, it shouldn't be. So I am not going to put a lick of pressure on myself to update this for the time being. If the muse strikes, maybe I will return to it. If the year ends and I've nothing more to say in this forum, I'll do my darnedest to delete it, and find some other outlet into which I can better channel my energies.

It was better to have tried than not to have though, right? At least this way I can say I'm not just discounting it for want of having explored the option....

Taking Inventory

So it's been over a month since last I posted. Lots has happened. I've discovered what gender my child will be: a girl. This was neither exciting nor disappointing for me -- I didn't particularly care what I was having, so long as it was healthy. It is good news only inasmuch as it helps me feel a little more connected to the baby-to-be. The pronoun shift from "it" to "she" is helping to get me ready for her arrival, which inches ever closer. Assuming she shows up on time, she will be here in fourteen weeks and five days.

Although my husband and family haven't had strong reactions, lots of strangers and acquaintances get this look of pity or disappointment when I tell them we're going to have a daughter. It's as if that's the second place choice -- one you will make do with rather than one you really wanted. This surprises me. Not that I'm blind to the fact that, even in 2008, women face adversity that men are spared. But it's gotten much easier for us to succeed than it was for our mothers or grandmothers, and I can only suspect (and hope) that the playing field on which my daughter competes with men will be even more equal by the time she comes of age to enter the game.

The little one has also started making her presence known in ways more noticeable than previously. Until recently, the biggest evidence of her was my ever-thickening waistline. A few weeks back, Squishy (the placeholder I've been using until she arrives and we settle on a name for her) started kicking me. It's pretty neat. It's bizarre, to be fair. The fact that she kicks with a rhyme and reason that is independent of my own -- that it's a reaction to stimuli of which I'm wholly unaware -- impresses upon me that this being I'm growing and nurturing is one increasingly independent of me. I mean she's not even been gestating for six months yet, and already she kicks when the mood strikes her.

There are other bodily functions of mine that happen without my willing them to do so. Blood clots when I get a cut. My heart beats without my consciously deciding I want it to. My hair and nails grow absent any volition on my part. But I still chalk those up to choices I am making -- albeit making with a part of my body other than my conscious brain -- on some cellular level. Squishy's movements are something else altogether.

On fronts other than the baby one, we've closed on our new apartment, we're slated to move this Wednesday (Hello, suburbia! Hello, square footage!), and in between the closing and the move, we've managed, with the help of a couple of contractors, to get the place into some semblance of shape. I still have a bunch of things to pack, but progress is being made nicely, and that's reassuring.

I wish I had more to add. I'm not sure I'm cut out for blogging. These days, I'm too busy living life to want to memorialize it. Moreover, I'm not sure I want to have this pulpit for communing with the outside world. It's funny: if I want to recount what's been going on lately, it's easy enough to pound out a five-paragraph piece to e-mail a friend. But it's difficult when it comes to writing for all the world to see. Writing for a readership of one -- the intended recipient of an e-mail message -- is significantly different for writing for an audience with size unknown. It gets back to the issue I raised in a post I wrote last September: I don't want to share the same quantum of information, or deliver the information the same possible way, to every potential reader out there. There's much more I am willing to share with friends than with strangers. Exes and bosses? I want them to know even less than strangers. So I wind up filtering and self-editing to the point that what I started out trying to say gets so diluted that I wind up not saying anything at all. Either I simply don't bother to post or I post words that don't pack half the punch of my original, distilled message for fear that that might offend someone or reach an audience I'd rather remained blissfully oblivious of my inner thoughts.

I actually logged on today with the intention of deleting, rather than updating, this blog. Abandoning it isn't the way to go. I'm either in or out, I'd figured. But then I saw two unmoderated comments. Two people had read my last post and decided to respond. Nothing nasty. Just feedback. And that was enough to get me to stick with it -- for a little bit longer, at least.

Lessons Learned

(1) There will always be critics. I need to develop a thicker skin if I'm going to be able to blog.

