March 29th, 2010 §
I actually really feel like writing at the moment but, to be honest, I feel like I need to do so much tidying up around here that I just can’t decide which comes first.
My bookmarks and navigation pages were both written using PHP, so they would update automatically. With a new theme in place now, the PHP calls don’t work and the pages are empty.
And there are so many dud posts that I would like to clean up as well, to give the blog a bit more focus.
I’ve been avoiding posting links on Facebook or linking to my blog when leaving a comment somewhere because anyone stopping by, potentially for the first time, won’t find much of interest. Or will write it off because there is too much dross up front. All the good shit is buried.
This is just another dud nothing post of course. Really, it is just me thinking out loud. (Well, the keyboard is doing sound effects anyway.) But it feels good to be getting back in the habit. Actually, it is really pleasant to be hammering away, and letting whatever comes out of my slightly numb head just come out.
It is NaPoWriMo next month, I believe. And I’m going to be writing poetry again. But I won’t publish much of it here (if any) because I’d actually like to start submitting my work to the journals. In fact, there are a couple of good poems I’m really annoyed at myself for publishing here. I think my expectations of life (and of what I can achieve in it) have been too low.
One thing that has been really inspiring since coming back to my online world is seeing Miscmum’s posts about submission deadlines, and to see the Miscellaneous Voices project that she’s put together. It is a (good) kick in the pants to see people doing in comparison to all my tedious, narcissistic self-pity.
(I’m definitely heading to the book launch, btw. if any of you are going to be there.)
Oh my god this is like teenage stream-of-consciousness drivel. But it is a post.
And it IS writing.
So… I’ll just slam up some basic pages tomorrow, with an “in progress” kind of notice and some links to posts which are more, um… representative? than what is on the front page. And all the tweaking can come later.
Actually, you guys can help me… Are there any posts you particularly remember, or particularly liked, or that you think are particularly me-ish? Feel free to just say, “That one about such and such…” and I’ll search for the link.
Hugs and kisses to all of you whom I’ve been catching up with over the last few weeks, by the way. You guys make me happy.
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March 27th, 2010 §
Yes. It was another false start for this (used to be) cerebral mum.
I will get back to it, I promise. I’m motivated, but overthinking everything as usual.
Too much clutter in my mind and on the screen.
I’ve fixed the screen at least. (You insane people who kept me in your readers for over a year can’t see that.)
Let’s call it a blank slate and start over.
Again.
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March 8th, 2010 §
Okay. So I’m guessing there are still a few people who have me in their feedreader. Your hopes were not in vain. Of course, some of you probably just kept me there so you could get those claws out as soon as I posted again and blast me for being the Queen of All Disappearing Acts.
So get those nail files out because here I am.
I’ll be writing something about International Women’s Day sometime very late tonight. You’ll probably be in bed.
But don’t expect this return to be without interruptions – I know. You weren’t actually foolish enough to expect that! – because this Wordpress version is hopelessly outdated and I’m not even sure I remember how to fix it. And I find this theme quite loathsome now so I’ll be fiddling around with the stylesheet sometime in the near future too.
Also, there was so much spam in my comments folder that I just did some wholesale deleting. If something you wrote, that I never read, got lost in the fallout… Well, you probably don’t remember writing it anyway.
Love you all. Missed you all. And I will be dropping by your places for a visit sometime in the near future too.
Until then, here a some repostings of poems which seem somehow appropriate for International Women’s Day…
— Prenuptial –
When the time comes, I will quietly press God’s jaw
And bite at the tendons of his stiffening neck.
I am disoriented.
When the time comes, I will face East.
Bedlam is the home of women with tangled hair
And I have no hair.
This is my home.
Men wear white when they visit me;
They are bridal.
I pick flowers from the fields to earn my keep.
No. That was in another place.
I’ll tell you a story.
When I was a girl, the grass grew.
Oh, I know the grass grows still
- I am not crazy -
But then it grew in the fields I grew in
And I raced to grow faster than it,
Taller than it.
But I fell and it defeated me.
A snake entered the pit of my womb
And planted there a seed
Which grew round and downward.
