Blog Every Day in May

Jenni at Story of My Life announced a blogging challenge for the month of May. And because I have been feeling like a total failure as a blogger this year, I am DOING IT.

You should do it, too! You can even follow Jenni’s awesome calendar of prompts for the month! I’m really excited about this…

Get ready…

love, elizabeth

Making History: Or why your blog matters

Doing some reading for my prospectus tonight, I was reading Peter Burke’s thoughts on microhistory. In it, he quotes an anthropologist named Clifford Geertz who writes about the need “to ferret out the unapparent import of things.” I’ve been chewing on this little phrase all night and finally realized that this has, unknowingly, been a life principle for me, not just as a scholar but as a writer and a blogger. I am fascinated by the tiny little nothing-detail that means something bigger.

That is what blogging has become for me – an opportunity to “ferret out” the important truth inside the day-to-day-everydayness. It’s amazing to me how blogging becomes a way of writing my own microhistory. I could probably write down every teeny life detail, however boring that might be to read, but somehow blogging the little stories tells a big story. And if every blog is a microhistory, then all the blogs in the universe together might tell an even bigger story. This is the strength of the blogger and I have been taking it for granted.

So congratulations. I bet you didn’t know that you, blogger friend of mine, were a micro-historian. Keep on making history.

love, elizabeth

Some fuzzy adorbs for your Saturday morning

Don’t thank me. Thank my Disney-character-come-to-life-dog. Madigan, stop it. Your cuteness should be illegal.

 

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend. I’ll be spending most of it trying to write this lit review for my prospectus. Maybe some house-cleaning. If I’m really good, I might even sneak away for a couple hours to see this movie. After all, it is important to support your movie-husband in all of his endeavors. Maybe I can convince real-life husband to take me.

love, elizabeth

New Day, New Blog

Well, kinda. I’ve been in a major blogging slump the last few months but with the warmer weather and the longer daylight hours, I am feeling the need to start anew.

I’m feeling drawn to blog a little differently than I have. I’m tweaking some things around the blog, editing the design elements. I put word verification back on commenting - so sorry about that - the spam content was getting ridiculous. I hope that won't stop you from commenting! I hope you like the changes and will keep coming back to read…

More soon…

love, elizabeth

Spring Feels Like Remembering

Maybe it’s the same kind of feeling that trees and flowers get, remembering how to shoot tiny leaves and buds out of themselves. Maybe it’s the bursting out into sunshine and cold spring air that makes them remember last spring and the spring before that and before that. Wherever that feeling comes from, I’m feeling it now. Spring makes me feel restless and reflective and a little bit like running away. I’m trying to figure out what it means…why spring makes me feel like this.

It’s like…that feeling you get when you see an old picture of yourself and you remember and it hurts. Even the happy pictures hurt. I watched our wedding video a couple nights ago. It was the first time I’d seen any of that footage. I kept pausing it to stare at that person in the video because I know it’s me, I see that it’s me…but I don’t recognize her. If I met her now, we’d be like strangers. I keep squinting at the screen, trying to x-ray her, remember what she was thinking and feeling and I can’t. If you asked me what my wedding day was like, I could tell you that I was so happy, that I couldn’t stop smiling, that it felt so quick and perfect but the girl in the wedding video…I feel like I don’t know her anymore.

Maybe it’s not like spring, at all. The way I remember and the way it was…they’re different. I wonder if a crocus wakes up in the spring and remembers all the other springs and thinks, this spring will be better than last spring…? Maybe crocuses just get to be brand new every spring and don’t have to feel the history of all the other springs that ever were weighing down on them like an impossibility.

But for me, spring is all about remembering. Every year, on that first warm-ish day when you don’t quite need a coat and birds sing Disney-style and suddenly everything smells like flowers…that’s the day I remember what it was like to plop fat garden snails into buckets, to dig in dark, earthy flowerbeds with Halmoni, to drive with the windows down and the radio up and think,  I want to drive with the windows down and the radio up every day forever, what it was like to be seventeen and falling in love, to be eighteen and planning a wedding, to be twenty-two and move far away from home, to be twenty-five and scared and tired and somehow okay.

I am one pathetic little crocus.
love, elizabeth

The Voice Drinking Game

Season 4 of The Voice premiered on NBC tonight and in honor of that, I present the thing I did tonight instead of my homework…The Voice: The Drinking Game. It’s going to be a fun season, I think. Two new coaches (I will not miss Christina Aguilera and her clown wigs, by the way) and the “steal” rule that was implemented last season – super excited. If you missed the episode or don’t have cable, you can catch it on Hulu.

Are you a fan of the show? What would you add to this list?

love, elizabeth

Can’t Help Falling

It’s a snowy March night here in Columbus, Ohio, and as I unpack the last of our boxes (FINALLY), I am head over heels for this crazy-good cover by Twenty One Pilots. They’re a local band that finally got signed to a big label last year but they’ve been popular here in town for awhile. Kyle just showed this video to me. Thought it might make you smile, too.

Isn't that great?

love, elizabeth