Friendship, true friendship, is rare. Can you find it even with people you haven’t met in real life? Do you have friends online that you feel closer to than some in your physical world? And if so, do you think there’s something wrong with that? That there is something wrong with you? Must you be with someone in the flesh, in the real “touching” world to be close to them? To have a real relationship? I used to think I had the answers to those questions. But I don’t. I have a life outside of online social media. A full life. Sometimes too full to be honest. But this online life of mine feels every much as real. Am I fooling myself? Is this as fleeting as the online internet provider’s connection? Some days, I think yes. People I thought were my friends disappoint. Lie. Say they support but don’t. But that is no different than real life friends or co-workers, people who constantly let you down or don’t have the same work ethic as you. Self-absorbed people who talk and talk and talk about themselves but never ask how you are doing…who don't see the consequences of their actions and often play the victim. Those people, I’m sure, are the same in their everyday, flesh lives as well. That's just who they are. It doesn’t have anything to do with social media or being online. We can’t “fake” the essence of who we are. Everyone’s true self comes out eventually, especially when you’ve been in the game this long. I’d rather have 10 close friends I can count on than 1000 fake ones, only after self- preservation. So today, I want to dedicate this post to tried and true friends, and in particular, a very special group of friends, The Writers of NuR, as we just saw our first anthology, Beyond the Last Page, go live and with great success! You are my writing comrades, but it’s more for me. We are friends. I count on you. And I hope you can count on me. We worked through deadlines, edits, critiques, and publishing. We listened to each other. We encouraged each other. We supported each other and left our egos at the door. We cheered each other on, sometimes hearing things about our work we didn't want to. We grew together. And we produced something I’m quite proud of, and quite smoothly I might add, a group dedicated to something outside of themselves. Though some of you I haven’t met in the flesh, you are every bit as real to me, sometimes more so. I like waking up knowing there is someone there to say good morning and really mean it, who listens with sincerity, and who isn’t a fair-weather fan, but a tried and true friend. Congratulations to our first, and, hopefully, many more successes. Cheers!
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-I love to write blogs, and I still love to read them! It brings life into focus for me. I still peruse the internet looking for blogs that interest me on numerous topics. I enjoy it. I started writing my own blogs, because I needed a voice to record my thoughts as they were happening to me. Events of the day. Things people would say to me that made me want to scream or rejoice. Feelings. Relationships. Emotions. Basically in a word: Therapy. Or in another: Health. I found that writing down my feelings and thoughts, much like a journal, help me process. Lets me move on. Forces me to think, deal with my cauldron of demons, and exhale or heal or make sense of a world I sometimes can't. And maybe it helps someone else. I never thought to publish them here, like I have been regularly. Who cares? Who would read them? Most of the time, they're stream of conscious type rambles that I think will be about one thing and morph into another. It was friend of mine who said: "Publish these. And not just on your website." I'm still debating that. Probably not. But as I learned of a new feature here on my website, Categories, I started to update my posts into topics for people to find easier, and I realized, I've written about a lot of topics (see right-hand column), some more meaningful than others. From poetry and philosophy... ...to goals, religion, and sexuality... I've got shit to say! But who's reading them? Am I wasting my time sharing them with you, maybe a handful of people who might click over and see what I have to say? Again, I ask myself, "Who cares? Do people even read blogs anymore? Is blogging a silly thing of the past? Is blogging dead?" A co-writer recently said: No one reads blogs anymore. Stop spending your time of this crap. It's not like it's driving sales... No. It's probably not. But I guess it doesn't matter. I write these for me just as I do my poetry. I write them because I'm an emotional person. I write them, because if I don't, I might carry things with me far too long, and that's not who I am. I write them to forgive. I write them to love. I write them to discover who I am. Plainly, I write them, because I'm human, and if I didn't, I might implode. Does it matter if people read them or praise me or any other reason? I would love it if they did. But I've realized that's not IT for me like it might be for other people. It will NEVER be the reason I write ANYTHING. Fuck that.
