I’ve never been one for
routine, for rising in the morning and performing the same tasks in the same
order day after day, week after week. My
husband does this. He relies on sheer
muscle memory to jump-start every day. He says it gives him comfort and a sense of control
of his life. He says that if he does not
go through the same motions in the same sequence every morning, he’s afraid he’ll
leave something out. Like, that he’ll be
in the car halfway to work and look down to discover he’s not wearing pants.
It’s a skill I have never
honed; indeed, a need I’ve never had. In
fact, I am quite in need of exactly the opposite. I need
variety. I need every day to be
different from the last, if only in some tiny way. Routine bores me to madness and only
exacerbates my middle-aged perception that life is slipping through my fingers
faster and faster, unremarked and unremarkable.
Still, if you spend enough years
on the planet, you start to recognize the patterns that shape your days,
unbidden as they may be. This time of
year—this maddening mid-winter creep toward spring—is traditionally a time of
restlessness and tedium for me. It was
something I had nearly forgotten about myself.
During the café years, there was never time to be restless or bored. I might have traded something very precious
for the opportunity to BE bored in those days.
Last year, still In Recovery, I almost relished the concepts of restlessness
and boredom. So this year, I’ve been
kind of taken aback by how much I hate being restless and bored.
It’s not that I don’t have a
stack of shelved projects I could be working on. I have a buffet-top that needs tiling and a
dresser waiting to be refinished for my office/guest bedroom. But since those projects would involve
dragging me away from my cheerful fire and out to the cold, ill-lit (and still
cluttered with old restaurant equipment) garage, they have little appeal. I do, however, have one task that has been on
a back, back burner ever since the demise of AOL J-land; one that keeps me busy
and engaged in the wee hours of the morning when I might otherwise be doing
midnight shopping on Amazon or playing game after game of Spider for no other
reason than that a day of restless boredom has not tired me out sufficiently to
require sleep.
In 2008, after much work and
worry (which I could ill afford in the middle of my restaurant tenure), “Coming
to Terms…” was saved from the noose of the AOL J-land death sentence and
transferred safely here to Blogger. Or
mostly, anyway. Every picture I had
posted in every entry for five years disappeared into the doomed AOL Hometown
ether. So though my words had been
safely transported, the pictures were gone.
Reduced to empty squares with little red x’s. And since many of my entries were 75% or more
pictorial, this was a problem. A problem
with which I did not have the time or energy to deal. Until now.
Luckily, most of the images I
had posted to my journal had to be manipulated in some way. I would choose a picture, crop it, shrink it,
mess with it, and then save it to my desktop so I could find it easily once it came
time to upload it. Eventually, the
desktop became so crowded with little jpeg files, I created a folder called “Pictures
for Journal” into which it became my habit to sweep the files once I was done
with them.
In this case, my chronic inability
to throw things away did NOT come back to bite me in the ass. It was a lifesaver. Because the lion’s share of the pictures that
disappeared into the ozone when my journal was exported to Blogger are right
there in a virtual file where I can easily find them. All I have to do is sift through five years of
postings, one by one, go into the “edit” screen and re-upload (is that a word?)
the appropriate pictures.
I’ve been at it for a week or
so, and I’m up to August of 2005. In the
back of my mind, I wonder why I’m doing this.
No one, NO ONE but me ever delves back into the archives of “Coming to
Terms…” What difference could it
possibly make that some of the entries are meaningless or irrelevant without
the pictures? Or that some of the
formatting got mangled in the transfer, or that some of the font colors I used
eight years ago are illegible in my current template? What does it matter? Who cares?
I care. It matters a great deal. To me.
With all its warts and
boogers, silliness and memes, rants and whining, “Coming to Terms…” is one of
the most important accomplishments of my life.
It is something with which I have stuck, through tears and anger, embarrassment
and frustration, awkwardness and sanguinity, tentative optimism and hopeless
pessimism, for almost ten years. That’s
longer than I’ve done anything in my life, besides be married. This is a body of work of which I am immensely
solicitous and protective. Not just the
writing, which at best shows brief flashes of brilliance but no consistent
talent; but the growth, and the change (as well as the things that will never
change), and the commitment it represents.
And the history. The story of my
life—at least for the past decade.
Even if I am the only one who
ever comes here, ever delves back into the archives, it needs to be good. It needs to be all that it was…all that it
can be. I’m pretty sure I don’t cherish
some secret hope that someday it will be discovered; that someday someone will
come here and read, and come to know something valuable about my life and my
times.
I just know in my heart that “Coming
to Terms…” needs to be in its best order.
Just in case.
