NRE

I have total New Relationship Energy for my new blog. It's cracking me up. Someone I know from another site called it the Narcissistic Souffle.

I just have so many things I want to write about. Quite a few people have remarked positively on my writing, which I love and can admit, crave a little. Though I do not so much crave criticism. Don't deflate my egg whites.

I journal on another site, which shall remain unnamed, as it is a "dating site" where I discuss more intimate topics. They have comment systems which work really well, and over the couple of years I have been there, a super journal community has developed, and many people have met, and even married through those connections.

We had a small meetup this week when someone from England came on a PNW tour and drove all the way down from Vancouver to meet me! It was pretty thrilling. Last summer I had a weekend party with a whole crew of folks I had never met. It squicked out my son (internet people are weird, you know) but it turned out really well for me and for those who came from all over the US. Meeting in person makes you real and heightens the intimacy we have developed there from reading each other's journals for all this time. It can be a middle-distance experience, like this one is, when you don't get to talk about it through the comments or in person. But that sets up expectations, too, like the expectation of some anonymity, which is a false one, these days.

I haven't really "dated" on that site, because I am such an isolationist, but I have certainly learned more than I would ever have in a lifetime of relationships about how to be an adult, and a person in connection with others. I think a lot of internet people are more isolated than they might wish to be, and the changes places like (okay, I'll tell, okcupid) Facebook have brought are mostly positive. You have to laugh about people Twittering to each other around the Market during the day, but it just adds to the fun. I used to complain about people being on phones at OCF ("I AM at the chicken booth, what chicken booth are you at?") but that is almost out-of-date now. I am out-of-date, in more ways than one. I don't really want to be in constant communication with a bunch of people. But I do check my FB news feed all the time.

I have learned that middle-distance is way more comfortable for me, and very often I choose not to engage, when engagement is exactly what is called for. I like that I am forced to, at Market, I see that I tend to bring some kind of job to most of my social situations. Even with this week's meetup, I thought it was my job to show this visitor something life-changing about Eugene. Turns out what he wanted was to find out something possibly life-changing from me. About me. Talk about your souffle.

I do have things to tell, like we all do. That's why I write. Most of my short stories are really just thinly veiled nonfiction. I process through writing, and I journal every day. I have different types of journals, for different subjects, but the closest I have gotten to publishing is this right here. On the dating site I have a screen name, but because FB uses real names so often, something I like about it a lot, here I can be identified as me. It's scary and also really great. It takes away one of my major excuses regarding publication, that I won't like the exposure.
Fiction is another way of limiting the exposure, though lots of readers project autobiography on authors, and my style would definitely foster that. So what, I guess. I don't really need to hide my past at this point. And I don't really need to hide who I am, for the most part.

I'm trying to face the fact that at the end of my life, most of this one little person's life will go to the dump. No one is going to read my dozens of journals, and probably I wouldn't really want them to. My golden words may already be concretions and goodness knows my Jell-O Art Museum will not be able to pay the utilities to keep itself open (though you never know, do you?) Even this blog, as it grows, will fade away. I have a couple of hundred entries at my other site, and no one is ever going to read all the way to number one. Even my biggest fan.

However, if I don't explain Fishhead Barbie, she will be buried in plastic crap like so much expired mayonnaise. If I do explain her, somewhere on the intertubes, someone will chuckle. Whether or not their life will change is not really important. What is the coolest thing about this rapidly devolving or expanding universe we find ourselves in, is that I can throw my stuff out there right now, and feel meaning in that. It will please me. And that is the best reason to get up and do that I can come up with.

I know I'm an extraordinary snowflake just as important as all of the other billions of us in this blizzard. I can see that I am so much more important to myself than to anyone else. Since I didn't manage the 30-year marriage as I expected and I am at middle-distance with pretty much everyone, this is my best avenue to expansion, journaling to myself and throwing it out into the tubes to whatever end it finds. It's exhilarating. I will look stupid, I guarantee.

So I will talk more about my Jell-O, and might end up writing a thinly-veiled fiction about the Radar Angels too. I have some people coming over tomorrow to view the Jell-O, which I haven't been able to put away yet, and I hope I will hear some of the stories again, the ones that are the same stories I tell but with completely different facts. Because it really is all fiction, when you come right down to it. We take our dreams and our viewpoints and our memories and whip them all up into our versions of the standard recipes, and that makes the banquet that we get to taste before it becomes garbage.

That's one of the things I love about the Jell-O show, the end, when people toss their art into a black plastic bag and drag it to the can. I don't do that, of course, because of my lofty self-importance, but I know it will be inevitable. I watched Sunshine Cleaning last night in my exhaustion. I just hope there isn't too much blood in my recliner, or Jell-O stuck to my floor, at the end.

Oh, and Fishhead Barbie? Barbie as an icon for the feminine needs no explanation, and she was often present in Jell-O art until she was largely replaced by marshmallow peeps. Putting the fish head on her was a stroke of genius, because I was making so many big-world Fish things at the time, and it took her from beauty to something vaguely slimy and dirty. Connotation is everything in Jell-O. She became my alter ego in my displays, representing what I was doing in each particular year. She can be found in lots of my old Jell-Os on mcwho_photos on photobucket (I will go there now and organize my albums, promise). She finally fell apart after being immersed in a soapdish bathtub of Jell-O which rotted (the smell of rotten Jell-O is just like cow manure, if you were wondering) but I thought it would be good to bring her back for one last appearance.

Of course, she will live forever now, on the internet. At least until the big Sun Spot.