Breaking the Surface

For a first post, I told my friend, this is like jumping into the deep end of the pool. She said maybe, but there are way more advanced forms of blogging which are like jumping off the cliff in Acapulco. Now why should it be that just writing down some thoughts is so intimidating? I mean anyone's thoughts, not just mine.

I have sort of made a commitment to myself that if what I write isn't any good at least I like the way the blog looks, at least at this point. I also think that maybe what I am doing requires a rare kind of introspection. Not that I am not introspective, I am, but sometimes I think my introspection is more like really thin, wet spaghetti in a collander with really big holes. Lots of ideas just kind of hanging out here and there and the only thing you can do is let them hang because if you pull them back in they break and if you try to push them through they break. Just stuff you wish you could ignore or take back or fix but you can't. Wasted spaghetti.

I have this idea that mastering something, even blogging, is something I am never going to do because mastering something means taking a task and continuing to find interest in it no matter how much you already know. Not being afraid of being bored by learning little tiny interesting bits about your subject sends you into depths you couldn't conceive when you first began. See, there is that Acapulco metaphor. And maybe once you get down into those depths you will see things you never saw before and maybe some of those things are scary, or maybe it could really be like Acapulco and you take the risk of missing the deep part altogether and break your skull on the rocks.

Why do I want to master something like blogging? I don't even know. I always think that when I solve a problem, the solution might come in handy later, or maybe just the lesson. I like to write and lots of times I read something and I think, Uí, I can do better than that, but then I write something and I look and look and look and think, that sucks! Not always but often enough I have the thought that breaking my skull on the rocks would be less embarrassing.

So every once in a while I pick up my sister's writer's market or one of her writing books or I look at poetry in the New Yorker magazine and I think, yep, this is why they are in the New Yorker. They use all the same words I do, they just put them together differently.