Happy Anniversary, Questioning!

Three years ago today, I posted this essay and started a blog to write my way out of an existential crisis. Given that I'm still firmly in an existential crisis, my original optimism might seem rather silly.

Perhaps silly is a reasonable thing to be.

Three years ago, I asked the following questions:

Where am I?
Technically, I suppose I'm in Ohio, a landlocked state. Metaphorically speaking, however, life sucked me right back out to sea from that shore of early motherhood. Buckaroo Banzai nailed an essential truth: "No matter where you go, there you are." I still have no idea where I am, but I'm here. The water is warm, the waves are rather relaxing at the moment, and the sharks are circling at a distance. I have learned that optimism and faith are extremely good shark repellants, but you just never know when they are going to get closer.

Photo from Pinterest

Who am I?
According to Albus Dumbledore, "It is our choices...that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." If he's right (I strongly suspect he is), we're not easy to define because we make choices right up to the moment of death. We're evolving always, so the answer keeps changing. Life is our very own novel where plot happens and we muddle through as best we can. (So yes, Karen, we will never feel like grown-ups. "Damn," you say? "Double damn," say I.)

Where did all this grey hair come from?
Who cares?

Why do I not have a single stylish outfit in my closet?
I have one now. Just one. The great closet purge helped.

Can I possibly participate in an intelligent conversation on a subject other than toilet training, the mysteries of getting a child to eat vegetables, or how much is too much for extracurricular activities?
Yes. You have no idea how relieved I am about this.

Is Susan Raihala still inside this person named Mommy?
Yes. She's just as confused as ever but rather happy nevertheless.

Part of what makes me so happy is you: your kind support, encouragement, words of wisdom. It seems that whenever I start to feel a bit discouraged or low, one of you sends me an email or leaves a comment that lifts me up. You have no idea the difference your words make, and I hope my words do the same for you.

Time to ice my elbow. Regularly scheduled programming will resume on Monday. In the meantime,

Photo from Pinterest

I plan to.

And of course we need to have a give-away to celebrate three years of questioning. For your chance to win a $25 gift certificate to Barnes and Noble, please answer this question in the comments: What did you do to make today ridiculously amazing? You can't say, "Nothing." If you haven't made the day ridiculously amazing, get your butt moving and just do it, and then share.

Rules: Comments will close on Sunday, July 24, 2011, at midnight eastern time and the winner will be announced on Monday. Only one comment per person. If you read Questioning in email, click on the post title to go to the blog and leave your comment there. You may need to click the Post Comment button several times for your comment to take. The winner will be chosen at random. If I don't hear from the winner within three days of announcing her/his name, I will choose another winner. And so on, and so on, and so on.

On My Mind

The energy to write a coherent essay this week is just not there for me, but I've actually had a lot on my mind lately. So don't expect anything in this post to relate to a single topic. Frankly, I'm all over the place right now. And it feels pretty good, actually.

Considering Christmas
Every year, I am annoyed that stores put up Christmas displays as soon as Halloween is over. This year, I saw plenty of displays before Halloween was over. Target, I'm talking about you. I think this gradual stretching out of the Christmas season is a sign of our increasing focus on stuff, the getting and spending. The focus during the Christmas season should be on love: for Christians, the love of God who sent his Son who inspires us to share His love with the world; for people of other faiths or no faith at all, love in a more general sense of generosity, kindness, goodwill.

That's what all the Christmas songs are about, isn't it?

So many homes are already lit up, with trees blinking in living room windows. People say it takes so much effort to decorate, they want to enjoy it longer. But when decorations are left up too long, you don't see them anymore. They just don't stay special. By the time Christmas arrives, where's the magic? The specialness of this amazing miracle that occurred 2,000 years ago? All the decorations have been out so long they're gathering dust.

Bah, humbug.

Plus, Thanksgiving gets lost in the commercial shuffle. I've very deliberately been thinking about how thankful I am this year, thankful for people, places, and things that make my life rich and interesting and fun. This has lead me to consider writing devotionals about thankfulness instead of Advent this year. Have you seen the annoying Buick commercial of the man whose wife gives him a car for Christmas and as he's sitting behind the wheel for the first time, a Buick drives by. It's obvious he really wanted the Buick and is disappointed in the CAR HIS WIFE GAVE HIM FOR CHRISTMAS!

I'm never buying a Buick.

For me, the Christmas season starts the day after Thanksgiving. I do NOT shop on Black Friday. I start to decorate my house for Christmas. I put out everything but the tree. We cut down a tree every year at a tree farm, and we don't want needles to dry out too quickly, so we wait to get the tree up until about two weeks before Christmas.

