Goals

I have always been fascinated by the concept of self-improvement. Its glittery promises beckon like a snake-oil barker at a country fair. Possibilities are limitless. The world is your oyster. What you want is within your grasp; you just have to reach out and take it. There's something about the concept of potential that I've always found dreamy and mesmerizing and, somehow, safe. It's a place in my head where everything is perfect and new and sparkly and clean and I haven't done anything to screw it up yet. Potential is as soothing, and addictive, as an opiate.


While I won't stoop to actually buying books on self-improvement, I check them out from the library in large numbers. Overcome with shame at my basic inability to get my shit together, I read them as surruptitiously as one might puruse a porno mag on a crowded bus. I dread the thought of someone asking me, "What are you reading?" And the hellish thing is, someone always asks me this question when I'm reading a book on self-improvement. It never fails. Noel Coward? Franz Kafka? Albert Camus? I'm left to my own devices. No one ever asks me if, say, Crime and Punishment is any good. But when you hold a book whose cover consists of large gold letters, lots of exclamation points, and a squirrely-looking guy in a too-tight suit pointing an accusatory index finger in your direction, suddenly it's Q&A time and you're doing a book review for the stranger sitting next to you in the little waiting room at the podiatrist's office. (Don't people understand that I read in order to avoid human contact? But that's a post for another day.)

So what do I want to accomplish in this blog? What do I want to improve? Heady thoughts to ponder. Let's put that off for another day (lol) and address it in tomorrow's post.

Once More, Into the Breach

I created this blog in 2007.

Since that time, I've posted nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Yet I can't seem to bring myself to pull the proverbial plug, cannot seem to acknowledge that setting up this account was a Grave Error in Judgment. What the hell am I doing here, lurking in my own empty blog after lo these many moons? For me to even write this inaugural post after such a lengthy time is akin to giving a dying plant just enough water to keep it alive.

Cruel, really. But don't we all have a plant like this in our lives? -- You got it as a gift months ago; now it's all yellow and brown and it smells a little funny and the leaves are dropping off and crunching underfoot. It still sits wrapped in its shiny green tin foil that you never bothered to remove. You ignore it for weeks at a time, and yet you feel oddly responsible for it....you feel a vague, gnawing guilt when you think of throwing it out. (Come to think of it, this last sentence applies, word for word, to your feelings about your husband. But that is a post for another day.)

You know, something could happen here, and I'd be off the hook. Something completely out of my control, absolving me of any and all responsibility. Blogger could evaporate tomorrow. My computer could crash. The earth could stop revolving on its axis and we could all be hurled violently into the nether regions of the universe. Then I wouldn't have to Be the Responsible Party. Because, if there's anything that I hate more in this world than Being the Responsible Party, I don't know what it is.

I think I'll just wait to see what develops. Maybe the cat will knock the little plant over and spill its soil onto the carpet and chew on its desiccated leaves, thus dispatching it from this earth forever. It is going to be out of my hands. I cannot, I must not, take it upon myself to end its fragile existence. Because it clings tenuously to life.

It waits, sadly, patiently, for water.