Fine

I told the story in passing about a year ago about how I once put my foot in mouth by describing the entire process of labor by means of which my amazing wife brought our beautiful youngest child into the world as "fine". Not that a monosyllable counts as much of a description, and in fact it's much closer to a dismissal, something akin to "this isn't important enough to get into in any detail". I was implicitly chastened at the time, and it comes up as a running joke between my wife and me now, just another example of my capacity for the occasional poor choice of words.

In context, of course, when I made that particular choice there were numerous contributing factors. I was telling the story about picking the bino's name, which was something my wife and I talked about before she went into labor and after the delivery room was cleared, but not during labor, ergo, labor had nothing to do with the story. It was not as though in the 32nd hour of labor my wife had a pain-and-hormone induced vision of Saint Gotthard of Hildesheim, or she ended up needing an emergency C-section and I found myself beseeching my dear departed grandmother to rally the guardian angels, and we ultimately namesaked the baby accordingly. The name selection conversation more or less picked up right where it had left off before they hooked my wife up to the IV's and monitors. And on another level, maybe I was even secondhand humblebragging a little bit. My wife had an attempted epidural when the little guy was born, something she hadn't wanted but freaked out and agreed to when offered in the throes of transition, all for naught because the anesthesiologist somehow botched it and only numbed the outside of her leg. After that she never really deviated from her natural delivery birthplans for the little girl and the bino, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't exceedingly proud of her for that. If I shrug off labor as no biggie it is only because that's how my wife makes it look, because she is a rock star.

I bring all this up because it parallels the ways in which I've been thinking about re-approaching this blog lately. I know, you probably thought I hadn't spared a thought to my lack of regular posting in weeks, but the truth is I think about it every day. Sometimes only fleetingly, but it's there. The problem for me is finding an entrypoint, which is difficult to do when lately the vast majority of everything strikes me as ... fine.

Which is not the same as bad! Or unimportant, or boring, or any other pejorative qualifier. Perhaps a simple lack of urgency is the best elaboration of the idea, and even then it's only in the very specific context of urgently demanding I find the time to type out 500 words or more as part of my overall mental response. More and more lately that has become a high bar to clear, and that in turn becomes a vicious cycle ratcheting the bar up higher and higher; if I haven't posted in a week, what's a big enough deal for me to break the silence? What if I haven't posted in two weeks, three, more, &c. &c.?

I've already acknowledged that with the status quo perpetuating resolution of our contract drama at work, things have settled back into their customary holding patterns, which I would sum up as ... fine. (95 days 'til I blow out of the office for a week's vacation at the beach!) I've already made my sorry-not-sorry explanations about how once upon a time the blog was my way of making myself write every day, and I've shifted a ton of that zero-sum energy into actually writing fiction every day, some of which flames out after scratching a mental itch, some of which gets finished and shopped around from rejection to rejection, and some of which I'll have more announcements about the potential publication of soon (I hope), all of which make sme feel like the writing as a whole is going ... fine. My wife and I are fine, the kids are fine, the house is fine and the yard is fine. I went and saw Avengers 2 last week and it was ... fine? I liked it a lot and may very well go see it again, but it didn't inspire a 2K word geeked-out treatise, obviously.

So the point, if I have one (which is by no means guaranteed in the EULA), is I'm realizing that if I sit around waiting for earth-shattering developments before I update the blog, those updates will be few and far between and the blog will fall into serious disuse. So consider this a bit of preamble throat-clearing to maybe trying to get two or three posts a week going, even if they wind up being short and random as a reflection of how much brainspace the blog has been relegated to. We shall see how it goes.