All the decorations come down New Year's Day, making our Christmas celebration last a little better than a month, one-twelfth of year. That's long enough to make it worthwhile and keep it special, don't you think?

Considering this Blog
Yesterday, I scrolled down and saw this.

30,000 hits. Wow. I'm blown away that so many people have been reading Questioning. That figure doesn't count the people who read it in email.

Questioning is just about me and my life. It's astonishing to me that so many of you like it. Thank you for your support and encouragement. I'm thankful for you. Each and every one of you.

But I know you really come here for Daisy.

Considering Mental Illness
Did you catch the Randy and Evi Quaid Act about a month ago? I was going to link to an article about their recent troubles, but I decided not to because it sort of reinforces my point that mental illness has become entertainment. Carrie Fisher's latest book capitalizes on her mental illness, as does Portia De Rossi's book. I'm happy Fisher and De Rossi can use writing to work through stuff, and since they authored the books, they controlled how much or how little they shared, and they profit from their self-exposure. The Quaids, however, were being paraded on morning talk shows as entertainment. The chatter on the Internet reinforced this, with most commentary I saw mocking them and cracking jokes about their mental problems.

It reminds me of my friend Karen H. She hated the movie Forrest Gump, and I asked her why. She'd seen it with some of her brothers who laughed at Forrest rather than for Forrest. It left a bad taste in her mouth to have seen Forrest's mental retardation as mocked entertainment rather than sympathetic portrayal of a powerfully engaging character.

It's all in the perspective, I suppose.

Celebrity alcholism, drug use, and mental problems confuse me. Oh the one hand, I think keeping these topics out in the open and talked about is a good thing. Sweeping stuff like that under the rug is never helpful. On the other hand, the discussion can cross the line into either exploitation, as in the Quaid case, or celebrating the problems themselves. I remember watching an interview with Richard Dreyfuss that gave the impression that he was proud of his problems. This may or may not be true, but that the interview provoked those thoughts disturbed me. Celebrities live under a microscope, and the rest of us assume they ask for it and the benefits of massive money and ego make up for it, but I wonder.

Considering Blown Light Bulbs
Many months ago, the bulbs in our bathroom overhead fixture blew out. This wasn't an emergency because we have 8 clear round bulbs over our vanity, so the bathroom still had light. After the overhead bulbs had been out for a while, George sarcastically asked if we were ever going to replace them, meaning when was I going to replace them. He said this just to get a rise out of me, and I knew it, but I'll be damned if I was going to change those bulbs anytime soon after that.

So, more months passed, days got shorter, and about a month ago, I finally replaced the bulbs. I did NOT like the extra light. It bothered me. Enormously. But I figured George would appreciate it.

I was wrong. He completely agreed with me that the bathroom was now painfully bright in the morning.

Isn't it amazing how accustomed we can get to the lack of a good thing, so much so that we resent its renewed presence in our lives? Our brains really are very strange places.

Of course, now, we're used to the bright light. It seems normal. The way things ought to be. When they blow again, we'll be annoyed. Until we get used to them being blown. Then we will replace them and resent the bright light all over again.

If there's a lesson in this, I can't find it. But it does vaguely relate back to getting used to Christmas decorations if they are left up too long.

And with that, I say Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers and Happy Thursday to everyone else. Make it a day of gratitude and thankfulness. And food.

The Joy of Cooking

It all started with a crock pot.

Back in 1988, after only two years of marriage, George grew bored with my limited repertoire of recipes so, in a desperate effort to broaden our dietary options, he bought a crock pot.

Do you know how infinitely weird it is to see your otherwise testosterone-driven, USAF second-lieutenant “I wanna fly in fighters” husband dancing with glee over a $20 crock pot he bought at the BX? Trust me. It’s weird.

He comes by his innate passion for cooking honestly. His mother is half Italian, which gives her a genetic imperative to cook. She enjoys putting good, rich, plentiful food on her family table, and both her children inherited that joy.

I’m not feeling quite the same level of joy myself. But then, there are no Italians in my family tree, either. My mother taught me to cook, for which I am grateful. Because of her, I can follow a recipe and feel pretty competent in the kitchen. I can pull together a complete Thanksgiving feast without feeling intimidated by anything except the gravy.

Why does the thought of having to make gravy give me anxious hives? I mean, why gravy? It doesn't make sense because gravy isn't terribly difficult or persnickity. Lots of other things are harder to make. Pie crust, for instance. Most people break out in anxious hives over pie crust and run to their grocer's freezer to buy them ready-made. Not me. All through my childhood, my mother would make dozens of apple pies every fall to freeze and give as Christmas gifts. Her apple pies are legendary, and she taught me her secrets so well that my apple pie won a blue ribbon at our church festival.

