k-brow: thinking aloud

If ever there was a time for laying low... I cleared a huge hurdle tonight, with the big parent meeting, where I talked for an hour straight about stuff I was just in the process of figuring out. Homework policy. Integrated instruction. Where I stand on pogs, pets and the standard division algorithm. I don't think I made them very happy with my fondness for the math program we teach. Sorry folks, I love Everyday Math. Screw the standard algorithm. Naturally, I was diplomatic, a state which took me all afternoon to work up to. I hate Back to School Night, but now it's over and I can breathe and relax until mid October when Parent conferences roll around. Back to keeping the head down and working my ass off. Not a problem, for the most part. I did take some time to gush a bit over the kids; by far the easiest class I've taught in years. Nice folks, those 5th graders.

Bits of Knits Chris and I had a conversation a year ago, about the weirdness of having a blog; the freedom you feel writing about your life, till those folk who know you start reading it. Now I truly usually don't mind this, and usually do a fairly good job of censoring myself into reasonable amounts of coherent sanity, but it all has me thinking about the evolution of my online writing career.

First there was the Diary-X account, which was read by no one I knew in realtime, at least in the beginning, and I felt pretty free in writing about what I write about, which isn't much; at that time there was the dog training, the weightlifting, the knitting, and the adjustment to my new Virginia lifestyle. And the pagan stuff, details of rituals, meditations, workings. Later, D-X crashed and I played around with Livejournal, which I like, in so many ways, and found ultimately unsatisfying, in light of my growing fascination with the whole crafterblog thing, which seems to live around Blogger and Typepad. So on to Blogger, on to The Knitted Brow and this business of having most of my readers NOW be people I do know, and quite well at that. Not a problem for these readers, but I still sometimes get these moments of...oh my gosh, people read me, people know about the blog! Aaaak, I've been exposed! And then the completely conflicting feeling of comment whorishness, wanting more readers, even though my posting's not so frequent or alluring. As Reya said to me, when I complained about feeling conflicted by my Leo nature, "There's nothing wrong with wanting to be loved, y'know."

Here, I feel pressure (self-induced, I might add) to post pix, show knitting progress, participate in all the online fun n' games like Corners of My Home, Project 365, 101 things in 1001 Days... and it just shuts me down. Cuz, like, I want to write about the goddess, tarot, middle aging and The Dark Night of the Soul that occasionally comes around. Only you can't always just drop that stuff down in the middle of a knitblog, or so I've convinced myself. To quote Blogless Michelle, "Pah!"


4 years ago, I was here, or headed here, at Stonehenge. No connection. Just wishing I was on vacation somewhere cool and peaceful. Or on vacation at all. P's off to Saipan tomorrow. Work, but also, no doubt, the chance to wallow over some nice reefs.

Not sure I'll make it to Knit Night this week. I'll play it by ear. Home alone means it's too easy to grab the takeout, and curl up on the couch and knit. Minimalist needs the facetime. I need the downtime.