My woman’s body was not built for movement
So I lay still.
This is the meaning of the story.
The teaching.
When the snake enters,
When his fangs are poised,
Do not interrupt. Lie still.
Talk to the grass for whom you raced and fell.
You belong to the grass.
This is an old, old teaching.
My bridal men stand poised with syringes
While I murmur to you.
I have another story.
When I was a girl I wore a crown.
Now I have no hair and God is coming.
199?
— You Begin –
When your soft fingers
flex against the walls
of my deep cavern,
you begin.
Or is it sooner?
When you first feel
the pulse of my hot
blood in your own veins,
is it then?
Or is it when
I feel him still
beneath me, still
enclosed by flesh,
but still.
Is it then
that you first move?
Almost you.
Or when I run
screaming
to my own mother,
blood on hands,
wanting to swim
with the bloodless girls,
already ashamed
of my blue bra?
Is that you then,
new, impatient?
Or is it when
my own fingers
flex against the wall
of her deep cavern
and further inside
I drum life patterns
into waiting rooms
and you begin.
— The Pitch –
I love men.
I love the stillness of them
Their lack of agitation
When they shake off
Their workaday
Clothes
Their ability to not
Talk, to not repeat
Their thoughts
Over and over again
Their lack
Of doubt.
Men are peaceful.
But there are times
When they need
To think beyond
Their words
Beyond
Other men’s words
Times they need
To see the
Queen trapped
In the corner
Of the chessboard
While they laugh
Albeit humourlessly
At another joke
At the Queen’s
Expense
While she shrivels
Beneath the gaze
And turns to ivory.
Women talk
But men hear
Men’s voices
Like dogs
It’s all
In the pitch,
Bitch.
When they
Are not funny
Why won’t you
Snarl at them?
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January 30th, 2008 §
I’ve done a fair bit of work on the site design and only have a few things left to tweak. I found a theme I absolutely adore but the layout is fairly image based so I had to do a lot of editing in Fireworks to change the colours.
But, boy, do I love the colours now! So here is a sneak preview…
(Note: I’ve compressed the image so it looks a little blurry here, but at least I’ve saved you some time on page load.)
The base theme had no header image so it took some work to build that in, although the hardest part was finding the right image to begin with and then blending it so that it would work full width while the content itself was fixed width.
I also incorporated a more website-style menu, rather than the usual blog-like list of pages beecause the blog isn’t the most important feature of the site: Making sure people have access to all the information they need to help us out is. I couldn’t take a screen shot with the hover effect – because I had to use my mouse to get the screen shot, but on hover the menu item changes to a lilac background, also with the little arrow indent.
Like I said, the CSS is a little image based but I haven’t created something like this before so I’m quite pleased. The 3 pictures there will change. I’ve just used stock images while working on the layout. Unfortunately my mother’s external hard drive got stolen so I don’t have access to all her photographs from Afghanistan.
It was a horrible loss for her after a decade of working overseas and travelling to exotic places and meeting so many wonderful people. Unfortunately her laptop only has thumbnails so everything is gone. It’s a good reminder to backup, I guess. But what an awful reminder!
I also switched the theme to left sidebar instead of right, again, so it appears more as a website than a blog, and I removed the top navigation bar all together.
I’ll probably write more about it the base theme later – and bore you all to tears – but I just wanted to show you a little bit of what I’ve been doing while abandoning this blog to hurried, un-proofread posts.
And when I finally have some free time? Boy, is this blog’s design in for a major overhaul!
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January 17th, 2008 §
I didn’t write a Christmas post, or a New Year post so this will be my Year-That-Was post.
Guera, one of my new favourite people, who writes one of my new favourite blogs, A Roaming Aussie Mum, has challenged me to the Favourite Five Meme.
I say challenged because I’m pretty sure that I will find this hard. You see, the meme is this…
Post 5 links to 5 of your previously written posts, one relating to each of these key words:
- Family
- Friend
- Yourself
- Your love
- Anything you like
The only thing I ever write about is No. 3. Yes, I am that self absorbed. But I shall give it a shot. You just hold the line while I go hunting.