Of course, I won because I waited until the last minute to bake the pie, and it was still warm when the judges tasted it. (I didn’t strategize this, by the way, I just procrastinated.) No matter how wonderful other desserts are, they simply cannot compete with warm, cinnamon-rich, buttery apple pie. I felt like I was cheating.

I live in America, folks, the land of baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolet. Of those three things, the only one every single man, woman, and child in the country cares about is apple pie. If you want to win a baking contest in America every single blessed time, submit a warm apple pie.

But am I passionate about cooking? Not really. It’s okay, but I’m more of a short-order cook and baker than a true chef. I don’t make up recipes or contemplate the mysteries of yeast while stuck in traffic. Cooking is mostly a chore for me, so I look for ways to make it go fast.

To my great good fortune, my apathetically monotonous menu activated George’s passion for cooking. Even in the early days, he created surprisingly few disasters. Only two have seared themselves into my memory. In case you didn’t know, pinto beans cooked to mush in Italian spices are not delicious. Also, if a recipe calls for two ancho chiles in adobo sauce, don’t use two CANS of ancho chiles in adobo sauce.

Please trust me on that one.

Mostly, however, George succeeds in his culinary adventures, which have increased in both daring and cost over the years. I cannot let him go to our local upscale market unsupervised anymore. Did you know it’s entirely possible to spend $100 on a single meal? Okay, it wasn’t just a single meal because there were enough leftovers to last a week. George is one-quarter Italian, remember. He cooks BIG.

To curb the expense, we started playing our version of Iron Chef. I buy a fairly random selection of ingredients that don’t cost $100, and George has to invent something edible with those ingredients using only whatever else we have to hand. He’s invented some lovely dishes with these challenges, and he has fun pretending to be Bobby Flay.

A dude who makes Julia Child’s French bread and fearlessly tosses a cup of water into his hot oven makes a great husband, but he comes at a price. Whenever I make dinner—let’s say a pot of chili—George will eat it and then tell me what he would have done differently. “Oh, I would have added a hint of Penzey’s ancho chili powder; it would add a more complex, smoky flavor.”

WHAT!? Are you saying my chili doesn’t have enough flavor?!?! You make the freakin’ chili next time, Mr. Flavor Expert!

Of course, he doesn’t mean it like that. He’s a foodie, and he just wants to talk about food. A lot. Like anyone with an obsessive interest, he derives great pleasure from discussing the process, the ingredients, a recipe’s good points and bad points and how he’ll change it next time. He contemplates the complexities of spices while sitting in boring meetings, invents recipes in the shower, plans menus while riding his bike. Sometimes, he even dreams about food.

To fuel these thoughts, he collects books and magazines about cooking. Consider this picture of his cookbook shelves:


Methinks we need bigger shelves.

For a while, George fantasized about going to a cooking school to become a professional chef, but after reading Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, he decided that wasn’t a lifestyle he wanted. Instead, he kept buying cookbooks and magazines until he so overflowed with ideas and enthusiasm that he craved a larger audience than little ol’ me. He started his own cooking blog, and posts his inventions and ideas for the world to see.

George uses his blog (Eat, Drink, and Be Merry with Spot) to spread the joy of cooking. I encourage you to check it out, even if you didn’t inherit powerful cooking genes, because finding joy in an everyday necessity really is good for the soul.

This Thanksgiving, George is making the gravy, but I'm making the apple pie. What a great way to share the joy.

Fun @ the World Wide Web

This week’s essay should have been about food. George has been harassing me for months to write a foodie essay, which will really be a mock foodie essay because I’m no more a food snob than I am a wine snob. As I just finished reading Julie and Julia, the time is ripe for questioning food.

Food is a big subject, though, and hard to narrow down to something digestible in less than five minutes without sophisticated powers of editorial discernment. I currently have no powers of editorial discernment, sophisticated or otherwise, because it’s August. August breeds angst in the hearts of mothers everywhere. August is the month of “to do” lists that go on for pages, the month of endlessly annoying bickering that turns mommy brains to mush. By August, mothers have been pecked nearly to death by chickens and are only kept upright and moving by the certain knowledge that school will start soon and their little darlings will peck elsewhere for hours every day and their wounds will have a chance to heal.

