Updated at the bottom

Have you ever read a post where someone said something so perfectly that you actually spun around in your spinny office chair like Alex P. Keaton when he was high on amphetamines in the “Speed Trap” episode on Family Ties?  This post is one of those posts.* (A heads up: she is currently pregnant and mentions it in the post.)  Especially when she wrote,

Blogging has so evolved since when I launched this blog. When I started blogging a few years ago, there was no Pinterest rabbit hole of perfect spaces and beautiful things to covet. And it seemed like many bloggers, besides a few established ones, were more rough around the edges (in a good way) — posting inspiring, informative finds that included some posts from their own home and life adventures. The photos weren’t always perfect. The posts didn’t have Photoshop layouts and cool type layered over images. More blogs felt like online journals to me, rather than mini online magazines with staged shoots and recurring features.

I don’t spend a lot of time on Pinterest, maybe because I don’t believe that living aspirationally is the healthiest frame of mind (and believe me, if I let myself go there, I could see myself falling into a state of coveting).  I don’t want to aspire to be something different or have my house look different or have my life be different, except in ways that a magazine or blog or pinboard can never direct. (Unless, perhaps, I am mistaken and embryologist Michael Tucker has a Pinterest account?)  I don’t want to live in a constant state of searching for something.

I’m drawn — like the author of that post — to blogs that have rougher edges.

I guess what I’m saying is please don’t go slick.

Please don’t try to put together the perfect blog, with the perfect layout and the perfect accompanying photographs.  Place on the screen whatever is in your head, whether it is pretty or boring or strange or upsetting or inspiring.  I read your blog not because I need good ideas or I need to be inspired; I read your blog to connect with you, the author.  To try to understand another person’s world and have my own viewpoint expanded.  And yes, ideas and inspiration come from that organically.  It isn’t fed to me, but rather, it’s something I find.  Like stumbling into a field of wildflowers rather than a cultured garden.

It feels as if there has been a lot of blogging attrition this year, a lot of posts where people write that while they don’t want to give up writing their blogs, blogging has become too difficult.  Twitter and Facebook are easier; faster.  There is no stressing about the quality of the paragraphs or the lack of visual accompaniment.  And that is true.  Except that we don’t have to let blogging go slick.  We can, as the author above states, take back the space and say that it’s great that all these trends exist, but we don’t need to participate in each one.

I’ve been blogging for almost seven years.  I’ve seen a lot of trends come and go.  A lot of memes pass through the blogosphere.  A lot of hot sites sizzle and burn out.  And still, I plod along.  Word-focused post after word-focused post, just as I did back when I first started blogging and had no clue how to upload an image.  As a reader, I am still drawn, after all this time, to a good story.  To a smart turn of phrase.  To an interesting analogy.  That is what makes me read a blog.

Which is not to say that other people aren’t drawn to stylized blogs.  But I did want to point out that there are at least two of us out here looking for the interesting find over perfection.  Just in case you were stressed out and not writing because you don’t know how to make your blog mirror what you see on Pinterest.

Truly, read her post in full.  It’s that good.

* I was not high on amphetamines like Alex P. Keaton when I wrote that.

Update:

I put this in the comment section below, but thought I’d move it into the bottom of the post since I think it keeps coming up.

I think some people have touched on something here. I see a big difference between taking care of your space (I really wish I was the type of person who had a neater online space that did more “things.” I don’t know what those things would be, but just more of these amorphous “things.”) and making a space slick.

There’s a difference between people who document things they would be doing regardless of whether or not they had a blog. One my favourite food blogs is Half Baked Life (http://ahalfbakedlife.blogspot.com/) because she not only posts good stories with her recipes, but I also get a sense that all this food would be made and consumed even if she wasn’t recording it. It would be called dinner. But because she has a blog, she also documents it and gives us a recipe. So it’s a win-win.

But then there are others who you sense would not have done X if not for their blog. If they didn’t have a blog, they would have just made some cupcakes, served them, and been done. But because they have a blog, they had to create tiny toppers to go on each cupcake shaped like their favourite characters from favourite books. And they had to serve these cupcakes in tiny champagne glasses that have been wrapped with cloth and ribbon to resemble open books. And they had to have all their friends eat them while they laughed hazily in the background while the cupcake is in sharp focus in the foreground.

