More to do Have I

And so, it comes down to this: I am afraid.
I start this blog but never post to it. I talk about grad school but don't study for the GRE. I dream about spending my life talking about books and religion but still am answering phones.

To be afraid is to be comfortable, and afraid and comfortable are two things that I don't ever want to be.

So it begins. The reality of it. The marination.



More to do have I.

And now for something completely different

I have been reading a lot of blogs lately, trying to understand how they work. But the truth is, I don't have a kitchy idea, so I don't know how to make this work.
At least that's what I thought. I don't know. I suppose I've decided that this is less about other people and more about me. Which means, screw you kitchy idea.

I have been in the process of reconsidering spending time with Confessions again. I want to know how to explore the the roles that predominately Christian acts are recreated in a secular society. Not as a judgment or a suggestion, but rather as a platform to being conversation. I like to be able to combine prose with music in a new way, as a statement.
Because I don't know how to not be po mo.

Meow.

To get sick of this theme very quickly

I am thinking today of social networking, and how it allows us to linger, and how it allows us to completely disconnect ourselves from people. It's funny to me to think that it means something that I'm in relationship and it's really real because it's "Facebook official." What does that even mean? As a couple who has no interest in having things like rings or a marriage license, why is that something that we think needs to be shared with everyone, including people who don't know us? (To be fair, my boyfriend deleted his Facebook.) Is it pride? or is it loneliness?
To go back to the previous thought, though. I was thinking about how one might linger by staying Facebook friends with people that you are no longer friends with, and what that does to the psyche. To be able to look at photographs and feel pleasure to discover that so-and-so has gotten fat, to feel regret to see that he or she has a partner that's not you, or even just to see a face on a screen but not in person and how that can make you feel connected, or make you feel like breaking your computer screen in half.

In truth, I find myself wanting to use things like Facbook more for professional reasons, but I'm not sure what that means or how doing so blurs the boundaries of professional and private. I find myself mostly using Facebook to keep up with my reasonably large family who shares a private page. It does make it easier as we are all spread across the east (coast? None of us are really on the coast except my parents). But it also makes it easier to not call. And, actually, one of my three sisters doesn't use Facebook at all. She had one, but they kicked her off of it because she was using the pseudonym and they didn't think "it's my cats' Facebook" was a good enough reason for a weird name. 
I'm not sure what that means either.


I think I'd like to take a class on all of this, because I do find it fascinating, and I'm intrigued by the psychology and sociology of this disparate inter-connectivity. But, at the same time, I can't stand it. Because I'd really like to go get coffee with someone and be able to hold them and smell them than communicate via email.

To Use Only Prepositional Phrases.

I just spent the morning researching coffee and day dreaming about what the flavors described would taste like. I am drinking yesterdays coffee. A lot of mistakes were made this morning. Mostly the one where I was fifteen minutes late to work.
I've decided to spend my day reading philosophy: communications philosophies, leadership theories, coffee philosophy. Coffee Philosophy would be a great title to an atrocious book. Probably about teenagers or people in their early twenties. Probably female. Probably white. I just stereotyped a book up. It's that easy to make millions, clearly.
But truthfully, coffee philosophy is something I really believe in. Not to the extent that I would make a website about it, I don't think. But, then again, I made a website about myself. Several, in fact.
It's the relationship to the world that comes about from thinking about coffee and the ways that it exists as a symbol. You can't unstir the cream from your coffee. You measure your life in coffee spoons. It's the best part of waking up. And the process, too, of coffee. Very important.
Because you begin with hundreds of very small things that are alike but not the same. And ground them down until they are the same. Then you scald them with hot water and drink them. Absurd when you really think about it. More absurd if you think they have feelings. But there's a coming together and the formation of a new thing when you make coffee, and the same is true when you drink it.

I haven't written about coffee so intensely since I was 18.


I'm going to be done now.

To Begin

To consider life is too broad. To consider words is too overwhelming. To consider the relationship between life and words may cause cerebral hemorrhaging. And yet...

I am not a student anymore, and I thought, often, that once I wasn't a student, I would read so much more. This is not the case. Life caught up with me and I forgot about books, about other peoples and my own. I neglected journaling and I certainly avoided the concept of putting that journaling out to the world. But, in an effort to shirk my Luddite tendencies, I suppose I can face this fear. With a great deal of trepidation, but facing it, no less.

I think, though, or rather, it is making me think about the ease that comes with using social media, a Facebook post here, a Tweet there. Things that the world can see if they Google my name (why would they Google my name? I don't know). But this, with anonymity intact as much as I choose, is somehow harder.
Perhaps it is simply that we are social creatures, but being social creatures does not mean that we share our hearts with society. In truth, a protester and I probably get much closer with a sign than I do when I get coffee with a friend.

But such is the power of the written word.