Here we go again

So here we are once again. I guess it's terminally online of me to immediately turn to the internet to say what I've got to say. The blog is strangely public and private at the same time. I'm not sure why it feels so natural, but it does. I know I don't write at the level of some people: for example, I learned in a previous post about Sara Ahmed's blog feminist killjoys, where she says far more interesting things than I do. I'm just working through my feelings, I guess. A semi-public private kind of life.

Lately I've been reading Hannah Arendt: On Revolution and Between Past and Future. I read Eichmann in Jerusalem a few years ago, but I haven't read anything else of hers or about her. The two books I read lately emphasize the difference between the public and the private spheres in a way that makes sense in the context she uses it in but is difficult to state explicitly to someone who hasn't read the book. My approximation is that the private sphere is the domain of social and species reproduction, and the public sphere is the domain of production of all kinds. The private sphere is communications between individual people as themselves; the public sphere is where one person addresses the world as a whole. Or something of that kind: Arendt asserts that freedom is exercised in public, particularly in the act of foundation (of a commonwealth, a republic, a nation…), but I do not know that my description here is good enough.

Be that as it may. A person close to me asked me about the role of the blog in our relationship. She'd found out something about how I perceived her from reading about herself in my blog. This was something that had never occurred to me, since nobody I write about in the blog actually reads it (despite being given the link!).¹ I wasn't sure how to answer. I'd always taken it for granted that the blog was an absolutely safe space to speak in to. That I was my own editor, publisher, promoter, and producer. That's why I've been so stringent with the page design: I want to do it all by myself.

The blog is a public space to speak into because I'm not speaking to anyone in particular. Anybody connected to the world wide web can come to this page and read what I have to say.² The speech isn't addressed to anyone in particular: I am writing now with no particular audience in mind apart from a vague sense of there being someone besides me here, but someone enough like me that they'd see what I'm trying to do.

But that doesn't work when it preempts private conversations. The problem was that I had said something in public that I hadn't said in private to avoid having to say it in private. I put it up on the blog so that I could say it to the absract reader in my head rather than the person to whom it was actually addressed, "it" being what I'd said that provoked the comment in the first place. Instead of saying what I had to say to someone's face, I said it behind their back but within earshot, as if speaking aloud to myself in a crowded room.

The blog isn't for getting around difficult private conversations by cheating out to the public for a witness. It's for talking about travel, experiences, things I'm thinking, learning, and reading about; it's for recording what I saw and felt.³ It's a log, a sequence of timestamped entries describing conditions as they obtained at the time the log entry was made. This one's posted on the World Wide Web, because that's what's trendy right now. At the most extreme, the blog is for writing down what I did during the day.

Today I slept in till past 10 am: I awoke at 8 am with the sun, fed the cat, and fell back asleep, periodically awaking to check the time. I met with my psychiatrist via video call at 11. I just had time to make a cup of coffee. I let the hot water coming out of the machine overflow the rim of the mug, so the americano was weak; but it was hot and copious, and I enjoyed it. The appointment went well. No changes to the regime of 100mg lamotrigine daily with 20mg propranolol as needed. The lamotrigine keeps my emotions within bounds (they can crash suddenly unassisted). The propranolol is a beta blocker and works by inhibiting the effects of adrenaline (on the beta receptors, I think). I've been taking it as a party drug, because its high is the best I've ever experienced. I told my psychiatrist this and he thought it was funny. The other night I sneaked the pills into a night club in a plastic baggie rolled up in my sock and furtively took one in a dark corner of the dance floor as if they were ecstasy.

This could go on in a scene for a while, but to summarize the rest of the day: I mailed the fur coat I inherited from my mother to Selina in Charlotte, tried to sell inherited antique books to the used book store up the street and was rebuffed to a specialist in Evanston of all places, and reread the article we're working on to submit.⁴ It ended with a lovely walk about, beer, and burger with a guy I met through gaming and have been talking to. It's been nice to have someone to hang out with here and there, on occasion.

He mentioned the blog, or maybe I did; anyhow, it came up, and he suggested that I write about my feelings around the move. I talked about those with the psychiatrist today, too. I've been selling and donating the goods I took from my mother's house when she died, because we didn't get rid of anything except her clothes. The words are failing me right now to describe the process. It's been long. I had to take the things I took from the house because at the time they held so much of her in them, or so it seemed to me. I felt it to be my duty to take care of these things that she'd shepherded for in some cases decades and to take up the crook over those things she'd packed into plastic totes and labeled for me because I'd asked for them before she moved to the smaller house and got rid of so many things she didn't want or need. But now I can let it all pass away.

I'm keeping about a dozen of the plastic totes: photo albums, childhood school work, books of exceptional sentimental value, and so on. Things that are irreplaceable, in short. I'm keeping the art (and adding to it!). I'm keeping a suitcase of coats and a suit, and two guitars and the stand of bagpipes. My birth certificate, social security card, and a few pieces of jewelry will go in a safe deposit box. Xerxes is going to stay with Matt Cardoni. I'll take a backpack with me, and the camera bag, and that's it.

Entropy is always increasing. I've gotten rid of so much, and so much information is lost. While I was packing up some scarves I inherited to send to Zach's finacée in San Francisco, I found a few strands of my mother's hair. I stuck them in a small plastic container and am keeping them. I carried them one at a time as I found them into my bedroom and put them in the little tub with the masking tape and black marker label on top that says "Jean's hair."