I love this song. Lucky Kaplansky’s version has been on repeat in my home this week, but I like this one, too. This song has been my prayer this week, really.
Juliet Turner – Broken Things
Newsy News
After that last post I feel all sorts of pressure to, you know, write something profound, so I decided to just pour cold water all over that idea and write a plain old newsy post. Sorry to disappoint.
Here’s what’s goin’ on in our household.
Me: I am near death.
That claim is just a wee bit exaggerated, but it doesn’t feel terribly far off the mark. Today I went in for my “well-woman check up” (don’t you just love those, ladies?) only to discover that my blood pressure was 80/55. Alas, I feel half dead because I am half dead! What a relief. It was kind of funny, because I had two responses when I discovered this news. First, I felt validated. I’m tired for a reason. Imagine that! I thought I was tired because I “just” had a 4-year-old and a 4 1/2 month old to entertain all day. Second, I felt tired. It was so weird. It was like once I had “permission” to be tired, I was tired. Really tired. So tired that when I got home I thought to myself, “Half dead people should not be required to make dinner,” and I seriously considered playing the good ole half dead card to get out of it. However, my sense of duty won over the drama of my near death excuse, and I have a meatloaf cooking in the oven. Don’t tell Matt, but I plan on using that half dead card to get out of cleaning up dinner, which is really my least favorite part of the process anyway.
My blood pressure is so low b/c my heart medication was doubled a few weeks ago. I had been having those icky PVC’s again (basically irregular heartbeats) so I wore a super sexy heart monitor for 24 hrs (seriously, folks, there is nothing more unsexy than wires being attached to your chest). The result: I had 1000 PVC’s over the course of one day. That seems like a lot to me, although my cardiologist didn’t seem too worried. If she’s not too worried, I’m going to try not to be too worried.
Now that I feel about 80 years old talking about health issues, I’ll move on….
Matt: he’s good. He is working a lot. I would explain what he’s doing, but every time he tries to explain it to me my brain goes numb and my head just goes into this automatic bob up and down thing, which I think is supposed to communicate understanding, which I most emphatically do not. This time of year I start to obsessively check my watch when he’s supposed to be home, b/c I am forever convinced that a deer is going to leap into his path and upend both him and his motorcycle. I would prefer to keep him intact, especially since he’s such a great husband and dad.
Amélie: The girl loves school (she is most certainly, then, my daughter!). She has so much fun. It was cute, because today she was telling me how this little boy, Camden, has been “arguing over” her. I had no idea what that meant, until further exposition revealed that yesterday Carly wanted to sit by her, but Camden “argued over” her because he wanted to sit by her. And then today, Laynie wanted to sit by her, but Camden again “argued over” her because he wanted that coveted spot. I suggested that Camden sit on one side of her and the other chosen friend sit on the other, but she didn’t seem to think this compromise would work. Who am I to question preschool politics.
Jack: Oh, baby. He’s such a…baby. He’s cute, cuddly, snuggly, and warm. He loves his blanket, any available pair of arms willing to hold him, and his big sister. While I may have to stand on my head to get him to laugh, he just looks at Amélie sometimes and breaks out into hiccupy giggles. He adores her. She adores him.
So that’s my day-to-day life at the moment. While I may have lofty dreams of becoming a writer, changing dirty diapers (lots of them) and dealing with preschooler insolence (since when is asking a 4-year-old to set the table child abuse?) should keep my feet firmly planted on the ground (or, more likely, in some playground mud).
my idea
I can’t sleep. It’s 12:30 a.m., and I’m still awake. This is really and truly a problem, because my little son has decided that he needs to wake up at dawn each day, with bright eyes to match my bleary ones and a cheerful smile to match my sleepy one. 5:30 is fewer than five short hours away. Tomorrow I won’t be able to write a complete sentence, so if I’m going to write, I should do it now.
And I must write. Now. I’ve been lying in bed tossing back and forth, tangling my already tangled sheets, trying to calm my furiously racing mind. The source of my insomnia?
An Idea. A big one.
First of all, I have a confession to make. It’s a dream, really, but as I tell you this dream I hesitate, as if my fingers were about to type out a statement of shameful confession rather than a declaration of a dream. If it were not the middle of the night I probably wouldn’t tell you. It seems that I can confess things in the middle of the night that, cloaked in darkness, seem much easier to say than when I am typing the words with bright, exposing sunlight streaming into the room. So, here’s my confession, my dream:
Someday I’d like to be a writer.
Oh dear. I said it. Immediately I desire to retreat. The demon of bald insecurity raises its ugly, foul head and curses me with terrifying fears. I smell the sickening sulfur of these fears: the fear of failure; the fear of incompetence; the fear that you, dear reader, are at this moment laughing at me or rolling your eyes or hitting the back button on your browser to find someone with something ever so much more interesting to say.
Lately, I’ve felt the itch to write. I’ve always suffered from this itch, but rather than scratching the itch (i.e., writing) I often rub some sort of numbing cream on the itch instead. Instead of allowing myself the luxury of a good, long scratch (OK, I realize I’m carrying this metaphor a bit too far, but it’s too late for me to go back now), I tell myself I’m too busy, too untalented, too raw, too jaded, too shallow, too deep, too whatever, and then I slather onto this itch the equivalent of a prescription-strength hydrocortisone cream. “Ahhhhhhh,” I sigh with relief as I anesthetize the itch, and then, without the distraction of that dang itch, I move on to my tasks. My dutiful self scribbles out a Things to Do list instead of an essay and starts plowing through those chores with Type A abandon (that’s sort of a joke–do Type A’s really do much of anything with unmitigated abandon?).
