Welcome! Because The Anchoress made such lovely comments on her site today about this blog’s design, I just wanted to put a link up here to Apothegm Designs, the people I worked with on this design — in particular, phin from Apothegm Designs. There’s a button in my sidebar for them, but it’s kind of far down.
So go check them out. And feel free to look around, but disregard this post.
It does not apply to you! 😉
Some clarification is in order about this post. I’ve gotten emails now from people who regularly read this blog but prefer not to comment. It would seem I’ve offended this particular group of readers. Please understand: That was never my intention.
I’ve addressed these readers privately, but I wanted to post this in case there are any other readers out there with similar feelings.
I had so hoped the post was more clear, but I confess I wrote it in an upset frame of mind. I was speaking to a very specific group of people and their readership of this blog.
These people either go or have gone to my church.
I don’t know how to be more clear: If you are not in that group, the post does not — in any way — apply to you.
And for those people in that group, if you are still reading, please know this request was not arrived at in a knee-jerk fashion. I’d considered my options for a long time and I’m sorry it came to this one.
I don’t have a problem with people who read and don’t comment. Not everyone has the time or the inclination and that’s totally fine with me.
I apologize for any offense I may have caused these readers.
(SCROLL DOWN FOR NEW POSTS.)
This little update will stay at the top here for a bit in case it’s been missed. I’m checking my stats regularly, hoping to see a difference.
Again, I am very sorry.
This post includes anyone who’s ever gone to my church …. regardless of where you may live now. I’m very sorry. Again, it is a request. I’m smart enough to know I can’t ultimately control people. Still …. I am asking.
Someone left this shopping list on a table at The Beanhouse.
Uhm, don’t you mean organic flax cereal, Garden Burger?
Have you seen the Nissan commercial that uses that song “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath? It plays out here constantly. And every time I hear it, I start singing along with the lyrics that Nephew #2 wrote to it when he was 10. I don’t remember them all, but I remember enough to sing along with the commercial. So I present them to you, so you can sing along, too.
Here it is, Afghan Man:
I am Afghan Man
Running through the hills of Afghanistan
Eating rats and twigs
Trying hard to find Osama’s digs
Okay. That’s all I remember. He’d play it on his turquoise-colored electric guitar with the amps turned up to this awful, glorious distortion. I remember the heavy emphasis on eating rats and twigs, all very raw, very survivalist. I think the deal was that Afghan Man was going rogue to find and kill Osama. I thought it was a very valid notion. Plus, with the distortion and the turquoise, the whole experience was truly magnificent.
Rock on, Afghan Man.
Do you ever just sit around and say, “Hey, I wonder if — just given the chance — I could place all 50 states on a blank map of the United States”?
Well, here’s your chance.
Um, I scored 82% and had an “average error” of 32 miles. Hey, it’s harder than you think to just stick, say, Missouri in exactly the right spot on a blank map.
I love these learning games. I mean, who doesn’t relish the chance to learn just how iggnernt they really are?
I got this from Sheila, who got it here.
It’s the From the Stacks Winter Book Challenge and here’s how it works:
If you are anything like me your stack of purchased to-be-read books is teetering over. So for this challenge we would be reading 5 books that we have already purchased, have been meaning to get to, have been sitting on the nightstand and haven’t read before. No going out and buying new books. No getting sidetracked by the lure of the holiday bookstore displays.
Okay. So I’m in. And excited! Oh, and the challenge runs from November 1 to January 30. Here are my picks:
1. Atonement, Ian McEwan
2. Anne of Avonlea, L.M. Montgomery
3. American Brutus, Michael Kauffman (already reading)
4. The Professor and The Madman, Simon Winchester
5. The Eyre Affair, Jasper Ffffffforde. Yeah, I’m pretty sure there are 7 f’s in ol’ Jasper’s name. And this one is assuming I can find this book. It’s somewhere around here.
This post is not going to sound very nice and won’t apply to most of my readers, but I am desperate.
And this is completely off the cuff, so excuse the rough edges.
Here’s the deal: If you are someone who would recognize me on the street, someone who knows me from, oh, say, church, for example — even if you only know me as “that girl who sings in the band” or “that girl I hate” or whatever, this post is for you.
I cannot make you stop reading my blog, but your continued readership is deeply uncomfortable for me. Don’t ask me how I know you’re there. Let’s just say it’s “come to my attention,” rather randomly. This is a HUGE part of the reason I shut down my other blog and left the link up for only 2 days. I realize now I shouldn’t have left a link up at all. I should have gone through the whole rigamarole of making a list of readers’ emails and sending out the link personally. But that would have covered only the people who regularly comment. So I didn’t do it. I considered it, but didn’t do it. Stupid.
