In which the newbie blogger rationalizes why she is weighting down cyberspace with her stuff

Blogging is one of those twenty-first century things that up to now has eluded and bewildered me. Come to think of it, up to this year, so did Facebook and photo-sharing which I also began in the last few months. Maybe I'm going straight to hell...or Hades...



I remember reading an newspaper article about 10 years ago about journalling and diaries. It was some kind of New Year series and journals were wedged between weight loss and meditation, I think. One of the journallers remarked that he kept a journal so the passing years wouldn't recede into long blank spaces, which is basically my excuse. I've kept a diary of some kind since I was ten. I was inspired by Anne Frank and named my diary "Aurora" because Anne addressed her entries to "Kitty" and when I was ten, I thought Aurora was the most beautiful name in the world. I wanted to be just like Anne Frank (preferably without dying in Bergen-Belsen). One thing I did learn from her was that you didn't have to write in your diary every day. So I wrote, sometimes daily, sometimes not for months at a time.

About fifteen or so years ago, I read the books by Ira Progoff on his journal workshops, and although I never attended the workshops, I got in the habit of trying to use my journals to step back and see blocks of time. Sometimes I try to look at a day, or a decade. Every year, I do a "run-down" of the year, for easy examination. Now, theoretically, this should take at most, 12 days if I do a month each day. It never works out that way. What usually happens is that I nip through the first months quite quickly and then spend days, even weeks, trying to get the summer into a brief narrative. (Summer is when Persephone returns home; in my case, I return to Victoria, British Columbia to visit my mother and because the thought of spending 12 solid weeks in the sticky grip of Ottawan humidity is more than I can bear.) There are two problems that arise from this activity: 1) I get to agonize each year about the fact that I only seem to be truly alive for two months or less a year; 2) while I'm trying to capsulize, I don't get any other journalling done and spend each January wondering what I did for the first quarter of the previous year. I thought an online blog might fill in the blank, and reassure me that I have some sort of life beyond instinctive breathing from January to April.



Today, the Resident Fan Boy and I took younger daughter to see The Water Horse, a pleasant little movie -- sort of "ET lands in Scotland and Frees Willy with the Whale Rider". This was made in (mostly) New Zealand by an American production team with (mostly) English actors (yay, David Morrisey!) with some Scots and New Zealanders thrown in, so I got the impression that somebody was a little confused about the differences between Scots and Irish. The characters kept exclaiming stuff like "Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" and "Holy Mackerel" which seemed a bit odd for Presbyterians (presumably) in 1942 to say, and the end titles rolled with Sinead O'Connor crooning away prettily, followed by a very Chieftain-esque instrumental. Maybe I missed something. Still, younger daughter was entranced, and the Resident Fan Boy didn't nod off, the highest praise of all. (I still haven't forgiven him for sleeping through The Seventh Seal.)