I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.
(Some time later…)
1. Family
Not just sibling rivalry… is probably the post in which I’ve talked the most about my relationship with my sister, whose house I currently live in. Although I mention her often, I don’t really discuss the details of our relationship, or its ups and down. I don’t discuss those kinds of details for any of my real life relationships, because words are permanent and I hope that I am wise enough to use only the ones I can stand by, and that I have enough integrity to not lash out in an arena where there other has no means to defend themselves. Our relationship isn’t easy, and I talk about that a little in this post, but the overwhelming emphasis is on what is strong and good. As depressed as I may be, as difficult as life sometimes is, I do try to always focus on that.
2. Friend
There wasn’t an obvious choice for this one. There is a post that written for a specific friend in a specific circumstance, Because you remember what I remember…, but my care for her was written obliquely within my thoughts on the nature of friendship. I know it reached her, however and that she understood all that I was trying to say so it is an important post to me. And then there is the The first birthday party…, with a long list of appreciation for many friends who too often get lost in the darkness of my mind. As awful as it is to feel alone and abandoned, it seems somehow worse to fail to recognise those people who do not abandon you and who light your way. This is the post I wrote for them.
3. Myself
Oh, a wealth of choices! I think that makes this an even harder choice. I have a favourite but I have linked to it in several other posts so I’m going to choose the most special one, one I didn’t write myself: The Cerebral Mum, from another perspective. I was so grateful to HG for doing this for me, to help me see myself from someone else’s point of view. It is such a wonderful post in it’s own right, but it also made me feel fortunate to have people like HG in my life, and that perhaps I wasn’t so lost as I imagined.
4. My Love
Love takes many forms, I know, but many of them have been covered by the other key words. The obvious choice is Caspar, but I do not think that I have ever captured in a single post the breadth of my love for him. And I cannot help but read this as meaning an adult love, they kind you have for your partner. I don’t have one, I have written nothing about one., so I’m sitting this one out. At some stage, I will probably write about this kind of love, theoretically, and the way it befuddles me. But that post doesn’t exist yet. The bonus post under “Friend” will have to suffice.
5. Anything I Like
My failed attempt to complete 30 Poems in 30 Days yielded one poem that I love, Sapphics of the deep, so that is my choice. It is imperfect. It was written in a difficult metre that I was unfamiliar with, but to me the words are rich; dense with symbolism and mouth-filling. Those not familiar with the Sapphic may not recognise the rigid form in which it was constructed but for an undisciplined person like myself, restricting my writing in this way and still being able to create something large remains a source of pride.
And now the tagging. I generally don’t tag people for memes. Instead I ask anyone who would like to participate to let me know so that I can add their link. But often no one ever does so today I’ll break that habit and and invite…
- Karen from Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum
- Mountainmama from Careful What You Wish For…
- Anonymum from The Nook of Oz
- Missy from Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
- Stewart from The New USSR, Illustrated
- Marj aka Thriver from Survivors Can Thrive
There are of course other people I’d like to tag but I’m only supposed to do 5 and January is half gone so many people have already written their retrospectives. If you want to be added, however, let me know because I was never that good at following senseless rules.
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December 28th, 2007 §
Dear Blog,
I know that I said I wouldn’t write until after New Year but the days seem to be getting longer. I don’t think I realised how much I would miss you, even though it was I who went away.
A lot has been happening, and I’ve been keeping myself busy. I’ve found other rewarding ways to occupy my time. There have been some awful days and some wonderful days and some dreary, nothing days in between. It’s not that I feel the need to tell you all about them: I have never been a good diarist and my thoughts have always taken priority over the events of my life. But I miss the anchor you provide, that space at the end of the day when my time is yours alone.
On the days when I feel like I have achieved nothing, when I have no motivation at all, I force myself to take care of you and it overrides the purposelessness of all those hours which came before. On the days when I am overflowing with ideas, or words, or pains, or joys, you give me a place to pour them out yet hold them safe.
Often my life lacks a sense of reality. I am not a grounded person. It seems odd that you, living such an abstract existence, are the thing which keeps me earthed. I thought you would be the place where I would take off on those flights of fancy I miss so much. I was wrong about that.
