I’m at a
professional crossroads (which is what unemployed people say when they’re
looking for a job). In my previous jobs, I’ve done a lot of writing. There was
a lot of creative outlet, and now I don’t have it. Oh, sure, I could “create” a
clean living room or “creatively” organize my tax documents. But I don’t want
to.
Blogging, I
thought. Maybe that’s what I need to do. It feels pretty old-school, blogging.
I could argue that my goofy Facebook posts and the string of responses to my
own posts is blogging. My friend, Kim, started a crock pot blog last year. She’s
a single mother with a fulltime job plus a daughter and mother to care for, and
she still manages to test recipes and post blogs about them once a week. Can’t
I write one blog post a week?
The last time I
blogged was 2006, when I hatched The Trash Blog. I blogged each day about the
crap I threw out of my house. It was a new year’s resolution, and my theory was
that if I went public, I’d be more likely to stick with it. So, I’m back.
Semi-publicly blogging. I don’t have a theme. Hell, I don’t even have ideas of
what I’m going to blog about. I’m guessing I’ll take a cue from George Costanza
and blog about nothing. Salsa? Seltzer?
I can promise occasional posts that are about nothing. They'll probably have run-on sentences, an abundance of parentheses, one-sentence paragraphs and sentences that begin with a contraction or end with a preposition. Deal with it, fellow grammar police.
Today, I went to physical therapy with a parrot. By that I mean, there was a parrot in the room while I was having PT. It was in a pet carrier that had one end open (pecked out?). I don’t know much about bird-raising, but isn’t an open container a bad thing? Sure, bringing a parrot to PT seems odd, but here’s what struck me: no one thought it was strange. It squawked and the staff said, “Oh, [Birdname] is lonely.” I honestly thought it was just a machine making a noise and the staff making a stupid joke, since I couldn’t actually see [Birdname]. (It strikes me now that I should have paid more attention so I would actually have known the parrot’s name.) However, I rode down in the elevator with Birdname and its owner, which is how I know about the open-ended crate. She gave it the weird parrot-lady treatment when people got on. You know, the “I’m acting like this so you’ll ask me about the parrot, but I’m going to pretend I don’t want you to.” I’ll admit that for a couple of floors, I wondered what would happen if the parrot suddenly shot out of that crate? Who would flip out the most? Parrot Lady? The man with the toddler in his arms? The couple with the baby in the carrier? Me? Birdname? In the end, it was drama-free, which was probably for the best.
Today, I went to physical therapy with a parrot. By that I mean, there was a parrot in the room while I was having PT. It was in a pet carrier that had one end open (pecked out?). I don’t know much about bird-raising, but isn’t an open container a bad thing? Sure, bringing a parrot to PT seems odd, but here’s what struck me: no one thought it was strange. It squawked and the staff said, “Oh, [Birdname] is lonely.” I honestly thought it was just a machine making a noise and the staff making a stupid joke, since I couldn’t actually see [Birdname]. (It strikes me now that I should have paid more attention so I would actually have known the parrot’s name.) However, I rode down in the elevator with Birdname and its owner, which is how I know about the open-ended crate. She gave it the weird parrot-lady treatment when people got on. You know, the “I’m acting like this so you’ll ask me about the parrot, but I’m going to pretend I don’t want you to.” I’ll admit that for a couple of floors, I wondered what would happen if the parrot suddenly shot out of that crate? Who would flip out the most? Parrot Lady? The man with the toddler in his arms? The couple with the baby in the carrier? Me? Birdname? In the end, it was drama-free, which was probably for the best.
But let me ask
you this: wouldn’t Birdname be a great name for a parrot?
