Tag Archive: blogging


Steven Slater’s Influence?

It seems like more and more people are thinking outside the box, these days. It may or may not always manifest in professional behavior, but overall I still think it’s good for the world.

Last night I couldn’t sleep and got up to write. I finished a blog that started with the last few paragraphs of this one, and promptly lost it to a faulty internet connection and lack of copy & paste common sense. So here I go again… I wrote last night about how I couldn’t sleep and how frustrated I was with my own mwntal limitations.

I’ve imposed these guidelines on myself for this blog, and anymore it seems I let one inspiration after another pass me by because it doesn’t fit the online persona I have imagined myself building.

More than ten years ago, I blogged from the heart. Sometimes multiple posts a day, just because I had a thought I wanted to share or at least write down. I honestly think I had more readers on Livejournal, without my own dedicated domain, than I do today. So who cares if my posts are relevant to specific readers or whether I have a decent picture to go with my blog?

From now on, I write regardless. No holds barred (or at least relatively few) and whenever I feel like it.
I’ve been realizing that I’m getting old. Lately, I look at teenagers and they seem alien to me. Sometimes I feel as if I can relate to their awkwardness, their feigned superiority and even some of their dejected responses to a world they really feel they’ve got little stake in. Other times I realize that the world they have developed in is breathtakingly different than what I experienced at that age.

They will never remember a time when none of the neighbors owned a computer. Most of them will never be dragged on a road trip with their parents and without a handheld internet device to keep them on-grid and entertained. Maybe I should feel a little grateful.

My isolation as a child drove me to read and find entertainment where I could. The introspection that still makes me feel ill at ease in social situations has also been my relief when the outside world becomes too much to bear. I miss it sometimes, and recall with amusement the raging boredom I struggled with.

I guess the point off all this half-remembered nonsense is that I’ve been wandering off the literary track for too long. I still don’t know if I’m capable of producing anything with my children at home (doubtful) but school starts soon. Charlie is almost ready for playschool and I have been ready to move forward toward anything for longer than I can remember.

From now on I write for me. You’re still welcome toread and comment, though. =)

marydiamond.com has jewelry?

Yeah, so I finally changed up my web page. It was getting pretty lame, looking at it every time I signed in and realizing that the “video of the week” had pretty much become the video of the quarter.

Also, I’ve been wanting to blog about all sorts of hot subjects, but I was concerned that I had over-publicized this site. Honestly, I’m not all that concerned about my own family reading it and passing judgement. My husband’s family, on the other hand, would be somewhat shocked to hear my opinions on things and I’d probably be “outing” us to them if I got too spiritual… if you catch my drift.

/sigh.

Well, at least the weather has been beautiful. I’m hoping to have a garage sale tomorrow, but I really haven’t done any kind of preparation at all for it. On the upside, someone on the next block down is having one this weekend as well, and they’ve posted signs all over the neighborhood. If they happened to purchase a classified ad, maybe I could just piggyback on their advertising and still turn a profit. We’ll have to wait and see. Wish me luck!

Oh, and don’t forget to visit marydiamond.com and check out our jewelry store. That’s another of my potential money making scams. I’m still applying for jobs, to no avail, since we’re dangerously broke again.

Guess I’d better have a damn good garage sale.

OMG it’s a new day.

Okay, so I’ve been moored in a sea of lethargy for weeks now. Somehow, this morning, I woke up and felt like maybe I could start to snap out of it.

I got up and dressed. My husband actually woke with the baby this morning, so I was able to use the bathroom and sit down for a moment to collect my thoughts. For some time now, I’ve been considering making lists -things to do, schedules for each day, things that piss me off, etc.

In general, a lot of things have been irritating me and I think that part of my lesson in this phase of life is to be at peace with the things I cannot “fix”. This isn’t to say that I’m typically a “fixer” who takes pride in making others change their ways, or demands that things be under my control. At least not openly.

Being an Aries, there is of course some amount of megalomania to my personality but it’s mostly due to this uncontrollable drive to make things be “just” and “right”. Of course, both of these things are pretty subjective when you think about it a minute. There are exceptions of course, but even then there’s usually more than one shade of very dark grey.

Anyhow, here’s a list of things I want to do. Just for kicks.

1. Start posting two blogs a day: one here in LJ, which I am eternally loyal to, and one on my wordpress blog (gasp!) which will eventually start paying out, I hope. I only have two because this blog has been a part of me for nearly ten years now and I don’t want to pollute it with thinly veiled marketing slugs if I don’t have to. That just feels like I’m selling out my oldest and dearest blog.

