Tag Archives: writing

It’s YOUR fault!

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I’m not sure how this happened. I haven’t found anyone to blame yet, but I’m looking for a scapegoat and would appreciate a volunteer.

When did my blog change from a fun hobby into a do-or-die project? It has been consuming my life. Incrementally, bit by bit, it nibbles at my days, chews up my evenings and gnaws the edges of my nights.

Dutch IrisI have computers everywhere, so I can work from any room. Any place I might relax, a computer lies waiting. The proliferation of computers was a convenience, so I wouldn’t have to haul stuff around. It wasn’t supposed to be a constant reminder of tasks and assignments. I renounced that stuff years ago … or so I thought.

I started reviewing books because I love them. Now, I have more books to read than time — and I’ve got deadlines. Deadlines? Come again? I’m retired, aren’t I?

No time to read other people’s blogs or listen to an audio book just for fun. No time to read anything that isn’t on my “to-read” list. Barely time to answer personal email. Or talk on the phone, shop, cook or do anything except write, edit and read. Sleep? No time for that, either.

We don’t change as much as we think we do. Just when we think we’ve finally gotten that piano out the door, it sneaks back in the window. Old, engrained habits lurk — then when you think you’ve got it beat, pounce. Whack. HEY! Where’d you come from? Saying “yes” until I’m drowning — it’s an old song, oh so familiar. I know the music, lyrics and all 42 verses. Old habits are like old shoes. So comfy. Slide right into those babies.

Riverside gardenWhen I started doing this, I wanted to be busier than I was, but didn’t want to be tied to a schedule. Free, unscheduled time is the singular gift of retirement. We may be short of money but our time belongs to us.

Instead of letting myself enjoy the wealth of time, I’m back on a schedule. I’m not even getting paid!

So I’ve decided it’s not my fault. It’s someone else’s fault. I just need to figure out who. What about you? Has your hobby, your blog, your avocation taken over your life? I’ll bet I’m not the only one who has a problem. Maybe bad habits are contagious and I caught it from you. In which case …

It’s your fault. I can point a finger and be off the hook. No need to ponder my complicity or change my behavior.

This must be why scapegoating is so popular. It has surpassed baseball as our national pastime. If others are to blame, I can be a total screw up. If it’s not my fault, I don’t have to fix it. Cool.

So, is it your fault? You, there, sitting in front of your computer. Yes, I mean you.  Don’t try to weasel out of this. I know guilt when I see it!

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Marilyn’s Dirty Dozen

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John Howell’s “Rule is as Rule Does” got me thinking about life and how we invent rules as we go. I make rules for myself and I follow them. But I hate rules, so the only rules I follow are mine, all born of hard lessons.

What rules? I’m glad you asked.

I’ve had a life in which the light at the end of the tunnel was always the headlight of an oncoming train. At one point, I got so stressed I could barely breathe. Something had to give if I was going to survive. I had to change. I had enough issues without stressing myself to death.

I began by getting a tattoo, a symbol of life. It was an acknowledgement of change, an acceptance of survival and the possibility I might have to do it again. The tattoo is a large phoenix in full flaming color. It’s one-of-a-kind, designed for me. I had it put toward the back of my left calf. I didn’t realize it was going to be quite so big, but I’ve come to like it. I was 57 when I got my only piece of body art. Tattoos are more permanent than most marriages, so if you’re going to get one, make it something you won’t find embarrassing later in life. Spelling and punctuation count. A typo in a tattoo is forever.

My left leg

It is difficult to shoot a picture of the lower back of ones left leg. Remember: Blue jeans leave ridges. If you want a picture of a your own body or some part of it, getting someone else to take the picture is better. Both terriers were really excited when I took off my jeans and socks. I’m pretty sure they thought it was a game. Bonnie figured she’d score a pair of socks but I outwitted her and put them up on the desk. Hah! Asking Garry to take the picture seemed weird and required too much explanation. So I snapped it myself. Awkwardly.

