“Rain is a very special blessing,” my mother says. Even when I was little, she’d already been saying it to my sister and me for as long as I could remember. Just as my grandmother had said it to her, when my mother was not my mother but only herself, in the dry Texas summers of her own childhood. Eons ago and continents away, as children reckon these things.
It’s summer now. It’s been cloudy all day, but they wait until the thunder starts to clear out the pool.
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Filed under Microblogging
(It’s my favorite color.)
Filed under Microblogging
I was planning on finishing part two of my post on “magic” last week, but then I had an idea for a very simple game I could program that would help get my point across much better.
The game is simple enough that I think I can just use HTML forms to make it–no JavaScript required–so it will be a good opportunity to practice with kelp, too. Most likely, I’ll have another devlog this week about why I’ve chosen to use kelp to redesign my website. I hope you’re looking forward to it!
Joy and health to you all.
Filed under Devlog, Microblogging
After you and your partner have been parents for a while, you develop a very strange relationship with your child-free past. On the one hand, you’ll still feel nostalgic for the “good ol’ days” when you could go hiking or have sex or see a movie on a whim, or stay up all night and sleep in as late as you wanted the next day, or treat yourselves to a quiet dinner at a nice restaurant without also having to arrange (and pay for) childcare.
On the other hand, you’ll also start feeling what I can only describe as “reverse nostalgia:” a desire to relive those child-free days with your children.
It starts with something much less strange: sooner or later you’ll start missing your kids when they aren’t around, even when you’re with your partner. For some it happens almost the moment their child is born; others might not get that feeling until their kids are old enough to talk, but I think it’s safe to say it eventually happens to any involved parent. The strange part happens some time after that: you’ll start missing your kids even in your memories, just while reliving moments from your life before they existed.
This is not to say you won’t want time away from your kids! The freedom of those moments doesn’t get any less enjoyable. If anything, they become that much sweeter when you understand their cost: the price you pay for not having your kids around is that some of the best people in your life won’t be there.
Filed under Essays
Filed under Essays, Microblogging
I’ve been really wanting to write more fiction lately. This is a good thing! I enjoy essays and microblogging and poems, but fiction is where my heart really is.
Unfortunately, fiction is much harder for me to write than tweet-length nonsense or even long-form essays, and it’s particularly hard to fit around my self-imposed requirement of posting daily. When I’m immersed in something I’m passionate about, it gets really difficult for me to focus on anything else for more than a few minutes at a time.
If I had a good buffer, I might be able to work around that by, say, alternating between a week spent on fiction and a week spent rebuilding my buffer–but I don’t have a buffer.
Another option would be to relax the daily requirement. I wouldn’t want to drop it entirely, but maybe a rule like “write every day, post X times a week” could work. I had a weekly schedule when I first started this blog, and it worked well for a while.
I’m reluctant to do that, though. I’m very proud of the consistency I’ve managed to maintain so far. If I’m still writing every day it shouldn’t matter, but I worry that without the public accountability I get from posting, it will be harder for me to stick to that rule. For some reason, writing something and then making it public feels very different than just writing it. (Okay, I guess the reason’s not really that mysterious.)
Maybe I could post excerpts? Like, if I’ve written part of a story that isn’t finished, I could post a little of what I wrote as a kind of preview? That would be pretty embarrassing for me, but maybe that’s actually a good sign!
(Although there is one other major problem with that idea: a lot of the fiction I want to write is extremely NSFW!)
Filed under Essays
My father-in-law got me this puzzle for my birthday a few years ago. It’s been sitting in a box for most of that time, but two weeks ago I got it out and brought it to work and yesterday I finally solved it! It was a good one. Thanks, Pa!
Filed under Microblogging
Me: “Man, that cake we got for my coworker’s birthday was pretty stale. Not sure I can honestly say I enjoyed eating it? Would have been rude not to, though.”
Me twenty minutes later, when everyone has gone back to their desks: “Ooh, there’s a few slices left!”
Filed under Microblogging
In Search of Secrets 