Reflections

Please write soon. . .

One of the most rewarding things in my life is my long-standing personal correspondence with two close friends. We send each other newspaper and magazine clippings and cartoons enclosed in funny cards or envelopes decorated with rubber stamps and stickers. Vacation photographs come in fat envelopes along with matchbooks from special places (Graceland!), swizzle sticks and buttons ("Hard Rock Cafe - No drugs or nuclear weapons allowed inside."). Any trip, no matter how short or close to home, is an excuse for a series of postcards, some with just the words, "I thought of you when I saw this."

There are few things as delightful as going to the mailbox and finding a personal letter from a friend among the advertising circulars and bills. Sometimes they are ripped open as I walk home from the mailbox, unable to wait to see what's inside. Other times they are set aside until dinner is cooked and dishes are washed, when I can sit down with a cup of tea and savor each word. One friend writes on the computer, stream-of-consciousness type letters weaving across many subjects and areas of interest. She has some health concerns, so her letters are farther apart--a ten page letter when she's feeling particularly well, then silence for months while she heals. My other friend sends me something nearly every week that makes me laugh or think--just keeping in touch. We talk by phone sometimes, but a two hour time difference makes evening conversations difficult. A letter can be started and added to in snatches of time over a few days or a week, with interesting articles, photos, and the latest Dilbert cartoon added to the envelope as they come to hand.

It takes effort to keep up a correspondence. Some friendships can't survive without face-to-face communication, and they fall by the wayside when one party moves away. I haven't seen one of my friends in over five years, and she just wrote that she's moving to Hawaii soon, but I fully expect her to keep me up to date on her life. Of course it's hard to keep a long distance friendship thriving. Many times I've received a letter that mentions something that's been going on in her life that I had no idea of. But it just provides an excuse to write and say, "More details, please!"

I don't make friends easily, so it's important to me to keep the ones I do have. The effort invested in correspondence is well worth it when I reflect on these long lasting friendships.

Action and Reaction

No matter how often we deny it, most of us can't avoid being concerned about how others perceive us. Whether we admit it or not, we all, to some extent, seek the approval of others. We must have the approval of our bosses, or we may lose our jobs. We hope to have the approval of the people we love, or we risk an unharmonious home life. It is more difficult to evaluate why we crave the approval of strangers.

My journal (and hence, my life), along with those of several other online diarists, was recently cited by a publication as being trite, mundane, boring, etc. (take your pick). My visceral response was to try to think of a way to make my entries more "exciting." A week or so later my site was mentioned in another online publication. The review was basically complimentary, but went on to say that my journal entries tended to be depressingly sad and melancholy. My reaction this time was to immediately try to figure out how I could make my entries more upbeat. I asked Bob if he thought that my online journal was melancholy. He said he did, but he went on to express his opinion that I probably wouldn't write a journal if I wasn't introspective, and most introspective people are basically melancholy. And anyway, he said, that's just the way you are. Don't try to change yourself or your work to conform to someone else's idea of how you should be. He's right, of course. I guess sometimes we just need someone else to say it for us.

I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't expect that someone else would read it, and therefore I want to create something that other people will find worthwhile, or at least interesting. However, it's ridiculous to expect to please everyone. Those that find me boring will go elsewhere. As I continue to write, I expect to improve and, consequently, find my audience.

So, this is me. If you think I'm boring or melancholy, hang in there 'til Spring. I may surprise you. But then again, maybe not.

Because I Can!

Web publishing is difficult to explain to someone who's never seen it. It's almost impossible to describe when you're starting from a zero knowledge base. But surprisingly, I've discovered that it's even more difficult to explain to someone why I'm doing it at all. Obviously, for-profit companies who put up Web pages are doing it to make money. That's understandable. Organizations put up Web sites to publicize their causes. That's also understandable. So why am I doing it? Because I can.

The Web grabbed my imagination from the first time I saw it. In the beginning, I didn't realize that publishing on the Web was something that anyone could do with a little work. I assumed that you had to know some arcane programming language or own an expensive piece of software or hardware to produce these works of art.

When I found out that anyone who was willing to put in a little work learning a fairly simple language could put up a web site, I couldn't contain my excitement. The idea that anyone in the world could publicize anything they wanted and anyone else could look at it just staggered me. Think of the possibilities! Learning HTML was probably the easiest part of my learning process. Finding a service provider, figuring out the connection, finding the software, etc., all consumed a lot of time and energy, and there were times when I thought I would just give up. But I didn't, I hung in there, and I finally got it all figured out.

Then I had to decide what I was going to put up. I didn't want something static. I wanted to do something that would require me to change it constantly, so that every time someone accessed my pages there would be something different there. I decided to do "Willa's Journal." I work on my pages almost every day, maybe just changing some little element to get it just right.

I wanted to share my excitement with my family and friends. It hasn't worked out that way, though; nobody else is very interested. They usually just ask me why I'm doing it. I don't really know why. When someone persists, sometimes I say that maybe if someone sees my pages and is impressed, they might hire me to create pages for them. Or I'm perfecting my knowledge of the media so that sometime in the future I might get a job doing this. But in the end, I'm doing it because I enjoy it. If no one else ever looks at these pages, it's okay. I'm doing it for myself. Because I can.

Thoughts About Home

I really love coming home. It's just such a relief to walk in the door, slip off my shoes, and leave "the cares of the world" behind. I feel very blessed that my home is my sanctuary. I've got a little sitting area in the front of the house, in the room that is also the dining room. I have an upholstered platform rocker with a little table beside it with a lamp, clock, candles, mug of pens, pad of paper and a few inspirational books. I sit there generally when my husband, Bob, is in the living room watching television. I'm close enough for him to come in and say hi during commercial breaks, but somewhat removed from the fray, so to speak. It's my little island. I love it.

Keeping a Journal

There's something magical about sitting down in a quiet place with my notebook and pen and putting my thoughts to paper. It helps me clarify my feelings and work out problems at times when I don't have a friend handy to talk things out with. My journal is always available, always willing to "listen." On occasion, I can work out my anger on paper and avoid a confrontation with someone. It's pretty cheap therapy.

Blessings

Blessings are those things that happen that remind me to be thankful for the little things.

A woman whose style I greatly admire told me that "we must have been twins in another lifetime" because our styles are so similar. That really made my day.

One day last week I went out to lunch and there was a young woman in a stalled car about half a block from a major intersection. Three guys in hardhats who had stopped for lunch ran out into traffic and, after waiting for the traffic light to change, pushed her car through the intersection, into a parking lot, and backed it into a parking space. Then they returned to their lunch, waving off her thanks.

The other day on my way to work I passed a young Indian boy of about eight years dancing alone on the sidewalk to some inner music as he waited for the school bus. On other days I have seen this boy having an imaginary sword fight or practicing karate kicks as he waits for the bus. His imaginary life must be very rich. I hope he's able to retain that spark as he grows up.

On my way to lunch one day there was a young man skating down the sidewalk on inline skates carrying a hockey stick. He moved so gracefully he could have been flying.

There is a cafeteria at my office. I don't eat there; I don't like their food. I was walking past the cafeteria when some medical-type people who were there for a blood drive were going in to have lunch. One of them exclaimed, "This place is awesome!" I guess we don't always appreciate the things we have.