Once upon a time people kept journals to deal with the tedium and trauma of daily living. These days the online world is a stage on which we can play out our lives in public, if we choose.
Not every personal website is about someone’s cute kids or cute shoes, either. Or even about a race to pay off student loans, learn a skill, start a business, homeschool their kids, buy a home or retire early.
Sometimes the poor players strut and fret some pretty intensely personal business: love, genderqueer politics, marriage, divorce, infertility, midlife reinvention, empty nests, aging, dying.
Writing helps us feel our way through chance, challenge and change. Or so I note in “When life hands you blog fodder,” a piece on the blog associated with my online writing course.
The Internet is crammed with the drab and the dramatic, adorableness and grotesqueries, rampant TMI and TL;dr. What makes for the most readable work, I think, is what one of my newspaper editors called “conflict.”
That is to say, “What’s the struggle? What’s the fear/wonder/longing that drives this piece?” Often what draws me (and maybe you) in is the sense of real emotion vs. faux feelings:
“Sure, the Internet is crammed with cat videos and twee posts about OMG-so-cuuuute toddler birthday party themes. Yet it’s also a place for primal screams.
“Writers deal with illnesses – their own or others’ – and grieve when the Lifetime movie ending doesn’t materialize. Parents of teens (or millennials who’ve moved back home) worry not just about money but about their children’s futures.
“Young men and women struggle with money, careers and love, or with the lack of all three. Artists toil in obscurity and wonder whether any of this is worth it. Jilted lovers wail and/or plot revenge fantasies that they’ll never really commit.
“The common thread? Sometimes, life really stinks – and sometimes writing helps us deal with it.”
Also up on the writing blog is the first of a series of “60-second writing tips,” short takes designed to help people punch up their prose. This time around it’s “Words and jewelry” – don’t overdo either one.
The Mother’s Day discount continues through May 31. Edited to add: If you want to take the course, visit my payment platform. Since I like to reward initiative, I will give a discount to anyone who e-mails me at SurvivingAndThriving (at) live (dot) com. You can also sign up for a mini-coaching package for $125; for details, e-mail me at the above address.
Blowups and baking soda
I’ve had a couple of purely fun posts up recently at Money Talks News. “85 uses for baking soda (and how it could save your life)” is an ode to the wonders of bicarbonate of soda. The versatile powder can de-stain, de-ice and de-stinkify. It improves foods as varied as iced tea, dried beans and tomato soup.
Baking soda can be used for household chores, first aid, personal hygiene, auto care, exfoliation and even pest control. One thing it shouldn’t be used for is to make “bottle bombs,” although I admit they look like fun.
One of my favorite frugal hacks is finding ways to get paid for stuff I like to do. Theater reviews. Travel. Building a savings account. Restaurant reviews. And, lately, finding personal finance lessons in movies.
“10 money lessons from ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’” is my most recent effort. My friend Linda B. and I saw it in Fairbanks, Alaska late in the evening of the day before it officially opened. (I guess it was midnight somewhere in the world.)
I say that personal finance is where you find it. The film illustrates examples such as “beware the fast talker,” “accept help if it’s offered,” “cooperate with colleagues” and “play the hand you’re dealt.”
The film is full of special effects and snark (rhymes with “Stark,” who delivers a ton of it), and a whole lot of stuff gets blowed up real good. The previously underused super-bowman Hawkeye pretty much walks off with the show, although he’s neck and neck with the titular super-villain. (And if you haven’t seen his Hawkeye-sings-the-blues routine from “The Tonight Show,” for heaven’s sake watch it right now.)
Ultron actually out-snarks Stark, which is quite an achievement given that (a) Stark gets more lines and (b) Ultron is a robot. Then again, he’s voiced by James Spader, who has a way with words — a sarcastic way. The man probably sounds snarky when he says stuff like “Good morning” or “Happy birthday, Mom.” Hearing a robot issue world-weary quips is terribly entertaining.
Related reading:
- 8 personal finance lessons from “Gotterdammerung”
- 5 financial lessons from “Parsifal”
- 6 financial lessons from “Godzilla”
I come from a long line of journal writers, but for me it just never took. I guess I couldn’t imagine why anyone would be interested in the details of my singularly mundane life. That is until a couple years ago when everything in said life changed. Lately I have been recognizing urges, as you quoted Dorothy Allison in your writing blog, “to have gotten this down.” While my story may never have an audience of blog readers, I thank you for the nudge toward putting pen to paper and releasing my thoughts to the written word.
You’re welcome! Remember that a fair amount of history is contained in “mundane” lives. Journals and letters home give historians a lot of material and also perspectives of everyday people as well as famous ones. It’s one thing for a talking head to say “there’s work for all who want it.” But 50 years from now we may read the journals (or blogs) of recent college grads and learn the realities of getting a job, any job, especially one with a decent-enough salary to allow payback of student loans to commence.
I’ve had the experience of “everything in said life (changing)” myself. Everyone has his own story to tell. Mine just ended up in personal finance articles and, ultimately, this blog.
Thanks for reading, and for leaving a comment.
I find it so interesting that people are willing to share on blogs and how folks….perfect strangers try to help. I’ll never forget the gal…I think from the “old MSN blogs”…shared the terrible, sudden loss of her husband in a car accident. The out pouring of support was unbelievably kind. As memory serves she also shared problems with the aftermath….settling his matters … probate … beginning a new life … I was just thinking of her the other day and how she’s doing. Your right Donna blogging is cheaper than therapy BUT I find it pretty amazing to witness the kindness of strangers….
I’m in e-mail contact with that woman, and she’s doing better. It took time for everything to shake down, of course. I can’t imagine having to settle probate while you’re still reeling from the shock of such a loss…But she’s moving forward.
Thanks for the update Donna. I agree, it must have been horrible to have to make sense of life with such a sudden loss and then to go thru probate. Had to be tough…
Aside from the kindness of strangers, something I’ve experienced a time or two thanks to blogging, I’ve been fortunate enough to make some very good friends thanks to this online life and that’s something to be cherished as well.
Hope you had a lovely Mother’s Day!
You, too, new mom. 🙂
And yes, I enjoy making friends this way — even if I never meet any of them in person. The chance to do so, however, sure makes it fun to travel to other places.
Yeah, there’s something to that.
I’ve kept journals ever since I was a little girl…congenital logorrhea, I guess. Recording daily events and writing out my reactions to them helped to cope with some of it. At the time I bought my first Mac, Apple had a feature called “iLife,” part of which was a primitive blogging platform.
Well, blogging was just getting to be all the rage then. It was something new to try. At the time, too, I’d become enamored of Trent Hamm’s The Simple Dollar and thought I could do that, too. It would, I imagined, be an electronic version of the journal that wouldn’t take up space in the closet — since I suffered from bag lady syndrome at the time, a personal-finance spin was a natural. Hence: Funny about Money.
Really, I never expected anybody to read it. Finding it on iLife must have been a challenge for anyone who felt moved to read the thing. But amazingly, it soon had a ton of followers! Even more came along when I switched to WordPress. The private became public…what a strange experience.
Yep. And people you might never have met — almost certainly would never have met — suddenly become correspondents. Or meet you at the Wendy’s near the Home Depot in Phoenix.