I noticed that there’s been a flurry of seasonal blogging this week. It seems like lots of places around the country are starting to feel like spring, and from what I hear, temperatures in Arizona hit 100 degrees, which sounds about right. I love to talk about the weather, but I don’t really like to write about it. Or read about it, unless, of course, it’s a weather-gripe.
I was telling Husband the other day about how every day, I sit down at the computer, and am faced with a choice: to be happy or critical. There are other types of blogs, obviously: informative blogs and funny blogs and pretty blogs and I like all of those, too. But the only thing I have any real expertise on is lawyering, and law blogs are boring as hell, and I’m only funny some of the time, and I don’t have a nice enough camera to make my life look pretty enough for the internet. So it’s happy or critical. And I almost always choose critical. I tried to explain to Husband that I’m not unhappy with my life. I just don’t think other people want to read about it as much as they want to read about other things. More interesting things. [Read some of Penelope Trunk’s thoughts on the tension between being happy and being interesting here.] I thought Husband might be insulted that I don’t post pictures of the gorgeous meals he makes me, but instead complain about how hard it is to be a wife. Husband, as an active poster on reddit, totally got it, though: “Critical posts are always the most popular,” he said. “When you post about what you like, people just make fun of you.”
And so, on this first day of April, I didn’t bask in the sun or breathe in handfuls of pollen or walk my dog or feel alive with newness and wonder. Instead, I holed up in my office for eleven hours because a partner told me that eight-to-nine hours a day weren’t cutting it and watched fat wads of snow tumble from the springtime sky.
Bending the Rules 