Oh God, No! Not Madonna . . .

So in the moment of fear inspired by the realization that my blog now has readers (okay, maybe just one reader) and is "in the spotlight" so to speak (Thanks for the link IHJ) I noticed that all of my blog posts (all whopping three) tend towards the melodramatic, depressed, and just generally pathetic.

Now, if you know me you will know that I am generally a thoughtful (pensive, not generous) individual who spends a great deal of time contemplating things that no one else even bothers to notice. It's me, it's who I am. In the last day I have thought about: the line painting in the BX parking lot, the reasons the signs right outside of the base are so different from the rest of the area, the most effective stanchion placement for the bank, the poor organization of the window screen boxes in the BX, the oddity of pick your own flower gardens and how they wouldn't work well in most of the US, that stupid little wood and nail puzzle that Jenn and Chris have, and about 100 individual reveries on the differences and similarities of the English and German languages. (Yes, Jenn, German is indeed the language you already know - sort of.)

So, as you can see by my list above, which, by the way, is in no way complete and is most likely missing many more inane conversations I have had with myself or the dog, there is nothing in there that tends toward the melodramatic or depressed. I leave the judging of 'pathetic' up to my reader(s). Yet, the only times I have posted previously the blogs have that overwhelming flavor to them. Obviously, I had to ponder this and here's what I've come up with:

Either A) I have very little to say about anything substantial going on in my life right now as 1) Max is not going through potty training nor his first few weeks in a big boy bed and 2) Darin and I have not visited anyplace new or special and while Darin has by himself, he's not likely to post about it and having not been there myself I'm certainly not about to tell folks what Norway, Washington, or Romania are like or B) I'm a lot more like the younger Madonna than I really want to be.

"What?" you are thinking. "Madonna? Seriously? Esther, with the big ol' gap in her teeth?" I know, I know, I came at ya' from the back alley, right? Well, I'll explain. When I was younger, almost half my life ago I would like to add so as to separate myself as far as possible, I revered Madonna. Worshipped her, loved her, wanted to be her. I don't know why - feel free to delve all you like. Anyway, during those long ago years I heard an interview with Madonna in which she was complimented on 'Cherish" and then asked why a number of her songs were so sad and if she felt that this was true of a lot of artists. Her response was that writing songs is cathartic and something you almost need to do when those sad moments arise, while the kind of joy you might feel that would inspire you to right a song like 'Cherish' doesn't really lend itself to dropping it all and sitting down and writing.

Okay, I'm probably giving her more credit than she deserves here and may even be saying more than she actually said at the time, but it struck me as true then and it still does now. If you think about it, how many teenage girls start a diary in that stage of early adolescence when everything sucks? Darn near every one of them from what I can tell. And yet it doesn't appear to be out of a great desire to become a writer because most of these girls stop writing in their diaries somewhere along the way and eventually find them when they are getting ready to leave for college, tucked away in a drawer or under their mattress, long since missing the little key that once allowed access to their deepest, darkest, secrets about how much they love (insert generic boy name here).

So, that said, it seems that the basic purpose that diaries serve is not to catalog all of life's moments, but to clear one's head of the crappier ones. All of this takes me back to the content of my blog, which everyone knows is really a diary of sorts. Most of my content has been written at moments when something was bugging me. Not something like the merits of preformed tube coin wrappers as opposed to paper sheets which one must carefully form into a tube around the ever slippery coins, but something more like "How long could I lie dead at the bottom of the stairs before 1) someone would realize I was there and 2) Max would start eating me?" You see, that's the kind of thought that you really want to get off your chest. Your not busy having fun with it, too busy to stop and write it all down. No, you're bothered by it, keep coming back to it. So what to do? Write it down for all of your friends to read and contemplate, of course. I mean, seriously, what's more interesting: Stories of the difficulty of finding just the right amount of vegetable matter to add to Max's diet to prevent constipation or delving into the neurosis in your friend (or acquaintances) head?

Right. Well then, I'll get on that story about Max just as soon as I can.

So many issues I should come with a warning label . . .