I never wrote my rules before, so this has been an interesting exercise. I don’t expect you to follow my rules, but they are pretty good ones. They grew out of decades of doing everything wrong, worrying myself into ulcers, simmering with anger at injustice, and getting frantic over every ecological or political crisis.

Marilyn’s Dirty Dozen

  1. Laugh often. Have friends who laugh with you.
  2. If you can’t fix it, don’t brood about it.
  3. Have pets. Cats, dogs, chickens, ferrets, bunnies, reptiles, bats or birds. Anything but spiders. I don’t like spiders.
  4. Don’t argue with stupid people.
  5. When you know you’re wrong, give up and apologize.
  6. Worrying is a waste of time. Whatever you are worried about, something else will happen.
  7. Staying angry at someone who wronged you hurts you, not them. They aren’t losing sleep over you. Forget it. Move on.
  8. Be a gracious winner. People may sympathize with a sore loser, but everyone hates a gloating winner.
  9. The path less traveled is often a dead-end. Before going down unmapped roads, make sure you can make u-turns in tight spaces.
  10. When you have a choice, do the right thing. When you have no good choices, do the best you can. If you have no choice, run for your life.
  11. Brutal honesty is inevitably more brutal than honest. Be kind.
  12. If you’re an artist, do your thing. Talking about it doesn’t count.

Live your life. You are unique. Celebrate!

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Weekly Writing Challenge: Papa Says Get Economical – Destiny in Under 500 Words

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The Path

Life happens. We plan. We’re psyched. Announce our upcoming adventure! Oops. Sickness. Financing falls through. The place we were sure was ours sells to someone else. Job offer dissolves; budget cancelled. Harvard said what? Who’s writing this script?

People (who ARE those people?) say “everything happens for a reason.” I’m not so sanguine, but I know we follow our destiny, like it or not. The longer I live, the louder I hear that drumbeat. Plans go awry. If fate decrees we aren’t doing it, discussion over. Make new plans? They fall apart too. Different reasons, same result. Another plan anyone?

Years pass. The you making plans has changed. If you get what you want, it won’t be what you expect. Could be better, might be worse. Surely different.

Take it easy, go with the flow. Bring energy, enthusiasm and a sense of wonder to everything,  planned or not. Life’s unexpected, but needn’t be dull.

From womb to tomb, it’s a journey. We are forever becoming. The only thing we can always count on is us. Wherever, whatever, we bring ourselves to the party. The unplanned things were the most important. Never entirely fun. Rarely easy, but critical. Meaningful.

From 13 years old I wanted to go to Israel to live. Not visit. I had no interest in tourism. I wanted to live there, experience culture shock, be enveloped by foreignness. My first attempt to move there — with mom’s collusion — got cancelled when I chose college, a special B.A. program I thought wouldn’t let me in. I planned to study nursing in Israel. I was 16, just out of high school.

Twelve years later, I did move to Israel — on my own with my 9-year old son. No plans to study. I’d gotten my chance 5 years earlier, accepted into an exclusive Master’s program for administrative nursing. I dreamed of running free clinics for people without insurance.

Along came life. My first husband got cancer at 34. After I got up off the floor, I figured I needed an income, not a master’s. I found work as a writer; remained a writer my entire professional life. How would the lives entwined with mine have been changed if I’d moved to Israel in 1963? My son might not exist — or my granddaughter. I’d never have met Garry. I can’t imagine such a life.

This is where I should be. I know it, though not why. If I’d chosen, I’d be richer, healthier, living with better weather and no mortgage. But I wouldn’t trade for what I’ve got. Life’s not what I planned. It’s a challenge. But it’s good. I am where I should be. Destiny.

My dogs are happy. They never plan, except for the next biscuit. I’m with the dogs.

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Daily Prompt: Bookworm — Where books live …

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Lap Log with Kindle HD (7″) open and on.

Where books are read, thoughts are alive and ideas matter.

