it's not so bad

I had a lovely weekend with my family, thanks.  No drama, just sunshine and laughter and chasing cows and pink wine and homemade bread and flights that were on time, thank goodness.  Weekends like that make me wish that everyone could enjoy a relationship with their immediate family that is as fundamentally happy as mine.  Don't get me wrong; we have/had our moments, but I love them very much and they're very, very good to me.

I thought I ought to write that down, in the spirit of avoiding this blog's usual fodder, the commemoration of bad.  Another Damn Life wrote about the 'perpetually escalating competition to prove who among us is the biggest disaster'.  I read that and cringed, physically backing off the monitor.  Yes, the name of this blog is Hopeless.  Yes, I record for my own (& others?) amusement the dopey goings-on at Chez A.  It's not about competing though, I promise.  I'm quite proud of my own adulthood, really.  This blog does contain allusions to my overall contendedness in the grand scheme of things.  However, it is devoted in the main to recording silly minutiae.  No one reads my archives more than me (no one really reads my blog, which is fine with me.  I don't go out of my way to advertise it; no comments really on the blogs of others, no facebook or twitter 'new post up nows!')  I write this for me.  For the need to memorialise. It so happens that I record something that makes me feel close to my family, who have been teasing me for years about that very thing - being impractical. 

In all honesty, I find that writing about the good is hard.  Writing about the bad is cathartic - whether the bad be silly or terrible.  I shake screeds of words about the bad out of my keyboard, but I find the good is usually stuck in there, with the crumbs and moulted eyelashes.  My Kiwi sense of cultural cringe - that anything I say about the good will be seen as a terrible boast, qualified six ways from Sunday or no - heavily edits anything I wish to say about the good. 

All of that is by way of justification, but also in saying I that I agree with Another Damn Life.  We shouldn't compete amongst ourselves to find the biggest klutz/cereal-for-dinner-eater/etc.  That smacks of laying claim to an 'adorable & endearing trait' that writers try to give humanity to their thinly-veiled idealistic female characters (oh you know you could name about a zillion examples from rom-coms, chick lit and young adult fiction.  Not to say those characters don't fulfill a need, certainly).  Anyway, I really like what Lyn had to say about it.

Now, regarding the comment Lyn made in an earlier post about borrowing Amalah-style OMG CAPS LOCK writing...guilty as charged.  Hah. I really need to find my own style and niche, which will no doubt involve tonnes more ill-judged parenthesis and dashes and semi-colons.  I enjoy that, clearly.

So, yes.  Today I stumbled across a blog that hit all of my insecurity buttons in a manner I admire.  And things are generally pretty good, here.

(I found Lyn through Kirsty of A Safe Mooring, whose writing I also very much enjoy.  I am indebted to them both.)