I kept a Livejournal – still have it, in fact, though now long abandoned – starting in 2000, I think. The year I graduated high school, the year I moved out, only to move back four months later. In the years since it has been a running documentary of my life, from the simple to the complex, in hindsight an obvious chart of my emotional growth. It also contains some of the most personal and powerful moments of my life – my move to Warren, learning I was pregnant, the challenges of Greyson’s cerebral palsy, and perhaps most in detail, the 8 year war of hope and grief at my mother’s cancer diagnosis, and subsequent death. As many do, I used writing as a coping mechanism, a way to sort out my thoughts with language so I could file them away where they belonged and keep moving, always moving.  When any creativity would grind to a halt, I’d try to counter it with something new. One of those things was LJ Idol, a writing contest for livejournal users that mimicked the format of American Idol in that there was a theme each week and the lowest amount of votes would result in removal from the contest. I never won – always petered out of the contest somewhere within the first few weeks – but always enjoyed the challenge.

This particular one was about what terrifies me, and it has remained with me all these years later as perhaps the most complete description of what haunts my brain. I still have this dream all these years later and it wrecks me every time.

whoosh. click. whoosh. click. whoosh. click.

The sound of an artificial respirator.

whoosh. click. whoosh. click. whoosh. click.

I heard it steadily over the course of days, and no matter what I was doing, that sound was always there, at the back of my head.

whoosh. click. whoosh. click. whoosh. click.

When it stopped, the silence was unbearable.

There are a lot of things I’m afraid of. Spiders, insects, the thought of another 4 years of a Republican White House, growing an extra toe or eye. But terrified? If you had asked me years ago I would have kept it at spiders. I really hate spiders.

But when I think of the word terrified, it seems to me like it would be something immobilizing, something that petrifies you and makes you unable to think or act as you normally would. I can kill a spider, no problem. I don’t like it and it creeps me right the hell out, but I have the ability. Spiders don’t terrify me, but the idea of losing my family sure does.

whoosh. click. whoosh. click. whoosh. click.

In this journal I’ve done a lot of expounding and analyzing and whining and crying over the loss of my mother and how it affected me on more than the superficial level of grief. When you’re a kid, at least when I was a kid, the idea that your parents would die seems so far off. In some ways I was pretty convinced mine were invincible. I mean, it was pretty clear they had eyes in the back of their heads and the ability to read minds, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume they would also live forever. That illusion was cracked when my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and shattered completely when she passed.

whoosh. click. whoosh. click. whoosh. click.

Ever since then, I’ve had these horrible dreams where my dad will get really sick and be in a coma in a hospital, and my brother will be driving too fast trying to get to him, and they’ll both die. I wake up in a cold sweat, just unable to function until the thought is out of my head. Or Warren, Greyson and I will be in the car, just going to the grocery store, and there’s an accident and I’m the only who survives. Or we end up at the wrong place at the wrong time in a bad part of town. It’s never me – I never die with them. I think if I did, I wouldn’t be so bothered. But sitting outside of it, I’m definitely bothered.

whoosh. click. whoosh. click. whoosh. click.

The worst is the dream of being in the hospital, perfectly healthy, with three beds and an incubator in front of me. All I hear is the sound of four respirators. I have no idea how they get there, it just starts with me, my head in my hands, and those four things in front of me under the harsh florescent lighting of a hospital room. I can’t see anyone in the beds, but I know who’s there. It’s my family, and the idea of being without them is terrifying.

whoosh. click. whoosh. click.

Then the respirators stop.

Just rolling this post out with a non sequitur.

Christmas is nearly here and as a result all of my holiday spirit evaporates by the time my car hits the open road, because Christmas seems to drive my fellow man to forget everything he or she ever learned about driving. I am trying to let it go because it’s Christmas and we’re all equally in a hurry to get to the Target before Twilight  and Hello Kitty Island Adventure are sold out, but it’s difficult. My road rage sustains me. It is my outlet for all other raging. You know what happens when people drive well? I learn all the lyrics to Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci”. Don’t contribute to my husband’s scorn, continue to drive like idiots. It’s for the best.