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Shine On Award from Tazeinmirzasaad

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Reblogged from It's ME:

Click to visit the original post

Woooohoooooooooooo.................. more awards for ME!!!!

Thanks to Tazeinmirzasaad for nominated me for Shine On Award. Now I shines like a star..

                    
                     \    /   /            _\/_      
                       .-'-.              //o\     _\/_
    _  ___  __  _ --_ /     \ _--_ __  __   | __   /o\\
  =-=-_=-=-_=-=_=-_= -=======- = =-=_=-=_,-'|"'_"'"--|-,_
   =- _=-=-_=- _=-= _--=====- _=-=_-_,-"      (")    |
  jgs=- =- =-= =- = -  -===- -= - ."       '-( : )-'
             ...

Read more… 98 more words

Wow -- a very nice award and completely unexpected! Thank you so much!

75,000 Hits – Wow. Gee. Golly.

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Yesterday I passed 75,000 hits. In the not very distant future, I’ll cross the Rubicon of 100,000. What does it mean? It’s nice to have substantial numbers. If after all this effort, I didn’t have something to show for it, I’d probably give up blogging. It has been an interesting and sometimes exhilarating year.

Dogged determination got me through a lot of it while trying to work out a formula to create high quality content — every day — and still leave time for the rest of my life. It eventually paid off. Most importantly, it got me writing again. When I started blogging, I hadn’t written anything but email in years. Writing is good for me. It gets my mental gears meshing, makes me reconnect with the world.

Serendipity got off to a slow start. Although I began it in February of 2012, it was well into summer before I began to take it seriously, post regularly. Last June, I was thrilled to get 40 hits a day. I couldn’t imagine getting 75,000 hits. Ever.

I caught some lucky breaks. A couple of my posts hit at a perfect time, a little ahead of events. Pure luck. The rest of it, though, was a determined effort to figure out a way to create good, interesting content and still have time for a life.

BigNumber

Posting daily makes it tempting to just put something, anything out there. For a long time, I reblogged a lot. I’m a pretty good curator and I think I chose good material, but ultimately the sheer weight of so much stuff became a problem. I had to rethink my approach.

I decided if I need a day off — or I just don’t have time to put something together properly — it’s better to rerun my own material. Some of you commented on my reruns; some think it’s cheating. Frankly I can’t see how reblogging someone else’s posts isn’t cheating, but reworking ones own material is. It doesn’t make sense. Every television station reruns shows all the time, so why can’t Serendipity rerun posts? I have favorite pieces I’d run every day if I could get away with it. Gradually, over the past few months, I’ve been limiting reblogs and reworking my articles and photographs. And deleting, deleting, deleting.

And, like distant thunder, the numbers keep rolling in. By the time you read this, they will have chugged along, heading toward the next milestone.

Change is constant

I’ve been changing Serendipity slowly but steadily. Without fanfare and some folks haven’t even noticed, but if you look at past months, the difference is pretty obvious. There is always a price to pay when you stop providing what your audience has come to expect. In my case, it resulted in about a 20% drop in traffic, though it’s picking up again. I think it was a worthwhile trade. Serendipity is a better site. Better designed, better material.

There’s less of a “kitchen sink” feel to it. More focus on reviews — books, movies, television and technology. More stories, less philosophy. More photo essays but in total, fewer posts.

75000

I’ve deleted hundreds of old posts — more than 300 so far and lots more to go. I was storing over a thousand articles. It was too much. Even with all the deleting, there are too many posts, but deleting has to be done slowly and carefully for technical and aesthetic reasons. I’m working my way from earliest to most recent. It’s hard to let go. I fall in love with words. It hurts to throw them away, but everything gets old. We all have to clean house.

Staying fuzzy

After a full year of daily blogging, I am finally seeing a shape emerging, a sense of what this thing I’m doing is and maybe where it’s going. It’s soft and fuzzy, but I don’t need it sharp. Edges become boundaries. I want the freedom to change directions whenever I feel like it. I don’t want to commit to a course. Life already has too many restrictions. Commonsense, personal inclination and good taste should suffice to keep me on track.

