50,077 was the total wordcount when I uploaded tonight, which makes me a winner (and somehow, contradictorily, this has put the line "I'm a loser, baby" in my head... sooooy un perdedor... gettin' funky with the cheese wiz...).

So, it's still only a milestone, because I'm nowhere near done with the draft, but I know these characters so much better than I did when I started this project four weeks ago today. So I'm kind of glad I'm not done yet, because it means I get to keep hanging out with them.

Mick's in the middle of making a call to Kurt from a payphone on the pier in Boothbay Harbor. She's in a yellow rain slicker and it's drizzling. I gotta go find out what happens next.

But it’s been an incredibly interesting, challenging, fun, and educational experience thus far. If you’re reading this and you’ve ever had a vague thought that writing a novel is something you might like to do “some day,” I can’t recommend the NaNoWriMo process highly enough. It’s amazing how, with a commitment of a couple hours a day, every day, you can transform yourself into a novelist. The commitment to a crazy, silly endeavor is so freeing. I have days when it’s easy, when the next scene is pulsing in my fingertips just waiting to pour out onto the page. And I have days when I drag myself to my desk and look at the little clock on my laptop and sigh and say, “Okay, I will write for 15 minutes,” and I do and it feels like what I’m typing is the most pointless exchange of dialogue or the most banal description ever to be put into words, and then I end up typing for another 15 minutes and it stops sucking quite so bad, and then another and I add up my word count and I’m up another 1,000 and I shut my laptop and go downstairs to reward myself with some Degrassi Junior High.

Some days the world feels more complex and beautiful than a lifetime of novel-writing could ever capture, and I feel like I’m dashing along, gathering scenes and images and typing them up as quickly as I can. Other days, I just feel tired, and I want to stay in bed all day and forget I made this commitment. But I know I won’t, and that’s been the most valuable thing I have learned. That I can stick with this, through the good days and the bad –- already I feel like I’ve weathered several deserts of dried-up inspiration and come out into the even more fertile pastures on the other side. I think that giving up has always been my biggest fear –- not just with this project, but with writing in general. I saw such potential in it that it felt safer to hold off on really starting than to start and give up. I’m into week three of my novel-writing month, and I see no signs of giving up, but I’ll check back in and give a celebratory holler when I pass 50,000 words.

Oh, and p.s. - if you care to check up on me yourself, you can do so via my profile at the NaNoWriMo web site, which is here.

I've been setting the coffee maker to turn on at 6:00 a.m. and getting up and writing for an hour or more in the mornings. I've loved walking to work the past three days knowing that I've already been so productive.

It's not that what I'm writing is necessarily all that good, although I think a decent percentage of it at least has potential. It's mostly that the sheer act of writing, of sitting at my desk and typing 2,000 words a day, is reminding me how much I used to love this. Writing has become so fraught over the years, something I obsess about more often than I actually do; and so just doing it has been a powerful relief from all the angst and mental energy that has gone into fretting about not doing it.

2,000 words a day is a lot and yet not a lot at the same time. I've written far more in a day, back in college when I'd pull all-nighters to get a paper done, and even some short stories have come faster, in great bursts of marathon writing. 2,000 words a day has been taking me between two and three hours. It's enough to feel like a commitment, but not so much that I can't still have a life. Mostly? I've just given up non-essential TV. (Essential TV being Arrested Development, Gilmore Girls, My Name is Earl, and Nip/Tuck.)

I realize I've been terrible and completely inconsistent about updating this web site. At least now I have a really good excuse, for the rest of the month.

So until I can offer a real entry, I thought I'd offer some various and sundry assistance.

Are you in need of interesting reading material on a range of random topics?
I've been loving Malcolm Gladwell's archive of articles. Some favorite topics include ketchup, faces, and birth control pills, but they're all good. Malls! Ron Popeil! The Chicago Heat Wave! Seriously, this web site has provided me with hours of delight.

So maybe you want to leave the house for your entertainment?
If you're in Philly, you're in luck, because the Film Festival is nearly upon us. I LOVE the Film Festival. I particularly love Travis Crawford's taste in movies; just about anything he reviews, I want to see.

