A Pointless, Plotless Presentation of Prolixity

I set out to write a good blog post today and was instantly stumped.

“Don’t write another surface level update about the family. I’m tired of that.” To which I responded, “Alright then, what do you want to write about?”

“I don’t know. Something with a point.”

“Like a plot?”

“Yeah. A story with a plot.”

So then I sat quietly and thought for an hour. A few years ago I started compiling a list of stories to tell because my mind always goes blank when someone says, “Laura! Tell me a story!”

Most of the stories I have, I have told already and a lot of them are too long for a blog post or they require accents, demonstrations, and facial expressions. The Story List consists only of keywords to jog my memory of the tales and over the last eight years of compiling, a lot of the keywords do nothing to spark my recollection of the stories I deemed worthwhile. So I scrolled way back through my computer and found old blurbs I started writing when I was sixteen. They consisted of the trivial nonsense that teenagers worry about that seems so monumental at the time. Wouldn’t it be interesting to read a list of everything that ever bothered and worried you? I imagine you wouldn’t remember 90% of those occasions. On the other hand, a few of the documents had bits of insight in them and the early stages of personalities beginning to form. I noted things Ellen was doing that at the time were annoying or weird but are now fully developed components of how she analyses and processes information. Things that seemed like angstiness back then were actually kids forming their own opinions about life, and a bit of angstiness.

The best find was an enormous document that was Ari and my correspondence for the entire year she spent in Scotland. I was seventeen and a disinterested senior in high school and Ari was a college freshman, cold and alone on the windy Scottish coast. More than half of it was each of us missing the other and wishing we were together to endure all the boredom and newness of things. It took Ari some time to make friends and adjust to British living. She was lonely often and far more deep and poetic than the partiers she was surrounded by. I was bored with my vacuous friends and enduring a “He said She said” style “You have to choose a side.” kind of friendship split for the first time. My life has always been surprisingly drama-free so these things made for interesting analysis when I got home and reabsorbed my day.  I wasn’t interested in either side to be honest and that made me a suspicious target to which both sides bonded over and I wound up being left out - and only bummed about being left out approximately every sixth weekend or so. I found lots of fulfillment in the time I spent outside of school.

What I found most interesting about our messages is how uninteresting they are. My messages to Ari were about walking dogs, hanging out with my parents, and updating her on the cute college guy that lived across the street at the time. Her messages contained lists of movies she had watched, how the weather was in Scotland, and the annoying habits of her roommates. I often look back at the years between 13 and 20 and have no recollection of what I was doing at the time. I know lots of people peak at that point in life, or have a grand first romance, or have something important to note on being a teenager. I don’t remember anything, including the classes I spent a year studying or the names of my “teachers” or what sorts of things my friends were interested in. Reading the Scotland File jogged my memory of the fruitlessness of that time. I was just waiting around to be set free and rolling my eyes at the hoops I had to jump through to get there. (So, not much has changed.)

I read about Ari’s winter there in Scotland and watched slowly as names she mentioned in passing became good friends as the year went on. She started to miss summertime and warm beaches and Jazz music and decided she wanted to come home and live in New Orleans right around the same time that I was accepted into SCAD and annoyed that now I'd have to go to college. This is all interesting to me because the pointless things are indicators of future things and the things that mattered then don’t even register on the scale of valuable thoughts. A lot of that Scotland File reminded me of this book I tried to read by an angsty Portuguese man named Fernando Pessoa who was born in 1888 and was bored with life. He scribbled notes and thoughts he had throughout the day into a little notebook and sometime after he kicked the bucket, someone published his book of notes. Sometimes I wonder if he minds this.

There is no real plot to the book. It’s simply the things a human noticed while they carried on through their day and for that reason, I never made it through the book, though what I did read was eerily relatable for the large time gap and made the mundane things of life sound a lot more poetic than they feel.  

So here I’ve written another plotless post. I’ve decided that next month I won’t do a single introspective post. By golly, they’ll all have a plot.

Y'ellow There

Boy this month has been very busy. Here I was, all bright eyed with my rekindled motivation for my blog space and I’ve been swamped with work. Isn’t that funny? Laura. Swamped. Ha!

But really. It took nine days after washing my laundry to have time to fold and hang things. I had a clothes pile for nine days. I don’t like that one bit. I’ve been dong lots of wedding scheming see. I spend my mornings emailing brides and working out clever ways to save them money because the wedding industry will really stick it to you. Sometimes there is nothing I can do to save money for a bride and sometimes you meet a bride that wants the whole world of flowers and décor at her wedding and she only has $500. Those are tough, dream-crushing kind of days. Last week I met a bride who is a dream come true and also a bride who seems wholly unconcerned about her flowers either way. It’s a smorgasbords of personalities, ideas, and budgets and sometimes I forgot who is who.

