about

About me.

Yet, though I am not what I ought to be
nor what I wish to be
nor what I hope to be
I can truly say, I am not what I once was.

– John Newton

Here are some things I do, which of course define me more than the words I write:

• I own and operate Always Midnight, a small venture into the world of selling accessories
• I am President and Founder of The Midnight Society, a ghost-storytelling / folklore organization
• I am a member at City Church of Richmond, a church committed to working for the city’s renewal
• I am a board member at SynerGeo, a neighborhood art center here in Oregon Hill
• I play softball every summer with the mighty Tidal Waves
• I write for RVANews, the finest local news source in town
• I work part time at Congregation Beth Ahabah as the Religious School Administrative Assistant
• I Tweet, and that’s where you can find tidbits that were too tiny for full-on blog posts
• I read a lot, when I’m not sewing or crocheting or learning to cook something new
• I take a lot of pictures
• I go on 3-mile runs or do Wii Fit on alternating days
• I spend my summers picnicking and going on day trips around Virginia
• I’m getting married in October to the most amazing man I’ve ever met

About the blog.

How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.

– Alexander Pope

I started blogging back in 2003, when people still called blogs “weblogs.”  And that’s what this site is: a log of my life that I keep on the web.  Originally I used Xanga, but moved over to WordPress in 2006 because of its clean interface and easy customization.

The purpose of this blog is to keep a journal, a place where my life is documented.  I’ve kept a journal since I was a child, and I wish I could still keep a paper journal.  I feel like all of these sentiments would be much more beautiful if written down in my own hand, in a pretty book kept under my mattress, with small mementos and pictures tucked between the pages.  But when I tried to keep a paper journal in 2003, I found that only frustration awaited me in that corner.  I had become so used to typing that I could no longer write more than just a tiny note by hand.  When I tried to write my thoughts down with a pen, my hand struggled to keep up and eventually just made ugly scrawl-marks on the page instead of coherent sentences.

In answer to the question “why journal in the first place?” there are three main reasons:

1. Because nobody else is going to chronicle my personal history.I love going to museums or reading books and seeing excerpts from peoples’ journals.  Those excerpts really help to tell the major stories throughout history, and sometimes personal journals are all the documentation we have of an event.  And I wish that my grandparents had kept detailed journals for me to peruse.
2. Because I cannot remember all this stuff.So this is my way of knowing that the things that make up my life — the day-to-day happenings, the people I meet, what I’m feeling at a given moment — will not be lost to time and cloudy memories.  When a friend asks “so what’s been going on?” I’ve never been able to give a satisfactory answer; there is so much that gets left out and I can’t even remember what I had for dinner last night.  I’ve inherited an almost non-existent short-term memory from my father, and this is the only way I know to combat it.  With memories typed down proper, my friends (and even my hypothetical grandchildren) will still have a record of what went on and not have to rely on someone else to tell them.  It all boils down to the Alexander Pope quote at the top of this section, which addresses the fact that we live in a forgetful world.  Our brains forget things naturally, and it’s a necessary and helpful function…for if we were always dwelling on the past, we would be wrecks.  But my memories are what made me who I am, and they show how I got here…and the idea of having them dull over time until they eventually disappear makes me sick.  So I set them down here, a safe place where they can be retrieved if needed.
3. Because it’s therapeutic. Everybody needs to decompress.  Some people do it by hitting some balls at the batting cage, and some people do it by talking.  I prefer to type.  It stresses me out to have a lot of stray information running around in my head, disorganized and without substance.  It feels good to dump those stray thoughts and feelings into the typed page, and thereby allow my brain to quit being so distracted and focus on what I actually need to focus on.  I think a blog is a fantastic place to pour out your thoughts and try to make sense of them, because it’s free, you can type as much as you want, and it doesn’t talk back.  Most of the time I find that I don’t need a lot of advice from other people; the proverbial “answers” become apparent to me when I just organize my thoughts, step back, and see the big picture.  Sometimes I’ll run into a friend and instead of having a back-and-forth conversation, I just stand there and nod politely while they push volumes of information at me, not waiting for or wanting a response.  Clearly that person did not want a conversation with me at all; they just wanted somebody to stand there and listen.  Or not even necessarily a person…a brick wall would have done just as well.  And that’s okay!  This blog is my brick wall.  It exists so that I can bounce a million thoughts off of it and not waste my friends’ energy, when a response is not what I’m looking for anyway. As a tangent off of this subject, there is nothing worse than going out in the world and encountering tons of rude people.  These people just make your day harder.  I think people are rude or offensive and act out in person because they just haven’t gotten all that stuff out in their blog.  I would much rather vent and let out frustrations in this arena, where only my good friends or people who choose to know my thoughts will purposefully visit, than push my speculations and verbal diatribes onto people in public.  I find that at least for myself, my opinions make a lot more sense and have a lot more purpose when typed out and read in their entirety, rather than when a small snippet is blurted out and then someone interrupts or takes it the wrong way before they hear the whole thing.  And I am not good at making verbal cases, because (again!) I have no short-term memory.  I’ll go to tick off a list of 12 things to someone, and I can only remember 2 of the items on the list.  This unfinished nature of all my thoughts when I speak them in person makes me prefer to capture them in writing.  And let’s face it — human beings do not all love each other and approve of everything that everyone does.  If we went about objecting to it every time we saw someone do something annoying, or say something incorrect, there would be chaos.  What makes us a civilized people is the fact that we exercise restraint, and we observe the fact that each person has a right to live however he or she pleases…and even if we have objections, we should treat them kindly and politely in person anyway.  Even if a person is spraying out nothing but negativity, we can choose to only pay it back with kindness and positivity…and make sense of it all later in our blogs, instead of with fists in faces.  Anything less than that is not civilization.  As Thomas Jefferson says, “Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.“  This is the difference between us and wild beasts. The irony of course is that while I started this blog hoping mostly to do a lot of venting, this has become less and less the case as the years wear on.  Maybe it’s just part of growing up, or maybe it’s just me and the importance I place on being calm.  But I rarely have anything to vent about anymore, and my posts are an endless parade of sweet things and happiness.  Which is exactly how it is IRL.