2. Start a themed blog, something like “Guess what psychological disorder I have” or “cooking with Adult ADD” or something odd and humorous like that.

3. Write down my dreams every morning.

4. Clean and rearrange our bedroom, furniture and all.

5. Find a freelance writing or online gig that will provide at least a supplemental income, which we cannot continue to live without.

6. meditate daily

7. exercise at least twice a week, for starters.

8. Walk the dog every day (which could perhaps help cover #7)

9. include this blog, embedded, on my new website, www.marydiamond.com

10. Look backward through all my posts and privatize anything that I don’t want my local social group to get a hold of. Because if people who knew me ever got around to digging here… let’s just say I could end up pretty humiliated.

Blogtastic!

This past Saturday night I hosted bachelorette party for a good friend, and boy was that stressful. In the end, all my obsessing over details, procrastinating, and scrambling at the last minute to make the event live up to my mental vision (story of my friggin LIFE!) turned out to be an unhealthy and unnecessary waste of energy. Things came together pretty well -aside from my causing the bachelorette and maid of honor to be over an hour late for dinner.

The bride had a BLAST, danced her butt off, and actually ended up profiting off one of the games I came up with on the fly. My husband believes that these events should be top secret, like forever, so I won’t go into detail… but in the long run it really felt good to see the girls enjoying themselves.

On the home front, I’m thinking of making a schedule for each day of the week in order to create a more consistent lifestyle for the kids and to help get our family’s social and physical wellness on track. It seems like life just grabs me sometimes and throws me way out into left field. The problem with that is that I’m a stay at home mom, and people rely on me to be responsible in so many situations that I often feel like a complete failure. Even my blogging is becoming more sporadic than I’d like. Maybe once I finish the schedules I’ll post a rough draft here and you can all tell me what you think. Is that obsessive? I hope not.

 


I signed up for payperpost for a little while ago and just found out I got approved! I’m pretty excited about the idea of blogging within a kind of format, but I’m still kind of unsure how the whole thing will work.

There seem to be a lot of cool options and opportunities on the site, and I like that instead of “customer service” they sign all their help text and such with “customer love”. That’s cute. Also, I’ve been checking out the opportunities and the vast majority of them are relevant to me -so I think anybody reading here would benefit from hearing about them.

So maybe, after all these years of blogging about things I do or buy and what I do or don’t like -I can start to maybe benefit in more than just a theraputic way from all my hard work. =)

I’ll have to go chat up some of the PayPerPost veterans and see if they can tell me what it’s all about. So far, I’m really hopeful and anxious to get rolling with the posts. So stay tuned!



Web Junkie

Well I found a tutorial on FrontPage 2003 the other day, and once I actually read through it and did the exercises -I really started to understand how to use the program. My father did the same thing years ago with his website, Chuck’s Odyssey, and despite his urgings I really didn’t attempt to learn it all.

I was really proud of him for figuring out how to design his own website. Maybe he can still be proud of me for following in his footsteps, just a few years later than he wanted me to.

Anyway, so for the last day or so I’ve been hunched over my computer playing with buttons and graphics and content and hyperlinks. Hopefully very soon I’ll actually have a whole website up at my domain, rather than just redirecting to this blog. There’ll be a pretty little button that links here, and lots of other goodies too.

At the moment, however, I feel like I’m going to pass out across the keyboard. I’m getting too old to stay up until 4:30 in the morning. On that note, Sebastian actually refused his bedtime story today. I was a little shocked when he said, “actually mom, let’s skip the story tonight” and leaned back on his pillow. “I’m just so tired” he says to me.

I hope that it’s just because he’s been sick and is recovering now. Granted, he’s getting older and learning to read himself now… but I always want to read his bedtime stories to him. It’s like a ritual for us. I think I’m getting va-klemped.

I miss my mind the most

I swear, throughout the day I think of a number of things that just absolutely have to write about. Whatever cute things my children do, stuff that my husband does to drive me nuts (both good and bad) and general ideas about life that come to me as I’m living it.

But for me to get to the computer, just once, before the idea or the internal monologue dissipates… now that would be a blessing. I’ve forgotten more good posts than I could probably ever write down. I don’t know what I’ll do with myself when my kids are grown and we’re retired. I guess 28 is a little too early to start anticipating the golden years, eh?