It all comes down to a spidey sense. I know people who make insane cupcakes like that in their day-to-day life… and they don’t have a blog. So I know those people exist. So it all comes down to a gut decision — do I think this is a reflection of your life, or do I think this is a life created for a blog? And I recognize that this may mean that I misjudge people all the time.

But I do feel sad when a blog goes slick. A favourite blog of mine went slick a while back. I miss reading it, but I’m also fairly aware having known how the blog used to be that I’m looking at a life created for a blog vs. the other way around.

I don’t mind sponsored posts at all, though I do sometimes think they can become (for some people) a gateway post much like a gateway drug to slicker things.

I keep returning to the same news story of a set of twins who underwent euthanasia this week in Belgium. They were born deaf and were now going blind, and “they wanted to die because they ‘could no longer bear being unable to hear or see the other’.” I want to talk about it, but I have nothing to say. I tried talking about it with Josh, but the conversation was very brief, like a quick dash of salt.

“I keep reading about these twins. I want to talk about it.”

“What can a person even say?”

And yet I read the article again this morning, almost as if I’m expecting it to say something different.

*******

So I pull apart the word: euthanasia.

Eu = good

Thanatos = death

Good death.

I break down the words even further, dig back to their roots; their stories.

Thanatos was the personification of death in Greek mythology. He was the son of Nyx (Night) and Erebos (Darkness). Like the brothers in Belgium, Thanatos was also a twin.

His brother was Hypnos, the personification of sleep. Hypnos lived in complete darkness — figurative blindess — in a cave without sound; deafness. The parallels keep rolling around in my mind.

In a pantheon of death-related gods, Thanatos is sometimes also specified as the god of peaceful death; easy death. When I read their brother’s account of the twins’ death, their small final wave and the repetition of the words “up in the sky,” all I could think of was this image of Thanatos and Hypnos there in the room, carrying the brothers gently beyond.

*******

I was moved by their death. Choosing to end their life together. It spoke to the enormity of their relationship. Obviously different but an equally powerful image is the one Ben Folds calls forth in his song, “Luckiest.”

Next door, there’s an old man who lived to his 90’s

And one day, passed away in his sleep

And his wife, she stayed for a couple of days

And passed away

I’m sorry, I know that’s a strange way

To tell you that I know we belong

That I know that

I am

I am,

I am the luckiest

Don’t we all love that idea as much as we don’t want to die at all?  To not have to go through the emotional pain of being parted from someone we love; in getting to go together with the person who holds our heart at the end of a very long, very loved life?

The brothers, of course, were not old.  This was not the end of a long life, but rather a road clipped short in middle age.  And maybe that was what made the back of my throat ache as I read about them.  Because this wasn’t the fading described in the “Luckiest.”  It was a horrible loss for their parents, their brother, their friends and family.  It was a choice, and because it was a choice, there were always other options — obviously unpalatable options, but options nonetheless.  And maybe it is the presence of those options-that-aren’t-really-options (or, more accurately, while others may have chosen those other options, they weren’t options that were acceptable to the brothers) that makes this story keep flipping around in my mind like a fish pulled out of a lake.  That fish; attached to a line.

*******

In my head, I keep thinking about how we process suicide, especially because at the same time, there have been so many articles about Aaron Swartz’s suicide.  Three lives, all cut short by choice, and in one case, it is called euthanasia, a good death.  And in the other, it is called suicide; Latin for self (sui) killing (cida).

There is so much anger after a suicide.  You want to resurrect the person just so you can scream at them about how much they’ve hurt you.  And yet we also have this thought that there are right times to end your life, reasonable times when living becomes unbearable and death then becomes a “good death.”  When we breathe a sigh of relief after a loss and say, “at least they aren’t in pain anymore.” How do we decide what is euthanasia and what is suicide?

It feels as if all deaths exist in greyness, processed by the remaining living.  And some we label euthanasia and some we label suicide, and others become accident or tragedy or finally or expected or too soon or unfair.  It’s almost as if this is part of the grieving process, to divvy up the deaths into their respective bin in our head so we know how to mourn.