Okay, then, do you like pancakes?
Because again, if you're in Philly, you have access to THE BEST PANCAKES IN THE WORLD EVER and you should really try them. They're at the Dutch Eating Place at Reading Terminal and I'm drooling on myself just thinking about them. I'm telling you, I'm a pancake connoisseur, trust me: Best. Pancakes. Ever.

Let's say you want cute new shoes to wear while you're watching movies or surfing the internet or eating pancakes or doing whatever it is you do.
Camper's new Spring/Summer line is out. I'm wearing the Penelope in white/teal to my wedding this summer.

All right, one more: if you're in need of someone to talk to about Sassy magazine, get in touch. I've been having a confluence of Sassy-related interactions lately, and I really enjoy it.

If you have other needs, let me know. I'll see if I've got any advice.

Later gators.

I can hardly blame them; it’s warm and comfortable in there, in the narrow space between the top of the oven and the metal plate beneath the range, and they can pop right up through the holes under the burners to get onto the counter and sniff around for crumbs. I can’t really blame them at all. But it’s unspeakably gross nevertheless to turn on your oven and have the smell of a hot mouse nest waft out of it.

This is February, the shortest month of the year, which somehow seems to have passed like those weekends when you notice all of a sudden it’s Sunday night and where has the time gone and did you really just sit on the couch watching HGTV for 10 hours? Only it’s a whole month, like, poof.

Sometimes life feels so fast and dull and like nothing more than a way of getting from one chore or errand to another that I have to step back and remind myself what it is to be alive.

Snow is good for that. When I started up the steps out of the Broad Street Line tonight, the sky was a luminous periwinkle blue and fat flakes were drifting past the yellow Midas sign and the snow crunched and creaked under my boots and all the cars were blanketed and the streets were glowing. The world felt quiet and I dawdled and walked down Federal so I could go past the old Jewish cemetery and look at the snow falling on the graves and outlining each branch of the magnolia trees.

February is when I start to notice that the days are getting longer. Through December and January, the darkness seems inevitable. At work, I watch the sunset splash salmon light on the face of the office tower to my east and turn back to my computer screen, knowing the sky will be dark by the time I leave for home. I don’t notice anything changing until one day, in the middle of February, when the air’s not so chilled and there’s light in the sky when I step out onto Market Street and I decide to walk home instead of taking the subway.

February ending feels like winter drawing to a close, and this snowstorm like a last hurrah. Crocuses aren’t so far off now, and then the magnolias will bud and those pink-blossomed trees, the ones with flowers shaped like little carnations or roses almost.

Life passes fast. Sometimes I have to step back and remind myself what I’ve done, explain how a month or a year can have elapsed.

In February, 2005, I read Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, The Orchid Thief and am rereading Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty. I saw The Woodsman, Monster, Written on the Wind and Far From Heaven, and the entire first season of Sports Night. I knitted one and a half pillow covers. I painted a painting and signed up for an Abstract Painting class at Fleisher. I bought a car. I made some mix cds. I booked the ceremony musician for the wedding. I saw Aryani’s amazing new solo, “Introduction,” twice. I spent time with friends, and had good conversations over coffee, Indian food, the Superbowl, the Oscars, and lots of really good email.

In between, of course, I did all those things that sometimes feel like they’re all I do: washed dishes, went to work, shopped for groceries, researched car insurance, bought subway tokens, took clothes to the dry cleaner, did laundry, went to the doctor, picked up a prescription, booked an airplane ticket, shoveled snow, got a haircut, paid bills.

Bought mousetraps.

This is life. I have to remember that it’s supposed to be a mix of the mundane and the sublime; that’s how it works. Some days it’s a mix of the mundane and the annoying, the mundane and the mildly entertaining, the mundane and the misery. But some days you step out of the subway and they sky is brighter than it’s been this time of day in months and there’s snow falling and the streetlights are halos of gold and it may be weeks, but you know spring is on the way.

(Tonight was the second time I’ve ever called 911. Oddly enough, both times it’s been about a gas leak. The first time was last spring. I was coming home, up our little dead-end South Philly street, and one of my neighbors was hanging out her window yelling. She spotted me: “Call 911!” she bellowed. “We’ve got a gas leak. Please call them for me!” So I did, but later I discovered that hers was a false alarm, and that she’d been getting people to call for her all day. Patrick, in fact, had already called the gas company for her several hours before. There was some sort of situation going on between her and her daughter that I didn’t quite get the full scoop on, and it seems that all of this gas-leak business was some sort of attention-seeking mechanism she was using to up the drama level.)