I've written them because I don't have a choice. I've written them to improve. As a writer. As a person. And as a thinker. There are too many days I want to give up because of something someone else tells me. I didn't think I'd write a blog today, "too busy," I said to myself...and then, I found myself writing, without even a conscious decision to do so! And here I am, finding a way to process things on my mind. It's helped me work out my demons. And what I really discovered is that being a writer is happening all day long for me. It's a part of who I am. I can't shut it off even if I wanted to. I have a voice. We all do. And this is what I do. I write. So even if blogging is dead. This little ol' blogger is alive...the tree really does still make the noise, even if no one is there to hear it. When I lost my aunt in December, my cousins asked me to rifle through pictures to see what I had, and it reminded me of so many things. There is something lost now, isn’t there? With our phones and our i-pads and our video capacity. We seem to lose so much, and one would think it would be the opposite, but it really isn’t. There is something special about those old photographs, much like old letters or postcards we’ve kept over the years. There’s something about holding them in our hands, touching them, running our fingers across the front, flipping them over to read the back, see the year, maybe the place. My mother was forever marking up those photographs. And everything looks so…I don’t know, pretty and nostalgic, especially when in black and white, like some of my mom’s baby pictures or first communion I came across. They somehow feel alive. They feel as if they're breathing right there next to us. The same is true of old letters or writing. There really is nothing that can replace handwriting. I remember holding Emily Dickinson’s work once in the basement annex of Amherst College, wearing gloves, being watched as if I might steal them. Smart. I wanted to. I regret the love letters I tossed or the notes from friends during class. I had a best friend and she and I wrote old-fashioned letters to one another in middle school, professing our “friends forever” in black-ink promises, only to be tossed as I moved or aged. Not enough space. Oh, the regret! A new study I read recently stated that this generation (is that me?) is losing living in the moment. That everyone is so Instagram-ized, trying to take the best pictures possible – oh, look at me eating this; or oh, I just saw this magnificent sunset; or oh, look at my dog being silly—that we’re no longer really living in the moment, or even enjoying it, or even REMEMBERING IT at all later, but instead, living for the moment to take a damn picture. How sad if that’s true! What will become of our memories or experiences if we’re so hung up on taking the picture, not for ourselves, but instead for someone else to say: Oh, isn’t Rosemary the coolest cat ever?
When I came across some of the pictures, it reminded, too, of my childhood and a scene in Edge of Torment I took from my own life, where Patricia, Annabelle’s best friend, has displayed a photograph of the two of them at Patricia's brother Billy’s wedding. It’s two best friends in a pool wearing funky glasses, and I remember exactly the moment I stole the idea from. It was with my cousin, my favorite cousin still to this day, and at the service, I asked her if she too remembered those days in the back yard at 4 or 5 or if the memory was only because of that picture. She remembered it just as I had and, though sad at where we were presently, we smiled and laughed and hugged, poured some wine afterwards, and sat down to reminiscence. That’s what photographs do for us. And I’m grateful I still have boxes upon boxes of them even if I’ve lost so many of the people in them. They are engraved somewhere inside my heart’s mind, far from being lost. And that brought me comfort. Today I am admitting something: I am not perfect. Not. Even. Close. Ha! Not so much a revelation, huh? Feel cheated? Tricked? Well, I have another confession. And I hope we’re still friends after it. I’m about to do something I thought I’d never do, that I thought was silly and trivial and narcissistic. And here I am. About to do it. “What?” you may be asking? You sitting down? I’m about to bite the bullet and go to a salon with one of my besties to get…No. Not fake boobs. Not Botox. Or something similarly appalling. But something else unspeakable...fake eyelashes! Why? Good question. And I’ll try to answer without seeming like…a boob myself! As a Christmas gift, I got a gift card to my favorite salon, filled with all kinds of goodies from facials to massages and to now, it seems, fake eyelashes! I’ve secretly always wanted to try them. But thought: I am not that superficial. Who does something like this? And here I am, about to take the plunge. Tress up my eyes. Ditch mascara, maybe for an eternity! We all have our insecurities. Right? Who among us REALLY likes the way we look. There are certain things I will just never like about myself—the length of my legs, the way I overthink things, the way my two front teeth seem to come out maybe a little too far, how much smarter my brother is than me…and… I could go on, but you get the idea. But my eyes have never been one of them. I don’t mind them. I like the way they change color. I like that I have 20/20 vision (even though I occasionally wear fake glasses. Dear god. I’m a mess!). So why the eyelashes? Well, why the hell not? That’s the best answer I can give! I've got nothing profound here. I work hard for a living. I earn my own money. And as I age, I find it harder and harder to find anything that doesn’t irritate my skin, mascara or eye liner often one of them. So why the hell not? It might be fun. I might have more confidence. Maybe I’ll become less shy. Maybe I’ll feel, for just a moment, that I am glamorous, that maybe, I’ll blink my eyes and feel the weight of luxurious eye lashes against my skin, and for once, become comfortable in my own skin. Highly unlikely. But at the very least, it will remind me never to judge why people might do what they do, cosmetically or otherwise. It’s not my business or for me to decide. Sometimes, we just feel the need to try something new, have an adventure, crawl out of our comfort zones to find the comfort and acceptance we all crave. And this 2019, I’m no longer going to worry about what other people think of me or my choices, or question why I have the urges I do, but instead, sit back, and say: Damn it. That was fun. And then maybe wink with the best damn eyelashes a girl could ask for! ;) |
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I LOVE to write and read. I particularly enjoy reading erotic romance that has tons of emotion in it. I hope you will ask me questions and share your favorite authors and novels. I welcome all feedback.
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