Do we go first to tears or first to anger or first to shock or first to a shuddering sigh of relief?

How do we know if we don’t label it?

*******

Josh is correct: what can you even say about this?  It was their choice, and as someone who supports not only the concept of euthanasia but also respecting another person’s choice, it stands to reason that I have no opinion on the rightness or wrongness of their death.  It happened.  And it is mostly a private moment for the family, though it was shared as a news item with the rest of the world.

I cup my hands around the fact of their death and do my part as a human to hold it.

As a mother of twins, I watch them sit with their heads together, talking about their next big idea.  I think of Marc and Eddy Verbessem’s mother, how she is coping in the aftermath.  Maybe that’s why I can’t stop reading about it, why I want to talk about it.  Koev halev.  My heart is out there, with this family I’ve never met.

Josh was flipping through channels on the television when he paused on an image of a couple talking about demolishing their kitchen.  The show was aptly named “I Hate My Kitchen,” and I sat down on the edge of the bed, whispering aloud, “I hate my kitchen too,” as if we were all in a support group and this was the point where we go around the room and introduce ourselves.

We’re about to do some major renovations to our house, things that we’ve been putting off for years.  The number one reason we’ve put it off this long is that my ennui has always been stronger than my desire to love my kitchen.  I want to love my kitchen, but I’m also not really into thinking about my dream kitchen or making it happen.  I guess what I really want is someone from the DIY Network to come in, make me a cup of tea, and give me about two choices for everything we need to replace.  And then tell me what to do.  Or better yet, do it themselves.  And then call me back in to see it when they’re done.

But we’ve entered into the orbit of home repair, and now we are spinning through a galaxy of hardware stores and estimates and cabinet configurations.  We’ve become the sort of people who critique and covet from other people’s houses.  You know how when you start treatments (and I imagine adoption is the same way), it becomes your entire being?  It takes over your calendar and your worries.  You start carrying around a notebook with you so you can record what your RE says when he calls, and you have a timer going off to tell you when to do your next injection, and you read Resolve newsletters, and you hang out with others who are going through the same thing.  I realized that since we walked away from treatments the second time, we haven’t really had something like that which takes over your whole life in that manner.  But redoing the house?  It’s about as close as we’ve come again to being consumed.  It’s trading one project for another: Operation Family Building has now morphed into Operation Home Repair.

I’ve begun to dream about real estate.  I had a dream where we decided that it was easier to buy a new house rather than redo the one we own, but when I started checking housing prices in the area, we found that even tiny fixer-uppers in shitty areas of Maryland were priced at 63 MILLION DOLLARS.  But one of the houses overlooked a baseball diamond, and I realized that for 63 million dollars, I could have a front row seat to baseball games from the comfort of my own back deck.

I’ve also found a site where you can purchase private islands.  I found one nearby for only $850,000.  That seemed like a fairly good deal for a private island, no?  The whole home renovation project has gotten me more and more obsessed with the idea of moving to a private island, as if repainting a kitchen somehow reprograms your brain to suddenly crave more real estate like a zombie wanting to feast on the contents of your skull.  Must get real estate.  Must get real estate that reflects my antisocial tendencies and love of water.  Brains…

So that’s where we are.  Coveting.  Dreading.  Wasting work time trying to get the house repaired.

Dear Prudence had a note last week from a person who had received a “Don’t Save the Date” card for a wedding — in other words, she received a formal announcement that she was not invited to the upcoming wedding.  On one hand, it’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard of.  I assume that if someone directly tells me about an upcoming event and gives me the date (wedding, birthday party, barbecue), they are planning to invite me when they send out invitations so I save the date.  If I hear indirectly about the upcoming event, I personally don’t save the date.  If I’m still available when/if the invitation rolls around, great.  If I’m not, well, we weren’t close enough to warrant a conversation about the date so I’m going to assume that my presence isn’t a make-or-break deal.  And if the invitation doesn’t roll around at all, I go on with my life and they go on with their life and with few exceptions, there are no hard feelings.

Except when they post all the pictures and details on Facebook.