SnapIt-105

This blog is my free space. It is intentionally amorphous. I gave Serendipity to me as a reward for years of following rules I hated, stupid rules enforced by ignorant people. Now, if the rules are stupid or ignorant, they are my own and I have no one to blame.

75,000 is a big number

Numbers have great symbolic power. It’s those tens and fives , numbers that match our fingers and toes. I blithely ignored 71,000, 73,000 and have watched the ascent past 74,000 to the nice round 75,000.

daily numbers

What can you expect in the next months and years at Serendipity? I’m not sure. I’m going somewhere for which I have no map. We’ll go there together and see what we see. I’ll write stories about it, take pictures along the way.

You can count on book reviews. Stories. A rant or two. Technology, gadgets, movies. Lots of photographs. I’ll try to make you laugh, cry, buy cool gadgets. I hope you’ll hang with me because you — all of you — friends, followers, occasional visitors have changed me and my world. You’ve introduced me to art, movies, books and ideas. I’d never have found all this great stuff without your nudges, hints, suggestions.

Change is ongoing. I may find something fascinating and new or may go back to things I’ve allowed to get dusty. It’s a messy erratic unpredictable thing, this business of living. Serendipity is alive. Messy. Like me.

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GET TO KNOW ME TAG – Guilty Secrets Revealed!

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I stole this from Natasha Harmer at Films and Things.

I know it’s hokey, but I’ve been filling out stuff like this since I was old enough to apply pencil to paper. I’m a sucker for silly quizzes in woman’s magazine and questionnaires promising to tell you “what kind of dog is right for you” or “which computer do you need?” I wouldn’t listen to the answers anyhow, but I just love answering the questions. I know it’s dumb. Surely you all do something equally dumb. We all have guilty secrets. I also read the back of cereal boxes. Maybe you have a secret passion for Harlequin romance novels? Someone must read them …

MarInTeepee-2

So. Here is my “everything you didn’t think to ask me about me because I’ve probably told you already” questionnaire. Feel free to steal it from me and fill in your own answers just like I stole it from Natasha. I didn’t create it and I’m sure neither did she.

I’m sure no one knows where it originated or why. On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.

Are you named after anyone?

My great-aunt Malka. She died right before I was born and in Ashkenazi families, we name kids after recently dead relatives, even if we barely knew them or actively disliked them. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea and neither did my mother.

When was the last time you cried?

When I was writing about dogs the other night. I cry about dogs. And cats. And horses. I cannot watch or read anything about harming animals. But that’s just tearing up. Really seriously cried? Probably when my brother died four years ago.

Do you have kids?

A son. And a granddaughter.

Owen and Garry

Owen and Garry

If you were another person, would you be a friend of yourself?

Yes. But I would have to tell me to shut up a lot.

Do you use sarcasm a lot?

Not so much anymore. Mostly, I grew out of it. When I was younger, I was very sarcastic. As I got older, I discovered many people can’t handle sarcasm; it hurts their feelings. One of these people is my husband. So I dialed myself way back and life is better. I still use a lot of irony though, especially in my writing.

Will you ever bungee jump?

No. Not even if I were a great deal younger and less broken. But I’d still ride the Cyclone. I rode two of the four biggest, baddest roller coasters on the east coast of the US last summer. I’ve been limping ever since.

What’s your favorite cereal?

Rice Crispies, but I don’t really eat them anymore. Not in years. I like the idea, though.

What’s the first thing you notice about people?

Their age. I want to know if they are close enough to my generation to know what I’m talking about without my having to explain everything.

What is your eye color?

Very darkly brown.

Kaity

Scary movie or happy endings?

Anything with a really good script. Happy endings are preferred but not mandatory.

Favorite smells?

Someone else cooking dinner.

Summer or winter?

Autumn and spring. And if YOU lived in New England, you’d agree.

Mumford River in Autumn

Computer or television?