But …. PLEASE. Anyone fitting this description who found my blog in its old incarnation as WN, found it through sheer happenstance. Since then, church people I don’t even know have been reading my blog, sometimes coming up and commenting to me, knowing details of my life, sharing them, it seems, with others. I’m afraid I must be blunt: I did not seek out your readership. I have been burned on so many levels over the last 5 years by “The Church” that this — please excuse my bluntness — this voyeurism feels like it’s reopening old wounds. It’s the potential of mutual acquaintances that freaks me out. It’s that you’re strangers, but not. It’s that I don’t know your intentions.
That FREAKS me out.
My own FAMILY doesn’t know about this blog — or even that I write anything — with good GOOD reason: I don’t want people I know or who know people I know reading this blog. I’ve never ever said to anyone in my life — my, ah, 3-dimensional life — “Hey, check out my blog!” I commend people who do, but I want to be kind of anonymous, you know? Just “Tracey.” I NEVER thought that anyone who knows me or knows of me would find this blog. The odds were certainly against it, given the way the blog is set up — just my first name — and given the fact that, in “real life,” I am deeply committed to silence about its existence.
Readers who are total strangers? Great. Like the anonymity of the confessional. Readers who are my closest friends or family — um, who won’t freak out about what I write? Also great. I don’t have any readers like that, because I haven’t invited them. But this in-between “I know you but I don’t and I see you but don’t talk to you because THAT would be weird since I know stuff about you that I have no business knowing” CRAP is too much. I can’t take it.
This is rambling, incoherent, because I’m upset. I literally don’t know what to do.
Do I just stop blogging? Is that what I do? I’ve moved TWICE now, just trying to get free.
I guess I’m asking you all — for the love of God, actually — to please take me out of your rotation. Please go … elsewhere. There are a jillion fascinating sites on the web to visit. Places where you might actually learn something useful. Or actually be edified. With you, I feel like I’m naked, in the worst possible way. Like at-the-doctor naked. I can only appeal to your conscience, because I can’t stop you. And there are now several of you, I’ve learned. Trust me. I’m not that interesting or you’d know me better in real life, right? As a group, you don’t comment. And I don’t have a problem, in general, with lurkers, but this lurking seems almost menacing to me because we inhabit the same space once a week. It feels like you’re just sucking up information about me and doing …. God knows what with it. You don’t seek to know me in real life, so I don’t get it. Why read? Unlike other readers, you could conceivably know me in real life, but you don’t. You sit and read in silence.
I just don’t feel safe with you. I need — and I’m sorry — you to go away. This isn’t to say you aren’t lovely people. But I don’t know, actually, because I don’t really know you. This is what I do know: I know you read my blog. I know you don’t engage. I know — scariest of all — you know people I DO know. And I know that your silence feels like judgment. It feels like it’s serving you in some way. And that way — that mysterious way — is frightening me and shutting me down inside.
I need to be free just to be who I am without worrying, without censoring my topics because of who might be reading or who might comment to me at church or who might share something I don’t want shared.
Okay. Wow. It’s just hit me. It’s like the whole infertility experience again — only with my writing. That’s how it feels to me. Church people pawing over my crap, doing what they want with it, feeling entitled to it because “we’re all Christians.” I can’t go down this road again. I’m not strong enough.
I realize I risk pissing you off, but I’ve already risked a LOT more than that just by having you as readers. What have you risked? Consider it an accident of geography. If you inhabited a different space, we wouldn’t have a problem, I suppose.
Okay. Proposal: Switch churches, send me proof that you’ve switched churches and severed all relationships with anyone at our church, and you are more than welcome to read this blog. Until then, I apologize. It’s just become too oppressive, too unsettling, something I never anticipated.
Please, please respect my wishes. Don’t make me beg any more than I already am.
— An interesting — and apparently widespread –– theory from a photographer friend of MB’s who frequently does wedding photography:
Brides and grooms who are cake smashers are more likely to get divorced.
He — the photographer friend — says this is a theory widely believed amongst wedding professionals who witness many a cake smashing and later hear through the grapevine of said cake-smashing couple’s tragic estrangement. Sad, no?
Britney and K-Fed were cake smashers. So … there you have it. Theory proven.
I’d link to a photo, if I could find one, so you’ll just have to take my word because, um …. I saw their cakesmashing video on TV.
