But you're wrong. I totally did. See? I'm blogging.
Now granted, this is my third (3rd) attempt at a post today. The first one, I was going to talk about the oddness of being a more-or-less-Buddhist at a dance competition (the "competition" part being the source of the weird, Buddhistically-speaking). But it devolved into this thing about how, during a recent meditation, I actually had a lovely experience of Jesus, leading me to ask if somehow this whole other journey is part of a larger one with him. Which would be fine. But, you know, not really a blog post.
The second one, I started sharing some memories of the road trips I used to take with my dad, except I started complaining. Rather bitterly. On these trips, he used to like to drop in on people from his past. Sounds fine, right? Yeah, no. These would be people he hadn't TALKED TO IN YEARS. They would, in fact, generally be people that I (his daughter, and the only person he has allowed to truly know him) had NEVER HEARD OF. Suddenly it would become important to see them. I begged him to just leave these poor people alone, assuring him, with all the tact and charm of a typical adolescent, that they didn't care and didn't want to be bothered. But he insisted they did care and did want to be bothered, so off we'd go, and the post devolved into the fact that I STILL thought he was imposing on them and I was STILL mad about it. All of which amounted to a thinly veiled confession that I was the one who didn't care and didn't want to be bothered. I was the one who had not wanted to spend my summers driving to Ohio to meet people I'd never heard of before and attend their evangelical-fundamentalist churches where preachers in robin's-egg-blue polyester suits would condescendingly say that their wives had an advanced degree: their "PhT," or, "Putting Hubby Through [grad school]." And my dad would unctuously pretend that he found this charming in order to ingratiate himself with these people he hadn't talked to in twenty years but suddenly had to see again. And the state of our family communication was such that I could not simply TELL him that I would rather drink dishwater than witness this. So I pretended, even to myself, through literal decades, all the way up to the point where I started Failed Post #2, that it was the imposition on our hosts that bothered me. (Actually, it really did bother me. I felt bad for those people staring blankly at us in bemused politeness. But not, I have to confess, as bad as I felt for myself, a 12 or 13 year old stuck in a parlor with fundamentalist old people SHE'S NEVER HEARD OF for her summer trip.)
Again...no.
Meanwhile, I have read approximately five articles, hoping I might find some rescue there. "Look! More bad news on the global financial crisis!" (My husband dolefully reported that, had Bill Clinton's surplus been left in place, we'd be ahead $5.6 trillion dollars right now. AND the economy would still be fine. Yep...a perfectly functioning economy AND an extra $5.6 trillion hanging around. As opposed to...what we've got. "It doesn't bear thinking about," I told him. "Really.")
So here I am.
No poetry.
