I haven't posted anything in a long time because I often run into this problem where I cannot, for the life of me, think of anything to say that hasn't already been said. It will start to feel to me as if all the greatest ideas and the best writers and the most original thinkers have either come and gone, or are people who are much more obviously better than me, like they have chips inside their palms that designate them as "Creative" or "Worth It." Actually, the only reason I'm writing anything right now is because I took this part-time job with the intention of blogging and using my time more wisely in my quest to live an actualized life, and how embarrassing if I just sit on the couch and watch The People's Court and How I Met Your Mother all day instead. Who could possibly be interested in anything I have to say, anyway? I haven't gained an exceptional insight on parenting or life just from being a mother, I haven't tried to cook through Julia Child's cookbook, I'm not spending a year living like Jesus or like Oprah (are these basically the same thing?) so, really, what in the heck could I write that would make any difference to anybody? My generation and the generations following mine are so self-absorbed, it's sickening to me that I could even be participating in the act of telling strangers about my day and then expecting them to read it, like it, comment on it, and share it. We have Facebook to tell everybody that we're tired, we have Twitter to tell everybody that we're hungry, we have Instagram to show everybody the food we're eating because we are hungry (with the 1977 filter because then it's not just a picture of a taco, it's art,) we have Pinterest to show everybody that, yes, we like curly hair for our wedding and a really big bookshelf in our house and this easy, fun craft project that I'll never have the time to do because I can't stop pinning everything I see! We are all on information overload, how can my blog ever make an impact on a world that already knows way too much about me?? In college, I read "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot and it became my favorite piece of literature -- so much so that I named my son Eliot. Anyway, the reason that I loved it was because I believed Eliot was saying that all of this art and literature and music and culture meant nothing. Like they are all shells on the beach; each one could be beautiful or ugly or special or typical, but even though there were so many of them covering the sand, making the beach look populated and full, the shells themselves do not constitute a beach. They are a piece of, an accessory to; many of them contribute to the picture, but many more are washed away and are never seen and, so what? What does any of that mean to the beach? The beach will be the beach no matter what -- if 10,000 shells are littering the shore or if only 10 are scattered in the sand. How nice it is to find a great one, and yet, finding a magnificent shell does not extinguish the truth that life is lived and then it is not. At any rate, this was not a popular opinion with anybody in my class, and even my professor toyed with the idea and then ultimately dismissed it, and I wasn't surprised -- of course, paying $30,000 a semester to discuss literature and poetry and then discover that it's meaningless to discuss it is a real kick in the nuts. Nonetheless, it didn't change my theory that sometimes there is no metaphor, no allegory, no deeper meaning. Sometimes words are just words and sometimes they are worth reading and sometimes they are not.
My point (and there wasn't a point to this before I started writing, it just came to me a minute ago) is that I'm just going to write (type?) down words. I'm just going to put them here and then tell you that I put them there. I'm no T.S. Eliot, I know this, and I'm no Virginia Woolf, but I'd like to be. Maybe I'll find a purpose for this (FASHION!?...no...CELEBRITIES!?...no,) and maybe I won't, but fuck it, I'm going to ride this wave.
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