What I Did on My Blogging Vacation

(Should be technically called my vacation from blogging, but that's not nearly as snappy a title.)

• Bought a guitar.

• Subsequently lost all feeling in the fingertips on my left hand from playing said guitar. And poked myself in the eye at least twice because of that lost feeling.
• Got a new camera (that I really, really love).

• Said goodbye to the old camera.

• Got bit by a spider! On my back! Ew!
• Got stung by a caterpillar! On my wrist! Ew!
• Dealt with a bee infestation in our 85-year-old duplex. (Bees! Ew!)
• Got a second copywriting gig for my agency (the middle piece that reads "Epson or Kodak").

• Went to the dentist for the first time in over a year.
• Found out that I probably have acid reflux disease because it seems my saliva is systematically eating my teeth, and thus I have eleventy billion cavities. Or five, which, to a girl who never, ever had cavities when she was growing up, is the same thing.
• Went to a Feist concert.

• Went to a New Frontiers concert.

• Read The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, a birthday present from my boss.
• Got a tattoo. (That's ink on my foot, not dirt, I promise.)

• Found wild honeysuckle growing in my backyard.

• Exercised enormous willpower to keep from blogging. Things got pretty dicey last Friday when I found this quote in The Writing Life: "Writing sentences is difficult whatever the subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick." I wanted desperately to write it down somewhere, or at least blog it. I was afraid I'd forget it forever if I didn't.

The only writing I did for myself during the entire two and a half weeks was on the back of an envelope while waiting an hour (AN HOUR!) for the dentist. This is what it said:
"Man with cane speaking Spanish into a cell phone--was he waiting on someone? What would he do if his name were called? His eyes were hard to find. Was waiting on his daughter."

Ever since I was young, I've had this crazy impulse to document my life so that I won't forget it. Or so that no one will forget it; I'm not sure which. When I was eight, I asked for a trunk for Christmas to begin amassing my collection of THINGS I WILL DEFINITELY WANT TO HAVE WHEN I AM OLD. And old, to me then, was 25. I went through that trunk and brought it to Dallas with me last November, and some things I did keep, such as my scrapbook from fourth grade and my baby blanket and a few favorite stuffed animals, but other things (such as my extensive rubber stamp collection) I tossed. But the impulse to preserve, you know, my life is still with me. It lasted well through my teen years, which should explain the fact that I still have the wrapper from the piece of gum I was chewing when I got my first kiss, as well as pretty much every piece of Union Redskins memorabilia that was generated between, oh, I don't know, 1995 and 2001. Go 'Skins.

I used bulletin boards in college, one for every year, to keep track of VERY IMPORTANT THINGS, such as pictures and concert tickets and magazine articles I liked and that piece of fake ivy that was placed onto my head as I was inducted into Sigma Tau Delta, the English honors society and the scoresheet from that time I bowled a 160 (complete with turkey!) and no one was there to see it. Last November I packed everything from each bulletin board into gallon-sized Ziploc bags marked with the corresponding academic year and placed each bag into my trunk.

Once I graduated college, my blog took the place of the bulletin boards and the trunk. There, I could link to articles I liked, write stories, and keep a log of my activities. My mom gave me my first digital camera the day I graduated (pictured above), and I began posting pictures of my daily adventures. Suddenly, I was able to document my life in a way I never could before.

I used to do a lot more writing and used have a lot more adventures, but, whatever my blog has become, it is still a repository for all of these things, and I can't imagine not having a space for that. I spent two weeks going frantic without it. Living an undocumented, anonymous life, I found, is not for me.

And so I will continue on. Maybe the writing'll come back to me. Maybe not. But I realized that what I'm doing here is completely for me, and if people happen to read it and happen to enjoy what goes on here, and some even happen to comment and say so, then all the better.