You may have noticed that I’ve gotten a little flaky lately. It happens to the best of us bloggers, though I have managed for more than a year to be fairly consistent in my twice-a-week schedule. It’s frustrating to go to a blog that sounds exciting or that is promoted on another blog or website only to find that its author has only ever posted once or twice ever or spends more time promising to “get back to it” than saying anything else.
But, as those bumper stickers used to say, Shit Happens.
I can’t feel too badly about it, either. One of the things about a rich life is that it is full of “so many things that we should all be as happy as kings” (to quote Robert Louis Stevenson). Or, at any rate, we should all be as overwhelmed with options and decisions and demands as kings, kings that are more than decorative anyway.
It’s been a wildly rich time around here—some of it wonderful, some of it just the painful maintenance of life and home. What has been great about it for me is that I’ve been able to keep some kind of productivity throughout, even if it hasn’t always been Joyous Crybaby. This is new for me—usually I am easily derailed. But this week, in spite of having our entire house re-piped, with its concomitant chaos of workmen and about thirty holes in our house’s walls; in spite of having to move all my clothes out of the closet and empty two tall, six-shelf bookcases in my study (still not restored); in spite of late-breaking announcements of class-size increases at my university and the requisite revamping of syllabi; in spite of whole new episodes of politicking over UCF issues; in spite of Jupiter’s cancer being back and him often to the vet again—I have kept working, on both the Oxford project and a new essay that I finally sent off on Monday.
I’ve tried to think about what has made this difference for me. One thing was a simple suggestion made by my therapist—when I started freaking out about the same old crap coming my way compliments of my employer, she said to me, “Try thinking about what’s different now, not just what’s the same.”
This has been a great strategy for me. Although I love my career choice and being a professor of creative writing, I have a frankly sometimes lousy employment situation. (Most of us do at least from time to time or in some ways. It is not a good era for workers of any type, professional or otherwise.) For a while, I didn’t think I would be able to tolerate it much longer, and one of the things that I’ve worked on this year is to change my ways of dealing with this work-related stress. I had to quit letting my university define me, and I have made great strides in that regard—expanding my community outside UCF, re-focusing on my writing rather than my service to the university in the way of curricular and course development, committee work, and other thankless and frankly mostly ultimately useless tasks.
Many things in my work life have changed for the better over the past year, and so I keep thinking about those things, not the same-old-same-old things. Many new opportunities have opened up, and I am sorry only that I won’t be able to do everything.
This blog has been a part of those good changes. Bruce told me this morning that I now have 322 subscribers, and I said, “Wow. Last time I checked it was just 50!” That’s exciting to me.
I also added a few new features to Joyous Crybaby this past week—I added an “About Lisa Roney” page—for those people who find the blog without knowing me already—and I set up pages to list the art, songs, movies & TV, and writing that I sometimes feature in posts. About this last—I would love to hear from my readers with more suggestions about that feature. I can at first just list artists or particular works, songs, movies, TV episodes, and particular pieces of writing or authors—and then later, if you want to do a guest post on them, great, or maybe I will incorporate more commentary later on—and then I can link them on the lists. So let me have suggestions, via the comments section or email at roney dot lisa at gmail dot com.
Bruce quibbled with me about this last—he said, “But ‘All Along the Watchtower’ doesn’t make me cry. I think of it as more of an angry song.” Indeed, I am terrible at titles and had a hard time figuring out how to succinctly label those pages. Any suggestions are welcome.
Another thing that Bruce pointed out is that there might be room for yet another one of those pages that would include a list of a different kind of writing—that is, more analytical stuff as opposed to the experiential literature currently listed. This might include analyses of happiness, such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided or Pascal Bruckner’s Perpetual Euphoria or of sadness in relation to the arts, such as James Elkin’s Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings. There’s even a new book out by Adam Brent Houghtaling called This Will End in Tears: The Miserabilist Guide to Music. I’m going to have to look that up, but I want to be careful not to try to become too much of an archivist.
I leave you with a hallmark quote from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. It is, after all, the 200th anniversary year of his birth, and I think he would understand perfectly the relevant bumper sticker, though a man of his times would likely have resorted to the minced oath of “Stuff Happens.”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
In the meantime, thanks for hanging in there during further blog evolutions. And happy crying!
Lisa Roney
Joyous Crybaby 