I never thought I would blog. In fact, I can’t believe I’m sitting here doing it now. Really, you could say I have an acute awareness of the insignificance of my life, my thoughts, my mundanities in the grand scheme of things, and am therefore reluctant - indeed loathe - to record any of it. Who cares? I tried explaining this once to a Verizon representative who was trying to sell me endless useless phone services, and the conversation turned into a weird pseudo-psychotherapeutic, anti-existentialist pep-talk.
But she missed the point. I don’t feel like a character in a Kafka novel; I am simply aware that my details are not important enough to record for others . . . particularly anonymous others who may have a million better things to do than read my useless mental meanderings, better things like . . . spending time with a real, live human. I know I certainly have better things to do than to document these useless meanderings, and I would be doing them . . . were it not for my husband. My husband is a dear man who disagrees with my assessment of personal details and the importance of sharing them. For some time, we’ve mostly respected this difference. I’ve occasionally poked fun at his obsession with Facebook, and he has contacted old friends on my behalf to try to reignite the cold flame of life’s shared trivialities. Such was the status quo until yesterday, when he decided that it was time for me to have a blog. The more he insisted, the more I, being contrary, resisted. He quietly suggested; I scoffed. He heartily recommended; I frowned. He designed a beautiful blog for me; I was unmoved. He contacted my friends who share his opinion about frivolous communication; I laughed. Finally, it was the calendar that wore me down. The calendar? Yes, the calendar that was a gift from his mother.

It is called a Family Message Center, because, though the bottom part is an innocuous calendar, the top has a dry-erase portion AND a thing that lets you record messages and play them back to unsuspecting family members. Have you ever seen a child with one of these recordable gadgets? The child records an annoying message and then chases others around endlessly pressing play and driving friends and family mad. Well, for the last 36 hours or so, my husband has been that child, relentlessly repeating his recorded plea. Here I therefore am, airing the minutiae of my mind, as I once vowed never to do.
Ah well . . . I also vowed never to bring video games into my home, but now we own a Wii, courtesy of my father.

Next time: Whether “He made me do it” is a credible excuse for a thirty-something.