I was bound to love someone sooner or later

The work week flies by and I’m hardly awake. I have the feeling that my life is being lived; passive tense. By Sunday night I already know exactly where I’ll be at any given moment for the next six days. In fact, not a single decision needs to be made because it’s already all figured out and has very little to do with what I really feel like doing.

My life is a high-speed blender of quasi-obligations of my own creation because I'm trying to resemble the person I used to be convinced that I was going to be someday. You know, the one that actually does shit instead of sitting around moaning about how the years are going by and what the fuck am I doing with my life and since when do I have fat there? This leaves a couple of hours per day to unwind and I’m having to decide if I’d rather sit for a couple more hours per day in front of the pterygium-inducing computer blogging or spend them with the school janitor who is now exclusively working from home and needs human interaction when I get home, even if in the form of a brutal love-beating.

Blogging has sort of lost the battle for me. I’ll be honest. It hasn’t only been about finding time. Many of my most inspiring blogging friends have dwindled away from their spaces and finding new bloggers who are just as good is exhausting. I’m hanging in here on the blogosphere by a tattered string and it’s been a long damn time since I’ve found a good new blog that makes me want to spend time in this cyber world, want to somehow fit it into my day, want to dust off the old blogroll which has become an antique collection and add a new link. Finding good blogs regularly had a recursive effect on my own desire to write. I wanted to write for the writers that I thought were amazing. I wanted to see if someone that good thought I was any good. I wanted to share a part of myself with those who were so generously sharing the really naked parts of themselves with me.

This brings us to today and this review that I didn’t want to do; this review that got pushed to the end of the queue in favor of work and yoga classes and exercise videos and stupid fucking French lessons and preparing meals that don't suck.

I had hoped this would take me an hour or less to pump out with a MEH or a GO FUCK YOURSELF. And then I read this and realized it was going to take a lot longer because I was going to need to read it all and in reading I began to remember why I was drawn to blogging to begin with. I remembered the feeling of discovering that there were real people out there living their lives, people I would never otherwise cross paths with: they were nurses and bikini waxers and stay-at-home dads and cancer survivors and ex-addicts and expats that had some kind of communicative gift that made me want to know everything about them, that made me hope that in some way I could be like them too. The ones I was drawn to the most were simultaneously funny yet serious, introspective but only by looking at others, wanting yet altogether grateful, and especially the ones that were prone to sometimes hysterical reflections on their own inherent contradictions.

Michelle is a self-proclaimed work in progress and she puts that work in progress forth for the world to read, totally and utterly unselfishly. Sure, she tends to get a little rambly, and maybe sometimes I want to beat her within an inch of her ability to modify her font sizes and colors. Maybe she has no About Me page for some dumb reason and maybe 90% of what makes up her template confuses me. Maybe she gets all Wordless Wednesday-ie and Friday Fragmenty and maybe sometimes I want to shake her into giving me a real title to a synthesized post. Maybe she's raging against a bunch of machines I'm just not raging against (one of them apparently being the fascism that is punctuation) but for the most part she's able to richly convey her rage and it's all her and so be it.

These easily-fixed annoyances aside, what I love the most about Michelle is that she's whole grain bread, man. She hasn't been processed into just giving us the sweet fluffy palatable side of her. She's heavily textured and is grainy going down and she's replete with all the integral parts that complete a real live person and not a persona: brains, toenails, warts, kidneys, heart, soul, sadness, joy, fears, and frustrations. The great majority of her posts are pieces to the great big yummy pie that I'm always harping on people around here for not fucking giving up and so I'm not holding back now for a few punctuation and font problems. Are you kidding? I have been wanting to do this dirty little deed for a long damn time so here you go, Michelle, here is my IFLY virginity.






An artist is only good to the extent that they are generous with what's inside them; they don't save what they have for another post, another drawing, another project, another day. They give 100 % of what makes them who they are each and every time they start the creative process. And this, My Dear Askers, is what it has taken to drag this old rusty blogger back to the blogosphere, to shake me and take hold of me and say nope your not done here yet.

And now, inspired, with my IFLY cherry popped, I'm off to dust off my poor forgotten blog and see if I can't pump some life into that fucker and visit some of my favorite bloggers who are still writing their hearts out who I have missed so.