butterfly dream

I have very good friends.

This became evident during this past four-day stay-cation weekend. I had some paid days to burn off and decided to spend them questing a little further in search of feedback. It having occurred to me during that last fit of whining about it that I hadn't ever actually just, y'know, asked people for some.

My first foray involved an LJ review site. After checking out some of their previous reviews, I applied with the pleasant assurance that they'd find me a step above the herd, at the least. No emo poetry on this journal!

Ah, yeah. I'm still pretty proud of the 'no emo poetry' thing, no question, but - well, if you're reading this, chances are you know where we go from here. The general gist involved too much rambling, also a 'lack of interesting or engaging content', specifically the personal touch. I needed to take chances, to 'spill my guts'...or at least, something like the 'story of how you once almost got a tattoo on your right breast'.

(The best thing about the whole experience was actually Shoemom's failure to pick up the hypothetical there, when I asked her to read the review. "You did WHAT? On WHERE?")

Didn't help much in dealing with the criticism, though. The ensuing crisis of confidence, here @ Shoe Central, is when I developed a new theory of true friendship: it's what causes the people you run panicking to over bad reviews, instead of merely patting your hand and going "Mean ol'critic!', to instead take the time to gently-but-firmly point out that yes, you have flaws, but no, it's by no means the end of the world, let alone your writing career. Although you're right, nobody else cares about the damn comedy team already.

Look, the reason I don't get deep into the personal around here is pretty simple: The Shoe story is just really, really boring, with a side order of unpleasant. There is verbal abuse and depression and struggles with weight and nerdiness, and occasional existential crises, and that one nagging incident where memory tells me I saw an episode of a favourite TV series, I discovered later, about a year before it was actually frelling made. (No, it doesn't hurt much, but it does make the Matrix flicks rather uncomfortable viewing.) 

Outside the immediate region of my navel, there's also the part where the one Shoesis is a gorgeous slender blonde chick with so little self-esteem Shoemom and I have had to rescue her from no less than five total losers over the past few years... Eventually we'll have to get into the story of the one paternal uncle who's contrived to drive three wives to nervous breakdowns while accumulating five kids, and trust me, neither of us wants that.

Put bluntly, I am inclined both by nature and nurture to suck it up, princess. Even listing the above broad outlines gives me an uncomfortable sense of over-reaching both peoples' interest and sympathy. Thus - not un-naturally I'd thought - I've been treating my online life as a distraction from all that, trying to find topics much more interesting and engaging while treating of my personal life in a gentle, inconsequential fashion to avoid it intruding. I do believe this qualifies for both the orthodox and Alanis definitions of irony.

The other problem draws on from that one - I've been treating this blog as a writing project. Which is fine as far as it goes, but does leave me alarmingly dependent on the goodwill of audiences; as was gently-but-constructively brought home to me this weekend, you can't just leave your rough drafts lying around without people coming to the conclusion that they might as well wait until things get sorted out.

Especially when you're in as dire need of a firm-handed editor as I am. I do ramble hopelessly, I know that; albeit you'd be amazed at what I manage to take out. It doesn't help that my first taste of online writing success came in an environment (ie, TWoP-style Idol recaps) in which I was not only praised but encouraged to be clever at length on multiple obscure topics. I came away from it with perhaps rather an inflated sense of myself as too precious for words.

So...I have some things to work on, and more to think about. I have to find a more suitable place for my essay-style pop-culture pieces, is what I think first of all. I do have some decent ideas in that direction. In the meanwhile...well, the people that have stuck around in some cases since the beginning, thanks. I now have a much clearer idea of how not to try your patience, as much. Although the comedy team may still be making occasional appearances...look, I don't get on your case about Dr Who, you leave me to Bob & Ray. And somehow we'll figure it all out.

So enough with this footling around with the funnie radio personalities (or possibly more accurately, chronicling their footling around); it's time to settle down to serious Life Lessons, boys and girls. No more whiling away the shining hours with the dulcet tones of a Jane Austen audio book - that hour is past due for improvement. For instance...

