That Which Fires the Imagination

Out of the frying pan and into... oh.

As nice as it is to have a platform like this blog to pontificate and excoriate, I always have to think at least twice about what I put up -- if not more than twice.  Each day that passes brings additional people to the blog.  It's been a long time since the days when I could identify the visitors ("Visit count up by one.  Must've been mom.")  I've made a conscious decision not to blog about work, just as I made a decision that I didn't want to blog about my trombone students.  Blogging directly about acquaintances is on the same blacklist.  This is what is known as a fortuitously prescient idea.

But now my issue is mainly that I've been in an incredibly irascible mood for quite some time.  A significant portion of what people do and say around me really gets on my nerves.  I haven't figured out if it's because the world has gotten just a little bit more annoying or if a problem in me.  Generally, if you have to blame the world AND everyone else for being different, it's not actually them that are the problem.  Occam's Razor: it's not just for breakfast anymore!


The gut response is "I'll just write about those annoying behaviors from other people in my blog, and I'll judge from the comments whether or not I'm justified."  It IS my closest public opinion outlet: asking the spoiled yogurt in the fridge for its opinion just garners me a dismissive grumble.

But the issue becomes strange when what I'm complaining about is integral to a particular group of people.  Let's say I had a problem with people doing gymnastics.  Something about gymnastics is something that I find objectionable and comment-worthy.  But even if I disguise names or genders, it's still going to be pretty obvious who is and is not a gymnast.  Other people may not know which of my friends are gymnast-inclined, but those people reading my blog from the tumble bars certainly would.

So I'm sort of stymied.  And it's made worse by the fact that I can't even have the unpacking conversations that I long to have about these things.  The sorts of "let me tell you what happened with that jerk" conversations that everyone has with their spouses and their spouses have with them.  The kind of stuff that makes all that "spousal privilege" talk on Law & Order not total bunk.

It's an unfortunate commentary that my most significant conversations in the past few months have been with a high school junior, a partially unintelligible Ecuadorean immigrant, one two three other men's wives, and a partially inebriated Dutchman. 

On the plus side, I could get them all in a studio and have one hell of a roundtable talk show.