(2) While my hat is off to those men and women who can keep up the demands of daily blogging, I don't have it in me yet. Whether that's a lack of material or a lack of energy or a lack of confidence, I'm not there just now. I think that forcing myself to post every day come hell or high water was tantamount to biting off more than I could chew so early in the game. I'm glad I gave it a shot, but I think that the publish or perish threat forced me to blog something -- anything -- and resulted in diluting quality of content in favor of volume. I'll know for next time.

So It's Thanksgiving...

Amazingly enough, no food coma. I exercised something resembling self-restraint, and didn't need to pick up my belly and carry it home with me. Of course, now it's 9:45pm and I'm peckish. But no matter -- we have leftovers. So if my hunger gets the better of me, I can help myself.

But I don't want to talk about the meal (good), the company (better than good), or any other traditional Thanksgiving details. The thing that left the biggest impression on me today was a near run-in with a homeless man on the ride out to my mother's Thanksgiving dinner.

Coincidentally, my husband (fine, since he's dispensed with pseudonyms on his website, I'll just call him by his name), Brent, blogged about an encounter with a few homeless men earlier this week. I don't intend for our blogs to serve as point/counterpoint or anything of the sort; I think my writing might suffer by comparison were that the case. It's just inevitable that I'll reference things he thinks about and says, as our lives intertwine pretty inextricably.

Anyway, Brent and I were headed out to Queens from our apartment in Midtown Manhattan. We rode an E train to get there. While en route to the subway station, we actually remarked to one another how dead -- how preternaturally empty -- the City seemed. The subway, however, was anything but.

Unlike the streets above, the subway car we entered -- at the front of the train where, even during weekday rush hours, you can usually find at least a few empty seats -- was packed. All sorts of folks were headed in the same direction we were, which meant that neither of us was able to get a seat of our own.

The ride to my mom's place isn't too long; at worst, it runs maybe 45 minutes. Tonight, we were only going to a stop by my grandmother's apartment, and then my mother was going to pick us up and give her a lift, killing multiple birds with one stone, so the ride was even shorter -- maybe 25-30 minutes. Even so, I wound up spending a very long ten-minute stretch on the subway.

Considering how packed the car was, I was startled when I noticed that, between stops, such that there'd be no incentive to give up one's seat, a slew of people (European tourists, if I had to guess; none of them speaking English) scurried out of their seats and crowded the corner of the car where Brent and I were standing. Because we were both carrying heavy containers of food, for about a half a second, I thought about taking one of the recently-vacated seats. Only half a second. I came to my senses pretty quickly.

While New Yorkers are surprisingly polite about some aspects of subway travel (e.g., giving directions to evidently-lost tourists, and waiting for folks to exit subway cars before entering the cars themselves), they are not so generous-of-heart as to relinquish perfectly good seats en masse for no good reason. So that large an exodus had to be motivated by something inappropriate and unseemly taking place near them. Upon reconsideration, I knew better than to try to grab a seat. I just didn't know what in particular I didn't want to be seated next to, even though I knew without a doubt that I was better off standing.

Brent saw him first; my view of the fellow was largely obstructed by a fellow traveler. There was a middle-aged, hard-living homeless man reclining on the subway seats. He had just dropped his trousers to half-mast (towards what end, I knew not, nor did I care to inquire). Folks were both recoiling in horror and staring at him, like the cliched train wreck off which you cannot pull your eyes. The tourists near me laughed nervously.

I couldn't see much of this man; just enough to see that he didn't seem to be threatening anything more disruptive than airing out his equipment. Eventually, he lit and smoked a half-used cigarette. The stench was overpowering. But he didn't make any fuss, didn't make any advances, and kept to himself, for all the commotion he was causing.

At the next stop, half-sickened by the stench of the cigarette, I convinced Brent to switch cars with me. We moved one car over, and that was that.

Except it wasn't. I can't help but pity the man. I imagine that anyone who has sunk so low as not to car (or not to realize) that he's disrobing on mass transit is in a very bad way indeed. I don't know where he came from, how long he's been like this, or what's going to happen to him. I know that I didn't have the power to help him -- not with Thanksgiving leftovers, and not with spare change. This guy needed Help with a capital "H."

