I am still alive

I have, alas, been very bad about blogging lately. And the funniest part about it is that it hasnt been because of a lack of things that I have wanted to write about. I swear, at least once a day I find myself thinking, "this would make a good blog post" and sometimes I even compose the whole post IN MY HEAD where it does no one any good.

I have wanted to tell the world about the people I see on the bus. Last week, I saw a mentally ill woman I used to know a long time ago. She didnt recognize me. But she was on the bus with a man who was clearly in love with her and with whom she apparently lived. I listened to their conversation for the entire TWO HOUR bus ride home (snow storm). It was funny because I found their words to each other very touching and very nice and it made me feel kind of good. But I was still stuck on the bus for TWO HOURS and I had a pee a little bit and I was hungry and frustrated and wanted to scream. Anyways, this woman was just so happy that she was, perhaps inappropriately, spreading it around by talking to people on the bus. There is, after all, bus etiquette that strangers only rarely speak to each other. As I got off the bus downtown, she said to me, "sweetie, if you need the eleven, you need to wait right by me" but I had to decline her offer since another bus which could get me home had just pulled into the transit station.

I wanted to tell everyone about my car which has now broken down twice in a week. I just spent five hundred bucks on it and now it is back in the shop and who knows how much else I will need to spend. The timing is bad because I need all the money I can get for my upcoming trip to Paris. I am going to do my taxes this weekend and I am going to hope that I get my refund before I leave. Still, on the money front, except for the car repairs, I am digging myself out of a financial hole that I am ashamed to have found myself in because I am smarter than that. Sometimes smart people do dumb things. But anyways, I have recovered from an earlier financial crisis and have enough money to live my life without the horrible budget I have been living with for the last several months. But, of course, I am going to still live with the horrible budget but just knowing that I dont HAVE to somehow makes it easier to do it. Weird I know. But there you go.



I wanted to tell everyone about last night. There was a lunar eclipse and everything worked out perfectly for it which as anyone who lives in Michigan can tell you, the chances of a clear night in Michigan in February arent especially high. But last night was crystal clear and the moon turned this cool orange color. I was at the lake where there are few city lights or at least fewer than here in Ypsilanti. So I stood on the deck there for a half an hour in the cold and looked at the beautiful moon and the stars which just seemed to get brighter as the moon got darker. I looked up at my favorite constellation, Orion for a long time and I thought about things I learned in my astronomy class about how Orion is in a part of space where new stars are being born and about how I'll be dead before any of the light from a star being born right now ever gets to earth. The nebulae in that part of space, such as the Orion Nebula, are just about the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

There has been more stuff too but I will have to save it for another time...

NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month. Every since I first heard about NaNoWriMo, I've considered participating. I mean, writing a novel seems like a good goal for a person to have in life. And it is one that pretty much any literate person can achieve. I mean, the goal is just to write a novel. It isnt to write a good novel although that would be pretty cool. It isnt to get published. It is just about the act of creating. Also on my agenda for Someday is to create some kind of painting/fresco hybrid thingie. I think I have that one scheduled for the Tuesday after I win the lotto.

Anyways, as usual I am wimping out of NaNoWriMo. But, I am going to participate in the less ambitious NaBloPoMo - National Blog Posting Month! I am going to write a post every day in November. It is a good way to keep the ole noggin working and November is a month where I kind of need that. So...expect to hear a lot from me. I cant promise it will be any good, of course. But that goes without saying.

The Future of this Blog

Sometimes, I am not really sure what I would like this blog to be.

When I first started it, I started it anonymously and used it pretty much the same way I would write in any journal I kept. I wrote a lot about how I felt about things and I didn’t worry about people I know reading it. People read it, of course. But it was strangers who were reading it. It was like having a private diary with feedback!

At some point though, I realized that keeping a blog could also be a useful tool for communicating with people I already know. It could be used in lieu of emails. It would allow people to catch up with me without requiring them to put in too much of an effort if they didn’t want to. Besides, I have always kind of believed the there is a bit of intimacy when one knows the minutia of another person’s life.

I made that change around 3 years ago, just as blogs were exploding in popularity. I got traffic. Boy! Did I get traffic. At the height of my blogs popularity, I think I had around 100 daily readers and another 100 who checked in at least once a week. I was all about that, let me tell you. I guess it would be fair to call me an attention whore ;).

For a while I kept up the more personal blog too until I learned why keeping two blogs which are mostly the same but one has additional tidbits leads the web savvy stalker types to find the personal blog. And that of course means having creepy people read one’s web log or in my case, one particular creepy person who probably knew where I lived or could easily find out!

So I stopped keeping the more personal blog and just have this one (mirrored at two sites for my reader’s convenience). But as it happens, the popularity of blogging in general and the popularity of my own blog as well as my interest in blogging have all kind of waned. So I don’t get the tons of attention although I still have a fair number of readers (and I appreciate all of you!). But I also don’t really need the attention in the way I did 3 years ago when I was in the middle of some serious drama with some other people and in the middle of a serious life crisis with myself.

So, I guess what I am saying is that I am not sure what the future of this blog will be. I might try to write every day even if I have nothing important to say. I might try to document things about my life for myself in case I ever get old and forget things (I have chosen to forget that when I read blog entries I wrote just a couple of years ago, I sometimes realize that I would have already forgotten whatever incident I wrote about if I hadn’t put it in the blog). I might try to write for others. I might abandon it altogether and go back to writing in a notebook kept by my bed. I simply don’t know.