Imagine How You'll Feel...

I have become one of them. Only when life is calm, or lends itself easily to an entry, do these people write new entries. It's frustrating when you've begun reading someone's page and then they are absent for days, weeks, months! As someone who has kept a diary since age 8, I can attest that a blog, like a journal, is thrilling at first. You vow to write every day so as to later look back at all the things that have faded out of memory. But after a day, a week, a month, life crowds the words out and all you're left with is a cheesy notebook cover 98% full of blank pages. Oh, the waste! Now, if you ever become famous, you will have to fabricate your memoirs, piecing together what once was, with what you now imagine it was. It's bad enough to let yourself down with an empty diary, but a blog. (Okay, not this one, since to my knowledge, very few people even know about it or have even ventured to the location - and by the way, it seems a silly thing to mention, to promote, so I admit that part of it is that I've not made it a point to point it out.) But when the authors of two blogs I read fail to post, on that rainy day when I craved a diverting look into another world besides my own, I am sad. And mad. And then I move on quickly, because I have other things to do. There is always a book to read. A meeting to schedule. A piano to play. A kitchen to clean. A friend to call back.

Last night I finished an interesting (ultimately dry with a disappointing conclusion) one called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. It speaks to the amazing capability that humans have to imagine what they will feel like if something should happen. Although, this process is flawed, because usually our imagination leaves out important details of the experience we will have when a thing comes to pass. As someone who has reacted sometimes very differently to certain things than what I would've imagined, and then wasn't able to communicate my reaction very well at all to those who it affected (to a pretty devastasting outcome, actually). I thought the book would be better titled "Stumbling on Unhappiness", because it largely spoke of things that we think will make us happy but don't, because we haven't imagined out our lives well enough to see that they won't resolve our dissatisfactions.

I like to read a non-fiction book now and again, if only to remind myself that life can be analyzed through research as well as through plot and characters, because frankly, I forget. My next book, though, is back to fiction to read Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow. He comes very highly recommended. While deciding which children's book to give a friend for her upcoming baby shower (guests were charged to bring their favorite book from childhood), I've been re-discovering all my old favorites. Of course, the books one thinks of are the common ones: Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, The Little Engine that Could, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. But I think I've found a gem that no one else will bring. I can't tell it yet, just in case. My favorite book, which I've already given her, is the lovely story of Swimmy, with endearing illustrations by Leo Lionni. Children's books really can be lovely, and with so few words. This morning, looking at one, I wished I was a kindergarten teacher or something so I could read them all day long, and see the children's faces as they listened.

No Such Thing as a Wrong Note

Today has revealed to me a surprising potential for redemption. It didn't start off so well, but as I work through it, I find that tinkering around has revealed better possibilities than I hoped for at first. There is a quote, sometimes misattributed to Thelonious Monk (whose birthday happens to be today - he would be 90) that goes, "There is no such thing as a wrong note." Now, this quote has also been credited to Art Tatum, a piano perhaps less famous nowadays, but even lovelier than old Thelonious, if they must be compared. It's easy to see why people familiar with Monk's music would think he'd said this. Perhaps it did say it at one point, cased within a lenghty lecture on the role of dissonance, silence and hesitation in bebop or jazz. Regardless of the source, this thought presents the great possibility that those things we do, or say, or even write that seem not to have hit the note that others (or even we ourselves) expected, might in the end make sense, even enhance the whole.

That's how I feel about this blog, which, frankly, I am not at all impressed with. And yet, I continue on... hoping that either this will one day be useful or will be the rough steps to a meaningful thought somewhere down the road.

Happy Leif Erikson Day!

With all the protests over yesterday's essentially non-holiday (for most of us) Columbus Day, I find it refreshing to be able to celebrate Leif Erikson day this October 9. Even though President Bush officially endorsed it, the holiday still feels like a delightful little lark, especially in light of my own Norwegian heritage.

You know, we even have our very own Leif Erikson Lodge in Ballard, although it is rapidly being surrounded by condos. Not too far from there, in Sunset Hill, you can also find the darling little Nordic Heritage museum. I've not been inside, but I used to go for walks when I lived in that neighborhood, and it looks adorable from the outside.

First Entry

It is hard not to start this off like a letter, but since this blog is addressed to nobody in particular, I suppose a "dear ____" wouldn't work anyway. "Dear nobody" sounds too fatalistic, since I hope that someone will be reading, although I'm sure someone out there has used it before - and I wouldn't want to make them feel badly about it. We've all been to places, emotionally, that we aren't proud of. I suppose I shouldn't speak of "we" in this blog, either, since it really is, by definition, entirely to do with my perspective.

Speaking of which, I would like to take this opportunity to explain the title of my blog. It's really a great exercise in making yourself feel absurd and pretentious to try to name your own blog. It would seem silly to title a diary - both overly ambitious (few diaries are published) and also a contradiction, since a diary really isn't meant for any audience but your own future self, perhaps, or maybe the grandchildren, if you turn out to have any. But I find it so much fun to read other people's blogs (thanks, Ethan!). I have so many things rollicking about in my own head during the day that I never say to anyone, and I have friends in far away place who I don't get to talk to as often as I'd like. Having given up on a clever title that refers to me or my perspective in a clever yet humble way, I chose to take a phrase from an author I admire. This is what I do when I can't express myself adequately. And I hope that some day I will contribute at least one phrase that will perhaps do someone else a bit of good and pass the favor along. The phrase I've borrowed was written by Joan Didion for her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, which is an excellent example of a diary that ought to have been published, and was, since it reads on the literary level as well as being relatable in the best way. I almost forgot, the line reads like this: “I would need to locate the dissonance between the person I thought I was and the person other people saw.”

Since I'm much concerned with music at present (listening to it as well as playing it at home on my own piano, which was in bad need of its recent tuning), I thought this would set the subtle yet clever tone that I desired for my own blog title. I thought it only fair that anybody who might read this first entry of my blog should be let in on the meaning as a reward.