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a journal |
 This book is intended as a place to blog about my life and things I'm interested in and answers to prompts from various blog prompt sites here on WDC, including "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  and "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" I'm not sure yet what it'll turn into, but I'm going to have fun figuring it out. |
| What do you want to bring more of into your life in 2019? Maybe love, joy, abundance, and what else? What in your life is no longer serving you and needs to be released? Could it be anger, stress, perfectionism, guilt? This past year has been a good one. I got another nephew, and although the getting got complicated, mother and son are healthy and happy. I got to see my family—all of them. Not all at once, but I got to spend significant time with all. I wrote a lot. That was good. I could write more—I should write more. I want more family time. I want a job. I know I have probably said that over and over, but it’s more true every time. Now that I’m fixed for a while at home, I need to get that done. I need to watch my health more. Sometimes it’s easy to skip the checks, but they are necessary. I’ve knit a lot this past year. For various people. It’s something I enjoy and something I hope to continue. There’s nothing that stands out as something that I need to get rid of. I try to address those as they come instead of building them up for a grand purge in January. Bad habits are important to eradicate. As they come, not trying to do too much at once. I’m looking forward to this new year. It has the potential to be great. |
| In figuring out--beforehand--what other people will do, how often do you get it right? Does your sixth sense or gut feeling help or does it confuse you? This is an interesting question. Okay, first I have to say that I’m fairly good at reading the next layer of a plot. When it comes to a movie or a book or a television show, more often than not I can guess what the writers are going to come up with next. I remember one time I was watching a movie for the first time. The main character had mentioned her father a couple of times, so when she was standing there wrapped in a blanket, I told my sister (who I was watching the movie with) that the next thing to happen would have to do with her father. Sure enough, he was the judge who had to deal with some assorted issues. However, real life seldom conforms to script. So, I try not to read things before hand. I can usually tell with someone I know well what they will do, but they always have the ability to surprise me, and I like that. I tell my siblings that they think very loudly, so I can read what they’re thinking. In some ways that’s true—I am the oldest, and so I have spent the most time studying their faces and their attitudes so I have a feel for them. Is that a sixth sense or a gut feeling? Maybe. I think it more likely a combination of preexisting knowledge, subliminal clues, and intuition. |
| “For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy” Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels: Essays What do you think? Is literature as useless as Andre Dubus says? Okay, I have to admit that I have a stake in this question. As someone who writes, I am never going to admit that literature is useless. Any more than knowledge of astronomy is useless. I do agree that reading a book comes low on a priority list for many who are hungry, who are freezing, and books don’t feed or warm physically. However, that doesn’t mean they’re useless, even to those hungry and homeless that Dubus was talking about. First, because literature and reading it provides an avenue where these questions can be asked, and perhaps, those things changed. Dubus himself agreed about that or he wouldn’t have published a book of essays in the first place. He wanted people to read his words and come up with prompts like this, questions like this that get people thinking about how changes can be affected in the world. Second, because no knowledge is ever wasted. The bits and pieces learned from books can eventually change a person’s circumstances—for goodness sake, reading the Little House books or My Side of the Mountain can give clues about how to survive in primitive circumstances. Most of what I know how to do comes as a combination of what I’ve learned through observation and through reading. Third—and most important, learning about literature or astronomy gives everyone, even people who are frightened and hungry and cold, the impetus to dream of a way to get out. Seeing the stars, reading a story can give people hope, and sometimes that hope is what’s necessary to make things change in their lives. It doesn’t work all the time, but it works enough of the time that I don’t think we can discount dreams as a motive force. I think that this quote misses the point. Sure, the most important thing that a person who is hungry needs is food, but abandoning literature isn’t going to feed that person. It isn’t going to warm them. A writer who abandons her calling might by inaction—by those books that she didn’t write—fail to save someone who could have been helped if they just read of another way to live. A person who is hungry and fails to work—through whatever means necessary—to better their condition (and that may include reading) isn’t going to find a dream of something different to hold on to. |
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