the most irritating aspect of blogs

is that you get only the general-public-version of life from people that you know better than that. i want to ask specific questions, and i want to tell many of you specific things, but not all of life is appropriate for public archives. i guess this is the good thing about the open-diary style of blogging, but that's just a pretense of privacy. the truth is that they aren't that anonymous, they just make you FEEL anonymous, which is a dangerous place to be. it reminds me of my all-time favorite little kid story, starring a very young-small-early melinda lanier. one night she snuck back into the living room when she was supposed to be in bed. melinda, apparently, had not yet established object permanence, and thought that if she covered her eyes (and couldn't see her parents), then nobody would be able to see her either. so she covered her eyes and walked through the middle of the living room.

such is the myth of privacy on the internet.

so. i know why it is the way it is, but today i wish it wasn't. i have more to say than i'm willing to say here.


PS MY CLOTHES NO LONGER FIT THE WAY THEY DID. in fact, some of them will no longer button at all (even though they still fit everywhere else). and i know that's not possible, but it's happening anyway. someone forgot to tell my belly that it isn't supposed to grow yet. yikes.

ANOTHER PS - Another story from Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

The Dawn Treader ends up in a tunnel of darkness in the middle of the ocean. If they land on the island in the center, every man's dreams will come true. Not every fantasy, but every actual dream will happen. But they get so lost in fear and in the actual darkness that they can't find their way out of the tunnel. The crew is panicking, the rescued refugee is hysterical, and nobody can get their bearings. It's the darkest moment of the book. Lucy, whose faith is always pure, leans out into the darkness and whispers, "Aslan, if you have ever loved us, we need you."

In a moment a bird flies overhead. He begins to fly just ahead of the ship, and the crew, unable to do anything else, begins to follow him. He leads them back into the light.

And as the bird flies past Lucy, he whispers, "Courage, dear heart." And the bird smells of Aslan.

Beautiful.

I'm reading Gilead now. It is more or less a stream of consciousness account from a dying country preacher, and it reads the way an old man talks. It is probably too slow for some people, but I like it.