Here’s what’s happening, though: I think I’m developing a resistance to this itch-numbing drug. More and more I find myself composing essays in my head while I cook dinner or hang laundry on the line or mop my floors. I find myself tempted to drop whatever I’m doing, sneak out my journal, and just write. Usually, the anti-itch drug works long enough for me to lose inspiration, but sometimes, I succumb. Like now, for example.
I said I was going to tell you my Idea, and obviously I got distracted on that rabbit trail known as “a long extended metaphor that doesn’t work quite right but I’m not sure how to get out of it so I just keep blindly plowing ahead and I’ll really shake my head and regret this when I re-read it in the morning.” Go ahead and look that specific definition up in your Dictionary of Literary Terms. I’m pretty sure it’s there somewhere.
I’m stalling, aren’t I?
So, here it is: (Of course, I’m not going to tell you quite yet. I must preface my long preface leading to my Idea with yet another preface. Wouldn’t a writing teacher have great fun with her red pen on this middle of the night ramble?!) I like the idea of doing some “thing” for a year and then writing about it as I go. Here are some examples: I recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which chronicles her family’s valiant (and quite delicious) attempt to eat locally for a year. Then there’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia, which is Elizabeth Gilbert’s incredibly well-written “travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery” (I just stole that last phrase from Publishers Weekly’s review of the book). Personally, I derived an awful lot of delicious pleasure from Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. While not published, Carrie is spending from Easter of ‘07 to Easter of ‘08 working on developing a new spiritual discipline each month. I have loved traveling with her through this spiritual journey, and I personally think she should develop this idea and publish a book of her own. 
ANYWAY………so here’s my year-long idea:
PLEASURE
I’m terrible at pleasure. Pleasure wracks me with guilt. Whether it’s a delicious meal, an extraordinary book, or a tantalizing piece of chocolate, I am absolutely wretched at allowing myself to be immersed in the pleasure of the experience. So what if I spent a year exploring a different pleasure each month and then writing about it? If nothing else, it will be good for me. And if the pursuit of pleasure becomes a “duty,” I just might let myself enjoy it.
I just typed out some of my ideas, but then I deleted them. Maybe I’ll post them tomorrow, but part of me kind of wants to hear from you. What sort of pleasures do you think I should pursue? I will post one idea, though, just to give you an idea of where I’m headed with this. Let’s take the idea of chocolate. Wouldn’t it just be horrible to spend a month tasting my way through such a pleasure? I can see it now: a friend whom I haven’t seen in awhile walks into my home. I let her in the door and wave absently at the mess of chocolate wrappers littering every room. She looks at me and gasps. “Are you pregnant?” she asks, as she eyes my noticeably fluffy belly. “Oh no,” I will respond, happily patting my expanding mid-section. “I’ve just been doing a lot of research.” And then I will smile at her and lick the delicious remains of that day’s research off of my lips.
Seriously, though. Running with the chocolate example, I could break away from the candy aisle at Dillons and explore quaint little chocolate shops, slip into a booth at a fancy restaurant merely to sample its famous chocolate dessert, and purchase chocolate samples on-line from chocolatiers in far away places. (Um, this little writing experiment might get a little expensive if I’m not careful!) And then I could write about the chocolate: about my journey to find the chocolate, to eat the chocolate, to become one with the chocolate (just kidding on that last one).Do you think this might work? Maybe you shouldn’t tell me what you think, because then I might lose my courage. I like the idea. I think that, if nothing else, it could be fun. I could at least stretch and grow and become a person who allows herself two things she so often denies herself: the freedom to write and the freedom to taste, touch, and experience pleasure. It is ever so late now. In the morning I will probably read this post and cringe at my reckless bravery in posting. Just to be safe, I’ve saved my rambles as a Word document just in case I decide to hastily retreat and hit the “delete” button in the morning. But for now, I must go eat a piece of chocolate before finally collapsing into bed….
Welcome…
I am not an artist. Therefore, I feel a bit guilty using an artistic term for my blog name. However, the blog name I wanted, roomofonesown, was taken. I couldn’t think of anything else, so chiaroscuro it is. I like the title. I think, first of all, that chiaroscuro is a fun word to say and write. Mostly, though, I like its meaning. I didn’t know what the word meant until I was in graduate school taking a class on British Modernism. We were reading Joseph Conrad’s book Lord Jim, and I became so fascinated with the use of shadows and light in the book that I wrote a paper on it. Chiaroscuro became to me, then, artistic in a literary sense, which is certainly more up my alley than drawing or painting. I discovered beautiful poetry in Conrad’s use of chiaroscuro. His characters often spoke of glimpsing a “rent in the mist.” They found meaning in the shadow as well as the light.
That’s me. I do love the light. It’s bright, simple, easy, cheerful. But my melancholy soul often lingers in the shadows. Here I plumb my soul’s depth. Here I can curl up in the silky, gray, enveloping fog and allow myself to probe through the murkiness of dark questions and equally murky answers. As I flit through the shadows, I can do so safely, because I know that shadow is only caused by light, and if the shadows get too dark…I can always make my way back to the shadow’s source: light. So I hope that this new blog will chronicle my journey as I weave through the yin and the yang, the shadow and the light.
Welcome to my chiaroscuro.