New Yorkers talk about the "Homeless Problem" -- something that is called increasingly to our attention as the weather turns colder. It's that time of year when those who can't find shelter take to the buses and, more often, subways for warmth and a little protection from the elements. This guy we saw tonight? Sure, he's part of the problem. But he was -- he is -- human, too. And I'm totally flummoxed over what to do. I had the good sense not to point and giggle. But my pity won't change anything.

I don't write to propose any grand solutions. I don't have any. I just want to express how useless, how helpless I feel at observing this man tonight in this condition.

I learned recently that my brother's girlfriend has made a habit over the last few years of volunteering on Thanksgiving at the Bowery Mission. I don't know her all that well yet, but I was really favorably impressed to learn that about her. Even though it's important to focus on family during this holiday, she has made a policy of helping folks who need it. Again, given what I said above, I know that cooking or serving a warm meal for some homeless people won't solve the Homeless Problem, either. But it's a lot more admirable, a lot more meaningful, a lot more money-where-your-mouth-is than blogging about it.

I used to make a habit of volunteering with New York Cares. I think it's time to get started being involved again. My family nurtures me. Hell, this City takes good care of me. I ought to give something back.

My First Ringing Endorsement

He may be a bit biased, or maybe he did it under duress, but the love of my life finally acknowledged me (that is to say, acknowledged this website) on his blog.

I only began blogging recently. So far, my readership consists of my husband, my mom, and a close high school friend. Once a fellow I met on Facebook stopped by, but I've not seen hide nor hair of him since, nor of any other visitors.

That's okay. Readership will grow or it won't. As I said a while back, this blogging exercise is an experiment.

But, since my readership is so small, I may as well write something that both holds their interest and doesn't bore (or, I suppose, offend) them.

This being 2007, I spend the lion's share of each day away from the folks I love the best. Sometimes I work so late, that I only get a few minutes with them. Sometimes, I don't even get that. I have to resort to virtual means of communication. When we do make time to interact face-to-face, often we're too tired, or too harried, to make time for conversations about the things that really move us, that really matter.

While I've been guilty of navel gazing, my husband has been posting about some real thought-provoking topics. Maybe if we had enough face time, and maybe if I thought to ask him, he'd've shared his conclusions with me in person. Likely not. I never say in ten words what I can say in fifty and, even when he gets a word in edgewise, I tend to cut him off. (It's not motivated by a sense that what I think about is more important than what he thinks about. Truth be told, the enthusiasm for whatever I'm thinking usually just bubbles up and is hard to stop; I give voice to the thought before considering that I'm interrupting. And by then it's too late.)

These blogs are providing us with soapboxes, on which we can pontificate and expound to our hearts content. I'm not just glad to have a page on which to articulate what's on my mind; I am thrilled that I get to learn (and that other people get to read) what gets my husband thinking on any given day.

That his topic of choice was me yesterday? I guess that means that, despite all the hours we spend apart, I'm still doing something right.

Validation

I jumped on the Facebook bandwagon. Both enchanted with online social networking mechanisms, inasmuch as they allow us to reconnect with old friends, make new ones and, well, network, and terrified of it, because of the inevitable surrender of personal information to the aether, I did it reluctantly, and somewhat late in the game.

As something of an afterthought, I posted a link to my blog on my Facebook profile. That was a few days ago. After the initial slew of acknowledgements by friends and acquaintances, activity concerning my profile has started to slow down. Which is fine with me. Like this website, it's an experiment.

Then yesterday, I got a friend request from a fellow I did not know, with whom I had nothing in common, save that we had graduated from the same college, albeit six years apart. Although he's the same age as one of my younger brothers, I was pretty certain he wasn't one of his friends. Moreover, I didn't recognize his name as one of the alumni volunteers whom I oversee in connection with their interviewing of high school applicants to my alma mater.

It turned out he hadn't been looking for me; he was seeking out another woman with my first name. Go figure. But, in investigating my profile to confirm that I was not the woman he was looking for, he noticed the link to my blog, and opted to read it. He wrote:

p.s. just saw you (and your husband?) have a blog. very interesting. i'm going to have to read it later, although i could take a quick glance at the very first couple posts about grown up sadnesses and realities. i can't agree enough with some of it! *** anyway, i'll have to read and comment some more -- you and your counterpart seem like such very fascinating people. rock on! :)

Serendipitous, no?

