Nets of stars have no boundaries
I'm having problems with the love meme.
Not because I can't find things I love/like/am very fond of about the lot of you. The trouble is the exact opposite. There's just SO DAMN MUCH I love about you guys, it's a challenge to tease out singular characteristics.
While I was grappling with this ridiculous dilemma - this is a meme we're talking about here, not rocket science - I wandered off to distract myself with lunch. During lunch I cracked open a book - Urban Tribes by Ethan Watters - that, incidentally I acquired from the lovely fairylogic this weekend past. This section from the introduction leapt out at me:
Even in times of change and flux, it is important to remember that shared social narratives influence our conceptions of our own lives and happiness. A life - even one's own - is too complicated a thing to hold in the mind, and this is why we need to identify with stories of others living in our own time. It is only through the sharing of these cultural narratives that we can give coherence and meaning to our existence. This may sound like esoteric stuff, but the point is that important things in our own lives can go unseen or misunderstood if we lack the story template in our cultural vocabulary to describe them.
I think the ah-ha! spark's pretty clear in there, but the love piece might still be a little elusive. It's like this, gang:
I love you for your stories.
Not the fiction you write - though I'm pretty fond of those tales too ;) - but the daily meanders you live. I love hearing about your cat/s and how the new puppy's getting along with the older, established dog. I love hearing about classes - how excited you are to go to college, how worried you are about returning after your hiatus, how frustrating it is to find the right sources for you dissertations and papers, how glad you'll be to graduate. I love hearing about work, whether it's maddening, boring or awesome. I love hearing about how you dealt with frozen pipes, how the house remodeling is coming along, and where you are in the condo buying process. I love hearing about the kids current social studies project, soccer practice, hockey lessons, cheerleading competitions and how lovely the playground in the park was this morning. Yeah, I love hearing about your trips to Germany and Mexico, but I also love hearing about your weekend visit with your parents, the afternoon trip to the grocery store and how delightful dinner was at that Asian fusion restaurant downtown. I love you -each one of you -for how you're living your own stories and how you share those stories.
And I absolutely love that I get to be a teeny part of it too - I'm here, laughing, cheering, commiserating and praying right along with you. If we all lived in the same neighborhood, these are the pieces of shared narrative we'd be weaving together when we met on the street or paused the mower on the half-shorn lawn. Instead, we have the communal white picket fence of LJ to lean our forearms on. This community is just as tangible as a group of folks sharing housing and on street parking - possibly more so, since we *choose* our community members here.
Last night, I posted a bit of a list post summing up the last few days. One of the things I mentioned was a need for potluck recipes; I didn't actually *ask* for recipes, and was mostly just typing out a mental note. Today I have a pile of potluck recipes from Missouri, Canada, Brazil, New Zealand, Sweden and Australia. You know what this means, right? Every time I go to a potluck from this point on, you guys are going with me too, to help feed the locals. Several years ago, a group of co-workers and I had international potlucks, where we'd all bring food from a specific country to share. I love that every single potluck I'm going to go to now will automatically become an international potluck. *beams*
There have been any number of people in my day-to-day - casual acquaintances, co-workers - who expressed concern for me over the past months. Given my current relationship and job status, they worried about me being alone. I did my best to reassure them that I'm NOT alone. I have community - a vast one, that only *begins* in my surroundings, before stretching out to encompass the world. To say this is a blessing is an understatement of equally vast portions.
We still, however, need to figure out this teleportation business post haste.
Climbing off the orange crate to go back to the love meme now...
Not because I can't find things I love/like/am very fond of about the lot of you. The trouble is the exact opposite. There's just SO DAMN MUCH I love about you guys, it's a challenge to tease out singular characteristics.
While I was grappling with this ridiculous dilemma - this is a meme we're talking about here, not rocket science - I wandered off to distract myself with lunch. During lunch I cracked open a book - Urban Tribes by Ethan Watters - that, incidentally I acquired from the lovely fairylogic this weekend past. This section from the introduction leapt out at me:
Even in times of change and flux, it is important to remember that shared social narratives influence our conceptions of our own lives and happiness. A life - even one's own - is too complicated a thing to hold in the mind, and this is why we need to identify with stories of others living in our own time. It is only through the sharing of these cultural narratives that we can give coherence and meaning to our existence. This may sound like esoteric stuff, but the point is that important things in our own lives can go unseen or misunderstood if we lack the story template in our cultural vocabulary to describe them.
I think the ah-ha! spark's pretty clear in there, but the love piece might still be a little elusive. It's like this, gang:
I love you for your stories.
Not the fiction you write - though I'm pretty fond of those tales too ;) - but the daily meanders you live. I love hearing about your cat/s and how the new puppy's getting along with the older, established dog. I love hearing about classes - how excited you are to go to college, how worried you are about returning after your hiatus, how frustrating it is to find the right sources for you dissertations and papers, how glad you'll be to graduate. I love hearing about work, whether it's maddening, boring or awesome. I love hearing about how you dealt with frozen pipes, how the house remodeling is coming along, and where you are in the condo buying process. I love hearing about the kids current social studies project, soccer practice, hockey lessons, cheerleading competitions and how lovely the playground in the park was this morning. Yeah, I love hearing about your trips to Germany and Mexico, but I also love hearing about your weekend visit with your parents, the afternoon trip to the grocery store and how delightful dinner was at that Asian fusion restaurant downtown. I love you -each one of you -for how you're living your own stories and how you share those stories.
And I absolutely love that I get to be a teeny part of it too - I'm here, laughing, cheering, commiserating and praying right along with you. If we all lived in the same neighborhood, these are the pieces of shared narrative we'd be weaving together when we met on the street or paused the mower on the half-shorn lawn. Instead, we have the communal white picket fence of LJ to lean our forearms on. This community is just as tangible as a group of folks sharing housing and on street parking - possibly more so, since we *choose* our community members here.
Last night, I posted a bit of a list post summing up the last few days. One of the things I mentioned was a need for potluck recipes; I didn't actually *ask* for recipes, and was mostly just typing out a mental note. Today I have a pile of potluck recipes from Missouri, Canada, Brazil, New Zealand, Sweden and Australia. You know what this means, right? Every time I go to a potluck from this point on, you guys are going with me too, to help feed the locals. Several years ago, a group of co-workers and I had international potlucks, where we'd all bring food from a specific country to share. I love that every single potluck I'm going to go to now will automatically become an international potluck. *beams*
There have been any number of people in my day-to-day - casual acquaintances, co-workers - who expressed concern for me over the past months. Given my current relationship and job status, they worried about me being alone. I did my best to reassure them that I'm NOT alone. I have community - a vast one, that only *begins* in my surroundings, before stretching out to encompass the world. To say this is a blessing is an understatement of equally vast portions.
We still, however, need to figure out this teleportation business post haste.
Climbing off the orange crate to go back to the love meme now...