Tagged: puttingwordstogether

Once in awhile I get an urge to either radically change my journal layout, shake up my flist/blogroll, purge things like crazy, even going so far as to entertain the idea of shelving the whole damn thing. Wipe it out. Start over, maybe. Most of the time that urge results in nothing so drastic. A new banner, instead. A perusal of my friends list and feeds which leads to 1 or 2 deletions and several almost-deletions before I pull back from the brink. I get the same urge in real life, as well. But because I am bound by family,...

I remember the night before a trip there was always this breathless feeling of excitement in the pit of my stomach. We usually went on car trips, my dad packing the big station wagon the evening before, laying out blankets in the back and putting all the baggage around the edges so that we had a place (when we were still kids and mandatory seatbelt laws were still to come) to stretch out or play. Sometimes we would get started early in the morning, before the sun was up and the world was quiet, the air still chill, and our...

Sometimes, especially when I’m in the middle of reading a book where the writing just blows me away, where every word seems so perfectly chosen and polished and dovetailed to a plumb with all the other words, in a way that I wouldn’t have thought to use it, in a way that is so fresh and so right that it nearly makes my hair stand on end, then I can’t imagine ever writing again myself. How could I? It’s not that I think that I have to write as perfectly as some of the writers I admire most, or even...

Good news, bad news: there’s always something happening, somewhere, to someone. Sometimes it hits closer to home than others, and sometimes it lets you live vicariously for a moment, re-living or anticipating or struck suddenly dumb by the awful and visceral realization that things can happen at any time, out of the blue, for reasons completely out of your control. 2 weeks ago, a friend got a job that might have been written expressly for her, and coming as it did after she had thrown caution to the winds and made a leap of faith to abandon her previous corporate...

When did I stop thinking that what I had to say was worthy of writing down? Somewhere along the line I veered off into feeling that if what I was writing about wasn’t scinctillating, profound or humorous, it wasn’t worth posting. This makes it harder and harder to want to post anything, to write ANYTHING, for fear it isn’t good enough. For who? For me or for my audience? The idea that writing about the mundanities of my day, the things that happen to me, the funny things my kids say, all those little things—isn’t good enough or exciting enough...

I sat across from you at the table this evening and all I could think was, you are so beautiful. How can you not see it? How can you be so sure that you’re unattractive? Someone’s got a lot to answer for, that raised you believing a lie. Now I’m not speaking just to you, I’m talking to myself and to the spaces inbetween, where the fine-webbed cracks appear on the inside of the surfaces. Do we all only see our flaws? Are we raised on denial, comparison and self-blindness? What do you see in the looking glass? Who? The...