I explained the situation to the dispatcher, who transferred me to the fire department, and within a few minutes, two police officers and three fire fighters were in my living room and basement, sniffing. While the fire fighters investigated the basement, the two cops took down my name and phone number, and then the three of us stood there waiting for the results of the investigation going on downstairs.

And an interesting aspect of being a cop that I’d never fully thought about before is that you get to go into so many strangers’ houses. Sure, a lot of times you’re probably too wrapped up in the situation at hand to notice anything, but how many calls like mine are there? Routine, mundane calls, during which you can stand around and idly study the contents of a stranger’s home? I wondered what they were noticing about mine, what judgments they were making.

The house wasn’t clean, but it wasn’t its messiest, either. I figured they’ve seen far worse, so I wasn’t too self-conscious about it, until I noticed the one fire fighter who wasn’t in the basement glancing at the stack of CDs that was sitting on top of the stereo cabinet. Right on top, out of its case, was Neko Case’s album “Blacklisted.” Which wouldn’t be anything odd, except that the album art she happens to have chosen to adorn this particular CD is the word BEAVER in big, red, capital letters. I’ve never been clear on why, exactly. But now this fireman probably thinks I’m into some sort of weird 1970s porn or something. Thanks, Neko.

The determination was that it smelled more like paint thinner than gas, and the police officers asked me if I had been painting. I shook my head, feeling accused. “But are you a painter?” the tall, butch female cop asked. I realized that to her, this was not a loaded question about whether I chose to define myself as an artist, but a simple request for information. “Yes, I do paint,” I said. “But I haven’t painted anything for the past month or two, so I don’t think that would have anything to do with the smell.”

We stood in the living room, the two cops glancing around a little more. “Did you paint those?” she asked, nodding at the two little still-lives of an orange on the wall behind the couch. “Yes,” I said. Her partner, a boyish-faced cop who’s probably no older than I am, looked over. “They’re good,” he said. “Thanks,” I said.

I thought about how it’s funny how clear-cut the question of whether or not I am a painter becomes when it’s all about finding out whether I own paint-thinner. In that case, yes, of course I am. I own paints and brushes and turpentine and liquin and canvases. It’s a nice reminder that sometimes the existential definitions are all that matter; if I paint, then I am a painter. If I write, then I am a writer. I get so wrapped up in whether or not I’m good enough or serious enough about these various endeavors that sometimes I don’t give myself credit for just plain endeavoring.

The fire fighters trundled back up the narrow basement stairs. They hadn’t been able to find anything that was causing the smell, so maybe it had come from outside. Who knows. I think I remember hearing a car idling outside and then pulling away right before the smell hit; perhaps it had some sort of really ghastly exhaust going on that just poured into the house. In any case, it was determined that I wasn’t in any danger, so everyone filed back out. I thanked them all for their time and apologized for the false alarm. They said to call right back if I smelled anything else funny.

I live right by the police station. The corner where I wait for the bus is directly across the street from it, so often while I’m standing there I see various goings-on at the station; shifts changing, cops heading into or out of the building, squad cars pulling in and out of the parking lot. And while it didn’t occur to me as we were standing together in the living room, I just realized that I actually remember having noticed this pair of officers before, some night recently when I was waiting for the bus. I remember seeing them and thinking how young he looked, and that made me think about my cousin, exactly my age, who’s been a police officer now for the past couple years out in California.

Maybe I’ll see them again some day. They see so many faces that they probably won’t recognize me, especially not when I’m bundled up in a hat and scarf and winter coat. But I’ll recognize them, and I’ll thank them again, silently, for coming by and reassuring me, and maybe most of all, for liking my paintings.

Add to this the fact that I seem to be having trouble getting to sleep generally, and I was a little ball of tossy, turny stress last night. And once the focus of my stressing landed square on the subject of The Wedding, all was lost. I started freaking out about not having reserved a rental cottage for myself and Patrick or our group of friends and picturing us all being relegated to a motor lodge on the outskirts of town with a view of the miniature golf course, instead of a cute cabin on the water with a view of the sun setting past spruce-covered islands, and I was freaking out about not knowing what we were doing for dinner on the night before the wedding, and about not having the faintest idea where to register, and it built to a frothing, steamy storm of worry and I decided I was never going to fall asleep, not ever, and that therefore keeping my eyes closed was just making things worse, so I opened them, and looked over at Patrick, and damn it, he was asleep. Hadn’t he felt the psychic distress vibes? How could he be lying there, breathing in and out so peacefully?