I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.
I’ve worried about the shape you take, I’ve worried about the face you present to the world. I’ve worried about your lack of coherence. Sometimes, I haven’t even liked you.
It turns out that you are not a mirror held up to show me who I am. Just like a person, you are a hall of mirrors. I cannot make you whole and make you Truth. I cannot choose which reflection I will look at: I may see from the corner of my eye something that holds meaning, or something unrecognisable. I cannot choose what others will see reflected. Some aspect of light may catch them, or they may move on.
So you will be what you are. Just pieces. I cannot write myself like a book. I cannot read myself like a book. I think I asked too much of you and I wore us down. I am an exhausting person. But that’s okay too. I do not need to worry about how our story ends.
You are a very special medium, and new to me, but you have taught me something. You cannot analyse an unfinished text, like a blog.
Or like a life.
And I miss you, so I’m coming home.
Yours (truly!),
cerebralmum
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December 16th, 2007 §
I’m back from a few days away, with so much to write about, but I really just need to get everything under control again. There are only 60 unread emails and 261 posts in my feedreader, and I think I’ve managed to reply to all the comments here already, but still feels a little out of control.
I need to clear myself some headspace. I need to clean up.
Obviously there isn’t going to be a Sandbox Sunday post this week because for the first time in a long time I didn’t spend Saturday night at home on my computer. I had hoped to write a [Fiction] Friday piece while I was away but didn’t have internet access in time. (Something to do with my cousin having a few too many knockoffs after work to remember to bring the laptop home with him.) That’s okay though, because Friday’s theme was Skeletons In the Closet and I couldn’t come up with any ideas that didn’t seem trite or tired.
In other news, you might vaguely recall me mentioning a while ago that I’d had a “stellar idea” for a new blog, a resource rather than a personal journal? Well, I’ve been working on it a little and today I came home to an email proving that I must be the luckiest depressed person on the planet.
Thanks to All For Women and their 12 Days of Christmas promotion, I have just won a new domain name, a year’s worth of hosting and assistance with the initial set-up of the blog. (That’s on top of winning that $250 recently from the Imaginif team!)
All for Women put together a wonderful collection of giveaways and they still have one prize left to give: $100 cold, hard cash. Entry is open until the 20th so stop by for a visit. Aside from my prize, my personal favourite was the Bright Star Kids Wall Graphics (which was won by KateF over at Picklebums), a wonderful and surprisingly affordable product which I will definitely be investing in once I get somewhere of my own to live.
If my good fortune has inspired you to leave a comment or three in hopes of some Christmas gifts, Imaginif is giving out another cash prize this month: Christmas Competition: Child Safety Tips. Or if you’d rather win an iPod, toddle over to Outfit Inspirations and take part in The Great Online Christmas Scavenger Hunt.
I’ve already solved the puzzle, of course. I’m annoying that way. (I still remember with sadness the day my mother said that she wouldn’t by me any more for Christmas because I solved them too quickly. Didn’t she realise that was part of the pleasure?) But I’m not going to tell you the secret. Because it’s about the journey, you know. It’s possible, however, that one of the links in this post contains a clue.
But back to my prize… I’m still not going to mention what the new site will be about, but I’ve got a busy year ahead of me and I’m hoping that it will be very successful. I’m even hoping that it will bring in a couple of dollars to pay for hosting once my year has run out.
And while I’m handing out the linky love (and, believe me, it’s genuine linky love) , I know as I set to work I’ll be spending quite a bit of time reading Andrew Boyd. He’s writing two interesting series at the moment: Get A Real Blog, for those thinking of moving to selfhosting, and the Flagship Blog Project, which is all about setting up new, quality blogs. It’s one blog a month for those involved in the project, a task I wouldn’t even consdider tackling, but so far the content has been really valuable and I hope the process laid out can help me achieve my goals.
But that’s enough for now. I need to do some serious cleaning to get my cyberlife back to almost manageable proportions. And then tomorrow I will begin to tell you about my long weekend.
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