03.19.00
ON WRITING   < <  rants  <  the_board   ||
or, basically.... why?

i guess i sort of got reminded why i started this section the other day. two things happened, really, to remind me that it was here and that i really had neglected it.

first of all, i got some mail about it. this section's old enough now that search engines would catalogue it, so it's been getting some hits. and, well, there's enough of you people out there (yes, you, you who's reading this right now who has *no* idea who i am. hi! ;)) who are bored enough to not only read it, but to actually think about what i said long enough to send mail. pretty amusing, that.

anyway, a couple folks sent me mail about some of the things i'd posted. most of them were about the littleton shooting, many bringing up good points i really hadn't considered. very cool.

a couple were just about the rants section in general, and one fairly angry young gentleman demanded to know why i thought people wanted to read anything i had to say. i was kind of taken aback by that, i hadn't really thought about it that way, that i could be letching people's eyeballs by force. 'Spewing [my] vacuous thoughts about cyberspace', I think he put it.

why, indeed? partially because i write anyway, and every once in a while i'm interested to see what other people think about what i say, even if it's to disagree, perhaps especially if it's to disagree.

but some of why -- and something i hadn't really thought about -- has to do with the second thing that happened to make me think about it.

my father, who is a writer and has always been one as long as i've known him, is the editor of a small paper in eastern N.C.. he writes a weekly column, mostly opinion and small-town anecdotes and allegories, the kind of reminesces i think he's always seen himself penning. i imagine he's the kind of man who has a novel stuck away in a drawer somewhere, part autobiography, part folk fiction. i hope i get to read that book someday.

his column was, as they always are, witty. charming, smooth, warm. perhaps i see most of this because i'm his daughter, but i've always enjoyed my father's words on the newspaper page. this particular missive was a light-hearted ribbing directed at my mother, specifically at her level of... cleanliness.

to give mom a bit of credit... i must say dad did exaggerate just a little, and did not include some rather pertinant details (like the fact that he and my 18-year-old brother, when left to their own devices, would live in a lifestyle repuganant to most frat-boys i know). but the truth of the matter was this: it was something normal and every-day, something common-place and regular... but somehow he could wrap it in words and make it a story. make it an allegory, make it mean something else, something more. and make it funny enough and witty enough and thought-provoking enough that other people wanted to read it. i always just thought that was really cool.

and this is my attempt at that 'really cool'. i'm not my dad, i don't quite write like him or choose the same messages, but i like to see my words out there, somewhere.

i guess i just realized this, the other day, when dad wrote this article about my mother and started another in a long line of amusingly loving family feuds. i've always enjoyed writing, and writing to be read, as a social sort of thing.

mom and i would read dad's articles over breakfast. mom and dad would read my essays over dinner. we'd read the papers, magazines, sometimes share books. when i got into high school and college, and read the classics, sometimes we'd discuss those. many a term paper was written after a long conversation with dad, sprawled across the old chair in his office, as he poked away at his notes with his middle fingers. i got a box of old books when i moved away, to take with me: The Scarlet Letter (which I later discovered made a great term paper pared with John Updike's S.), 1984, a giant annotated Shakespeare. they're all still on my shelves, in the living room, with the rest of the favorites.

i often discuss books with my friends, and particularly with my best friend. he and i often share particularly good ones (he's currently blazing through the Ender books by Orson Scott Card.), as well as keep a sort of rambling poem going on the bathroom mirror in lipstick or soap or whatever's available. my refrigerator is covered in magnetic poetry, always rearranging. whiteboards covered in scribbles, notes and bits of poem (mostly him), hang in place of pictures. i suppose you could say words are all around me. he's a writer, much like dear old dad.

and so of course i put them here, too. i don't write for a living, like my father, or write out of need, like my friend. i just do because... it's normal. it's hello.

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