While I'm not sure how I feel about being told that my website is focused on "grown up sadnesses and realities," that sort of feedback is why I've started this blog. Give me a reaction -- any reaction -- so long as you listen to what I have to say and take me seriously. (Or, at least, take me seriously when I'm trying to be serious, you know?) I guess the dialogue has begun. I couldn't be more excited.

Stagnation So Soon?

It's funny. Amongst my friends, I'm not known for my brevity. As one friend once said, "You and I, we never say in five words what we can say in fifty." I adore prepositional phrases, and have a tendency to write in run-on sentences. Hellsy, more often than not, I think in paragraphs, not sentences.

My preferred method of communication with my nearest and dearest these days is e-mail. I write epic e-mails. I wax hyperbolic about everything and nothing. And yet, when it comes time to blog -- to discuss the same sorts of miscellaneous life experiences I e-mail friends about daily -- I have writer's block.

Maybe it's the knowledge that this blog could gain a life of its own and, as I think I've written before, who knows who could wind up reading it. After all, with a little creative Googling, it's not too hard to track down former high school nemeses, friends with whom we've lost touch, old colleagues, our exes, our significant others' exes, our exes' significant others, and so on. We like to think that our e-mails never reach any destinations other than the eyes of the readers for whom we intend our messages. More often than not, they probably don't. But blogging? Blogging is putting something out there for everything to see.

After all, as recently as this past week, I read the story of a favorite blogging family of mine: a photograph they'd taken of their daughter had been used by an online parenting website in conjunction with an article about the dangers of lead paint. Used with neither their knowledge nor consent. That's unacceptable. That sort of thing gives me pause; it make me think twice before continuing with this blogging effort.

If all I want to do is keep a journal, I don't need a blog on which to do it. If I blog, as much as I may try to keep a low profile (avoiding last names, adopting pseudonyms, trying not to call too much attention to myself by jumping onto the commenting-so-that-people-visit-your-website-and-check-out-what-you-have-to-say bandwagon), the word will get out. I'll get sloppy. It's bound to happen.

But I've never been a keeper of diaries. I'm not in this simply to catalog my daily goings-on. The public nature of blogging intrigues me. When the time is right, I'll be eager to engage the world, or at least that portion of it that is interested in hearing what I have to say, in a dialogue. I want to do this for all the reasons so eloquently articulated by Misguided Mommy. Even if it means opening myself up to unsolicited assvice.

I can't recall where I first heard this explanation, but someone once said that if you dislike someone, the way he holds his fork can drive you insane, whereas if you love him, he can upend his plate of pasta and dump it in your lap, and it won't matter at all. I guess blogging is like that. Some people pour their hearts and souls into their blogs and the dividends they get on their investments are nonexistent; they get shot down and ridiculed by the blogosphere. Other people can write two-sentence quips about what they had for dinner, or about how they didn't get out of their PJ's all weekend and refused to wash their hair, and their literary stylings are such that they can quit their day jobs and pay the mortgage with the ad revenue realized from their blogging efforts.

I want to be in the latter category. Not necessarily for the potential untapped financial gain to be had. I just want to write something that means something to someone. Something that I can be proud of. And something that helps other people, or motivates them, or moves them, or induces empathy, or makes them think, or makes me friends.

After all, I met the Mister online. And he's my best friend in the world. If the Internet led me to him, then I have to figure that there are experiences I won't have, other wonderful people I won't meet, and things I won't learn unless I put myself out there. Even if not everything I have to say is genius. Even if some of it is downright dull.

NaBloPoMo -- National Blog Posting Month 2007 -- will take place in November. I think I'll give it a try. In fact, I'm going to treat next month as a dry run. I'm not sure that volume = quality content, but I am sure that not posting means I'll never give myself a chance to find out if I have something worth saying.