Computer, if I had to choose one or the other, but I watch TV on television and do everything else on a computer. Or Kindle, which is just another kind of computer anyhow.

What’s the furthest you’ve ever been from home?

Israel.

Do you have any special talents?

I’m not sure how special they are. I write a lot, what with having this blog and all. I take pictures. I talk pretty well. I used to play the piano almost professionally. Note: There is a monumental difference between “almost professionally” and “professionally.”

Where were you born?

Brooklyn, New York

What are your hobbies?

The aforementioned writing and photography. I can’t play piano anymore. My wrists are gone.

Do you have any pets?

Dogs. Bonnie the Scottie and Nan the Norwich Terrier. Plus a share of Bishop the Australian Shepherd and Amber the dachshund. I used to have cats too. And ferrets. And parrots. Tropical fish too, but I’m not sure if they really count as pets. Right now, we have a lot of ants. If I think of them as pets, maybe I won’t be so freaked out.

Bonnie, Nan & Garry

Favorite movie?

Is that a fair question? There’s someone who has just one favorite movie? How about a favorite genre? Which would be comedy.

Do you have any siblings?

An older brother, deceased. A younger sister, somewhere in Virginia.

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Daily Prompt: Freedom of Facebook – Serendipity’s my little world

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I believe in freedom. I don’t just say that. I mean it. I believe everyone has the right to express his or her opinion, no matter how uninformed or stupid.

I do not believe our society should allow — or worse, encourage — the spewing of hate in public. Facebook has become the poster child for bigots, supporting the vicious outpourings of ignorant and mean-spirited people. When I first signed up for Facebook, there was much on it in which I was uninterested, but there were also many people expressing reasonable opinions, telling stories of their lives and the lives of others. It was a way to link up with people I hadn’t seen in years, find out what was going on in lives being lived far away. It was fun.

Freedom is meant to be a good thing, not all ugliness and hatred.

Freedom is meant to be a good thing, not all ugliness and hatred.

Then it changed. The 2012 Presidential election brought out the worst in many people. Diatribes and postings full of hate and threats (implied and explicit) of violence. I started blocking people. It made my stomach churn and still does. There is no room in my personal space for bigots, racists and hate-mongers. I frankly don’t care whether or not they have a legal right to spread their vicious invective. There is, above all, a thing we call “right and wrong” … and that stuff is wrong by any standards. Worse, the proliferation of this ugliness affects how the world perceives us — in a very negative way. It polarizes dialogue and keeps people and parties in their separate corners. You cannot have a functional body politic if people cannot speak to each other. If we hate everyone who is different from us, we don’t see them as human. That’s a terrible thing. I don’t see anything good coming of this.

My blog is my world. I own it. I have control over it. I do not allow argument for argument’s sake. The trolls will never control my website. I do not allow personal attacks of any kind and the mere hint of racism will get that person banned forever. I may not be able to control Facebook, but I can control this space and I do.

My opinion of Facebook? It is what it is, the populist bulletin board for the world. I go there to play a few mindless games and see what some of my friends (the real ones) are doing. See who has posted pictures of family, babies, friends, dogs and all that stuff. I cross-post my blog to Facebook, so technically I guess I’m considered active, though I very rarely post anything directly there.

It’s a good place to go and find out what people are yelling about these days, what the current hot-button issues are. What kind of craziness is currently afflicting our world. The people who rant on Facebook would no doubt rant somewhere else if they didn’t have Facebook so perhaps it’s better that they have it — a public venue — than to be forced into the dark corners where they would fester and become even more evil than they already are, though that is hard to imagine.

Should Facebook enforce their own guidelines? They should. Morally and ethically, they should. They aren’t strict guidelines and are only likely to weed out the most extreme of their clients.

Will they? I doubt it. They’ve gotten too big. They lack the personnel to monitor their site. It’s become a monster. I suspect eventually it will self-destruct.

In the meantime, it’s the place where the crazies hang out. Like wild dogs, maybe they will eat each other and leave the rest of us alone.

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