Month: July 2003

Today, after work, we went to Fred Meyer for a while, because it’s air conditioned and our house can get kind of stifling around 5-ish. No particular shopping mission, which was kinda fun…looked at the rubbermaid stuff, the furniture, lamps, clothes….

And ended up in the shoe section. I’ve been meaning to buy new sneakers for at least six months, but I’m cheap and picky, a bad combination. However, today turned up a couple of good sales, and C. persuaded me to spend a little cash on my footwear (since my feet are sort of problematic)…so I bought two. 🙂

Now if only I could find the right pair of sandals.

I’ve been chewing on bb/Shelley’s latest….

I have three (maybe four) “real” friends in my “virtual/blog” world, and a couple more who I’m sure are out there, reading but not blogging. two are people I’d lost track of entirely in the real world, one on purpose, so to speak, and one by the vagrancies of life.

oddly, Gus and I weren’t terribly close when we were teenagers, and she went by Jill…age and school meant a lot more at that age. now I follow her writing and her life with much more of a sense of participation, even if a lot of the references remain obscure.

K, on the other hand, found me first, in part of a vast soap-opera story of which blogging is only the latest chapter. (it’s a story with everything: friendship, family, love, lust, birth, fighting, world travel, and band camp. in fact, we were group-blogging before there was a Web.)

and Kat, well, Kat’s just my best friend. I love that she’s on the Web, with her own weblog…which I’d been bugging her about for a long time before she started. (not reading her writing? go, start now. give her a job, too.)

(the fourth person? well, I’m hoping Joe will go beyond our little round robin experiment….)

aside from my friend/bloggers, I know that Tom is out there someplace, maybe lurking, maybe not, same with my baby sister Elizabeth. (Edith — yes, our parents did that — I don’t know about. I wonder, but I haven’t asked. more about that later.)

same with C., I guess (my site is the home page on our browsers at home); he’s more interested in Snapping Links than in this stuff.

I get this eerie feeling sometimes, when I realize that someone I know in “real” life is reading what I write online. I’ve long had a (potentially dangerous, IMO) tendency to compartmentalize my life; when people I knew from one social group met people from another group, I used to call it “when worlds collide.” (my relationship with C involved a major “when worlds collide” moment.) I’m not always sure who to be.

which I think makes those moments good for me; I learn how to negotiate without a net.

the moment that I used to wonder about, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with dread, was if K and Edith collided here. then I told her that I’d been in touch with him, and stood my ground on how that is for me, and it turned out okay. (learning that I shouldn’t assume how other people will react.) and now I don’t care, or at least I don’t think I care.

I am hungry to turn the “virtual” friends into real ones, though, which is probably a sign of how isolated my personal life is at the moment. but even without that, I’ve come to like and sometimes even admire people through their writing — people like Shelley, Dorothea, Anita, AKMA, the other Elaine, Ralph — for all their strengths and faults and quirks. (I really wish that going to Seattle wasn’t such a slog; those weblogging meetups sound like fun.)

today I itch. now I’m drowsy (up way early this morning), but can’t really sleep. grrrr.

turns about to be a streak of red pain going down one side of my back. I am surly. (fireworks weren’t that bad, managed to get to sleep at a reasonable hour.)

it wasn’t that hot – I’m just cranky because I got a bit of a sunburn…while laying out on the “beach” napping, watching a great blue heron, and writing! (also saw a deer while walking back to the car; very cool.)

yeah, I had this burst of inspiration while dozing early this afternoon; it’ll be a lot of work, but now I know what I’m doing with my novel, and part of why the ending was so weak. (one reason: it’s just the middle.) I wrote several pages while watching the lovely day.

now if only the neighbor kids (I thought they were going camping this weekend?) don’t set off fireworks too long tonight, and it’ll be a good holiday.

either it’s hot, or it rains, depending. noisy semi-legal fireworks. oh, and they mowed down the “meadow” (abandoned lot) around the corner, where the grass had grown up to my shoulder (lovely to walk through on the sidewalk)…to put up a fireworks stand…that’s a church fundraiser. one of their signs says “NO TAX” in big letters — because it’s a fundraiser. ugh. “celebrate the birth of your country by blowing a small piece of it up” indeed.

OSCon in Portland – can’t go to the actual conference of course. way too much money. but I wonder if the (free!) exhibitor’s hall would count as work.

I’m wishing I’d realized this was going to be so close much, much earlier – then there would’ve been a prayer that I could’ve gone to the XML and/or PHP tracks for work.

I want a soda. (scary but true: at first I said to myself “I want a pop.”)

I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.