Because THAT is where the other hand comes in.  Prudence touches on it with the idea that posting all about your upcoming nuptials on Twitter or Facebook creates an assumption (perhaps) that the people you are speaking to will be invited.  If my cousin posted about her engagement, wrote about dress shopping, told us about the cute place she picked for the ceremony, I would sure as hell assume as someone who is close family that I’m invited unless she also tells all of us that it’s going to be a tiny ceremony with just immediate family.  After all, why is she telling all of us unless we’re going to get to witness the event?  On the other hand, there are plenty of people I am not close to that I happen to be connected with on Facebook, and when they post about their wedding, I don’t assume I’m invited.  So… I also know that this doesn’t totally hold.

Social media certainly complicates things.

Which is why I don’t really know how I feel about people posting party pictures afterward on Facebook.  If I was there, it rocks to be able to see the pictures everyone took and snag a few.  If I couldn’t be there, it rocks to be able to see the happy event and feel as if I got to experience it visually from afar.  If there was no chance for being invited, such as when a blogger I’m friends with on Facebook got married recently, I get to feel as if I was included a little bit in their happy moment and congratulate them as I would have if I had been there.

BUT.

If I wasn’t invited and I have no clue why I wasn’t invited, it totally sucks to see all the fun I missed out on.  Or that the kids missed out on when parents post pictures from their child’s birthday party, and I awkwardly hit “like” even though I am looking at pictures of their classmates having fun without my kid.  This knowledge comes even without social media*.  Back when I was a kid, we always knew when other people were having their birthday because we sang to them in school, and if we didn’t know the details of their party, we knew that we weren’t invited (and that hurt).  But once the party was over, unless the kids who were invited came to school crowing about what a great time they had (as they did when someone’s parents did something really unusual such as the time when Courtney’s parents rented out a whole arcade and we could play any game we wanted as many times as we liked), no one really gave much thought to the party after the fact.

But now, people post all the pictures from the party on Facebook, and you have this photographic evidence of everyone having fun.  Without you.  It’s like watching the Sneeches have their wiener roasts.  And that sort of sucks.  Especially when the function exists on Facebook to SHARE ONLY WITH A SMALL GROUP.  If you’ve excluded me from the shindig, also exclude me from the photos.  Exclude me from all the updates beforehand and after.  It’s easy to share only with the people you’ve invited (or are planning on inviting) and leave the rest out.

So when people don’t take advantage of that option, they kind of sort of suck a little bit.

I feel differently about posting on a blog because you don’t always know who is reading.  Yes, it’s public, so therefore anyone can read.  But at the same time, there isn’t a clear list that you can pick-and-choose to send your news or images to such as on Facebook.  If I knew someone had just had a party that I wasn’t invited to, I would skip their blog post about it.  Whereas I can’t really skip it (unless I hide their updates) in a general Facebook news feed.

Party pictures on Facebook sent out to your entire feed or just the people invited — yay or nay?

* Having twins, we also sometimes run into the fact that one is invited to a party while the other is not.  When it’s an all-boy or all-girl party, that makes total sense.  But one of them (and not the other) was once invited to a mixed-sex party.  That was awkward.  They discussed it together, and it was decided that the invited kid would go to the party without any hurt feelings directed at them from the twin.  I took the non-invited kid out for the night in a total hedonistic frenzy of all of their favourite things to assuage the hurt feelings that were there and directed at the birthday kid.  It was both a thoughtless gesture (invite both to your boy-girl party or invite none, but don’t invite one) and a realistic one (while they share a lot of friends now, as they age, I expect that this will happen more and more often).

I love this quote so much that I have to type it down here so I don’t forget it.  And if you missed it, you should read it.  When Anne Hathaway won her Golden Globe, she looked at the award and said,

“Thank you for this lovely blunt object that I will forever use as a weapon against self-doubt.”

Isn’t that gorgeous?  Everyone needs that blunt object in their life, whether it is a kiss from a partner that lets you know that someone is always in your corner or a Golden Globe award.  In the end, we all just need to end up armed against self-doubt.  It’s one of those emotions that serve no purpose except to hold us back from maybe achieving something great.  I sometimes need to read something to remember that.  So thanks, Ms. Hathaway.