Some ten years ago — maybe more like thirteen — my blogging M.O. was to sit down at my computer every evening and tell my friends what was going on in my life. One blog post could run the gamut, talking about my weight, my job, vacation plans, photography, candlemaking, links I’d found online… which made categorizing those blog posts later on quite a trip.
I don’t do that much anymore. Matter of fact, I don’t blog nearly as much as I used to, and most of my blog entries are more of digital journaling or scrapbooking or whatnot — I feel obligated to keep up with documenting what’s going on in my life. I’ve kept a journal since I was seven or eight years old (off and on at times), and my journal nowadays is my blog. (I do still keep a longhand journal by my bed for stuff I need to get out of my head that isn’t appropriate to share with the entire internet.)
Nowadays, I crosspost my blog entries to Facebook and Twitter, just so I can be sure people will see them and read them if they care to. People tend to use FB like they used to use Google Reader or LiveJournal — OK, some people still use Tumblr, but that was never my jam. If you miss Google Reader, or RSS readers in general, you might consider trying NewsBlur. I think my husband and I are the only people we know who still use an RSS reader, and NewsBlur is the best one we’ve found. There’s a social aspect to it, where you can share stories and comment on them, but you can also train it to hide stories you don’t want to see — for example, I’ve had enough of stories about our current president, and I don’t need to see any articles about maternity wear from websites for working moms, so I have those (and some other topics) trained to be hidden. It’s a handy feature.
Anyway.
I didn’t really have anything specific I wanted to get off my chest tonight. I just kind of had that feeling that I really ought to sit down and get some words out of my head before my brain shut off for the night. My husband always jokes around with me about my blog, how he can tell something’s really bothering me if it makes it into a blog entry. That’s just how I roll: if something’s bugging me, I write about it. Otherwise, it rolls around in my head and never gets solved.
I’ve actually been feeling kind of like the merry-go-round is dragging me along lately. That happened to me pretty regularly as a first-grader. I’d see other kids walking along the outside of the merry-go-round, where you were supposed to stand and hang onto the bars, so I’d try it myself. Of course, I was not the most athletically inclined kid, so I’d trip (or someone would trip me) and down I’d go, hanging onto the bar for dear life, eyeing the abyss beneath the merry-go-round and yelling, “Stop the train!”
No one ever understood why I didn’t just let go.
Being seven years old, I couldn’t explain. Now, at age 41, I can clearly understand why I didn’t let go, recalling the vivid memory of the narrow space beneath the merry-go-round churning past my face. Better the devil you know — I’d rather get dragged in a circle than chance rolling underneath the spinning disc and meeting some worse fate.
Now, I don’t feel EXACTLY like that. I’m not focused so much on avoiding the dark abyss as I am on just being dragged along. It’s really more like running up the down escalator, but it’s similar. There are so many things I’d like to get done, but only a finite amount of time for me to do them. Prioritization is key, but so is using my time wisely, and allotting time to do particular things when my brain and body are primed for those things. I’m just not good at forcing myself to do stuff I don’t want to do, especially when I’m tired.
On top of that is the fact that I haven’t really felt like doing the things I LIKE to do most of the time. I get an entire hour of “me time” after my son goes to bed. I could spend that writing (like today), or editing photos, or mending clothes, or reading magazines, or potting plants, or straightening the workbench in the garage, or deep-cleaning the kitchen, or tidying my home office, or reorganizing my digital music files…
Sometimes I wish life were like Mary Poppins. I want this thing done. SNAP — it’s done.
All of my dreams I can remember lately center around me dropping the ball bigtime. Forgetting my son somewhere. Forgetting my mellophone and/or my drill sets at a drum corps show (that’s a recurring one). Moving back into the dorms at college and not being able to coordinate schedules with my old roomie on campus. Being late to work, blinking, then realizing I’m half a day late to work, then realizing I’ve missed the whole day — usually because I can’t find my shoes or my pants or I just fell asleep. It’s like my brain is telling me to step up my game.
I wish I knew how.