My New Favorite Past Time

My husband and I bought our first house back in May. Brutus, the guy who sold it to us, had been renting it out to college kids and a couple different families over the course of several years. We were excited when he said we could keep all of the appliances that were in it. That meant we could keep the washer and dryer, three refrigerators, and the dish washer. He even threw in a hot tub that fits five or six people. "Too good to be true," you say? Exactly.

Public Humiliation at its Finest

 A post from the blog Magic In The Backyard asks what are some reasons why people censor their writing and how can we be fearless writers. While this isn't one of the assignments on the blog, this relates very much to the topic.


 I mentioned in my previous post that I had kept journals from the time that I was nine years old until a little over two years ago when I experienced something that made me afraid to write. It sounds a little crazy, I know. Talking about it now gives me a mental image that I am holding a pen in my trembling hand and can't make eye contact with the notebook. As I move my pen closer to the notebook my whole body begins to shake with fear as if I know that once the ink touches the paper a giant monster is going to emerge from the page and steal me away to a dark land where they eat people like me for lunch, people who express their feelings. You would be frightened too. Wouldn't you?

Entering the Blogosphere...

       Hello? Hello? Hello? Is there anybody out there? Comment on my blog if you can hear me... Is there anyone home?

From the age of nine, until a little over two years ago, I kept journals. I documented everything going on in my life and the way I was feeling about it, wrote stories, and poetry. I must have over eighty notebooks and at least a dozen more that got lost throughout the years. It was my way of getting my thoughts out of my head and onto paper so I could see them and sort them out. My spiral-bound therapists. 

Not everything I wrote about was an issue that needed to be resolved but a lot of it was. Every now and then I get a stack of them out and revisit the past. Some of the things I wrote are so funny to me now. The teenage angst/boy crazy years are especially hilarious. If I had married every boy that I swore I was going to marry I would have beat Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor by a land slide! I also get a kick out of all of the times I had wished I didn't live with my parents because "I wanted to be free and happy." I really thought that when I graduated from high school I would buy a Volkswagon bus and follow the Grateful Dead using the profit I'd make from selling hand-woven purses and grilled cheese sandwiches in the parking lots at their shows. I was sixteen when Jerry died. It was devastating. I can only imagine what my parents thought when I cried about it for days. They had no idea that my dream of owning a parking lot retail business and traveling the country in a vehicle that used diesel fuel was crushed. I may laugh now about how ridiculous I was back then, but when I wrote those journal entries I was serious. Maybe they'll come in handy as a sort of emotional reference manual when my daughters become teenagers. Actually, I'm going to save that scary thought for at least eight more years since my oldest is three and the second is only eleven months old.     

    

      Getting back to the subject of writing, I mentioned before that I have not really written anything in over two years. I experienced something that was emotionally traumatizing and I became afraid to write because of it (that post is next). Only recently have I felt that I can write again and I have a lot to say. My life has been very colorful and interesting so far. I am thirty-one and probably have more life experiences than some people have during their entire life. The last few years of my life have been eye opening, terrifying, frustrating and exhausting; however, I got through it and gained a lot of knowledge and wisdom, found love and strength, and managed to keep my sense of humor. I hope whoever reads this can get something positive out of it.Welcome to my blog. Thank you for letting me share my life with you.