This Space UN-Intentionally Left Blank

Ay yi yai!

Oy Vey!

Yo Ishtenem!

Mea Culpa!

Ay Dios mio!

How do you people with full time jobs AND kids do it?

How do you have the time and energy to blog?

Because for the past 2 weeks my producing work for the Listen to Your Mother Show has been at about the level of a full time job.

And my kids are still, well, my kids, and they want their mom's attention and clean clothes and food when they're hungry and their homework (oh, god, the homework!) checked. Well actually, no, they want to be allowed to NOT do the homework, but that's not going to happen.

But still, you know what I'm saying. I am busier than ever, and with all sorts of stuff I have to take care of for my ACTUAL mother, too. (Banking! Doctor Appointments! HER Laundry! Social Security Office - AGAIN!)

And then there's always the Autism factor. (How could I forget the Autism time tax? Just estimate however long you think something is going to take, and then double or triple it. And do that again. Now you're close.)

So my blog, my writing? Suffering dearly.

Half written posts in my queue? Yup, dozens.

Anything close to being able to be actually sent out into the world with the touch of a "publish" button? Hardly.

I have written wonderful, beautiful posts... entirely in my head in the shower.  And then never gotten them to screen or paper. (Yes, I actually do sometimes write on physical paper and then transfer into digital words. Fancy that!)

One advantage of being out in the world interacting with adults: I shower daily once again (they can no longer smell me from Jersey).

Another advantage? Not only do I have no time and mental space to write, I also have no time to obsessively check my blog stats. I simply could not tell you how many people have visited my blog in the last day, or even week. And that? Is frankly a relief.

That said, however, as much as I feel expanded by all this exciting producing stuff, I also feel diminished in that my writing is clogging up inside me once again, an expressive and creative logjam.

I've had struggles with blogging before, had fallow times. But this time around, it's not so much about losing my writing mojo, as getting filled up by the words tumbling around inside me, the pressure building up with no release in sight. (And don't go where that image takes you, okay? Just. don't.)

I am suddenly understanding my friends who regularly write compact, sweet, 300 word posts. It takes less time!

So, as I can see no relief coming in the near future, and I hate how s-l-o-w-l-y my archive is filling up (it's the 6th of the month and this is only my 3rd post - and it's not much of a post), I am just going to have to try harder to get something - anything- up here. And maybe write those short, pithy posts that have eluded me in the past.

And since this has all been so much something about pretty much nothing; a self-referential rumination; a curved, tail-biting snake, circling itself round and round - I will leave you with a little actual something... the song that's been playing in my head these days, my personal soundtrack.

And yes, I HAVE been feeling like a Muppet of a (wo)Man lately.

See you back here tomorrow folks, hopefully with a little something something.


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Coming Soon: Posts from the Zombie Files

Tonight when I sat down, way late, to post - short people finally asleep, me awake, house as picked-up-after as it's probably ever going to be tonight (read: not very; but the small-toy-booby-traps have been stowed away, so you probably won't trip over stray crap and kill yourself, either) - I realized, once again... I got nothing.

It had been a busy day: rushing to Jake's school way downtown for our Parent/Teacher conference immediately after dropping Ethan off at his, a half-day for Jacob, Hebrew School after school for Ethan; the kind that leaves me hollowed out by the end.

So I figured it was time to do what I had previously said I would do when this situation arose this month (in which I am foolishly committed to posting every day whether inspiration has visited or not): mine my not-quite-dead draft post archives for gems.

So I opened up my Blog's command center and found this:

That's right, for approximately every three posts I've published there is one unpublished post: poor orphaned child, sitting unfinished, forlorn and abandoned in my queue.

Now some of these are mere wisps of things, half thoughts, hastily jotted down, ideas for posts that I planned to write at some nebulous time in my future. Others are half done things: neither beast nor fowl, full of egregious typos and devoid of form, starting to go somewhere and then stopping, all out of steam.

And then there are the jewels I'm looking for: nearly done posts, just in need of a little polish before they are ready to be sent out into the world. Well, maybe a bit of rewriting and a new ending, but still, close enough to done that its worth the effort to march them to completion.

So, from these 113 draft posts languishing in their not-quite-dead-not-quite-live state, I thought I was going to simply pluck one out to share today. I thought I would just click and find a perfect small near Insta-Post. Just add a little extra verbiage and it's ready to go! Voila!

But then I found that even the "nearly done?" Still take a ridiculous lot of work to bring into a place where I'm willing to let them out of their hidey hole. There's a reason I didn't get these particular bunch finished. They were not easy to wrestle into shape. Damn.

And the ones that were the closest to ready? Were the best of the bunch, those I want to spend the most careful time with, make sure I am bringing them to the height of their potential shiny brilliance (to drag the "polishing up gems" metaphor possibly beyond where it should reasonably go). ADD and perfectionism, it's a heady mix in my brain, I tell you.

So tonight folks, I leave you with this: a post telling you about more posts soon to come. So all those papers I wrote in college about deconstructionism and the such were not in vain, they were preparing me to talk about talking about talking about things. Which just goes to prove that I can prattle on about anything. Yay, me!

And tomorrow? REAL CONTENT, I promise.

(Hey, I'm getting really good at using a lot of words to circle round and round a topic but never really saying anything of consequence - maybe I should go into politics?)


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