...Oh, hell, you don't care, do you? And neither do I, really. At least, not enough to turn this blog into a self-help bestseller at this late date. As a previous commenter astutely mentioned, I do find myself standing at something of a personal and professional crossroads these days, and while that particular topological feature is invariably fascinating on the immediate scale, they do tend to lack severely in pure panoramic splendor.
If I'm dying, or the cat's dying, or somebody from Random House offers me a zillion dollars to become senior editor, or anything else at Shoe Central is otherwise in danger of turning me into Mitch Albom Lite, I'll let you know, OK? Otherwise, we'll just skip the Harsh Reality angle for the time being. Possibly even the entire summer.

It doesn't help that, when I went to compose a rant about the difficulties of a wannabe fiction author instead, I discovered I'd already covered that base six months ago. I mean, really, how pathetic is that? I don't even have literary pretensions, I have literary diffident suggestions.

This is all I suppose what comes of developing my critical faculties before my creative ones; having honed to a fine - perhaps overfine - point the ability to tell worthwhile literature from drek, said faculty steadfastly refuses to allow me to put anything down on paper until it's very very sure I'm not going to embarrass it.
It's quite nice about the whole situation, you understand; willing to give me every chance to improve, even becoming rather fond of being taken for long walks while I try to unsnarl the logical tangles and become philosophical about genre cliches and all the other possibly-mildly-pretentious-after-all hooh-hah outlined in the earlier entry. But it's absolutely firm in re: the production end of the thing, and really, I can't blame it.

Public service announcement: Bully the little stuffed blogging bull, whose ongoing attempt to catalogue the entire PG Wodehouse canon stands as as a source of inspiration to online-journal-keepers everywhere (primarily because being left in the dust by a fuzzy toy would be pretty damn embarrassing) has finally got round to one of the finest comic novels in the English language.

Be it known that we at Shoe Central are seriously considering putting failure to chortle within two seconds after clicking through that link on our personal shortlist of Reasons Not to Trust Anyone Who Doesn't. Or at least looking at them kind of funny.

Anyway. It's Day One of life after sinus infection, and yours truly is finally starting to sit up and take notice. Quips have been exchanged with friends; online fiction has been perused, the iPod has been refreshed with new audiobooks. The dancing-girl illusion has been stared at right up until I realised I was trying to coolly analyze why it kept coming out 'right-brained', which on account of I'm pretty slow on the Net-gag uptake took awhile. The creative juices are, beyond a doubt, well and truly stirring.

So it's Day One of the Great Writing Experiment - in which yours truly spends an hour a day writing something, anything - and I'm sitting here sicker than a dog. Which you'd think I'd be used to by now as a monthly occurrence, but nooooo, somehow I always end up with new and exciting modes of crampage. Some perverse prototype version of forgetting the pain of childbirth, I s'pose.

Anyhoo...let's see...yeah, not much else going on around here. The books all say write what you know, but they never say what to do if what you know isn't all that exciting. Like, yay, I had cake today. (Although, don't get me wrong, it was massively good cake. Someday, if you're very very nice to me, I'll share the secret recipe for Shoemom's chocolate decadence).

Turns out on closer examination most of my blogging inspirations work by tagging on to some inherently cool stuff - comics, say, or celebrity gossip. As noted in the previous 'whoo-hoo-I'm-back' entry, I don't even watch TV, much, and the stuff that I do watch is hampered by the fact that I'm in Canada. We're Number Two! Is there a market for six-month-old Top Chef recaps?

...Now, just what the blazes do I put in it?