Anyway, my eyes were now wide open, so I decided just to stare at him, figuring maybe he would feel my gaze and wake up. But it’s hard to focus your eyes on a dark face in a dark room in the middle of the night for very long without going totally cross-eyed, so I upped the ante. I opened my mouth wide and bared my teeth, still staring, like the stuffed tigers and bears in natural history museums, and I perched there over his face. I felt very much like a scene from Calvin and Hobbes.

Only then I thought about how I would feel if our positions were reversed and I woke up with someone’s teeth poised right above my head, and I started to feel bad. So I closed my mouth and closed my eyes and decided not to torment my sleeping beau anymore. But the problem is, I was thinking about how hilarious it would have been if he had woken up and seen me there in full-on taxidermy mode, and I started to giggle. Very quietly, but also kind of right next to his head. So a few seconds after I’d decided not to wake him up, I accidentally woke him up.

And what I’m realizing is that these entries keep being like bizzare versions of textbook illustrations for annoying adages. Yesterday, “Been there, done that.” Today, “Misery loves company.” Maybe it’ll just sorta keep happening, and then someday I can publish a hip comedic memoir called Aesop Rocks: The Timeless Truth of Truisms in One Girl’s Life in which the title of each chapter is an aphorism!

Chapter 12: A stitch in time saves nine!
Chapter 19: Every dark cloud has a silver lining!
Chapter 24: Don’t cry over spilt milk!
Chapter 27: There are plenty of fish in the sea!

Oh, lord, stop me before I make myself puke. ("Oh, you mean she was kidding? Damn, I was looking forward to reading that book, too.")

Looking at all of those platitudes, it occurs to me that I learned most of them through MadLibs. No one I knew ever really used these types of phrases in their speech, so when they started to pop up in the MadLibs my brother and I liked to play with when we were living in Mexico, I often had to ask my mom what was supposed to be funny about the sentence, “A toilet in time saves sandwich,” and she had to try to explain.

(So, the other funny thing about “a stitch in time saves nine,” is that I had just read A Wrinkle in Time when I learned the phrase, so instead of understanding it as simply being about mending a tear, and thereby metaphorically, you know, about catching problems early, I always pictured someone –- probably the three Fates, because they were kind of mythic and had needles and thread, and I was into Greek myths at the time –- sticking a needle through the fabric of time, gathering it into one of L’Engle’s wrinkles, and stitching it together –- thereby making the temporal distance between point A and point B nine times shorter than it would otherwise have been. That image still comes to mind whenever I hear the phrase.)

But meanwhile, back to last night. Tossy-turny me was now accompanied by a tossy-turny Patrick, since my giggles had woken him. We talked wedding stuff until we had satisfied ourselves that trying to make decisions about anything meaningful at 12:45 a.m. on a work night is patently ridiculous. So, yeah, for maybe three minutes, tops. Then we both tried our best to fall asleep, with what I suppose must have been eventual success, evidenced by the fact that I was asleep this morning when the alarm went off. But hey, at least we both had to get up. You know what they say: misery loves company.

Chapter 32: I’ve got a case of the Mondays!

It was about the size and shape of a cassette tape, with a plain black leatherette cover, and all sorts of information inside -- metric conversions, complete miniature highway maps of the entire U.S., first aid tips -- it seemed small enough and useful enough that even I, who have never successfully used a day planner for more than about a week, might be happy to tote it around. I knew buying it five months before 2005 was risky, because it could easily end up in the bottom of some pile or other, forgotten entirely until some time in 2007. But. Like I said; it was cute. And only about six bucks. So I bought it.

And you know what? I totally didn’t lose it. It’s right here in my hot little hand in the second week of January. I’m feeling good about that, like it bodes well for becoming a more organized person in the coming year. I can now always be the one who always knows the answer to those commonly asked questions, like, “How many scrupoes are in a dram?” (“Why, three, of course,” I’ll answer, after consulting the Apothecaries’ Weights section of my handy day-planner.)

