Upload, Metaphor and whatever...

Upload, Metaphor and whatever...

It occurs to me that this blog is all over the place like a mad woman's knitting. I now have a possible reason why. I am a mummy and in US parlance, I have a "Mommy blog". Bud Weiser in his review of Pre-Wife on The Rising Blogger (too many links..making me dizzy...) makes the following comment:

"This blog is a bit all over the place in the way a “Mommy’s Blog” can be. We mean that every event the author finds note worthy and posts about is not always fascinating. But, when he is amusing he can be very funny."

When I read that I had a self reflective cringe moment. But, you gotta box on. I am waaay too undisciplined at the moment to create a theme for this blog, although at one point I did teeter on the brink of the "childhood stories to slit your wrists to" theme. Actually, there will be more on that later when I get back into writing my piece-meal memoir of a 30 something. (It must be incredibly irritating to people who have lived a long life to hear a sentence like that. I read a profile recently on Diana Athill who has recently had another volume of memoir published at 90, and is a best seller. Death and old age sell nowadays - for some reason that makes me feel warm and fuzzy. If you do read the profile, perhaps you, like I, will find the gawping and wide-eyed wonderment at her 'temerity' to shag black men, somewhat jarring.

But getting back to the point, I am going to resist a theme for a little while yet. And I will flow with any tangent that goes.

I have read a little further on into that Daniel Pink book A Whole New Mind and I just read the part about the rising importance of "Metaphor" as a conduit to understanding. I had a momentary lapse into self congratulatory back slapping (in the metaphorical sense only - I find it very hard to actually slap my back having been born with what I am sure are abnormally short tendons and ligaments - the only way I can explain how someone so skinny can't bend in half - oh I am loving these tangents today). I recently posted a rambling "Letter to a Friend" in which I used the metaphor of a car as a way to revisit some of her major life events and to understand her trouble in sorting some stuff out. Using a car as a metaphor for life is pretty cliche and "old hat" (snort!) but I think I made good use of it in this particular instance. The superstitious blip in the back of my mind (atheists shouldn't really be superstitious) is waiting for lightning to strike me down now, or for my pants to split when I next attempt to touch my toes, without bending my knees.

Pink talked about metaphor in the context of how "Symphony", or the "ability to put together pieces" as he puts it, are skills that are becoming increasingly valued - "...recognising patterns, crossing boundaries to uncover hidden connections, and making bold leaps of imagination." And as he later states "Modern life's glut of options and stimuli can be so overwhelming that those with the ability to see the big picture - to sort out what really matters - have a decided advantage in their pursuit of personal well-being." I like that. In fact I like a lot of what he says in this book. It makes a scatty person like me feel that my scattyness has some point - I am making "connections" due to having my interests spread over a "broad range of disciplines". I suppose other people would still just call me scatty and unfocused. If only they could see that I am riding a brilliant wave of right brained symphonic inspiration flashes, while crossing skills boundaries and grasping relationships between relationships in a single bound. I am like "Gloria White-Hammond, a pastor and pediatrician in Boston; Todd Machover, who composes operas and builds high tech music equipment."

In case it is not clear to those in the back who are talking and chewing gum, I am being mildly ironic. My hubris does not take me quite this far.

As a small postscript, I have been trying to upload images onto this site, but our upload speeds on our broadband plan are in the vicinity of 2M per year. Maybe one day I'll get there and you will have something prettier than text to look at.