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My Profile
Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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11:52 a.m. - 2003-04-17
Sometimes I feel like a huge fraud. There are great whacking hunks of my life I don't talk about here. Part of it is I don't have time to limn each episode of the day. I try to speak of one thing per entry, or at least theme smaller bits together, so a lot of other stuff gets short shrifted. For example I'll write an entry about going to the grocery. Yet on the same day I might also have dark thoughts about money. One kid or the other will do something cute or aggravating. Mike provided a worry or two. I spent 10 minutes waiting the bus with Wolf and GLARING at the speeders booming down our road, flying along 30-50 miles an hour faster than the posted 35mph speed limit. (Though granted, that one guy who whizzes past at 95mph probably doesn't see my glare, he's been and gone in a nano-second.) I did some chores. Watched a movie. Yeah, even in a life as constricted as mine, there's lots of stuff that goes on which never makes it here simply from lack of time to write about it. But sometimes I have things which are too personal to talk about. Too personal for a diary? Well, yeah. It's a PUBLIC diary and I never quite forget that. Oh for certain plenty of my angst gets put in here and I don't always paint friends and family in the most flattering light. But often I find myself thinking, "Oh man! I can't say that!" This censoring is mostly about my feelings for or interactions with other people. Here I might bare MY soul, but I don't feel entitled to strip anyone else naked. Plus now in my dotage I've become aware of how transient most emotions are. Today's high piss-off will be tomorrow's vague memory. To eviscerate my husband and call him the scum on Satan’s balls is unfair. He’s really only ball scum maybe 1% of the time. Should I post a vicious put down and scorching character assassination when my fury and his assholery last a few minutes and yet the entry stands forever? Plus it seems massively unfair that strangers will hear about things my family or friends might not want others to know about. I can talk about my business in so far that it is NOT also someone else’s. I do not have the right to make that decision for them. That same prudence keeps me from delving too deeply into my sex life, being gruesomely detailed about my childhood, or speaking about many of the ugliest thoughts I have. Some things are too private for me to talk about and too hard for you to read about. I don’t want to be responsible for someone else’s emotional skid mark. Nor do I want to blow my image. LA the Sage IS me. But The Sage is not ALL of me. The Sage is funny, wise, often amusingly sarcastic, righteous, sometimes a bit fragile, but even on the lowest shakiest days, she is strong. She is the Superman to my Clark Kent. The me who is just LA, on the other hand, is often frightened. Unhappy. Lonely. Bitter. Harsh. Judgmental. Vindictive. And above all, weak. Weak in body. Weak in character. Weak. A big fat baby plagued with self-doubt. I don’t even WANT to fix stuff. I don’t want to hear about keeping a stiff upper lip. I don’t want encouragement or have people tell me to be brave. And I sure as hell don’t want others looking at my ugliness and going away disgusted and disappointed. I like that people love The Sage and I don’t want to lose that by showing too many of my warts. The Sage is really the last vestige of who I was when I went out into the world every day. Who I was before my life became so small. I don my Sage Hat with pleasure. Once a day morphing into the woman who walked tall, smiled openly, and was good at so many things. LA the Sage is part echo, part ghost, and a slim lifeline to hang onto in this bewildering frightening sea of pain and limitation. I need her. Without The Sage I would truly go mad. As I put on clothes and paint my face to go out into the world, so too do I cover myself when I come here. I might not wear quite as much protective layering as I do for a trip to the mall, but to finish the metaphor, here you might get to see me bare faced in my panties and bra, but never, ever am I completely naked. LA’s Pick of the Day: “The William Tell Overture” by Rossini
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