It is early evening, and I'm sitting in my bed with a
glass of tea. I woke up overly ambitious, with a to-do list that inevitably did not get done. I spent my morning sitting in my laundry room over a plastic
garbage bag, sifting through cones of compost and separating worms from the
finished byproduct of feeding them my kitchen scraps. Harvesting the compost was
mostly a process of trial and error, consisting of two days of work and my
scrunched up face watching various Youtube tutorials.
After working on the compost bin, I went on a walk with my boyfriend that lasted longer than expected. It was sunny and fifty degrees out on a December day so we were taking our time, stopping into a neighborhood church and a nearby bar for a beer. Mainly though, we were going slowly because my boyfriend got into a bike accident last week and hasn't been walking the same since. After the walk, I headed to the grocery and then rushed home to make myself a quick dinner and now, I'm finally getting to this blog. This was my day. It was a good day, minus my boyfriend’s bruised knee and his unwanted immobility.
It was eventful, though not noteworthy, which is precisely why I believe it has
some distinct importance.
I’ve been blogging for over a year now. I’ve been reading
blogs since my days in Honduras,
when I had down time and internet access at my office. It’s a curated format,
which we all know makes it a bit of an eye roll, but also at its best, it is writing
that does what good writing strives to do: allows for escape, inspires a
daydream and occasionally, the real conjuring up of future plans. Through
blogging, I have read the thoughts of a medical student researching in
Vietnam, a painter on leave in India, a florist tackling
owning her own business. I have read many, many kitchen thoughts. Clicking
through, it’s a film roll of well cropped photos but I stay for the real win.
It gets me every time. It’s the words.
More specifically, it’s the writing of the everyday. Media
bombards us with tragedy and so at times I search for normalcy. Getting a grant
to spend your days painting in India
is not normal per se but what that person
ate, who that person encountered on the way to the market, what quiet moment
they had during their week - when written well, interests me.
I wish I could find a blog from a Honduran who would upload her
everyday on the internet. I’m sure it exists, and I’m sure when documented,
it’s more nuanced and varied than the news of Central
America we read here. There are a lot of other voices I haven’t
spent enough time trying to find. I crave the subject matter of blogs but not
always the voices – mostly white, college educated women (This could be on me,
unknowingly drawn to voices that mirror my own). But fortunately, that void is filled by my greater love of fiction and memoirs. It is filled by Sandra
Cisneros, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rafia Zakaria, Ta-Nehisi
Coates, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Daniel Alarcón, Francisco Goldman, Gish Jen.
A little more than a year in, I keep trying to figure out the angle of this blog and its focus. If I think about it, most of my posts end up being filed under "mental wanderings" but maybe in the midst of all of the other tragedies circulating in our news feed, that's the narrative I crave. When honest, maybe there's something both significant and modest in the narrative of the everyday.
