August 16, 2003

• Why am I here?

  
  

  That’s not a plaintive question aimed at any divinity.  I used to question the meaning of life and wonder why I’d been born on this planet.  Lately, my focus has been more up-close and personal.  Today I’m blogging about what Xanga does for me.  I started blogging because of a dream.  I thought at the time that I was supposed to be journaling for my health.  That has turned out to be one of the helpful effects of these efforts.  Another very helpful effect has been the way you Xangans make me think.  It’s something I don’t think I would have found in any private paper diary.

  
  

  namaste had some detailed practical suggestions of how to handle the situation after getting run off the road by a truck.  Of course, at the time it happened I wasn’t thinking that way and never noticed even whether the tractor was an independent trucker’s or carried a company logo.  Now, a couple of days later, I can’t even recall what color it was.  My mind was on other things at the time… like survival.  I do recall that its headlights were turned on, but those of the RV in the other lane were not.  The RV was white.  Both trailers on the truck were dull silver, probably aluminum.  Anything more I might add would be confabulation.  I wasn’t paying attention.

  
  

  wixer pointed out that not long ago my title was “Life is good!” and then yesterday I’d gone to, “…could have been worse.”  She asked if those are opposite sides of the same coin.  I don’t know.  In retrospect the truest thing I can say regarding that contrast is that it is the result of spontaneous blogging from moment to moment, with no regard for what has gone before.

  
  

  Emerson came to mind:

  
  

  
  

  A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines … Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today.

  
  

  
  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays:  First Series, 1841

  
  

  I have enough consideration for my readers tthat I strive for some continuity, especially in the memoirs (and what’s with that, anyway?  I seem to progress in that thread only when Mercury is retrograde–which suggests that there will be new memoir segments coming up in a couple of weeks), and I’m enough of a perfectionist to notice that I often fall short in that area.  Life is continuous and blogging, for me at least, is sporadic.

  
  

  As for consistency, I can attain it in a limited sense over the short run, usually.  In some ways, I’m consistent in the long run.  I’ve been consistently red-haired all my life.  Freckles blossom and fade seasonally, except during winters I spend in the Southwest.   My height has changed little in the last forty years, and my weight has fluctuated a lot.  I can find more physical areas of consistency than mental ones.  My opinions change more often than my hairstyles.  If my hair is long enough to stay behind my ears when I tuck it back, and short enough not to catch in my armpit and pull when I turn over in bed, I’m happy with it. 

  
  

  Since earliest childhood, I have always preferred wearing sturdy, durable pants such as jeans, over dresses or more flimsy clothes.  As long as I can remember, I’ve had a tendency to wear my food.  In other words, I’m a sloppy cook and messy eater.  I’m klutzy in other ways too, and that used to bother me a lot until I learned that it’s a common effect of the neurological disorder I’ve had all my life.  Now that I’ve found a good excuse for it, I don’t worry about it… until it’s time to do the laundry.

  
  

  Those two blogs, the “Life is good!” one and “It could have been worse,” both developed from trains of thought that occurred to me while I was driving to or from town.  The former one centered around the difficulty I was having expressing my feelings without resorting to facile dualistic value judgments.  The latter one came from some head-tripping on what might have been if I’d done things differently.  I can’t really know what would have happened, but I couldn’t imagine things being much if any better than they have become over the past few months.  Really, at the most basic level, both blogs came from my pleasure and happiness with the recent course of my life, and from my satisfaction with the choices I’ve made.

  
  

  Xanga is another choice with which I am happy.  After using several bulletin board forums and email newsgroups, I’ve reached the conclusion that I am temperamentally better-suited to blogging.  I know there are other ways and other places to blog, but this one works for me so I’m content with it.  That’s not a lifetime commitment, just a statement that is true for today.  If I’d ever had enough spare funds to expend on a lifetime membership, I might consider it a lifetime commitment, in which case I might develop more anxiety over things like the recent DDOS attack.  As it was, I had a few ideas for blogs during the week I couldn’t access my site.  I used my Notepad text editor to record the bare-bones outlines… and then forgot where I saved those files. 

  
  

  That’s another way I’ve shown consistency throughout my life:  putting things away so well I can’t find them later.  Then, when I do run across them while looking for something else, what delightful surprises I get.  I suppose I could find those files now, if I could just remember what I named them…  ah, well, no matter… there’s always something to blog about.

  
  

  

  • 12:16 pm
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