My August angst has sent me running to the World Wide Web for entertainment and distraction. Of course, before we had high-speed Internet service, I didn’t get the fascination. Now, however, I understand why the Internet has the television industry running scared. How many times have you channel surfed for, like, whole minutes of your life on cable’s two-thousand channels and found NOTHING worth watching? All that effort for nothing, nada, the big zero. But a few clicks on Google, and the world is your oyster in seconds. You can ALWAYS find something worth the effort on the Internet.

Best of all, you can always find proof that you’re not the craziest thing in the universe.

Take, for instance, Lowering the Bar, a blog by lawyer Kevin Underhill that reports nutty legal cases. Yesterday, I opened it from my Google Reader (oh, how I love Google Reader!) and found this article reporting that Tom DeLay will be on Dancing with the Stars. Underhill writes, “Yes, it is sometimes impossible to tell the difference between real news and what one might find on The Onion, and this is one of those times.” I can’t decide if DeLay’s dancing celebrity is a sign of the coming apocalypse or proof that God really, truly wants us to be happy even in the face of governmental corruption. I’m leaning toward the happy because it’s a better salve for my chicken-inflicted wounds, but now I can’t watch Dancing with the Stars because the possibility that DeLay might be any good would ruin the fun completely.

Another blog that provided two whole minutes of maniacally weepy laughter yesterday was Craftastrophe: Because Handmade Isn’t Always Pretty, which reports deeply disturbing crafts like this, or this, or this. (I'm only linking here because I can't stand the thought that images of cockroaches on a plate, rat salt and pepper shakers, and Barbie heads ever appear on my blog.) But yesterday’s “Egg-Cellent” entry was just funny. It reminds me of my friend Martha, a nurse who once wore earrings made of condoms to the Officer’s Club. One side of each package was clear, so the orange condom provided a sunny backdrop for a hand-painted tropical scene complete with beach and palm tree.

Just spend a moment reflecting on the idea of condom earrings worn at an Officer’s Club.

You’re welcome.

Next up for fun is ICanHasCheezburger.com. Yesterday, I found this captioned kitty picture and felt such kinship with the cat that I touched my face to see if I’d grown whiskers or something.

This one could also appear on Craftastrophe.



Whenever I need verification that nothing in the universe makes sense, I visit the Engrish blog, where people post pictures of poorly translated English. Last week, I found this wonderful billboard that, well, explains everything.

Or not.

After this little trip around the World Wide Web, I'm feeling quite normal and well-adjusted and ready to tackle back-to-school clothes shopping with a fourth grader who would prefer to wear his holey, stained, rotting-off-his-body kindergarten olympics t-shirt every blessed day of his life. Let it go, son! For the love of God, let it go!

Pray for me. Please.

Apocalyptic Horses and Grammar Nazis

As I drove home from my sister’s place in Maryland, I thought a lot about grammar. Ten hours is a long time to reflect on something as geeky as grammar, I know. Long car rides send my reflective brain to strange places.

GrammarLand was not, however, the strangest place my brain went on the drive. I spent an interesting half-hour contemplating the fiberglass animals I saw on the back of a low flatbed trailer. The first animal I noticed in this unlikely menagerie on I-68 was a rather smallish bison. Having seen many real and scary-looking bison in Yellowstone, I know how big an adult can grow, which is about as big as the super cab pickup hauling these weird animal statues.

Accompanying the miniature brown bison were two painted, life-size horses…one in the same brown as the bison and the other sort of reddish. Then I noticed two totally white, unpainted horses, which of course made me think of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Were the colors right? I thought they were all white, but perhaps I was mistaken, especially because the Book of Revelation gives me the heebie-jeebies and thus rarely enters my mind unless four fiberglass horses appear out of nowhere on I-68.

Perhaps these four really were the biblical harbingers of doom, sans riders, of course. Their fiberglass legs looked spindly. What would happen if they snapped and fiberglass horse parts went flying all over I-68? I felt an irrational urge to pass the trailer just to be on the safe side.

As I accelerated past the trailer, I noticed a small unpainted fiberglass pig tucked beside the bison. Pig butts are funny enough to push all thought of the Apocalypse from my mind. When I finished chuckling, I started thinking about nonrestrictive modifiers and passive voice again.

You might think nonrestrictive modifiers and passive voice are far less interesting than fiberglass pig butts, but you’d be wrong. A recent thread in the General Stamping Forum at SplitcoastStampers reminded me that grammar is a highly controversial subject which flares tempers and turns some people into elitist, arrogant grammar Nazis preserving the purity of the rules they learned in seventh-grade English.

Problem is, some of those lessons are WRONG. Sorry about the all-caps yelling, but nothing provokes my ire like people who slavishly follow rules, even when some of those rules don’t exist.