I also made my first big business blunder and emailed 300 potential clients without blind copying them on the email. This means all 300 people could see the other 300 people I emailed, making all of them feel very insignificant and making a few of them send snarky emails back to me as though I did it on purpose. I felt icky for an entire day and giggled awkwardly to cover it up. I won’t do that again.  

There’s little for me to report about Home Time Things as I haven’t seen much of my family in the last two weeks due to the aforementioned busy factor. As for me, well I enrolled in and attended my first beekeeping class, ran out of time to plant the seeds I got from my gardening workshop, cooked an Indian dinner (Indian food, not dinner for an Indian), had a quick visit with Louie, drove lots of flowers all over town, moved to the next level of banjo pickin’, finished a really great book, ate six glazed donuts in an embarrassingly small time frame, sorted papers with Dad to file my first business taxes, and met with multiple brides in multiple Starbucks in the same day and almost fainted from all the caffeine.

Also, were having the best Springtime weather which means I’ve got my annual bout of Spring Fever which means I’ve been looking at airline flights to places I’m too scared to visit on my own but it’s good fun to pretend. I’m going to wrap up this uninformative post because I have two appointments today and the first is one hour from now and I have not showered or had lunch... in three days.

A Trio of Unposted Posts

I would have liked to have finished two posts by now, this month. I’ve started a number of them but they either felt ranty, pointless, or horn tooty. It’s hard to write about yourself without it feeling like you’re only interested in writing about yourself. Sometimes I start posts with no real intentions and I watch where they go. Other times I get going on some thought that makes a hard left out of no where and before I know it, my post on the off-putting side effects of sitting on wicker furniture for too long turns into a dissertation on human kind and all the things I hate about us, and our wicker furniture.

For now I’ll tell you this. I had three posts in the works. One was about personality types and though I typically prefer self-deprecation, I wasn’t going to let slide the fact that my scientifically approved personality type is the most highly intuitive of all the types. I figured I’d work that in for all the folks that think they can pull one over on Big Lu. But then I re-googled some facts and read that only 1% of humans have my personality type. On the one hand, that explains so much of my weirdness. On the other hand, as a highly intuitive person, I see how easily my blabbering on about my own rarity (if you will) could be misconstrued to sound as though being a part of that 1% is as great as Bill Gates would have you think. You see, I’m too intuitive to believe there is a limit to special people. I’m no one you haven’t met before and the 99% of other people with all their personality types have their own breed of strangeness to carry with them. So anyway, I bagged that accidentally elitist post.

I wrote another post about mental growth and change - a topic I know little about. I argued that there is too much focus on “reaching your potential” when we’re all relatively inconsequential. That sounds like the Laura you know, doesn’t it? Well shows how intuitive you are. I argue my own argument with big thoughts. I thought about growth by nature of experience. Old lions are better hunters than young ones. They weren’t seeking growth or wisdom like humans do. They just acquire it over time and do their best to show other lions. Humans are capable of utilizing that wisdom, spreading knowledge, offering new ideas, but how far can that really go? Humans can’t teach humans the meaning of life. We can only show younger ones the best and worst ways to maneuver through it. You cannot understand the dangers of a hot stove until you’ve put your hand on it. Children can’t be born with the knowledge of a full lifetime. Then they’d miss out on being children and that’s where hope comes from. Humans without hope don’t move forward. Why does it matter if you move forward? It doesn’t. So that post looped around to start again and I couldn’t get it out of the vicious cycle. So I bagged that one too.

The third post was about all the little things that went wrong a few weekends ago when I did my first true Lux wedding. I’ll still write this tale for indeed it will make you laugh but frankly, I haven’t gotten around to polishing that one just yet because I’ve been awfully busy and it takes more time to tell a story right than it does to ramble about the 1% and the worthlessness or wonders of human capabilities. So I bagged posting that post because I lack the mental discipline required to accomplish that feat. 

So let's see. Where does that leave us? 

There was a grand reunion of sorts here...

I've got my first ever Lux ad in a real live magazine...

At the end of last month I partook in a gardening workshop that got me all excited about having a yard one day. Oh the veggies I'll grow.

I had 80 feet of garland snaking through my home for a few days while it fluffed up after being shipped here in a surprisingly small box. Taylor liked that our house felt like a jungle. She misses the garland.

Lastly, here is a collection of white American faces watching some big "important" football game. 

Don't they look thrilled? Chris was silent as he watched his beloved Patriots drag behind. He even left the room at one point to blow off some steam. I felt bad for him and sad for losers in general but then those Patriots won that dern game and he wouldn't let us hear the end of it.
Last time I feel bad for Chris Villard.