Lighting Candles

I thought for a while about deleting my blog.
That's why it's been so long.
And because my last post was about Skype, which doesn't exactly facilitate a lot of imagination.
Also it's been so long because when one is dating someone who is not a fan of/familiar with the blogosphere, one apparently self-consciously doesn't blog at all, except to guiltily check a couple dozen of them every day, as usual, including visiting one's own to live wistfully amongst the cobwebs of one's former crackling, comforting fireplace for a few moments.

I love to blog. I love to read blogs. I love background colors, usually whites and creams and yellows. I love stupid playlists, and good playlists, I love blog templates covered in raffia and buttons and stupid stupid polka dots. I love lists of things that make people happy. I love writers and picture-posters and mothers and over-emoters and crafters and seamstresses and fathers and siblings and ethnographers and scholars who blog their experiences.
I love the part of blogging that most non-bloggers are uncomfortable with, the part where people blog about their grilled cheese sandwich or their cat's first bath, or they link a song and a few lines of a quote they like, or they copy someone else's post sneakily and deliberately, or they want to be a singer, or they get mad at someone, or they dedicate their post to someone, or they say thanks for reading them, or they pick a side of the abortion debate, or they're trying to get published, or they took thirty pictures of their kids swimming on the opposite side of the pool and want everyone to see them, or they just got some new pinking shears, or they just talk about themselves and share too much information for sixty lines in maroon font that's bolded with innumerable spelling errors--
these are the things I love about blogging.
That you can blog things nobody in the whole universe has ever thought or cared about, besides you.
And if they have, or haven't, it doesn't matter. You're blogging it because you want to blog it. For yourself.
For the record.
Yes, it's human, and very weird, and detached, and quirky, and you can seem a trillion times cooler when blogging the "right" things, and people blog their meals and their new haircuts and their aversion to highlighters and their knee-jerk reactions to religion or politics that aren't always well-organized or sensitive, and they blog a picture of their ear that they took on accident, or how much they hate Facebook, or how they're gay and brave enough to tell everyone, or what their take on a controversial sermon is, or why the smell of a certain store or the upholstery in their car brings them relief.

This morning I hopped merrily (yes, merrily) down the stairs next to the bell tower while it played "God Speed The Right" and I admired the cologne of the man walking in front of me as it wafted through the cold air and up the steps.
Because somehow, this October, after being unbearably hot for weeks, the air has suddenly hit the perfect temperature in the mornings, as a gift to all of us who have to be out and about early and also to those of us who appreciate fall to the point at which we take deep, dizzying breaths of it before nine AM and daydream about it in the fluorescently-lit basement of our office building in the afternoons and race home to light pumpkin candles and watch the sun set before rushing to the theater at night.
That is something I wanted to blog, so I blogged it. Go team fall.

School is school. Work is work. Show is show. Come see it. You can see me getting hysterically carried to the guillotine every night, Monday through Saturday, until Thanksgiving.