Some good news

My life is way too tied to the computer, but you knew that already.

So there was rejoicing when my new computer came yesterday, and the reason it's so much cheaper than my old computer is that it's exactly like my old computer, except white instead of black. Really. That's it, that's the only difference I can tell. I even bumped up the memory, like on my old one. But it's last year's model of MacBook, and can you spelled "planned obsolescence," boys and girls? It's sort of amazing that the new bells and whistles keeping being priced at more or less what the old bells and whistles cost us, but that's part of what makes us long to spend the money all over again for the new one, isn't it?

In other news, the data recovery people called, and they pulled all the jpegs off my hard drive. Liz has made me think I could have done this for a fraction of the cost all by myself, but Dude at the Apple store was using words like "rust" and "corrosion" and at the time I sent it off I still thought I was going to try to have the old one rebuilt and these guys would have preserved the warranty. Which only had three weeks left on it, right. Who says we make good decisions under stress?

But in the end, I was willing to pay what they charged to have those pictures, and I wound up with a new computer with a new warranty for the same as what it would have cost to get the rebuilt one, and I am deciding not to worry about the money any more. I don't use credit cards much, and pretty much never more than I can pay down the same month (we are in a long, long process of paying everything off) but this is one time when it made sense.

And, yes, another bit of unrelated news!

My shul just made a plea that everyone use this search engine so they'll get a penny a search. It adds up, folks, and you can fill in any charity that's registered. I know the non-profits in your life are hurting, too. You can add it to your F!refox search engine list so it's super easy. Why not? Mitzvahs should always be so easy to do.

Gratitude

Yesterday at my parents' table I gave thanks for family and friends and safety and health and Hope and Change, but today is a different kind of day. Today I need to give another round of thanks to the Black Friday sales and to Lo, who thought of me when she ventured out into them, and to Am@rican Expr@ss, which has kept on sending me a card every year even though I stopped using it years ago after I paid the damn thing off. A new computer is coming my way, and I think once I figure in savings on shipping and having a brand-new warranty, it's going to cost me less than the rebuild would have.

Yesterday's thanks were more important, no doubt about it. But today's are nothing to sneer at.

Because life has its charming ups and downs

The breathing study was, on the one hand, a success in that my breathing appeared completely fine, but on the other hand, a dud, in that when people with asthma are in between flareups their breathing is completely fine. So nothing was ruled out or in.

And my dog spilled water all over my computer yesterday morning. The computer is...how you say?...ah. Toast. The computer is toast: this is the word from the folks at the Apple store. It's going to cost an arm to rebuild it and a leg to recover the pictures, and another leg if I decide to get everything off the hard drive.

If I don't start backing everything up maniacally when this is all over, youall have permission to shoot me.

Meanwhile, posting is going to be pretty patchy--no computer at home, and all.

Debates

For all the time I spend online (and oh boy, I spend plenty), my inner Luddite holds sway in much of the rest of my life. We have a television, but it's about 12 years old and has no reception, which is extremely deliberate: we restrict our cable service to phone and internet. This means I've been following the debates via friends' tweets, having recently been inspired to start using the Twitter account I set up last Spring.

I gotta say, I think I got everything that was important to get. Anything I missed, I'll pick up on SNL videos tomorrow.

What to do with this blog

I've been stuck on this blog for awhile now. Well, maybe you noticed. I'm not sure who I'm writing for, or why, and I'm not even quite sure what it is I was doing when I was writing more. Was it therapy? Was it art? Was it loneliness?

I lost my groove because I got more depressed, and I got really really scared, and my life got far too messy to be setting forth in front of strangers. Things are a little better now. But I'm not sure how to get back into writing.

The one idea I have so far for a new thing to be doing with the blog, if it happens, it ain't gonna happen this week. So I'm making my unofficial hiatus official for a week so that I can take blogging off my list of things I'm thinking about consciously.

Be back in a week.

Another year

Last year, I started blogging.

Yesterday, we were back at the Four Seasons for our circa-Valentine's Day High Tea, on yet another miserable mid-February day. The valet opened the car door for me again, and accepted the key to a different, slightly battered Civic Hybrid (the car we drove last year was totaled in May), and this year we had two second-hand carseats in back, one of them not yet installed, because while repairs at the usual building are ongoing, Z.'s daycare has had to move to new digs far enough away from our house that as of tomorrow, we are carpooling to spare the polar bears.*

Last year, I was still making my way back towards music; mostly, the radio was tuned to NPR. This year the front of the car is littered with cd's.

The trash in the seat wells is pretty much unchanged.


Blogging, blogging. Very few decisions have changed my life as much as my plunge into the Web 2.0 world. I went from isolation to abundant connection, and I figured out some seriously important things in this space.

When I began I felt quite urgent about writing, but the place the blog has in my attention has changed a great deal, and my posting has fallen off dramatically. I realize that I am at a crossroads with it. I'm not quite sure what is going to happen. I would like to be posting daily again--given the array of things I'm avoiding dealing with in my unbloggable life, I don't expect that to happen anytime soon, but I think that was a good discipline for me--only if daily blogging is a project I'm going to resume, I need to find an approach to content that does *not* use confessional journaling as its model.

