Limits of Blogging

I guess the past few posts have been kind of depressing, huh?

I hope I'm not coming across as one of these self-pitying bores. The fact is that generally, I'm a pretty cheerful person, and I laugh very easily. When I'm with Jeff or my friends, we're often laughing, even if we are talking about the most unhappy events of our lives, not because we don't know how to talk about unhappy events but because we make each other happy. I am surrounded by amazing friends, the kind you know to cling onto your whole life, even though I don't blog about them very often, since I'm assuming they haven't abandoned their sense of privacy as casually as I have.

There are a lot of facets of my life that I haven't yet blogged about. Probably because as Tolstoy said (to paraphrase), happiness really isn't much to write about. The past month of my life has been difficult with my second miscarriage, for sure, but it hasn't been spent in the depth of despair, as it might seem from my blog alone. The rear of our house, wall to wall glass, looks out onto the garden, and my life is usually lived surrounded by California poppies, fuchsias, snapdragons, abutilons, and roses of all colors. But that is a view I haven't shared with most of you.

Here's how my life usually unfolds outside of the blog. A few weeks ago, through facebook, I found my fourth grade best friend from PS 20 in Queens, NY, and it turns out that she lives in the East Bay. The last time I saw her was when she was in college. Now, more than fifteen years later, we have reconnected, and we've spent several jolly hours catching up. Yesterday, she came over with her family along with a few other friends, and we passed the whole afternoon laughing, playing with our dog and their kids, eating, and then eating some more. I find nothing more satisfying than stuffing my friends with my cooking and then sending them home with leftovers.

And today, I am off to my book club, which we've had going for about 5 years now. The members of the club are the warmest bunch, and we love seeing each other. I'm sure we'll hang out for hours, as we usually do, gossiping, talking about the book (Christopher Buckley's Supreme Courtship), giggling, empathizing. Together, we have read over fifty books. And tonight, Jeff and I will be off to have dungeness crab (yum) with a high school friend of mine who's visiting from Michigan.

But would I have thought to blog about any of these events? Probably not. Because... well, because I don't assume that they are interesting to any one other than me. Also, I don't want my blog to be just a record of my daily activities, but a place where I can store some emotional truths (as pretentious as that sounds). In that process, this blog may seem a little weepy at times, perhaps a little intense, possibly somewhat imbalanced, hopefully not too neurotic. But I hope you will have the patience to bear with me.

If I ever have the occasion to meet any of you anonymous readers in person, I hope you will do me the favor of saying, "Wow, you're so different than what I expected!"