I used to be one of these arrogant Nazis from GrammarLand. At the experienced age of seventeen, I informed a hapless park ranger of a misspelling on a park sign: “picnicing” should have been “picnicking.” He looked at me as if I were an alien from another planet, which was my first clue that my obsession with grammar and spelling probably exceeded the bounds of normalcy.

Eventually, I went to graduate school and taught the dreaded Freshman Composition. During my first few nerve-racking weeks teaching, a student asked me why I added commas to a sentence in her paper. I couldn’t remember the exact rule, which made me panic for a few seconds. I knew the commas belonged around that particular clause, but saying “because I said so” would have been pedagogical suicide. Instead, I said, “Let me show you how to look this up in your grammar handbook.” I did, and that was how my student learned (and I relearned) the rule on commas around nonrestrictive modifiers.

Whew.

That night, I read the entire grammar handbook to refresh my memory. The experience taught me the power of internalizing rules so completely that you forget them. Each rule I reviewed seemed like an old friend. “Hello, Nonrestrictive Clause That Takes Commas. Good to see you again! How have you been?” But really, these rules had been with me all along, hanging out in my unconscious mind working their magic and earning me good grades.

Grammar rules serve a noble purpose: they allow people to communicate as clearly as possible in a highly imperfect world. Communication under the best circumstances is fraught with peril. It’s so easy to be misunderstood…and so painful.

Some so-called rules, however, are not rules at all. They start as recommendations arising from common stylistic errors. For instance, many of my students believed with near-religious fanaticism that they should never, ever, under any circumstances start a sentence with and or but. When I corrected this misunderstanding, many students simply refused to believe me.

I felt deep kinship with the high school biology teacher whose ultra-conservative Christian student refused to believe that men and women have the same number of ribs.

Strunk and White’s superbly succinct book, The Elements of Style, includes a section titled “Avoid a succession of loose sentences,” which discusses the overuse of and, but, and other words that weaken the rhetorical effectiveness of writing. Beginning writers often resort to wordy, sloppy writing simply because the teacher assigns a word-count to their papers. The more useless words a student sprinkles around the paper, the more quickly he or she reaches that magic number of words to complete the assignment.

Reading wordy, pointless essays forces tortured seventh-grade English teachers to make broad, sweeping, self-defensive declarations like “Never start a sentence with and or but.” Students prefer clear and absolute rules like this to Strunk and White’s “avoid a succession of loose sentences.” What is a “loose sentence” anyway? It sounds vaguely dirty, doesn’t it?

Interestingly, Strunk and White generally object to the use of however at the beginning of a sentence. They state, “Avoid starting a sentence with however when the meaning is ‘nevertheless.’ The word usually serves better when not in the first position.” Notice that they qualify their injunction with the word usually.

Almost any rule can be broken if breaking it makes rhetorical sense. Would you correct the grammar, usage, and spelling Mark Twain deploys in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Perish the thought! Twain skillfully uses vernacular to develop characters and lend realism to the setting and atmosphere of his novel.

Sort of like this blog.

See what I mean? I used a sentence fragment to emphasize the transition in topic. If this were a scholarly essay, I might have written, “Twain’s use of language to reinforce verisimilitude and offset pretentious delivery of the novel’s main message sets a precedent for twenty-first century web log authors whose rhetorical situation requires them to minimize the division between writer and audience, to bring writer and audience together metaphorically as friends chatting over cups of tea, much as Huck converses informally with his audience.”

I bet you prefer the fragment.

Language Nazis (like my young and silly self) have either lost or not yet learned perspective, and they inflate grammar and spelling errors to assume apocalyptic importance. They accost park rangers, send indignant emails to bloggers who dare misspell a word, and post unintentionally ironic comments on internet forums promoting rules that don’t exist.

Errors appear in even the most accomplished and meticulous writer’s work. Bloggers are rarely meticulous. If I spent as much time proof-reading and style-checking each blog post as I spent on my academic writing, I’d only be able to post once a month. Instead, I sit at my laptop and type like I talk, only funnier because I can go back and change things and reword and exaggerate for comic effect. This means I bend, break, and ignore many rules that I followed fanatically when I wrote my geeky master’s thesis. If I wrote my blog like I wrote my geeky master’s thesis, it’s unlikely you would read it. I wouldn’t.

The geek in me, however, couldn’t let go of the four possibly apocalyptic fiberglass horses on the flatbed. After a bit of research, I’m relieved to report that they were not a sign of the end of times. The Book of Revelation states that only one of the apocalyptic horses is white. The others are black, red, and pale (whatever that means). Not a bison-brown one in the lot.