This isn't really an announcement of change, though, more like an alert that this is a blog in search of a new mission statement. I'm hoping to figure it out when things settle down. You know, in my next lifetime.



*All credit to Phantom for the concept of teh polar bear points.

Unbloggable

Like all of you, there are various things that happen in my life that I prefer not to write about for the entire googling public, out of concern for ethics, privacy, or both. The discerning reader will notice that I have almost never written about a staff member, for instance, and I rarely mention members of my family other than A. or Z. And so on.

However, there is now so much that I've put out of bounds on this blog that I'm wondering what's left. I'm coming up on my first anniversary of blogging in a few weeks, and I'm wondering not so much whether I will have run out of things I want to say, but whether I will have run out of things I feel I can say, at least in public.

It's made me wonder about this whole venture of musing out loud for an audience that can choose to stay invisible. I'm not a shy person, I'm quite able to take care of myself in a crowd of strangers, but I am fairly private about my inner life. I tend not to pass along relevant events in my life to my therapist, for instance: Z. fell down the garden stairs two weeks ago and I spent an evening in shock and PTSD flashbacks as a result. I got to my session and other things were uppermost, and I just never got around to telling her. For that matter, I never got around to telling the blog either--well, okay, now I did, and I'm fine, everyone--but it does seem like I'm not doing a very good job figuring out this whole opening-up-to-an-audience thing.

There was a point last summer when I realized that if I kept on blogging as I had been blogging--commenting frequently, clicking through links, committing to daily posts, putting a lot of focus on my stats--I might attract a reasonably large number of people to this blog, and if the audience became large enough that I felt like I didn't have a sense of who was reading, I would start writing quite differently. I decided I didn't want that to happen, so I became more of a lurker and Rhymes with Javelin has remained a sort of sleepy backwater of a blog. (I like to think of it as a blogger's blog, for the discerning, but hey, we all need our delusions.) I'm fine with that--usually at least one person is willing to say something about what I put up here, so I don't feel like I'm writing into a void, but the group of you I'm imagining out there reading this, you feel fairly cozy and friendly to me.

Yet there's more and more I don't say. Because I know people will find me by googling for "correct pronunciation shotput," or "ezpass mylar," or for various unlikely occasional rhymes. And because people who sorta kinda know me in real life may well find me and suddenly, a post or two of reading later, they are more intimate with me than I'd choose for them to be, and more intimate with me than I know that they are.

So I'm wondering, especially those of you who've been at this awhile, how do you handle the whole balance of exposure and intimacy?

No...Time...To...Blog...Must...Play...Scrabble

It's true. I joined Facebook. Blame Phantom.

The pirate's mama and her bandaid

Even pirates' mothers scrape their elbows from time to time.

Z. got a pirate ship for Christmas. I got a new computer. With Photobooth.

Hey, everyone.

The artist at her easel

I realize this sweater has made an appearance in this blog before. Actually, it was in my fourth post, ever. You might be surprised to know it remains one of my most popular posts (coming in just after the one I unwisely titled "braless").

Why? Because it comes up third when you ask google for the last frost date in Philadelphia. Never let it be said I do not provide my readers with useful information.

Hanukkah hiatus

November was fun, but December is going to be patchy. It has been already: first I had this problem with cookies. The internet kind--mine went stale, or moldy, or something, and blogger wasn't letting me sign on. But I threw out the old ones, and blogger gave me some new ones, and now I'm good to go, only I have NO TIME this week, and only Sunday for the foreseeable future. So this is me saying, hi and bye, all. See you on the other side.

The deal with the phone line

Writing from work to fill y'all in on the bloggy silence. We've had no voice line for a couple of days, except A. did manage to call me, very staticky, from work this morning. But when you pick up the phone, there's no dial tone, just a little lonely crackling.

Oddly, we do have some DSL service, but it's extremely patchy and liable to vanish and leave you stranded on the side of the information highway.

We checked the box with an old-fashioned plug-in phone, and the trouble is outside the house and therefore the phone company's problem. Hooray! They're supposed to fix it Friday while we're still at my in-laws. Anyone want to make a bet on it? The day after Thanksgiving?

Meanwhile, for Mom and anyone else who might be calling, our phone is being forwarded to my cell, which spends 95% of its life both misplaced somewhere or other and turned off so you can't call it to figure out where it is. But I dug it out when we figured out the landline was down and I've had it with me since. Yeah, ambivalent about the cellphone revolution, that's me: if cellphones didn't so obviously solve the problem of staying in contact while in transit, I might be perfectly happy for it to pass me by.

It's kind of funny, having it with me. It's like there's a phone in my pocket, or something. I feel a little bit "on" all the time. There's also a phone at my elbow, the store's phone, and objectively speaking it rings much more often. Why having a phone in my pocket should make me feel more keyed up for it to ring, I don't know.

Any thoughts on cellphones, or am I just a decade too late on this one?

Bad news

DSL on the fritz. Details to follow.

Bloggy milepost

Hey all,

At some point since the last time I updated my profile, I crossed the 1,000-views mark. I'm now an established blogland citizen, thankyouverymuch.

