Explanation of a Title

At dinner with my family, I realized what this blog was really about.

I feel like so much time is spent focusing on what keeps people apart. The little cracks in the fabric of relationships, the shortcomings of love, the decaying of friendship. It feels like very few works of literature or art are about happy people, and if they are about happy people, they're often synthetic-feeling and syrupy. Rarely do movies concern truly happy people. Happiness never just comes to a person. Happy people are strong, industrious, fragmented, injured, and hopeful. They are often just as damaged as their miserable counterparts. If not more.

Despite this obsession with pain, I think there's something so beautiful in the strings that hold people together. Abandonment happens, sure, and selfishness and insecurity are powerful motivators. Yet people will always be extremely caring. Families aren't just a necessary by-product of society. I really believe there's a powerful intrinsic motivator there. People want to connect, want permanency and bonds in a life that's so frightening and unpredictable.

People come alive when they interact, when they meet each other. There's a wonderful feeling of connection, of your heart coming alive in communion with another. Love has more layers than any other emotion. It's contested more than hate, challenged more than fear, betrayed more than affection. But it's so powerful.

I realized as I looked at my family- small, battered, little family that we are. We've survived cancer, death, Alzheimer's, drug addictions, pregnancy scares, first loves and flameouts, years of resentment, frustration, and exhaustion. But we're still here, we still love one another. We're still supportive and happy. And as the dust continues to settle from years of upheaval, I'm realizing that it will stay that way.

Burning bridges.

Most of the change I have experienced in my life has come from the outside. All of a sudden these random, volatile events landed with a bone-jarring thud in the middle of my everyday. Yet lately I've been experiencing changes of a different sort: the softer, more subtle kind that occur much quieter, almost too quietly to notice. The change that occurs internally.

I've always considered myself to be an open person; that my accessibility was something of which I was proud. I thought being happy meant being available to whatever came my way. Letting things, people, events, come and go. Everyone had access to my head and my heart, and everyone affected me, as I affected them. It was a good plan, and it worked well for me.

I've come to realize that while there's nothing wrong with that idea, it doesn't hold up. You change, as life changes you. Somehow I had kept this this deranged notion that innocence meant staying the same. But I guess to deny change is to deny life, and is really, pretty tragic.

I can't remain "open" forever. I know now that being open also means being exposed. I realize that you should give yourself to someone, until they give you reason not to. And when that occurs...you must give up on them. Some people shouldn't be allowed access, don't have the right to flit back and forth and in between. We are all precious people, our emotions are fragile. We tremulate and worry and are hurt by each other. And some bridges were meant to be burnt.

And once that happens, you start to feel this incredible liberation. It's very comforting to begin to understand why certain people are no longer in your life, and why they no longer have any place in your life. You can begin to define yourself by what you are not, instead of what you are. And that is a powerfully concrete thing; a solid, bold line in a luminous, transient personality.

Summer Reading List 2009

Mysterious Skin- Scott Heim
The Delivery Man- Joe McGinnis Jr
The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy- Robert Leleux
The Town that Forgot How to Breathe- Kenneth J. Harvey
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights- John Steinbeck
The Hunchback of Notre Dame- Victor Hugo
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things- JT LeRoy
The House of Mirth- Edith Wharton
The Cossacks- Leo Tolstoy

There is something really liberating about going to Borders in 93 degree weather and walking out with $82 worth of books.

I think it is going to be a good summer.

I really like that part in the Julie & Julia trailer when Amy Adams says "I can write a blog. I have thoughts."

Because what is a blog? I feel like it's become so taken-for-granted, and become so normal. Or at least, pretty commonplace. Very few people raise an eyebrow at the word blog, or at least don't bother to ask.

I think they've also become sort of a cherished idea. There's this idea that they're exciting, very of-the-moment, a potential gold mine of inspiration, of words and ideas. You hear about people "buying" someone's blog, or modeling their life after a blog they read. Forming group blogs, online book clubs, things like that.

To me, it's weird, and probably overblown.

Blogs aren't really anything. At least not anything new. They're just a bunch of thoughts, a bunch of words, only instead of scribbling them on paper, instead of them bleeding through margins, they're organized in font on a screen. Instead of being kept secret, or at least revered, they're accessible to anyone. We're such a vulnerable generation, and we're spread very thin. Nothing is really kept to one's self. They're a bunch of thoughts and ramblings all competeting with each other for attention. Every person's individual thoughts are crammed up against one another, in a battle to overcome anonymity.

Not that there's anything wrong with it. It's normal to want to think, to want to write. It's normal to want your life to make sense. A blog is just the newest form of a timeless idea, and it's just another example of our naked generation.