Hey, you know what else this day planner has? It has one of those completely over-generalized, useless charts of average height/weight ratios. And apparently for a 25- to 29-year-old woman of 5’7” I am on-the-dot average. Who’d have thunk? I don’t know if I’ve ever been average before, at anything. This is a new experience for me. I have spent much of my life, past the age of 14, trying very hard to not be average. Ah well. You win some, you lose some.

Back to the day-planner. I’m very excited to begin using it. I’ve already gone through and filled in all of the key dates over the next eight months: my trip to Mexico in March, my brother’s graduation, Patrick’s sister’s wedding and Claire and Nick’s commitment ceremony, my wedding in August.

But the thing is, after that, I’ve got nothing. The horizon of my life just kind of drops off in mid-August, like those old maps of the flat earth -- drops off into a stylized ocean of swirling sea monsters and mythic beasts -- I can almost see the intricate calligraphy: The Great Unknown.

And the thing is, The Great Unknown could end up being The Great Mundane. Because it’s entirely possible that I’ll just go on a brief honeymoon and come back to Philadelphia and stay at my same job for another couple of years, until I go ahead and figure out what’s next. But see, I’ve pretty much been saying that “This job is what I’m doing until I figure out what I’m doing next” since I accepted it -- two and a half years ago.

This job was never something I decided on or strived for. It basically fell into my lap. And sure, it’s treated me well, which is why I’m still here after two and a half years, and why it really wouldn’t be the end of the world if I just came back from my honeymoon and stayed.

But there’s part of me that’s keeping that horizon blurry for a reason, and it’s that for now, I need to feel like change is still possible. Like there’s a chance that a year from now, my life will be new and exciting and completely different from my life now.

Don’t get me wrong. My life now isn’t a bad scene or anything. I count my blessings often: Great boyfriend who’s gonna be my husband soon, job that’s pretty interesting and that gives me all kinds of treats, like health insurance and a gym membership and free designer glasses. Cool friends, and a nice family, and Netflix to keep me well stocked with good movies to watch, and the Free Library with good books to read, and Fleisher to let me take all the art classes I want for 30 bucks.

I suppose it’s just something in human nature that keeps us searching. Perpetual dissatisfaction. Moments of real contentment and fulfillment come so few and far between, and the rest of the time we’re like junkies trying to score that one perfect high. But the recipe keeps changing. We tell ourselves that everything would be perfect if we just had a boyfriend, or a new house, or a new job, or if we lost 30 pounds or if we moved to Iceland. But then one by one, we get the boyfriend, we buy the house, we land the job, we lose the weight, we move to Reykjavik. And one by one, the initial high is followed by the inevitable “Aaaand, now what?”

I mean, people, there’s a reason why the phrase “Been there, done that” has outlived most other annoying catch phrases of the early 90’s. We’re not still running around saying, “Homie don’t play dat” or “Those jeans look great on you... Psych!!” No, “Been there, done that,” I imagine, will be with us for quite a while, because its truth is basic to the human condition.

And with that, I’m outy. This entry is so five-minutes-ago. Psych!!

I wonder how many others like me, sitting at their desks in Monday office towers, looked out and saw her flight, and couldn't help but smile. Happy trails, Kitty.

I’m actually finding it a pleasant surprise that I actually do feel like I’m gaining not just experience as I get older, but perspective. Perspective seems to be the constant theme in my realizations: How big of a deal various events are to me, how quickly a day or a week passes, how long a year or a decade or a century seems – these are what’s changing. I've been able to understand historical events in a much more full and interconnected way than I could even in college, as a History major. I see patterns and themes there that never occurred to me five years ago.

But this gaining perspective thing, while I’m enjoying it, is also a trade-off, which is what Patrick and I were talking about the other night: When you’re a little kid, the reason it feels like the month before Christmas takes eons to pass is because every day is full of new experiences that seem to fill your whole life, your whole mind.

The playdough handprint you painted as a gift for your mom in kindergarten that day. The Star Wars lunchbox your neighbor Corey just got that you can’t wait to get home and admire. The new technique you and your brother have discovered for sliding down the carpeted stairs on your belly while emitting a Tarzan-like chorus ah-ee-ah-ee-ah-ee-ah. As a kid, you focus so hard on the moment at hand that it seems to expand both temporally and in its importance. It’s generally said that children have shorter attention spans than adults, but I think that’s actually kind of a misleading way of describing the difference, at least from how I remember my own childhood.