My Beloved and I, on the other hand, were NOT cake smashers. We lovingly — oh! soo lovingly, kinda nauseating, actually — fed each other bites of cake while loved ones gathered ’round and booed us. Jerks.
So, fess up, people. Cake smashers or cake feeeeders?
— Also, just another bit of business here. Anyone else have a list of people your spouse is absolutely NOT allowed to marry if you cack it? I mean, it’s not just me, right? RIGHT? Seriously, the line of women jonesing for My Beloved after I crump it would start right at my casket and end only when my outraged spirit rises up and obliterates them all. Gotta watch my (dead) back, you know.
— And finally — brethrrrenn — is it sexual harrassment if the dude is gay? I mean, can a gay dude say to you– girls — oh, something like, “I need something hard to write on. Let me use your ass?” Or perhaps, whilst staring lasers at your chest, “Wow. I didn’t know you had all THAT under your apron.” Or perhaps, creatively, “You are very sexy.” Why is it that societal standards seem different about this if the person is gay? The urge to kick in the nuts and sue is the same, right? Men, would you be less upset if a gay dude said these things to your wife/girlfriend?
Or, hypothetically, of course — what if the dude is, um, elderly? Like 80 years old? And constantly flirts with you and “wants to go the beach with you,” ew, and “would never let you go if he were 20 years younger” (20?? Hon, try 40) Or actually PINCHES YOU ON THE CHEEK — YOUR PERSONAL CHEEK — LAST SATURDAY WHEN HE CAME INTO YOUR PLACE OF MEAGER EMPLOYMENT JUST TO SEE YOU???
Hypothetically, of course.
Okay. That’s all. Just had these totally random and hypothetical thoughts banging around in my brain.
Sophomore year in college. “The Fantasticks.”
Freshman year was, frankly, a waste. A mad blur of make-out sessions with a guy I had nothing in common with except these marathon make-out sessions. A guy whose face glowed eerie and pale, like the moon. A guy who’d gotten my phone number off the box I was forced to wear by the seniors on my dorm floor during Freshman Initiation Day. A guy who, by this time, sophomore year, was now my ex-fiance. Yes, that’s right, fiance. He had proposed one night in the dark of the dorm lounge, his moony face the only light source, giving me a swirly rhinestone cross necklace to seal our mismatched lust. When we broke up shortly thereafter, I returned the twinkly thing for a full cash refund of 69 whole dollars. (No questions asked — Phhhew!)
So in between exhausting, sweaty fondles with McMoony and occasional box-wearing and — let’s see — watching “The Exorcist” once, as I recall, there was no time for auditioning. I’d completely abandoned something I’d always loved for my temporary lust over a tall, glue-faced boy with bad taste and excess saliva issues.
Nevertheless, after this year of walking away from the theatre, this year overflowing with creative laziness and atrophy where I learned virtually nothing beyond the exact contours of each of McMoony’s teeth, when auditions rolled around for “The Fantasticks,” I STILL thought I was da shizzle.
This was not a consensus, however.
The Music Director, a Lebanese woman named Hadil, immediately thought I sucked. Hard.
She later became my private voice coach, but at our first music rehearsal for the show, she gazed at me over her glasses and told me bluntly, in a voice low and thick: “At auditions, I did not think you could sing. You were singing in this weird belting voice, like … a cow. When I heard you sing, I wanted to die, but the director really wanted you.”
But ….. um …. I’m da shizzle, lady!!
She was still talking:
“So. You are cast now and my job is to work with you. All right. Let me hear you sing.”
I opened my mouth and —
“Do NOT use that voice you used at auditions.”
Okay. Now I was completely petrified.
I’m supposed to sing? NOW?? In a voice other than my tried-and-true high school musical belt?? But … but … you don’t think I’m da shizzle! I don’t know what to DO! I can’t even breathe! I am shaking! I might cry! Death is so SO close!
But she didn’t care. She just gazed at me over those glasses, waiting while I wavered. Her eyes were dark licorice drops. There was a twinkle there, but I saw only my imminent death. I tried to look anywhere but there. Finally, she started playing a vocal exercise on the piano, waving me to sing along.
I obeyed. And sang. Just me.
When I stopped, she was silent for a moment.
“Hm. You actually CAN sing. Good.”
It sounded like “gooot” when she said it, clipped it off. “Gooot.”
So off we went, working, working, working. Here I was, thinking I was already so far down the theatrical road — “Hurry and catch up with me, people!” — when, really, I was arrogant, stupid, lazy, full of bad habits.
But that show, that woman, that director. It was really just the beginning of the road for me.
(more to come ….)