 I mean, the one topic on which I can demonstrably write stuff many people read - Canadian Idol - doesn't start for weeks. And frankly my life in the meantime is not exactly of that special calibre of fascinating that makes publishing houses glance up. (Although I have been told my wails re: getting up for work in midwinter are really quite, uh, artistic. Operatic, even. But hey, I'm Canadian, where's the fun in that?)
At any rate, I need to post something. I've got this journal all set up and it's gorgeous and I truly hate staring at blank space, especially when it's in back of my eyeballs. So as a kind of mental ipsum lorem text, here's a random musing from a year or so back on Kids' TV...

…You have to realise, I've been around this stuff in one form or another for about ten years now - starting with managing the children's section in the bookstore...onward through the TV-addict nephews...through the discovery that when I'm home in between temp assignments TreehouseTV makes for a nicer background hum than Jerry Springer.
In short, I've developed something of an immunity - it's almost become a minor hobby. As a public service, I herewith provide TV Coping Mechanisms for Bored Grownups:

Key: AVO - American Viewers Only
B/CVO -British/Commonwealth Viewers Only

--Practice sprinting for the remote as soon as you hear the Barney theme begin. Time yourself on speed, distance and how fast you can subsequently remove the loveable purple spawn-of-something-deeply-unholy from your consciousness.

--During Dora the Explorer, count how many times the Map sings 'I'm the Map!, I'm the Map!' in succession. (Twelve, is my rough estimate.) Bonus: If you listen closely, you can actually hear the voice actor becoming more and more desperate for air from eight repetitions onwards.

--AVO: Mentally redub Bob the Builder into the original British accents. The machines will still be whining incessantly, but at least they'll sound cuter doing it.

--In light of the fact that Blue's Clues recently sent Steve off to college, take bets on how many room-mates he'll go through in the first six months. "Dude talks back to his soap dish!!"

B/CVO - Appreciate the minor miracle that is UK stop-motion animation. If possible, catch an ep or two of Wind in the Willows or Brambly Hedge.

--Decide how many of the weird subtexts in The Toy Castle can be attributed to the fact that it's ballet-dancing-based, and how many are just plain strange. For example, who decreed there should be human-sized Frog Twins, Frieda and Frederick, involved; and why they're dressed up as the King and Queen of Hearts. For extra credit, work up a scary campfire story for next summer starring human-sized frogs with enormous bright sparkly blood-crimson mouths and Scarlett O’Hara accents.

 --Whilst suffering through yet another 'realistically' annoying toddler character, entertain yourself by picturing how long they'd last in your childhood...the one that featured Dad and his belt.

--As Bear in the Big Blue House opens, and the big ol' hunk-a-fur is 'sniffing' you - in extreme close up and quite audibly - try hard not to think all the things you're thinking.

--Confirm what you've long suspected - that the Berenstain Bears' real given names are in fact supposed to be ‘Mama’, ‘Papa’, ‘Sister’ and ‘Brother’...this despite the fact that everyone else in their furry Bearverse has a moniker like ‘Fred’ or ‘Lizzie’. Speculate on what name you'd rather send your son through life with, 'Brother' or 'Sue'.

--Wonder what age Little Bear et al. have to be before clothes become a requirement. I imagine a little Bar (Bear?) Mitzvah-esque ceremony around age 14 or so: "Son, it's time you knew the truth...you're naked. Go, put these on and cover your shame forevermore."

--B/CVO: Think of the strangest possible cartoon character you can. Like, oh, say, a mini-snowmobile. Then turn on Wumpa's World, set in the darkest Arctic, and lo and behold...two of them. Pink and blue. Named Zig and Zag, in case you were wondering.

--Appreciate the rare-but-wonderful moments of genuine for-all-ages wit that sneek in here and there...like in Wumpa's World, when Wumpa the Walrus decides to learn ballet...cue walrus, fluffy pink tutu peeking out under his parka, assuming third position. Or the bit on Bear in the Big Blue House starring identical otters Pip and Pop: “Hey, sure! ‘Adventure’ is our middle name!!” “Uh, no, that’s your middle name. Mine’s Angelica, remember?”