Gershwin? With bongos?!

Today I spent most of the day more or less knocked out with a killer migraine, though I did manage to get out of the house – out of town, even – to spend a few hours with Mr. A and his sister, checking out the county library book sale and eating lunch at my favorite Mexican restaurant.

The best thing I got at the book sale was not a book but a short stack of ancient LPs, mostly from the 50s and 60s. There was a time when I had a great collection of old records I had picked up at thrift stores and yard sales, chosen primarily for the great titles and/or cover art. I specialized in pictures of ingenue torch singers with dramatic hairdos and tiny-waisted jewel-colored dresses. I left them all behind when I left the ex, along with almost everything else I owned. And I've never missed them. But today at the library I was so inspired by the selection that I decided to get a few, just for fun. Here's the breakdown:

Records with great cover art AND great titles:
• But You've Never Heard Gershwin With Bongoes (from the back cover: "Don't cheat your ears. They deserve this.")
• Drink Along With Irving (Songs and Nightcaps for the Man of No Distinction), featuring a really fabulous early Andy Warhol-esque pen and ink illustration on the back
• Ira Ironstrings, The best damn dance band in the land, which has an amusing story on the back cover and claims to have been recorded "April 11 and a hunk of April 12, 1930, in North Crumble, Macon County, Georgia, without benefit of clergy," though the actual copyright is 1960

Records with great cover art of the wide-eyed ingenue variety:
• Music of Desire
• They Say It's Wonderful
• Art Van Damme Swings Sweetly – the New Sound of the World's Greatest Accordionist (what can I say, I love accordion music)

Records I thought I might actually like listening to:
• Let's Dance The Bossa Nova (missing its instructional booklet of dance steps, unfortunately)
• Some unnamed jug band record
• Beatnik-looking Indian guy singing hits from Hindi go-go movies

And finally, for nostalgia's sake only:
• Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews' My Fair Lady, which I had to get because as a kid I spent countless hours leaning up against the baggy stretched out black and gold fabric on the front of our stereo cabinet speakers, listening and quietly singing along to my parents' copy of the exact same record.

Any records that come from the library sale are bound to be scratchy and terrible-sounding, but to me, that only adds to the appeal. And if the cover and title are cheesy enough to attract me, there's almost always at least one song I like, as well. I can't wait to get the turntable hooked up and listen to them.

Over lunch at the Mexican restaurant Mr. A's sister started talking about her son's page on MySpace, which led to a discussion of online communities and related ideas ... and once again I found myself wondering if Mr. A knows about this blog or not. I've never told him about it, but I have heard him refer to "tinarama," and a few weeks ago he encouraged me to continue "writing stuff on the internet." So maybe he does know and just doesn't bring it up because I never bring it up – though I almost always end up talking with him about whatever I write in here anyway, because if it's important enough for me to want to keep track of here, it's important enough that I want to share it with him.

All this makes me think about something I don't think about much anymore: why do I "write stuff on the internet," anyway? Especially if I feel anxious about being read by people who know me – why put it out there where anyone in the world can read it? Do I really think anyone else wants to read about my heavy bleeding, or my anxiety attacks, or my occasional existential crises, or any of the other embarrassingly self-indulgent crap I write about? Isn't it crazy to expose all this stuff to strangers, or even to the unwelcome attention of certain people who do know me? For example, my ex-husband found my tinarama email address by googling, and if he found that, why wouldn't he have found this, too? Is he reading this? What do I care if he is?

Why not just write in my own private journals and keep it all to myself? That's the way I did it for years and years – more than 25 years, in fact.

I first started blogging as a way to extend my journaling practice. I had got into the habit of using my journal as a safe place to store memory. I would write down exactly what I was really seeing, doing, thinking, feeling, as truly as I could in the moment, as a way of keeping real with myself. Because I don't know how it is with other people, but with me, the good things are the only things that seem to stay fresh in my memory. It's one of the reasons it takes me such a long time to get out of bad situations – because as soon as the bad moment passes, I start to forget how bad it really was.

For example, as soon as I finished my tantrum over the email from my ex-husband last month, I immediately started berating myself for being so hard on him. Then I went back to the journals I was writing the last time I spent any amount of time with him, and rediscovered something I had forgotten: that as recently as a month or so before I met Mr. A, the ex actually suggested we consider having a baby together. In other words, he was completely out of touch with reality and continuing to mess with my mind and emotions in some really creepy and disturbing ways. Remembering that helps me know that it's okay to have strong negative feelings about him sometimes, and that I don't have to be mean to myself when that happens.

Anyway: I was working for a web development company in the late 90s, spending many hours researching various things online, and had started reading people's online journals. My first connection with the concept came after I emailed a woman who'd written a thoughtful article about parenting and mental illness. She emailed me back, and her email signature included a link to a website – her online diary. From there I discovered a whole community of people who were writing about their own challenges with mental illness (which I was dealing with myself at the time), as well as all kinds of other things. These were not professional publications or scholarly articles, but actual personal narratives. I loved seeing how insightful and candid and courageous and compassionate they were willing to be, and it made me feel good to see some of the inner workings of people's lives who were struggling, like me, and surviving. It made me feel like I was going to be okay, too.

At the time I still didn't have many friends here and so the emotional intimacy people were willing to share online was really attractive and intriguing to me. I felt so grateful to these writers for putting themselves out there – and I had been writing my own life down in the same way for such a long time – that I immediately started writing my own stuff online as a way to pass along the favor. I felt safe saying anything I needed to say, because I never used my own name or any other information that could identify me or anyone else I was writing about.

I always told myself that my goal with this process was to gain more confidence in speaking my own truth to other people. Eventually, I thought, I would be able to talk openly with people close to me about anything I needed to talk about, just as freely and easily as I was learning to open up to strangers in my online journal.

That hasn't happened yet, although there are several people who know me who also know about this journal. That's a good thing, because it sort of ups the ante in my crusade against self-censorship. Inviting people I know into this space, and then changing my writing so I only talk about things I think they will be interested in, or not grossed out by or horrified or bored at, kind of defeats the whole purpose. Still, I worry. I worry that if I don't write about my big bloody period, in ten years I might not be able to remember what my period was like when I was 40. And at the same time, I worry that if I do write about it, people will think I'm disgusting or an exhibitionist or in some other way disapprove of me. Maybe they'll think it's fine for me to write about those things if I want to keep track of them, but that I should restrict my online writing to topics of more general interest. Maybe someone will write a mean comment making fun of me for being neurotic and self-absorbed and inappropriate, and for lacking any sense of discretion or common decency. Maybe they'll tell me to get a life! Maybe I should show a little more self-restraint. Maybe I should limit myself to amusing entries about how I had to dose up the dogfood with caesar dressing and toasted pine nuts today, because we'd run out of pup soup (the delightful melange of leftovers we mix in with their dinner each night) and they refused to eat their kibble plain. Or about how I almost crashed the bike the other night when I reached down to adjust the headlamp and rode right into an enormous pothole I hadn't seen, because the headlamp had been pointing off in the wrong direction.

But, well, sometimes I just need to write about personal, embarrassing things. This is a personal journal that I'm writing for myself, to document things I think will be useful or interesting or funny or in whatever other way worthwhile to me, to remember in the future. Sometimes it might be entertaining to other people too; sometimes it's just plain old documentation. In any case, I don't have to please anyone else but myself here.

Ugh. Enough self-examination for one day. I'm starting to feel all defensive, and nobody's even attacked me yet!