Keeping it Lite and Merry, All Year Long.

It's nice to be inside, all warm and cozy, with my tea made in my new cast iron pot from my sister, which makes me feel all special and important (it's like so much better than a regular tea pot. And much more expensive).
My class tonight was canceled due to the snow. Damn snow. I don't remember the snow being such an inconvenience when I was a child. In fact, I hardly remember it snowing more than twice my entire childhood. Everyone always wanted snow, everyone was always talking about the drought and how if we could just get more snow...and now it seems my son plays in snow the entire winter while I shovel our driveway over and over and then drive three miles an hour in the slippery mush sweating like a cooking pig over one of those hot Hawaiian fire pits.
Even today, on my way to work, driving way slower than grandma (cars were passing on both sides!) I still slid, two times, one right into the middle of a red light intersection.
I just don't get it. My tires aren't bad. I'm in third gear for gosh sakes.
Other than snow writing has also been on my mind. Specifically, this blog.
Over three years it has slowly and quietly crept into almost all aspects of my life: friends, family, work.
It's interesting, this writing.
If I may get a little sentimental, it's all very near and dear to my heart. It enables a certain aspect of myself to come out that otherwise doesn't--in person I can be quiet and maybe shy (I like to think sweetly demure but I think it can also come across as being a capital B) and hard to get to know. It takes time for me to feel comfortable, and sometimes time doesn't even help. I like my old friends, girls who have known me since my memories begin. Or at least friends from my early twenties.
But this blog...this blog makes it's own friends. And that is perfectly OK with me. I never feel so loved as when someone comes up and gives me a hug who I hardly know, but who I know reads the blog.
Writing in an open, public way takes a lot of courage, or stupidity--I keep going back and forth and I can't really decide. But when I think about it, I tend to land on the latter--you throw yourself out there, your inner most thoughts (OK, not really. I am not that dumb, really.) But you open up a great deal more than you ever would otherwise, and you find yourself walking around in your real life feeling quite naked, wondering who read what post, and hoping some were skipped over by certain people, or, The Worse Thought Ever: no one is reading them at all.
Sometimes it's awfully cold, being so naked, and I feel so awkward I literally want to curl my naked body up in a little ball to hide and cry. And some sentence, some damn sentence, will keep rolling over and over in my mind...why oh why did I publish that? Great Gawd! On the INTERNET!
My husband has suggested (or maybe it was me, I can't remember) that I let him read through my posts before actually publishing them in efforts to not completely ruin my life via The Blog. Which in the moment sounded like such a sane and mature thing to do, but then other times I really don't care because we all feel whatever I write on here, and that is one of the reasons I write the thing to begin with: even when nobody comments...OK, so not so much when nobody comments, but! when somebody does comment, it makes me feel less alone.
I love writing. The process itself takes on a life of it's own....sometimes it's absolutely torturous and just looking at the screen makes me want to throw the dumb laptop into the toilet and other times I have this fun, sneaky little smirk on my face the whole time because typing the words gives me just as nice of a buzz as a glass of good shiraz.
But most of the time writing makes my life complete. My experiences don't really have an end until I push "publish" and then I take a deep breath and can be done. I can move on.
I get to experience things I like twice by writing about them. They almost can become more real than the experience itself, and many times when I look back and remember, it's the writing I remember, not the experience. Just like a picture.
And if it was a bad experience, I write about that too because writing usually will make it better, if only because I can step back and laugh at her, because, she is so crazy, and her life is so normal, and through it all she is really handling things quite well and you just want to reach out and hug her and let her know everything will be OK and she just needs to calm down.
Writing has let me laugh at myself and helped me to begin to not take myself and my life so seriously. This, by the way, is my 2011 New Year's Resolution: To Not Take Myself So Effing Seriously.
It's all just too funny really. And even if it's not funny, if you can see something funny in it, it makes it so much easier to survive (I'm thinking here specifically of changing the millionth nasty, stinky, dirty diaper....you know, with the pre-toddler just wriggling out of your hands like you are trying to brand the poor baby and poop everywhere and instead of getting all bent out of shape, taking a deep breath and in your best baby happy voice making up some poop song or something of that sort...K, maybe that was a dumb example but you get my drift).
Having a sense of humor just might be the key to surviving The F***ing Fours as well. Nothing else has really been effective.
And through it all, this blog is there. Letting me vent. Letting me yell. Keeping me sane, letting me laugh at me. You, people who read this, are all apart of that, and that makes me love you too.
Peace and a blessed 2011 to you all.