I got the swag and it’s pumpin’ out my ovaries

(in free verse)

I would rather do cartwheels

handsprings

triple toe loops and

quadruple axels

down a stretch of old asphalt

in the Arizona desert

in a bikini with

no sunscreen on this amazing

blindingly white

sun-resistant

Irish-Scottish-German-Cherokee-Sioux-Iroquois

already sunburned skin

in the scorching heat of

Mid-July

with no source of water nearby

with crowds of people watching

as the asphalt gives way to sharp gravel

and I end my

ill-advised gymnastic extravaganza

with a triple backflip-somersault-twist

and land in the splits

than clean one more thing in this house today.

One of the things I admire most about personal bloggers is their willingness to share all parts of their lives with an audience. There are those who think writing about yourself, your life, is an easy thing – and for some, it may be, but how often do you sit down with people you don’t know and talk about events or feelings that are deeply personal to you? It’s terrifying and cathartic. 

I can’t do it. I’m afraid. 

I have all of these things inside me, this massive coil of emotion that just tumbles and writhes in my brain and my guts and when I sit down to get them out, I’m paralyzed by my fears. What if someone reads and gets the wrong impression? What if they judge me harshly? What if I get too personal, and the people I love are hurt by what I have to say?  What if I talk openly about my children, and they find it later in life and are upset by it?  These are the things that scare me, and keep me from an outlet that I think would be really therapeutic if I could just spit them out, jump that hurdle, break through that wall. 

So this post is the anatomy of my fear, and the core of it is the fear of loosening the grip I have, the control I have over my image on the internet. It’s a security blanket, a heavy one I’ve had wrapped around me for 14 years. Here I can be anything, anyone. No one has to know my flaws, my shortcomings, unless I want them to. No one has to know how gauche and awkward I feel around people, or how unsteady my footing is when I’m in a new situation, or how little confidence I have in anything that’s important to me, or how I have to analyze every tiny little thing in order to get it to sit comfortably in my head. 

On a rational level I understand what a false and childish comfort that is – people always see more than you think, and usually more than you want them to, even in this vast anonymous sea. I don’t flatter myself that I’m the only person who feels like this, either – I think people as a whole function like a cell; here we all are, small but not insignificant, our true selves surrounded by varying levels of cytoplasmic distance depending on your comfort level, with ribosomes of friends and family the only ones allowed inside that shell of who you want to be perceived as being. We are complicated creatures and for all I feel apart, I recognize that I am but one of many who feel the same way. 

I want to change, though. I want to be more open. I want to discuss with you, whoever you may be, the things that make me tick. I want to be able to tell you how guilty I feel for being short-tempered with my children over stupid things, or not spending enough quality time with my husband. I want to tell you how I am afraid of failure and success in equal measure, and dissect why that is. I’d love to share with you why I am always surprised to have friends, and such good ones. So I hope that if I keep working, keep banging my head against this wall, I can break through it and do so. 

Wish me luck.

Embarrassing.

I have no defense here. I am not timely. I haven’t prioritized sharing my offline presence with my online presence. If we’re being honest – and I try to be because frankly a good portion of my life contains events that couldn’t be made up even if I wanted them to be – I internalize a lot of my crap because I like to sit on it and hug it tight and love it forever before I break up with it and post it on the internet. Thus, last post, 2009. 

In a lot of ways I feel like my relationship with online blogging is unhealthy. I mean, if you were dating a person who kept promising they’d be better and then constantly did not, and in fact, did worse, I suspect you’d be out the door. Then they’d beg you to take them back and you’d give them another chance and they just do it again and again. 

So, I’m sorry, Internet. I won’t tell you I’ll do better. I can only tell you that I’ll try. 

