Up to this point I have had a pretty bad case of blogging anxiety. That is what happens when the people who read your blog are all English majors or intelligent and thoughtful people you are eager to impress with your own intelligence and thoughtfulness. Too much pressure. People who blog are supposed to have an adventurous life or a philosophical turn of mind or some sort of unique hobby that becomes the subject of their musings.
I'm not sure that I have any of these.
What I do have, however, is a looming life and location change. What I have is a group of friends with whom I desperately want to keep in touch. What I have (or sometimes have or hope to have) is a powers of observation and a sense of wonder and a desire to grow into a more thoughtful and self reflective person. As the result of some combination of history and personality and the speed at which my brain and heart process things, all of these traits become more pronounced in me when I am writing than when I am just thinking or even talking to people. So that is why I am, yet again, starting up this blog.
That, and the fact that I really like to talk about myself.
So anyway, if you are reading this, it is probably because I have asked you to. Hello. Don't expect anything too exciting or insightful here because if I set that before myself as a goal I will never update this thing. And I want to make this attempt at self-expression, thinking through typing, or whatever all this is, stick.
So here we go. Blog numero uno.
It is Saturday. There is tea next to me, music in my headphones, and a student sitting at a table near the door of this oh-so-collegiate coffee shop. We are in each others' lines of sight and every once in a while, we glance up at the same time and make eye contact before looking at the edges of our tables or our computer screens like they are what we intended to study all along.
Saturdays are my day off--24 hours in which I refuse to do anything related to my classes. I never (ever, ever) thought I would become the sort of person who had to discipline herself to take a day off, but such is my life these days.
But that is not what I want to talk about right now. What I want to talk about right now is moss.
Yeah, that's right. Moss.
I have lived here for 4 years now, but I can't ever remember noticing the moss until just a few weeks ago. If you live here, you should start to keep your eyes open for it because there is a lot of it and it is actually a kind of interesting substance.
I walked to this oh-so-collegiate coffee shop this morning and upon leaving my door realized that my ipod had been running on shuffle all night long and was dead. So, Regina Spektorless, I set out with the sounds of cars and my own footsteps.
It's kind of amazing how much space in my head was cleared out by the lack of sound. I felt like I was thinking and noticing more than my usual ear-budded self. (Which is ironic because the very Regina Spektor album I was planning on listening to has a line "You keep in your headphones to drown out your mind. Ironic.) And as I was walking along, I started noticing the moss again. It was growing in individual little green mounds on the edges of the curbs and, even though I can only assume it was all the same species, varied in shades from a deep, dirty olive to glow-stick green. A little farther along I started noticing it on the trees as well -- a bright green spray of it flocking the the northwest side of the trees.
So anyway, I walked downtown and thought about moss. I thought:
- It reminds me of coral growing on a shipwreck.
- What does it actually eat, growing on concrete like that, and how does it hold on?
- What would it look like to decorate an apartment in those moss colors? Would it be cool or overwhelming.
- God created moss--thought it up and figured it all out.
- Once you notice something once (in this case, moss) you start to notice it all the time.