What a relief.

Gratitude Journal #6

Today I am grateful for this, the 72nd post, and the one-year anniversary of Questioning my Intelligence. Yay, me! If you've not read how it all started, click here. But please answer Monday's question first:

What are you grateful for today?

Reader’s Digest, Socrates, and the Meaning of Michelangelo’s Stumps

While staying at my mom’s house for my grandmother’s funeral, I picked up a Reader’s Digest and found an article titled “The Story of Your Life” by Joe Kita. Kita explores the value of writing a memoir for the average, um, Joe. According to Kita, you don’t need to have accomplished anything particularly dramatic in life or have skeletons in your closet to write a memoir. Telling your own story helps you gain perspective, see connections, and understand your life in new and often helpful ways. Life is complicated and messy, and writing memoir helps a person organize the mess and make sense of it. Kita quotes Stephen King, who said, “I write to find out what I think.”

I’m sure you see the relevance of Kita’s article to what you’re reading right now. Tad obvious, isn’t it? Questioning my Intelligence, indeed. If you haven’t read my very first blog essay, here’s a snippet from it that illustrates my point:

Having an MA in English predisposes a person to appreciate pithy aphorisms, so my quest to find myself will begin with guidance from Lord Acton, who wrote this little gem:

"Learn as much by writing as by reading."

I’ve read plenty, so now it’s time to write my way out of this existential crisis, to bridge the gap between the competent, educated woman formerly known as Susan Raihala and this Mommy person who wipes bottoms that aren’t her own and says things like “Because I said so!” and “Hands out of pants!” daily.

Welcome to my blog.

By the way, I wrote these words a year ago and still say “hands out of pants” daily.

Sigh.

This random Reader’s Digest article encouraged me in writing this blog, and it certainly helped me write my grandmother’s eulogy. Grandma’s life story was not dramatic or flashy, and she had no dirty skeletons in her closets. She kept a very tidy house full of laughter.

After the funeral service, my young niece, looking quite shocked, told me, “Aunt Susan, you’re bad!” I asked her what she meant, and she replied, “You made people laugh at a funeral.” Oh, the horror! When I was her age, I’d probably have thought the same thing: funerals are serious, sad events, aren’t they? Levity has no place, does it?

I explained to my niece how important it was for everyone to remember the funny stuff about Grandma, before the osteoporosis crippled her. We needed to revisit those happy memories as we said goodbye. Yes, I made people laugh at a funeral. And they were comforted.

My niece, however, seemed unconvinced. Perhaps I should give her a subscription to Reader’s Digest for Christmas so she can learn from its regular column “Laughter, the Best Medicine” just like I did when I was little and living in Grandma’s house.

Words are powerful things, for good and ill. They build up and tear down, motivate and destroy, comfort and lacerate, induce laughter and provoke tears. The words we use create and shape our reality, sometimes unpleasantly if we aren’t careful. Early in my adult life, I talked a lot about my depression and the pain and suffering that went with it. Gradually, as my brain chemistry sorted itself out, I stopped needing to talk about the bad stuff. I got the words out, and they did me the courtesy of going away.

Sort of. During that time, I kept journals. I only wrote in them when I was depressed or angry or frustrated—emotional and in the moment. Anyone who reads them now would think I was a horrible train-wreck of a person because only the bad stuff got written. There was plenty of good stuff going on at the same time, but I didn’t need to make sense of it or to purge it. The bad stuff needed purging, so that’s what I wrote.

I still have these journals. I don’t want to read them again, which some people might say is cowardly. I know better. They are dangerous. As I reorganize my house over the next few weeks, I’m going to shred those journals. I don’t want anyone reading them and feeling hurt by my words. Especially me. It’s time to clean house.

Memoir is different from those journals, anyway. My old journals whine a tedious “woe is me” lament. Memoir, on the other hand, examines events from some distance and puts those events in perspective. Memoir turns memories into meaning. Reflection, perspective, and honesty are critical to this process. So is compassion—for oneself and for others. A healthy dose of humor also helps.

Most people think their lives aren’t worthy of memoir. Socrates—no ordinary man himself—said, “The unexamined life isn’t worth living.” Bit melodramatic, Socrates, but he had a good point. Ordinary lives, examined carefully, really do become extraordinary. Many of my essays take ordinary events and show how meaningful and rich they are. The essays take small things—Snuggle-Bunnies, for example, or a piece of Godiva chocolate—and fit them into the bigger scheme of life.

