I'm at a major turning point in my life. My mother died this past June. My daughter graduated from High School a year early in July. I turned 50 last May. I am starting into the official (officious?) work force again. By the time I turn 51 I will have a company formed, an LLC under who's rubric I can jam all the things I do. This LLC will sort of be like this blog/site.
This blog site has been created as a place to collect, expand, and continue on from all the online writings I've done in the last 10 years be it about Late-Boomers or CODEPINK. It will also connect to if not house thoughts and musings and even some of the writings themselves per books I have begun the process of pulling out of myself. One is a biography of Gene Stratton-Porter I have been working on for years as time permitted. The other is my recollections and research about a disorder or syndrome from which I believe my mother suffered and through which as a consequence I was also hurt, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
I also have joys and new experiences I want to crow about. I have always loved the technology behind visual communication. While I've never been a good photographer, I've played in the graphic and written arenas of communication for decades. I loved my first typewriter that I bought instead of a car when I turned 16. I've been having an affair with one or another of a myriad Apple & Macintosh computers and products since the early 1980s. These dalliances provided the base from which I could jump into what is now termed, "Social Networking" platforms as they developed in the '90s and on into this decade.
Email lists seem so primitive now, but... they were so high tech when I started using, posting to, and forming them. Bulletin Boards, Websites, Publishing Networks, MuDDs, MMRPGs, Blogs and Wikis are other types of online communication tools I have played with and that have lead up to a point where I personally feel the first really integrated attempt at the creation of a real virtual (LOL) reality has been achieved with Second Life®. It too will be soon be passe unless it evolves into the next mash up.
All of these things have lead me here to creating a TypePad site and I will wax philosophic about many of the picnic spots upon that path as I fill out all the information I have to exchange with others (probably women) who can stand the stream of consciousness writing I use when I am at my most creative and connected.
I so often quote Whitman, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes." I suspect he was talking about the American character but, I also think the term was biographical. It is in that sense that I borrow the phrase to describe myself and in a larger sense the 21st Century Woman. I speak of the time period in between the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression, and the Iraq Occupation. It hasn't been all that friendly to complex people who refused to jam themselves into boxes so as to facilitate the cultural conveyor belts of the Industrial Revolution.
I was fortunate enough to study with a woman at Purdue University who was and is a seminal thinker. Myrdene Anderson. Both she and her mind alive colleagues and friends that she shared with her students and unsuspecting passers by knew by the 1970s that the next real paradigm shift had already happened . Lots of folks are just catching on now that this has happened. It is exactly like Al Gore's knowing about massive change in our bio- and geo-climatic systems, per An Inconvenient Truth, but not being able to really get through to others until recently. We are seeing the evidence of a shift to processual, inter-connected, and personal understanding and away from linear, Cartesian, and impersonal logic.
This is what I write about, this is what I consult in, and that is how and why I write.
I'll occasionally be re-posting, with permission, bits of Ana Herzog's reports and her images from the in-world Second Life venue for the Life 2.0 conference over the next few days. The conference sessions actually started Saturday so I won't waste too much time with repetition -- you can read about the sessions she attends at her "My Life as an Avatar" blog at http://secondana.blogspot.com.