So that’s the Parasol Party story.  Since this is nothing more than a personal journal, and not designed to be devoted to a particular subject matter or niche, it’s probably not interesting to strangers…and that was never its purpose.  If you’re a stranger who doesn’t find my life interesting…that’s to be expected!  So don’t read it; nobody’s twisting your arm.  If you’re a stranger who does find it interesting, then please feel free to read and comment and make a new friend.  This is the internet, after all.

I also post privately on a regular basis, for when I need to “name names” for posterity’s sake but don’t want to drum up drama.  Every once in a while I’ll publish a protected post, which is available only to actual friends that I know IRL due to the need to post the kind of specifics you can’t post on the internet (addresses, work stuff, etc.).  If you need the password to these posts, just ask!  [Note: the password has changed from what it originally was. So just ask again!]

Some quotes about journaling

Writing a journal implies that one has ceased to think of the future and has decided to live wholly in the present.  It is an announcement to fate that you expect nothing more….Writing a journal means facing an ocean you are afraid to swim across, and deciding to drink it drop by drop.

– George Sand

No matter how we react to life’s inherent doozies, an important part of the healing process is to use each painful experience to grow.  We can learn to understand our highly charged reactions, try more adult ways of coping with life, and finally, begin to live as grown-ups.  And by chronicling our misadventures, we can begin to see that there is enrichment in disappointment, adventure in the unexpected, and enlightenment in the face of life’s next big wallop….Despite what we may have been taught, “taking responsibility” for our action or lack thereof does not mean taking the blame.  Adding the secondary emotion of guilt to a heavily burdened conscience serves no purpose.  Acknowledge, make amends if appropriate, and move on.  Writing in a journal paves the way to a more restorative course of action.

– Molly O’Shaughnessy

I wonder if I shall burn this sheet of paper like most others I have begun in the same way. To write a diary, I have thought of very often at far and near distances of time: but how could I write a diary without throwing upon paper my thoughts, all my thoughts – the thoughts of my heart as well as of my head? – & then how could I bear to look on them after they were written? Adam made fig leaves necessary for the mind, as well as for the body. And such a mind as I have! – So very exacting & exclusive & eager & head long & strong & so very very often wrong! Well! but I will write: I must write – & the oftener wrong I know myself to be, the less wrong I shall be in one thing – the less vain I shall be!

– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If some indiscreet person reads this diary, I wish to deprive him of the pleasure of making fun of me by pointing out to him that this aims at being a mathematical and rigid report on my manner of being, neither too favorable nor too unfavorable, but stating purely and severely what I believe to have taken place. It is destined to cure me of my absurdities when I reread it.

– Stendhal