Ah, the blogsphere

Ah, the blogsphere.

I used to write on this blog sometimes five and six times a day. I was steeped in the digital world, but more so, I was sitting in a cubicle bored to tears most of the time with thoughts and ideas and impressions rattling around in my head and this space was the best outlet for them.

But more and more I'm just living life right here in the "real" world. Not that I'm still not fascinated by the digital space. I still am, probably more than I've ever been. It is my little window to the world. I'm still unemployed, and while for some crazy reason I'm really not worried--how can you worry about something that is so far out of your control, like this financial crisis, as the Europeans so eloquently call it? It's like worrying about the weather. So, while I keep myself so busy sometimes it's almost laughable. I'm out of work yet there still aren't enough hours in the day for me to get everything done, from looking for work to taking care of the apartment and the meals to writing and continuing to just improve myself as a human being. Yes, that last one takes up a lot of time and energy. (That's a joke, son.)

And sometimes I feel a little guilty that I don't write here more. I know there are followers; some people subscribe, some people lurk, and others drop by occasionally to see what's up in my life--idle curiosity, perhaps, but it's nice that people are thinking of me. Just as I think of people in the periphery of my life.

It's not an excuse for not writing here, but I'm busy trying to figure out what to do with my life, how to do the things I want to do, how Sue and I can live our lives the way we want to. There are classes I'm considering including more acting classes and writing classes and auditions. Thursday I have a job interview for contract work that I have to prepare for, which would be great if I could land it because it would be the kind of work I used to do before I quit freelancing and went back to the agency. I loved the freelance life, the freedom, the stimulus from meeting new and interesting people, and learning about new subject matter and details for things I already know about.

Red Dog is out in a few hands now, hopefully being read and not just taking up space on a hard drive somewhere. It's at a few theaters for consideration for readings, and I'm hard at work on another play now that deals with all my favorite themes: abandonment, trust, family. That's all I'm going to say right now, because you don't want to show something to the world when it's still in such a formative state. The air seems to shrivel things. But I'm just as excited about this play as I was about Red Dog. I love the pure joy of simply writing.

And right now I have four pieces of chicken marinading in the 'fridge that I'll cook on the grill later and put back in the 'fridge for a meal later of cold chicken and salad when Sue gets home. I tell you, when she walks through the door, my heart just sings, and I love seeing the look on her face, too, when she sees me. I say I'm lucky, and she says she's lucky.

I try to keep things open. For the longest time I had my Facebook page closed up only to friends. But then it occurred to me that one of the things I like so much about the digital world is the idea of its openness. Again, that shared experience that we all have, whether we want to admit it or not. Being closed is not the way to go in the new world, and so I opened my page up to the world, and have had some good results. I've "met" new people, musicians and artists and actors and others in my field and though we've never met face-to-face we've shared ideas and personally, I've learned and grown from them.

But openness can be a bit creepy, too. There are those who will always abuse anything. I have a lurker on this blog, someone in Australia, and all the signs of a creep are there. He hits the blog pretty regularly, and he seems to be searching for anything relating to Sue. For a while he'd keep going back to pictures I posted of her and used the keyword, lanka, as in sri lanka where Sue lived for awhile. It was weird to see the connections. I removed the pictures, and it seemed when he realized they were missing he immediately used the keyword "sex" to look for things on my blog, which I thought was a rather poignant, primal, word association. Now he sits on the blog for a good hour, pouring over the posts date by date. Anyway, this is the dark side of the Internet, and just like all new things in the world, we have to adjust and learn, which is the one thing I love doing.

As I started with this post, ah, the blogsphere.