Writing—good writing, at least—isn’t about a great mind putting down great thoughts in great prose. Thank goodness because my mind is far from great! Good writing is about discovery and evolution. The best papers I wrote in college and graduate school started from ignorance, with a question I wanted to answer. I once wrote a twelve-page research paper because I wondered why there were so many tree stumps in Michelangelo’s art. I never answered the question of Michelangelo’s stumps in my paper; I just explored possible explanations for their presence. The professor liked the paper so much he advised me to turn it into a master’s thesis.

You don’t need answers to write interestingly about a topic; you just need questions and a curious mind. In fact, the best questions rarely have an answer. They have lots of answers.

Or no answer at all.

“Learn as much by writing as by reading,” Lord Acton said. He was right. Words—and how we use them—shape our attitude and our perceptions of the world. After a year of blogging my life and writing little mini-memoirs of my experiences, I’ve learned to move more confidently toward the positive, to at least try to see the humor in unpleasant situations, to take a bigger perspective so the little troubles don’t take over, to walk a little further down the road of forgiveness, to examine my life as the wonderful gift it is.

Thanks for joining me during this first year of questioning my intelligence. I’m having a blast and hope you are, too.

More Questioning

I have started a second blog about autism called (surprise!) Questioning Autism. For those who don't know, I am writing a book on autism, and this new blog is basically to help with that project. I would like Questioning Autism to evolve into a useful resource for other parents and family members of people with autism.

Each week, I will post a question asking people in the autism community to share their answers either in the comments or via email. Most of the questions will probably be aimed at parents but other relatives, teachers, doctors, and therapists are welcome to add their two cents anytime. As time goes on, I'll also add links to useful resources and information on other blogs and websites.

I know many of you will not be interested in subscribing to Questioning Autism, but if you know anyone who has or works with a child on the autism spectrum, please forward this link to them. Also, any ideas you have for promoting the blog online would really help, too. My online friend Joan B kindly promoted Questioning Autism and Autism Awareness Month on her blog, Paperlicious. I've linked to her blog before because it's so funny and her stamping is divine, so if you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it!

For those of you who are part of the autism community, I am asking for constructive input, suggestions for things I can do to make the blog more helpful and interesting, sites I could link to, questions I could ask, etc. I really appreciate any help or suggestions anyone can give!

For those of you who subscribe to Questioning my Intelligence, thanks so much for your support and encouragement and comments and emails. You have no idea how grateful I am. Next essay coming soon...be prepared to laugh!

And Now for Something Completely Different...

No, you haven’t fallen into a script for Monty Python, the British comedy show that obsessed my darling husband years ago and which still takes up valuable synapses of his brain. No Dead Parrot Sketch today, gentle readers, but we are going to talk about something completely different: metablogging.

Ooooh, what a hook! Metablogging. Makes you want to keep reading, doesn’t it?

If you’re scratching your head wondering what the heck metablogging is, I’m not surprised because I first came across this term in the secure and very strange corners of my own brain. It popped magically into my head Monday after I woke at 5:00 a.m. unable to fall back asleep. Here’s your chance to see the random and bizarre turns my brain takes that lull me away from sleep so frequently. Aren’t you lucky?

Upon waking, it dawned on me that I didn’t have a completed essay for this week, though several are started and will wait patiently for me to get back to them when I feel like it. So I contemplated what I’m doing in my life now that might interest my forty or so regular readers plus the poor innocents who accidentally click on my blog.

Hmm. I’ve been reading several books about brain development and something called “the reading brain.” (Yes, I’m a geek, in case you had forgotten.) These books have me thinking a lot about how we think, otherwise known as metacognition, a term I dredged up from somewhere deep in my brain in synapses formed in college. I think.

Anyway, if metacognition is thinking about thinking, then of course blogging about blogging would be metablogging. Right?

Sadly, I discovered in a quick Google search that I did not coin this clever new term. As usual, I’m entering into a trend late, which is par for the course of my life, actually. Metablogging, it turns out, is something of a hot topic among bloggers. I make no claim that thinking up words like “metablogging” is normal, but at least my brain is not alone in the way it thinks, which is some comfort to me. Oddity loves company every bit as much as misery.

Anyway, the idea of blogging about blogging intrigues me so I thought I'd show you a glimpse behind the scenes.

You, dear reader, fascinate me. You take valuable time out of your life to read my random blatherings, which I try to keep to sub-five-minute bursts. You have no idea how hard this is for me and how many brilliant sentences and paragraphs I delete in the interests of not trying your patience. Having spent years editing other people’s writing does not make editing my own any easier. Because I know how valuable your time is, I really do try to give you my best—and briefest—no matter how painful it is to me.