It's the same way I taught myself how to take pictures. I never took a photography class. I just went out and took a bunch of pictures. And then I took some more. I saw what came out, and what looked like crap, and learned from my mistakes. I may not be great now, but a higher percentage of my photos are keepers than used to be the case. If blogging proceeds at the same pace, then it's better to indulge the urge to post whenever it may strike, rather than be stymied by self-censorship. It'll be an interesting experiment.

More soon....

On Insecurity and Paralyzing Self-Doubt (or Sorry to Get All Meta on You So Early in the Game)

Like way too many twenty-somethings in the Summer of 2003, I indulged in the weekly guilty pleasure that was The O.C. (Only Season 1…and – fine – part of the way into Season 2, lest you think too poorly of me.) For a brief while, the Seth Cohen character became something of a patron saint for me – giving me hope that being a cool nerd or nerdily cool was something to which I could hope to aspire. He identified his life as one of insecurity and paralyzing self-doubt, and I’m focused on just that issue today.

I’m not the mission statement type. If I had sat around trying to decide why to blog or what I’d hoped to get out of blogging before I actually set up a blog, I’d probably never have gotten around to it. If, as countless high school teachers (and my legal writing prof) insisted, a thesis sentence was a prerequisite to every paragraph, I’d never succeed in putting pen to paper.

That said, I’m also not wholly a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants type of girl. I have whys and wherefores. I just don’t always have them fully fleshed out before I begin to speak or write.

Truth be told, and I suppose blogs are, or this blog is, supposed to be about telling the truth (for all the world, or at least those who happen onto your URL), I’m more someone who, after muddling at length over whether to or whether not to do something, say something, etc., takes a deep breath and plunges in. For better or for worse. I jump off the diving board, and hope there’s water in the pool.

It usually works out okay.

Given what I’ve seen of blogs, at least in the three some odd years I’ve been reading them, often there’s room for them to evolve. A blog may start out as being about one thing, and then evolve, and then evolve again. So if I don’t set out too many rules for myself just yet – if I just consider this a work in progress – then I’ll probably be okay.

It’s hard to be sure. I’m writing this now without a clue as to what my readership will be. Will I have a constituency – a readership? Will people discover this site weeks or months or years down the road and read my archives so they get to hear the story from the beginning? Will friends and siblings and parents – and former classmates and colleagues and bosses and ex-boyfriends – read this and nod appreciatively to yourselves, or snicker, or be outright horrified?

It’s not as if this blog is, or will become, the sum total of everything I feel or think. But there’s no doubt that it is, and will remain, what I put out there of myself for public consumption. I’ve yet to decide if I want to give myself permission to air my dirty laundry, or my petty thoughts for anyone with an Internet connection, a keyboard, and fingers to see.

And yet….

And yet I have the advantage of hindsight. I’ve gone back to the incipient posts of some of the blogs I read regularly. To be sure, there is plenty of rambling about nothing to be found there. Some of it makes for surprisingly interesting reading.

So maybe I have to give myself permission to write, unfettered, about whatever comes to mind. Maybe the voyeur in you will want to read about my laundry lists and hangnails and nonsensical dreams and what I ate for dinner last night. Or maybe you won’t want to read those postings, but you’ll like enough other stuff that you’ll put up with them. Or maybe you won’t frequent my blog. Or maybe you’ll write me hatemail.

Maybe I’m not writing for you at all anyway.

I just don’t know yet. But I guess that’s what this is all about. Here I am, shouting into the void, waiting to see what sticks, and what comes back. Here I am – trying my damnedest not to be so paralyzed that I tremble to push the “Publish Post” button. Here I am, blogging.

It’s as good a place to start as any.

Here goes nothing (or, perhaps, everything)...

So, after countless months of discussing the pros and cons of online navel-gazing, the Mister finally started a blog of his own tonight. Never one to be bested, I figured I'd best do likewise. So here I am -- one more former English Lit. concentrator (the catchall major for the undecided) spewing inevitably self-indulgent content into the aether.


As I have never been one to keep a journal or a diary, and, consequently, am not yet sure to what end I want or plan to maintain this site, if, indeed, I want to maintain one at all, I don't know how long it'll be before I post again.


Even so, here I am, jumping onto the proverbial bandwagon, starting a blog. I'm as curious as you are to see what happens next.