Meanwhile, I really, really need to bitch about traffic. I am a restive person. I rarely get upset. I like to save my negative energy for anxiety and rage-fueled rants on the world wide webs. But for the LOVE of GOD I cannot COPE with people who INTERRUPT THE FLOW OF MERGE TRAFFIC. Can I talk to you about this, persons reading this who have clearly hit the bottom of the internet? Because the way I understand it – maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it - when two lanes merge into one and it is not an on/off ramp, it goes one car, next car, one car, next car, right? A simple 1-1-1-1 pattern? Yet there are assholes in the world who seem to think they have accomplished some event in their life that gives them the privelege of DOING IT WRONG. Are you that person, the one that sees a lane closed sign and drives all the way to the very last possible cone before turning your blinker on, passing any number of available merge spots in your pursuit to get to the top of the list, like you’re some kind of cheetah in pursuit of dinner? Except there’s no actual dinner here to pursue and instead you’ve just pissed off 8 other drivers because you pulled a dick move. Don’t be that person. Be a friend. Take an open spot. 

Don’t be the person who tries to squeeze in to a spot where a vehicle has already let another car in front of them, either. That guy has done his part. It is your job as the merger to remember the pattern, one car, next car. If you speed up to get in front of that guy, you’re being a dick. Don’t be a dick. Brake and try the car behind him. If that car won’t let you in, that car is being a dick. 

What I’m saying here is, respect the flow of traffic. It is designed to get you there as quickly and safely as possible. And who knows, you may do it to me and it may be my moment to snap and then I will follow you home and send you a really sternly-worded letter about personal responsibility, and you do not want that.

Four months later – hello! In my absence I have cooked many things and also had a baby. Amazing, is it not? And since Greyson dumped a glass of iced tea in my laptop while I was feeding said baby, I also have a new laptop. Parenthood, it is a challenging and unexpectedly expensive thing.

Still plugging away at a new design (and perhaps an new URL! stay tuned.) and with my toddler’s current obsession with getting out of bed the second we shut the door, time is at a premium. As is sleep, but that’s actually good training for the new kid. As a result, dinner has been relatively uneventful and dessert has been popsicles, thus the lack of recent posts. And to top that off, my nesting instinct has kicked in and I am compelled to clean out and organize every cabinet and drawer in the kitchen. I am pretty sure this is my husband’s favorite part of life, period.

I did try an interesting experiment this evening, prompted by the monthly challenge in the LJ bakebakebake community: being creative with a box of cake mix. I can’t tell you what I did else I’ll give it away, but I think I’ll nail it down on the next try. Meanwhile, the Bi-Monthly Menu of Doom for this half of the month consists entirely of recipes from Mark Bittman’s “How To Cook Everything” and while all three things thus far have been delicious – the matambre in particular, and I will, in fact, write that up tomorrow – I can’t help but feel that NO ONE CARES about my penne alla vodka from tonight because it contained 5 ingredients. Similarly, the brown jambalaya was terrific, but not only was it very simple it photographs very poorly. Let’s be honest, no one wants to see a bowl of raw chicken, or “chopped” raw sausage. It’s just not visually appealing.

So, that’s the scoop for now, my goal is to have the secret experiment solid by the end of next week and the website up by the end of this weekend (yeah, right). We’ll see how that works out.

I am having the most ridiculous formatting issues with my posts, so expect a new look sometime in the near future. Perhaps a look that will not force me to edit and re-edit and re-edit trying to find the magic spacing combination to keep my divs from floating all over the place. Argh.

There is an unholy and desperately sad kind of amusement in preparing for a steak a poivre dinner while simultaneously making lemon-blackberry tarts (to be posted soon!) and having to run back to the computer to be reminded of how to bake a potato.

Pregnancy, thy name is brain-dead.

[14:54] <@Ali> no, there’s a stone you bake bread in your oven on
[14:54] <@Ali> wow
[14:55] <@Ali> let me try that again
[14:55] <@Ali> there’s a stone upon which you bake bread in your oven
[14:56] <@Cal>  Ali: Stupid prepositions! Complicating up where words go in!
[14:56] <+Sindri> A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
[14:58]  <@yellowgoat> Preposition placement is something I never much cared for.
[14:59] <@Ali> As long as it’s not superfluous, it doesn’t matter overly much to me where people put their prepositions at.