When I started this blog almost five months ago, I thought only my mother and sister would keep reading past the first essay. They are obligated by the closest bonds of blood, and it would hurt my feelings if they didn’t read it every week. All I expected from the rest of my friends and family (who received pesky emails that first month) was that they check it out. Beyond that, I figured a random handful might stick with it but most would probably roll their eyes and say to themselves, “Susan has waaayyy too much free time on her hands.”

Happily, I was totally wrong and more than a handful of friends and family have offered amazing encouragement and support, which drove me to submit my first-ever article for publication. No word yet from the magazine, but thank you from the bottom of my heart for getting me over my fear and acting on that life goal.

What totally floors me, though, is the number of complete and total strangers who have signed on. That strangers would click on my blog did occur to me; but that those strangers would stay, read, and even sometimes subscribe to Questioning boggles my mind and fills my heart with profound gratitude.

What do I know about you, my kind readers? If you are one of the ten or so who read this blog through various feed services like Windows RSS and Google Reader, you’re just a number on my subscriber count—except for Joan B, who introduced me to Google Reader. She reads and comments, so I suspect she’s one of the Google Reader subscribers. Please check out her blog. Even if you’re not a stamper, you’ll enjoy Joan’s rollicking sense of humor and wonderful artwork.

Thirty of you subscribe to my blog via FeedBurner, which supplies me with your email addresses. I personally know 21 of these subscribers. One of you (whom I don’t know in real life) has an email address based in Brazil. How cool is that? Hello, Brazil!

If one of you unsubscribes, I get an email notifying me of your rejection. I tell you this so you will feel horribly guilty if you quit me, but I promise not to flood your inbox with pathetic emails begging you to take me back. I’ll just eat chocolate until I get over it. It’ll take a lot of chocolate, though, and if I cease fitting into my skinny jeans, it’ll be all your fault.

Depending on how blog-savvy you are, you may or may not know that bloggers can monitor direct hits to their blogs. I use SiteMeter for this. For many hits, I can see the IP address or server, what country the click came from, what internet page referred the reader to my page, and how long the reader stayed. If you check it out (see the sidebar for a link), you’ll notice an alarming number of people whose stay is 0 seconds. I try not to take this personally.

In addition to my delighted astonishment at the number of hits I get, I never expected the SiteMeter information would be so, well, informative. For example, people from Singapore, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Finland, England, France, Germany, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and even China have clicked in. To celebrate this world-wide readership I tried to find an audio clip of “It’s a Small World, After All” but only came across a creepy video clip of the Disney ride on YouTube, which I will spare you the torture of experiencing. Instead, please chime in with a chorus of “It’s a Small World” yourself—come on, you know that you know the words. Lovely.

Now that song is in your head instead of mine. Thank you.

I also know what Google searches lead people here. The most interesting search hits land on my Bike Porn essay and show the sad limitations of Google technology. Consider the person who lives in Alkmaar, Netherlands, who searched “juicy backside porn hub” and ended up on my blog. Somehow, I don’t think this person got what he/she expected. There were similar search hits from people in Egypt; Kiskunlachaza, Hungary; Billancourt, France; and Pompano Beach, Florida.

Don’t you feel sorry for these poor souls whom Google let down so badly? When I wrote that essay, I never expected to stand between perverts and their porn, but so far, I have disappointed people on three continents. Why does this make me want to giggle?

Blogging has proven very educational for me. You have no idea how excited I was when I successfully installed the SiteMeter and FeedBurner code. It made me feel very internet savvy when, in fact, I am not. For all I know, the internet is run by squirrels and pulleys. I’m no Al Gore. But blogging has taught me a few interesting skills, like how to name a hyperlink (that’s what the little icon of earth with a chain does—who knew?) and how to follow directions for cutting and pasting code that really just looks like gibberish to me. I’ve also learned to edit html code to make words italic or bold. If you know the code for strike-through, please share. I think I could have fun with that.

Hopefully, reading my blog is educational for you, too. I’ll bet most of you have never heard of Kiskunlachaza, Hungary, but now you know it exists and at least one pervert lives there. I’ll also bet it was news to you that there is a sub-genre of pornography—not the metaphorical porn I blogged about—that involves bikes. Sometimes in the process of questioning my intelligence, I learn things we’d all rather not know. Instead of dwelling on perversion, why not distract yourself by trying out that little earth-and-chain icon in your next email. It’s, like, totally cool!

And speaking of hyperlinks, let’s end our exploration of metablogging with something completely different…The Dead Parrot Sketch.

Enjoy.