The One Blog Post on the Planet that ISN'T about Will Smith Slapping Chris Rock

When I started this blog, I envisioned it as a chronicling of the crazy time in which we were living (the one I thought was temporary but now don't) and a place for personal reflection.

It turns out that as a chronicler of contemporary events I SUCK.

People of the future, I dunno what to tell you except there was a thing at the Oscars and it's been discussed to death and I don't care. I don't care. Everyone was wrong, everyone is terrible, I don't care.

I will say, I do sincerely feel like we have lost our ability to laugh at ANYTHING. Everyone I saw today who had a joke or a meme got roundly criticized for it because apparently you can side with anyone but the one thing you can't do is laugh. It made me think of an old West Wing quote...I don't remember what it's in reference to, but they are talking about not wanting to turn something into a joke (as per the news cycle,) and the response is, "What exactly would I have to do to it to make it a joke?" Which is how I feel. When one millionaire actor hits another millionaire actor in the face on live TV at an event that is 99.99999% about how everyone looks and you're not allowed to make a joke about it, that's not a good sign. I miss a world in which we could laugh.

So anyway, I'm really not here to talk about that.

I'm not even really here to talk about my first kid free trip with my sister since before James was born, which we did over the weekend. My sister's kids are 8 and 9 years older than James. When I was pregnant with James she was away from her family for a weekend for a wedding and when the wedding was over (I wasn't invited,) she and I shared a hotel room for the night and went swimming and hung out. We had not done anything similar since but last weekend we spend three nights in Santa Fe, which is a favorite vacation destination of hers. I flew into Denver to meet her and we drove down together, about a six hour drive. It was a lot of fun. Soooo much history. And I enjoyed the time with my sister. She is in a very different season of parenting than I am but we both definitely needed the break and you get to do a lot of things differently when you travel without children. Like appreciate history.

I feel like I definitely need to blog more as this has become more of a catch up session than anything else. While I do appreciate having a dedicated office space to myself and not having to do everything on my lap on the bed (as I did in the early days of the pandemic when I started this blog and my office space had not yet been cleared out,) I only make it downstairs to my office a couple of times a week and that's a good week. I need to start keeping my laptop upstairs so I can do computery things up there as well. Options are good.

What made me really want to write this week, though, is a dream I had.

The day after I got back from my trip I was just plain exhausted so after James got home we all had some downtime (the kids had been up late as well because they rode along to get me from the airport) and I took a two hour nap. It was amazing. And I had one of those very vivid dreams you have where when you wake up you are so bummed it was a dream even though awake you knows it could never happen.

What I dreamed: I bought a section of Cheney Stadium (in Tacoma where I used to watch baseball games as a kid) and used it as a writing studio.

Yep, in the awake world it makes no sense but to dream me it was just the absolute BEST place to be.

I think I might need career counseling. I've chronicled here my struggle with trying to figure out the next chapter in my life but I think my brain is telling me it isn't going back to public libraries, despite the money and time spent earning that degree. Which doesn't bring a lot of clarity. But I think my brain may know something I don't.

I'm distracted tonight. This is the problem with only getting on the real computer a few times a week...I do not, very intentionally, have facebook on my phone so when I am on the computer it is a siren. But that's what's new in this neighborhood.

Media consumption: I've not read a lot of good things since I got back but on the way to and from Santa Fe I read two five star books. First was The Road to Memphis which is part of the Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry series. Why that series isn't required reading for everyone is beyond me. And the other is Everything Comes Next, the 2021 collected and new poetry collection by Naomi Shihab Nye who is a favorite poet of mine. While in Santa Fe I watched two movies with my sister, CODA which was amazing and Turning Red which we both found bizarre and didn't get. Like the Internet is raving about that movie, I completely do not understand the hype. I've been saying it feels like a remake of A Goofy Movie: kid is growing up, parent is in denial that kid is growing up, family chaos ensues, everthing ends at a rock concert. Clearly I don't get this movie.

Today I'm grateful for: leaving and coming back, my new writing gig starting tomorrow, nights when my husband cooks, ebooks (great on airplanes! that's about it,) coffee and tea, and my family.

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