Ah, therapy.
First of all, I'm an anti-blogger blogger. That is, I don't really read other people's blogs much, and I don't really think it's particularly right for most folks. Or me, for that matter.
But, I have always had aspirations to write, and for lots of reasons never kicked the rust off the tires, to fracture a metaphor. Now I'm doing this as a form of therapy (see below) and to ease into the practice of writing regularly - even if I have nothing to say. Scratch that, I've always got something to say, it's just not particularly profound a large part of the time. Just like most folks.
Secondly, this isn't my first blog. OK, so I'm a hypocrite! My first blog was an invitation-only setup through my hospital, to keep friends and family informed about an illness I was going through. It was an exercise in sheer laziness, in that I didn't want to have to tell 40 people the same thing over and over, individually. It also helped me keep track of my illness from a management perspective, and enabled me to get a handle on it by explaining it to others. 1ST ADAGE: You don't really understand something well until you explain it to others.
But the illness is overcome now, and there's no point to that blog any more. I'll talk about that blog at some point, but since it and the illness for which it existed aren't important at the moment, I'll go on to other things for now.
I call this 'creative dissonance' because I am a sea of contradictions, and those contradictions define me and my limits, and strengths, and thus are the motif I will follow.
Some of those contradictions I will explore:
Hopeful skeptic
Sports fan feminist
Cynical idealist
Optimist by nature, pessimist in practice
Utterly failed perfectionist
High-culture maven & rock n' roll enthusiast
Snarky boy scout
Pacifist road rager
Polymath wannabe
Apocalypse Now and Sound of Music...
...and I suspect you get the idea by now.
How does someone live with all these contradictions? Well, having a very tolerant partner is a must, to keep bitterness, etc at bay. A vicious sense of humor comes in handy. And a quiet distance from most everyday troubles seems to be key.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not sitting under a tree in homemade sandals chewing bark and writing on a wooden tablet that miraculously finds the net somehow. I'm married, have three dogs and two cats, a mortgage, and pay fairly close attention to my community, a college town. I used to work, but that's a long story (for the future). Now I sit and rot my brain on Netflix and Civilization (video game) and do not much else. Time for a change, and this blog is part of that.
So the main 'therapy' part of this is to put my slightly above average brain to figuring out how someone moves from the above contradictions into a reasonably fully realized and functioning human being. Should be good for some yuks along the way (at my expense, mostly).
OK, not being a 'pro' at this, this seems like enough to get started. Out into the blogosphere...
