We met with the realtor today to list our house for sale. I know I should feel some of the lament that my husband does, but what I feel more of is relief. It is the gypsy blood as my mom says--we aren't gypsies, but its an apt expression. I have moved no less than 35 times in my 35 years. I come from impoverished renters. People for whom the strategic tax benefits of a mortgage are lost in the morass of daily living. Food banks and government commodities are not unknown to our kind. Though I know that my family wants me to be successful, owning a home actually embarasses me. Who do I think I am? (This is whole different can of worms.) I look around at our other home-owning friends in our predominantly white upper middle class town, and in my mind's eye, I am not them, but I know I am outwardly indistinguishable.

For these reasons, and my own arrested emotional development (I don't like being a grown-up) this house has felt like a lead weight crushing my chest cavity for the past 2 1/2 years since we bought it. I find myself wanting to pack some clothes, books and toiletries and hit the open road. I don't want any of the furniture, don't care about the dishes, the lawnmower, or even the televisions. I don't lament, I revel in sorting things to give away. It is the gypsy blood. I think it is the sense of a new beginning that moving has always meant. One can reinvent, be brand new, even as age advances.

My more pragmatic self will intervene, pack the dishes, the computers, the DVD player. And, maybe in our new place I will discover the idea of roots. My own roots. Release my family, release my former self, endeavor to know stillness.  Home is my metaphor.

I am a "mass of complaints and grievances" in the words of George Bernard Shaw. Life seems to move in waves for me--flat, then an insurrmountable crest. Suddenly, I have more freelance work than I can do, the prospect of moving house 3000 miles, and grad school.  All of which I have sought and finally received. We might go ahead and take the jobs we were offered. NOW WHAT?! I need, I need...help packing, companionship in my doubt, better stress coping skills, a steely sense of resolve.

Something I have noticed in this exercise--and the fictional 'blog is my reticence to use my judgments and characterizations of real-life people and events. What if they see them? Even if the representations are only based on something real, what if someone recognizes the sliver of the real? Even when moving in the fictional, I push against my own fear about what is exposed about me in what I make up. I am having fun in my fiction blog thinking up the disturbing things my character thinks and feels--but obviously these things are not completely foreign to me. I think that if I were to write more--even attempt to write professionally, I would have to reconcile with the fact that I might completely alienate my family. I have a non-confrontational modus operandi, and I don't express the ugly--but its there. In fiction there's the opportunity to both tell the truth and enhance it, and in doing so piss people off. One can say, "its only writing, its ficiton, I made it up," but its still revelation.  Fiction might not be REAL, but in it, one can still tell the truth.

I am realizing more and more that most of the people I know have a concept of me is built upon on only part of who I am. The daughter, sister, wife, worker, neighbor. Writing--or making art of any kind--shakes the foundations. Its uncomfortable and entlightening at the same time.

I am sitting in my home office with my husband on the other computer and my dog at my feet. Cut to daydream: dog at computer, husband at feet.

 The frenzied clicking and occasional computerized grunt coming from the other side of the room lets me know that the extra RAM I installed in computer number 2 is being utilized for the good of humanity. Video games. I don't get it.

We just got back from a "vacation" where we interviewed for jobs in California. We were both offerred them, but he not for the right job, or me, the right money. Grumble.

It has finally occurred to me that I may never know job satisfaction. We work so we can buy things, and then we need to work so we can buy more things. I think in another life, I would be a self-sufficient farmer living off the grid. Goat cheese. I could make goat cheese in Mendocino. Beholden to the ocean only. But not now, not with these staggering student loan debts and the rising price of real estate. I work like the dog I am hoping for some respite, half hoping for more.

Hey all. I admit I am finding this blogging exercise excruciating. What to reveal, what not to reveal. What these decisions say about me. Who's reading? How can this information be used against me? How can I use it against myself? Why do people do this? It is like keeping a journal for exhibitionists, except without necessarily, getting a reaction from the audience.

I find that even communicating by e-mail occupies a different area of my brain than does talking or even writing letters. Sometimes, someone will reference something I told them in an e-mail and I've felt momentarily exposed, knowing I had the thought but not remembering that I'd communicated it to a human being. I don't like that kind of surprise.

And yet, there's the drive to communicate, in whatever way I can. I think it is a human need to express oneself. Writing is easiest for me. I can communicate effectively in person but I find it comes at a cost to the personal, there is a veneer that comes into being that shelters the things I really think and feel.