As a kid, I could absorb myself completely in the world of my Playmobile figures or Breyer horses, and go for half an hour or more without my mind wandering out of the imaginary world I’d created for them. True, perhaps after half an hour I’d get up to go to the bathroom or get a snack and decide that I wanted to read a book or play on the swingset or bug my brother instead of returning to my game.

But now – it’s hard for me to remember the last time I focused for even 15 minutes on something without those thought interruptions – Oh, I’ve got to remember to buy some canned goods for the food drive at work – Did I pay the phone bill? – I should really try to stop eating so much ice cream, I’ve probably gained five pounds – Housing prices keep going up, man, I should really get on that whole pre-approval thing – I haven’t emailed my cousin in a while – Yeah. That. So while I may look like I’m focusing on a given task for hours at a time, it’s a surface-level focusing. There are very few things I can still get as absorbed in as I could as a child. My perspective has shifted.

Though now, when I do still find those things that completely absorb me, it feels like a revelation. I realized it this summer while picking raspberries on Powderhorn Island in Maine – a tiny little treeless island in the Sheepscot Bay near West Boothbay Harbor, where I have been picking wild raspberries with my family every summer since I was old enough to toddle up to the prickly bushes and pluck berries from them. This summer, we went twice during my week-long vacation in Maine.

Sarah on Powderhorn, August 2004

And something about the weather patterns or the pollination or something must have been working in these berries’ favor this year, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen them so luscious and plentiful. One day, we picked so many that (and you don’t know how it pains me to admit this) some of them actually rotted in the fridge before we could finish eating them. And there were many of us. And we love us some wild raspberries. It’s just that we had picked, like, seriously, close to a gallon of them.

Anyway, what I realized, out there on Powderhorn, with the sun on my hair and the smell of bayberry and salt air and sunscreen in my nose and my ankles scratched up by brambles and my eyes and fingers darting from cluster to cluster of dark pink and juicy blood-purple berries was: If no one called me back to the beach to go home, I would just stay here picking berries for hours.

Someone always does call me back. “Sarah! Tide’s going out. We’ve gotta get home!”

“Okay,” I yell, but my hand is deep in a thicket finding more berries, and I begin moving slowly back in the direction of the beach, dawdling here to pick just that perfect one, or there – oh, how could I let that one go? – until, “Sarah! You coming or what?” And I get back to the beach to find everyone already on the boat, ready to shove away from shore.

There are very few things in my life that I have to be cajoled and dragged away from anymore. Sometimes reading a good book will do it. Once in a great while, when I get in some sort of zone, writing can be hard to break with. Maybe sometimes painting, though I think that’s partly logistical – if I have a palette full of paints, I don’t want to go to the trouble of cleaning them up or covering them with plastic wrap or whatever unless I seriously have to.

But it’s rare these days for me to be so mentally consumed by any activity that dislodging my attention from that thing and moving it to something else is actually difficult for me. And that’s an experience I remember having daily, sometimes hourly as a child. The phrase, “Five more minutes? Please?” was one I made heavy use of.

And I guess that’s what I mean about perspective changing. On one hand, it’s nice to be able to transition between the various commitments and activities of my day without much trouble. To multitask, as it were. But it’s also really great to find those things that can still suck me in, focus me, pull me down so deep into concentration that clawing myself back out again takes a little time.

I’ve often thought and spoken about my sense that art, and fiction writing in particular, comes from a sort of dreamstate – a different level of consciousness than that on which we live our day-to-day, must-remember-to-buy-dish-soap lives. And I feel like what I’m describing here is part of that.

The nice thing about getting to be an adult, I suppose, if you can figure out how to pull it off, is that you can get to have both. You can read theory and history, and think about trends and context and broad patterns, and you can understand the world around you much better for it. But hopefully you can also find ways of getting into that place where you can focus on a story or a painting or a song or a dance and it can open up into a universe, the same way a two-minute dream can contain an epic. That’s the balance beam I’m trying to walk, at least.

