Sunday's Stream of Consciousness Post

This post is going to wander all over the place in a stream of consciousness sort of way. I beg your forgiveness.

Spent several hours today bringing my index of "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim" up to date and doing laundry. I seriously enjoy that thread; I seriously hate laundry. I also hate that I have so many 'dry clean only' items. Today I said f*** it and washed my silk knit sweater sets in Woolite. They seem no worse for the experience. I wonder if those labels are part of a Dry Cleaning conspiracy.

As a sidenote, having nothing to do with laundry but having somewhat to do with the Uncle Jim index, I believe my first encounter with Macallister on Absolute Write had to do with how to get the links right on that thread. She's compiled all the posts Uncle Jim has written into an "Undiluted" thread.

One of the more active 'students' on the Learn Writing thread has sent me their MS and I'm beta reading it, a duty I undertake with much seriousness and hope that I am helpful to this writer. I think I'm a groupie. I mean I lurk on the fringes and don't write seriously myself, so what else would you call me? I'm ok with it.

Also from AW, I was thrilled to hear about the Encyclopedia Britannica lawsuit against Publish America the other morning and to see so many posts about it throughout yesterday and today. I wonder how they'll try to spin the bad news to the faithful.

I'm getting bolder with leaving comments on blogs I enjoy. I put one on Making Light today. I've been leaving little thoughts other places, too. I particularly enjoyed my first visit to Tish G.'s blog Snarkaholic. Her post on August 25th was about conversations - a topic near and dear to my heart although it still hasn't finished baking in my head what I want to say about the subject. I left her a note in her comments.

I realized tonight that I'm coming up on a 2 year anniversary of sorts. I started posting on the Wil Wheaton dot Net Soapbox forum about 2 years ago. I don't know the exact date because Wil closed the forum last year and I didn't think to make a note of my "boxday" as we called it.

A core group including most of the moderators opened a successor forum with Wil's blessings and called it tehSoapbox. Although recently I've not been as regular a visitor as I once was (I've got 1,241 posts on that board) it still holds a special place for me. And I must say, I do miss being honored as the Empress of the Shiatzu Massage Chair Empire. That sillyness continued for months -- coming on the heels of my mother's death it was a much needed respite from reality. I discovered LiveJournal as a result of discovering that a number of the folks from tehBox had LiveJournals and kept a running conversation with one another there. I joined up and joined in there as well. Then earlier this year I found Absolute Write Water Cooler. There are a few folks who post on Soapbox that post on AW and also at least one who I've seen on Making Light comments as well. ::waves Hi to Xopher:: A diagram of all these connections would be fascinating.

The point of all that is to say that before that day two years ago I had no idea there were places on the web where you could have interesting, intelligent conversations and get acquainted with so many people. There is some kernel of commonality linking us one to another that in Real Life might very possibly have eluded us. We live in different cities, states, countries or we work in very different jobs or we were born into different cultures or we chose different lifestyles -- working mom, stay at home mom, creative job, technical job, person who volunteers, person who writes checks for charities as well as the whole gamut of the usual differences one would imagine. Yet there's something in what we say and how we say it which draws us together. All the rest is irrelevant.

Just curious, how many of you have conversations with ex Baptist centrist-conservative unmarried but with a long term partner of the opposite sex mother of teens StarTrek nerds (and that just barely begins to describe me)?

Thought so. :-) As I've said previously, this whole idea keeps gestating in my thoughts. I occasionally get pieces and parts of it thought out and if I don't write it down, I'll probably forget it.