It made me wonder what bloggy markers you pay attention to--anyone want to weigh in?

Advice, please

Okay, this is one where I'm asking a question, but I already know what the answer is, I just want you to tell me everyone would decide the same thing.

So the stereo in the living room, the one with the cd changer? Hasn't worked in at least six weeks, maybe longer. Everything's plugged in, and nothing happens. The machine is at least twelve years old, so I figure some crucial circuit just burned out.

There are still cd's in it.

I should take a screwdriver to it, right? To get the cd's out? I won't be doing irreparable damage because it's not going to be repaired anyway, right?

Hiatus

There's a lot of stuff going on for me just now and it's sort of not so good for me to be writing publicly, I think. I'll be back when I get through it.

Wanna de-lurk?

Edited Friday morning: okay, lurkers, I'm getting impatient. So far no one has commented for the first time on this, and I know some of you have clicked through. You think I can't see you out there?

Okay, it's not the third anymore; I should have done this yesterday, but I am lame and distracted. Still, even a quiet little blog like mine has folks who read silently in the background, and I wanna hear from you. Since I am a statcounter addict, I know that you're out there in Somerville and Vancouver and Indianapolis and other places. Won't you speak up?



Here's my audience participation question, just to get the ball rolling--this being me talking, you know I'm going to get all introspective and shit on you.

When you're overwhelmed with people and work and dogs and doctors' visits and life and all of the rest of it, where's your refuge? If you've been reading me awhile, you know I take to the water or hole up with yarn and mystery novels, if I can.

How 'bout you?

And if you remember how you found the blog, I'd be interested to know that, too.

Oh, and regular commenters, don't be shy--I wanna know your route to me and your self-indulgent caretaking habits, too.

Listen to this space

Inspired by ppb and Jo(e), I just did some neighborhood freecycling for an mp3 player. I'm picking it up Monday, so I'm thinking you'll hear me singing Z. goodnight sometime next week. I'll try to get her to sing along!

Feeling a little wrung out

So I'm going to take a few days off.

There may be some hike journals or toddler logic if the inspiration strikes.

Otherwise, see you in the comment fields, and I'll be back on Monday.

Without words

I've been taking stabs at writing about swimming for a couple of days now. I'm finding that instead I wind up writing about other things, topics that haven't wound up on the blog and which I'm not sure need to show up here, either. And while these long-winded, abortive drafts proliferate, I don't ever get around to swimming, the thing I wanted to talk about in the first place.

So I've realized that this is a post that matters to me, and will be all the better for my leaving it to my hindbrain for awhile: days or weeks or months. A couple of other posts have taken convoluted routes like this one--there was one I wrote about friendship a week after Helen's memorial that incorporated half-assed stabs I'd been making at the topic from before I started blogging. And the post I put up on singing for and with Z. benefited from my coming back to it and back to it over the couple of months it was incubating.

However, one thing that I think I'm trying to figure out how to get around in writing about swimming is not just how much of my life it is attached to--though that is immense--but also how I use the laplanes as a wordless place that my brain can fill with words in the most tumbled-around way. I am paying attention to my body--my stroke, my muscles, the floaters in my eyes, my breathing--and the words in my head must cope and comply with that rhythm. They don't have my head the way they do when my head is in the breathable air, so they loop back on themselves more, they trail off, I let them go and pick them up again when I can, they dance and swim their own selves; and when I am swimming, I am more able to handle the emotions that I usually try to corral with words. In my time, I have swum miles fueled by sadness and anger and fear and anxiety and bewilderment and joy. Coming out of the water, I find the words have sometimes come together, or dispersed--the first situation is a gift; the second, also: if the words are gone, what was setting them off didn't matter so much after all, it was just something I needed to get out, and I did.

Knitting is a similar kind of quasi-meditative activity for me, though it is one in which words act oppositely, probably because I think about my form when I swim, but not my technique when I knit. I knit talking. I knit reading. I knit walking, even--all I need is a pocket big enough to hold the ball of yarn. The rhythm of my knitting is steady and relentless and my thoughts get pulled along; I knit words right into the fabric my fingers are making. Knitting keeps my brain going in sentences and paragraphs, and I follow my thoughts interminably. I have entire conversations with myself while I'm knitting, I have disquisitions on whatever it is that I cannot currently dislodge, and I seldom seem to get anywhere. It is not an accident that I find staff meetings and after-dinner conversations and waiting rooms to be the ideal settings for knitting. Whether I experience it as pleasant or plodding, if time becomes long and meandering, I want to fill it with rows and rows of yarn. The only emotions that I have used to fuel entire sweaters are grief and love.

But I hardly ever write about knitting. I think in six months of blogging (today exactly completes my sixth month) this makes my third post about knitting, and although taking up typing as a hobby has cut into my knitting time, that still severely underrepresents the amount of fiber I have made my way through. But as much as the activity pulls words into its wake, I just don't often feel like I need to attach any words to the action itself, so I don't have a string of half-started knitting posts cluttering up my dashboard.

But swimming ... I hope I'll get back to it.