I didn’t turn around or anything, just kept walking, which is my standard response to catcalls and other street attention – though I always wish I had some snappy, Lorelai-like witty response with which to disarm the fellow, and usually spend the next block crafting the perfect retort and replaying the incident in my head, only to then be further annoyed that I’ve wasted more time even thinking about it at all. But this time, instead of mulling over my missed comeback opportunity, I found myself thinking about this whole engagement thing.

For one thing, it’s kind of funny that this dude on 13th street spotted my ring straight away, when some of my close coworkers haven’t noticed it yet. I’ve been shy about bringing it to people’s attention, because these are people who already know I’m engaged (the engagement came a couple months before the ring), so it’s not like I have actual news to share – just a shiny (and gorgeous) new Symbol. Because of that, telling people feels less like spreading interesting information and more like… bragging, or something.

I’m never sure how much of myself to divulge to people, and I think I err on the shy side of keeping most things private. Which is another thing I was thinking about on the walk home tonight. Because a web site is by its very nature public, and I’m not sure I’ve worked out the pros and cons of how much personal stuff to post.

Back at my first web site, I jumped right in and, assuming that only a few people at my college would be reading it, put up whatever I felt like. I was also in a sort of experimental exhibitionistic phase in college, like I think a lot of people are around that time. You know, I did things like get naked on the playground with my boyfriend, and perform poems about fucking at a poetry slam, and hold a spontaneous kiss-in with a bunch of friends while standing on top of a table in the dining hall. Sigh. I have pictures of myself from those days wearing an outfit that consisted of little more than red fishnets and some strategically places shreds of red fabric. Rest assured I will never post them here.

Even then, it’s not like I wasn’t ambivalent about some of my web-related sharing. But I was more willing to go ahead and do it anyway. Now I tend to talk myself out of everything. Even things that aren’t at all personal or embarrassing: just things that I worry are somehow self-indulgent or self-important.

Because, like, isn’t the whole concept of having your own web site making this awful assumption that you have something super important and unique to add to the world? It’s intimidating, especially given the way the world of blogs has evolved since I had an active web site in 1999 and 2000. Like, what do I have to say that hasn't already been said 40 times earlier today, and better, by somebody with better design capabilities, to boot?

But the point, I think, is that each of us does have something unique to say, if we’re willing to do the work of figuring out what it is and saying it. I’ve been reading a lot of Studs Terkel recently, and what I find amazing about his work is the way it showcases the wisdom and intelligence and thought processes of so many “regular” people. What I learn, again and again, reading his books, is that we are all “regular.” Growing up, as most children and adolescents do, I always felt somehow special. Like fame and fortune were mine by rights, and the Universe would any second swoop down and bestow them upon me. You know, earnestly performing commercials in the mirror, writing my angst-ridden poetry. All the standards.

And it has only been as a function of becoming an adult that I’ve realized on a sort of gut level – because I think I’ve theoretically known it for longer – that I’m no more special than the next guy. But the thing is, that’s not a bad thing. Because the next guy, just by virtue of being an individual, is pretty damn special. Just not in the fame-and-fortune way. More in the nobody-will-ever-see-through-my-eyes way.

So that’s the point of this whole ramble, I guess. It’s the explication, the justification, the pre-emptive apology to the people I know who think blogs are kinda silly and self indulgent (which I’m not necessarily disputing).

And now? It’s time to go. Patrick needs his computer back. Mine’s ill – that’s a whole other privacy dilemma. If you pay someone to recover the files on your computer, and there are some… er… embarrassing files on it (like, say, from your college days, perhaps)… there’s just no getting around that, is there? Thoughts?

* I’m not sure why I felt the need to capitalize that little title, though the acronym it would make, G-COPP, comes out sorta nice. Sadly his acronym was not needed again in the brief story, so my acronymtastic powers are moot for the time being.

I'm thinking of sending in a photo to them.

In the days that follow, maybe I'll get some thoughts together enough to post here. Meanwhile, I'm posting lots of photos over on the art page. That seems to be more my speed right about now.

A probably-homeless man crossed the street towards me and stopped. "You're looking very nice today," he said.

"Thank you," I said.

He looked down at the sneaker I had just slipped off my foot.

"Those shoes should be burned as a sacrifice to the gods," he said.

I smiled and finished changing my shoes. He walked on up the block.