Flotsam

Random bits of flotsam, in which you very well might not be interested...

I wonder if this is what my journal sounds like. I wonder if, when people ever do read my journal and find these blogs interspersed in real time in context, they will see that this is really me. Or am I just being that "slice" of me that I wrote about the other day? I'm trying to get closer to true all the time. I think I'm making progress.

I love nerds. I love being one, and I love finding one. It's very treasure-huntish.

I am very blessed in my in-laws. My father and mother in law are loving and generous people, and I am so lucky to have them. They appreciate my daughters and are active parts of their lives, and they are grateful to Patrick and I for giving them grandaughters and raising them well. That's a wonderful thing.

My friend Jamie marched for Equality in Washington DC this weekend. I have a friend who went there and did that. I have a friend who fights to make the world better, safer, kinder and fair-er to every single one of us. The least I can do is to speak up here, where I am, to send messages of love and acceptance to everyone who will listen.

And, while I'm on the subject, I have people who will listen. Children. Yikes. Sondheim warned me that this might happen.

I had a very intellectual conversation with a mother at Friendly's this evening as our Irish Stepping daughters drank blue soda at the table behind us. We were musing on the world our children will grow into, full of all kinds of people. My kids don't know a world where people are not considered equal, now or ever. They think nothing of the fact that our President is black and their Uncle has a boyfriend and a woman can be president, too, and almost was. People are just people. And while I know it might be true that THAT is "my world," and maybe not the world of some kid growing up in some Bible-belty southern state, it's still the only world I intend to teach them. They'll find the rest of it soon enough.

The winds of change are really a-blowing. I feel like so much is happening, or about to happen. I felt like this a lot in college...that you could wake up one day and be someone different than you were the day before. I sort of feel like I've been missing something in recent years by forgetting what that felt like. Maybe I could have been experiencing that all the time, and I didn't pay enough attention to it. I think it's more likely that I was experiencing a whole bunch of other stuff at the time instead, and it's kind of impossible to pay attention to everything.

My friends surprise me a lot. They always turn out to be so much more than I even gave them credit for, and that's saying something, because I give my true friends a lot of credit. I admire and value them. Sometimes, though, one of them will say or do something that I find brave and fantastic, and I will feel kind of awestruck by them, and humbled to think that they like me. I have had that happen a lot lately.

Ewoks were a stupid idea. Seriously. Who ever came up with that?

It's been a lovely long weekend, and I feel quite renewed. But there are big things coming for me, for us, over the next few weeks, and I walk in an air of possibility. Invigorating, but also disconcerting. I'll need to write my way through it all, because it's the only way I've ever known how to do anything. To write my way through it. I'll see how much I can actually share.