Things I Don't Get: Food Blogging

Why do I care what you ate for breakfast? Or how beautiful your pancakes are? Or what you used to glue together your Holiday Gingerbread House?

People taking pictures of their food before they eat it... Nope, don't get it. I'm a firm believer in finding the aesthetic joy in places unexpected, but I don't think fried eggs make great art.

Not that blogging is art.

But isn't it?

Talk amongst yourselves...

Online Life

I'm exhausted. Everything in my life is exhausting right now. It's just too much. NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo are eating my soul.

I keep thinking about how now everyone's building a life online in some way or other, even just with email. I have a friend who said that he now finds it unusual when people *don't* have a blog or some sort of website. MySpace, LiveJournal, Facebook... We are building a Second Life. Which isn't even mentioning Second Life.

We are becoming a society devoid of privacy, exhibitionists all of us. But you know, I think that's a pessimistic way to look at it. I really believe that our gravitation towards having an online presence is a way of breaking out of the isolation of our daily lives. I think it is symptomatic of a world that has gotten very lonely in recent years. We're reaching out to each other, complete strangers.

If you think about it, it's really quite beautiful.

.... Now if only we could stop judging each other...

A lo lejos...

I've been reading a lot of the blog Wabi Sabi Moments, an American citizen writing from abroad about the election--*AWESOME* blog.

It's made me reflect, though, on my experience of the 2000 election, when I was in Spain, and having to explain to people every day about the Electoral College and, later, what the HELL was going on in Florida...

... but this was before YouTube, and even Teh Interwebs were in their adolescent stages of development.

The day of the election, I took myself to a little Internet Cafe and tried to get on cnn.com to get any sort of information that wasn't from the International Herald Tribune. There were, apparently, so many hits on the site that it had slowed to a crawl and there was simply no getting on.

So I resorted to Radio Nacional de España and listened to what was happening the night of, which was the morning of the day after for me. I woke up at about 6 a.m., knowing that the polls had closed, and heard the official result... Bush had won with 271 electoral votes.

I don't remember, prior to my existence on that day, ever knowing that 270 votes were needed to win the presidency. But I won't ever forget it now.

Bush won, and we all know the rest of that story.

I sneaked over to my American friends' apartment across the patio and attempted to stick a little note in their reja with the news. At that moment J. came out and I handed him the paper that said "Bush won. 271 votes." He looked at me, his liberal Oregonian face semi-shell-shocked. Slowly put down the paper and said "What does this mean?" I just shook my head and shrugged.

And then the Florida thing happened and there was, for a minute, hope.

But honestly, the 2000 election, being as far away as I was, never fully registered with me. Only now, after 8 years of That Man do I realize how much was at stake.

Sorry for the cop-out post last night

I know that was a cheap post that I "wrote" last night about Stouffer's Mac n Cheese, but I had to post *something*, and I was not digging the blog vibe yesterday... I had a bad taste in my mouth after thinking more about memoir, which made me feel like more of a narcissist than I really am. But I am a Writer Chick, and that lends me to being a little more self-involved on the whole... And thus the reticence with the blogging.

That and the utter appreciation of Stouffer's Mac n Cheese.

So, I looked at the map at www.electoral-vote.com and was dismayed to notice that overnight, NC had swayed into Barely Republican territory, and Missouri went from Barely Dem to Exactly Tied. I don't know what caused the shift, but it's scaring me a little. Something must've happened in the news that I'm not aware of, since I'm boycotting TV.

"McCain needs a game-changer." "McCain has to stop the hemmorrhaging of his campaign." Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that he's doing it? That somehow he's finding a way to play dirty pool and shift things in his direction? Is it the Ayers thing? Is it the low-down-dirty pool he's playing? I've never seen a nastier campaign. Please don't let McCain swift-boat Obama!

I had a dream Obama won, and there was such joy in me that I was virtually bursting at the seams.

I hope it's a premonition.

Can't Sleep, Can't Write

Chronic insomnia is a problem for me. So when I can't sleep I write, or organize, or just listen to music and wish fervently for sleep... which probably succeeds in keeping me awake.

I don't know what it is that's keeping me awake tonight. I tried to write something somewhat meaningful, but fell back on blogging instead. Blogging and going outside to smoke in the street that's always deserted. (Smoking = Bad For Me, I know. It's on it's way out. Of course, I've been saying that for three years now.)

Anyway, I can't sleep. Apparently I can't blog either, because nothing's coming to me at all now. I had some great idea about blogging about where I went to college, and then I thought, no, I need to save that for some sort of memoir, and then I thought about all the troubles with memoir in the U.S. right now, and thought more about whether I really want to participate in the perpetuation of a genre that's based on self indulgence, when I do enough of that here, with the blog.

Things that make you go "Hmm..."

Christ, the lady upstairs is vacuuming right now, and it's barely even dawn. I've been up all night. How glorious.

Going out to catch the sunrise.