So, tonight was the last night of my German I class. We had dinner at a local restaurant and used a tiny bit of German to order. It was really just an excuse to go out to eat, not that I have a problem with that - my roulladen and knödel were quite good and my German salat was as good as any other German salat, if not better. However, as it was the last day and a more social event than the actual classes were, I got involved in more conversation than I previously had. Well, I'll be the first to tell folks that I am a blithering social idiot. As a matter of fact, I have told a group of folks that, precisely that, and they laughed; perhaps out of lack of understanding that I was serious or perhaps because they realized just how serious I was and statements like that make people uncomfortable. Probably the latter, hmmm. Either way, it's true. I am an idiot when it comes to social encounters. Either I stay relatively quiet and uncomfortably wait for the obligation to pass, or I open up my mouth and stick my foot in just as far as it will go. Now, I'm not saying that I don't feel the things I say to be true, nor am I saying that I wouldn't stand by my opinions if challenged, heck, in hindsight it is very infrequent for me to regret having said any of those things, but I am saying that I can't stand the feeling I'm left with at the end of a night like tonight. This evening, for example, driving home I went through all of the things I'd said and how much of an idiot I'd seemed. Which is weird, because I don't think anything I think is stupid (if I did I wouldn't think it anymore, duh!) yet I'm left with this uncomfortable feeling. So, if I'm okay with what I've said, why should I be worried about what other folks are thinking of what I've said? I think the inherent problem is that somewhere in the last couple of years I've allowed myself to be more comfortable in social situations but while I've backed off on that front I haven't backed off on my shyness. Weird, huh? A person whose mouth runs like she's drunk but doesn't have to wait until the next morning for the regret to set in. I still consider myself to be quite shy, but I don't think most folks would see it. It's hard to see shy when a person's mouth is going a mile a minute, but it's just the only source I can see for why I get to feeling like this. Perhaps it's because I simultaneously put myself out there as true and honest and who I really am, but I am aware that it is very hard for people to see all of the parts, especially not in one night, and so I must necessarily come across with missing information. I'm like a building that a person can see and touch and say "Oh, so this is an Alysn." but what they don't see is all of the complicated stuff inside the walls that makes it all stand up and work. As honest as I try to be, there is no way for someone to understand everything and see all of me. You would think the obvious solution would be to hold back and not allow people the ability to mistake me for something simple, but I'm not comfortable with that either. I guess I need to develop a comfort level with people not liking me, accept that there is no way people can know the whole me, that even if they did know the whole me they still might not like me and that's okay. God, do people really feel that way?

The brevity of Henry James

Henry James, an author on whose works I once spent an entire semester's focus, is quoted as having written "We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have." I heard these lines for the first time today and looked them up because they had a poignancy to my life which I could not immediately explain. Hardly surprising since they were used as the closing words to a heartfelt television show, but still no less meaningful to me for all of the emotion they were supposed to engender. It seems, however, that the writer chose to stop the quote prematurely as James actually went on to say "Our doubt is our passion. And our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art" and it was with these additional words that the television writer's spell over me was broken. Not because what James said no longer had any meaning to me, but because the addition of all that he had said was so much more meaningful and so much less trite than the abbreviated quote. I was especially taken up with "Our doubt is our passion. And our passion is our task." How true that is for me every day of my life I feel I can barely put into words. I lack confidence, plain and simple. It seems that every moment I am who I am, I am that way due to doubt: Am I good enough? Do I try hard enough? Do I love enough? My life is filled with the pursuit of answers that only continued action can pursue. Like a dog chasing its tail, I can exhaust myself and never accomplish anything, overwhelmed by the passion of chasing down answers that probably don't exist outside of myself and seem incapable of showing themselves inside. And so I work this task in the background of my life, worrying it like I would worry a wound in my mouth; painful to do but so compelling and impossible to resist. I have no answer for it, but I am exhausted, that much is certain. I wish I could find solace in James' words, but I cannot for I know that there is no solace, no peace in who I am. There is only me, my task, and the madness of this art of life and that must be good enough in the end.