August is Near

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I write every single day. I have five blogs, I take two days off a week from the blogs but that does not mean I don’t write. I have not had very much success getting people to follow this particular blog although my other blogs do boast quite a number of readers. I cannot believe I have not written in this particular blog since July 8th. I feel like it is the one I need to be writing in more often just to get some practice in.

One day long ago, I decided to follow a guy who is an expert in blogging. He promised his followers (thousands!) that if we followed his advice (some free, some premium) we could increase readership and monetize our blog if that was a goal. I have never been able to actually sell anything I write. All of my work has been given freely and it has been quite a bit of work. I did do translations that I was paid for but they did not fulfill me, it was just a way to pay bills.

At the end of June, I concluded what turned out to be decades of volunteering in my various communities. I am 65 years old. I had a dream once, a dream of becoming a writer. I believe I have some talent, I know I have a lot of desire. What I am lacking, however, is the poverty that would make it imperative for me to NOT give my work away. This has always been my problem, not only in the writing area but in everything I sign up for. And I will give you a quick example of just how much of a patsy I can be: Today a friend of mine realized that she made a reservation at a hotel and found herself at what she thought was her intended hotel with no reservation. That part was solved but now she will likely lose her money on the other hotel…my immediate reaction was to offer to pay for the room even though the entire affair had nothing to do with me and I am not even with her in this moment.

Why? I think this is the kind of thing I need to address in therapy if I ever decide to go back. Why in the world do I feel guilty when I had nothing whatsoever to do with her mistake? Hell, she didn’t ask me for a loan or anything. I have no explanation for this but I do think I need to sit with it and mull it over. When did I become responsible for everything that goes wrong everywhere? No doubt it is some childhood thing but again, when do we stop blaming our parents for our quirks and begin to take some responsibility? A conundrum.

Sometimes I feel guilty when I subscribe to a “free” newsletter and then get hit with “if you want premium content, please subscribe at $…” I mean when I launched my newsletter, I financed it, brought in talent in exchange for ads and generally paid for everything I needed to because it was a newsletter that I thought the community needed not that the community asked me to do it. With that logic, I felt that it was my obligation to present it free of charge and NEVER expect to be paid a single penny. When people started asking for things like “Letters to the Editor” or a complaint section, I felt perfectly justified to say: nope, it’s my newsletter. If you want that, then you make a newsletter yourself. The subject was dropped pretty quickly and I eventually did end the newsletter simply because once you start getting sponsors, the content is subject to another’s approval. I don’t like not having control. But my apologies, I will try to write regularly as I promised and about writing to improve my writing. Adding a few new followers would be a welcome by-product but I am glad for the ones I have. Thanks for being here!

Musings on a Thursday

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Now that I have retired and accept that my input with several organizations is no longer going to be sought, I have entered a different phase of my existence. I have long been aware that much of my day was spent doing someone else’s bidding, much as it was most of my life. This is not a coy attempt to get sympathy or attention, it is merely a statement of fact that I wish to recognize for myself. I am now at liberty to devote my days to the activities that motivate me in my pursuit of being the communicator I believe I was meant to be.

I want to write in my blogs in the amount to which I have committed: once a week. I have 5 blogs so I have two days off. On those two days my ambition is to devote myself still to writing but to a different kind of writing: my stories, my remembrances of my parents and growing up, and scripts for future entertainment. In the meantime, although I no longer have small children who I am responsible for “overseeing” or “raising”, I do have a large home that I enjoy keeping in a decently clean and orderly manner. Naturally, I am not inclined to hire anyone to help me with household chores because that in and of itself brings a new set of problems.

I have been vaccinated and feel fine. However, I do recognize that since I retired from all these obligations, I have a sense of brain fog. I don’t think it is related to the vaccines, in fact I am convinced it isn’t. I think it is the fact that for such a long time, I spent my days checking my agenda for things to tick off and now I have empty spaces where activities used to appear. It is disconcerting but as I have said before, I have no doubt this is a passing phase that will resolve quickly.

My writers’ group met this morning via Zoom. We have managed to maintain our rhythm despite Covid-19 and all of us continue to find strength and support in belonging to the group. I am happy that we are doing this even though my personal attempts in the last almost two years have not amounted to much published material. I don’t really count the blogs as being published even though for most people they would constitute an impressive amount of wordage on pages. I look around my office and see that I have made little progress in the daily task that I had originally set for myself of decluttering a tiny spot of desk every day. In fact, I seem to have even more files open and books laid out than I had last week. What is wrong with me I ask? Then I remember to be gentle, and to begin to treat myself with more empathy. It will get done, the children will arrive early next week and I do want them to see their former “school” tidier than they remember it. Let’s hope it is so. At least the floors are clean and I have not seen the need to put books there!

Reading, Writing, Speaking…

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After a long time of waiting, the day is finally here and I am officially “retired” from the last of my pro-bono obligations. I am not sure how I feel yet but relief is certainly a word that applies. I know there will be a few weeks of residual “work” that will have to be signed off on but at 65 I hope I can look forward to a few good years of productive idleness. That is a goal I have had since I was a small child. I remember that I used to look at “old” people and envy the fact that they sat around and looked out the window at nothing and no one bothered them. For them, the days might have been lonely but I was unaware of that, why would a young child ever think about that?

I just got off the phone with a person who works for a company called “Publishing Concepts”. From what I can surmise, they were hired by my alma mater to contact alumni for two purposes. One is to update information and the real other one is to ask questions and record (permission requested) the answers. I had no problem with either one though I admit I objected to the “urgency” of the email I received and the lack of information actually given originally. Yes, they said something about an oral history project but when the actual end of the conversation came, I realized that it was a pitch to sell me (much like those dreaded and awful graduation pictures) a “package in two installments of 199.99 each..(.come on, just say $400 total!) that included a yearbook, a CD of the oral histories of alumni (I can’t remember a single person I went to that school with because I was a night student), a t-shirt, a mug, and they will throw in a baseball cap.

Fortunately, I did not have my credit card information handy. I don’t blame or get mad at the person on the other end of the line, after all, she is just doing her job but this kind of thing makes me think deeply about a lot of things. Not the least of which was that I can make an actual oral history myself and giving to my children without it costing me $400.00

In the end, I asked for an email to be sent to me so that I could then decide without pressure how I was going to handle the whole thing. I am glad that I did that. The email was sent to me less than a minute later and I now have all the information I need about the company that has been hired by my alma mater. It is not a bad project but the communication used to “sell” it was not what I would have done. Oral histories have their place and these days people listen to recordings more readily than they are reading so there might be something to it. In any event, food for thought.