New Year, New Space in the Blogosphere

29 has been a crazy year for me so far.

And by crazy, I don't mean crazy as in "painting the town rojo with my rockstar husband, out every night trying to close down a different bar or discotheque." I don't even mean crazy as in "so very busy with trying to teach young Beckham three languages, keep kitchen cabinets alphabetized, and spur the youth of America into greatness from my classroom." I mean crazy as in crazy. As in, perhaps in need of meds. Not real meds, but maybe St. John's Wort. Or just a nice Benadryl-induced nap.

A list of things that have happened since I turned the big 2-9.

1. I emailed Ryan at work, insisting that we change the paint color in the bedroom.

2. I gave serious consideration to either: A) shaving my head, or B) dyeing my hair pitch black and becoming our high school's first "gothic" teacher, complete with bad poetry posted on the walls of my classroom. I got a start on the bad poetry just in case.

3. I nagged Ryan, our neighbor who is pregnant, an unsuspecting clerk at the grocery store, and anyone else who would listen about wanting to have another baby.

4. I wallowed.

5. I wallowed some more.

6. Which was followed by more wallowing.

I'm not sure if it's the arctic temperatures, the funk-virus that has harranged Beckham and me for the past few days, or the impending doom, now measured in months not years, of turning thirty, but I'm in that itchy itchy impetuous boredom phase where I can't be sure from one moment to the next whether I might finally organize our closets, or instead quit my job and head west. It's a dangerous place to be, especially when one has a tiny audience watching, an audience who needs plenty of laptime and funny faces and juice boxes and dancing to Michael Jackson's early stuff and all of the other commitments I signed up to when I invited a tenant into the ol' uterus.

So since Ryan vetoed the "bedroom with bright blue polka dots" idea, and since it's even colder in some places due west, I've decided to instead take my need for a change of scenery out on this blog.

We're moving ... and moving on. The "Thoreau-bred" baby (which most people thought of as a horse reference and not an allusion to Walden's own) is morphing into something new. Which is for the best anyway, since B has now moved on from Thoreau into even deeper water ... who knew Kierkegaard could be relevant to a 15-month-old?

In thinking back on this blog (which will be celebrating a birthday soon, too), I feel good about the pics and stories that I have posted for friends and family to view; I'm happy to think that Beckham will have a digital scrapbook in which to view himself throughout his first year. I'd give anything to be able to read the particulars of what my mom was thinking as she stumbled her way through learning to be a mom. With that in mind, there are a couple of places that I would like to push this space in the coming year ... new avenues that I'd like to pursue in hopes of making this tribute to my little guy more of a "Beckham: the early years" novella than a photo album. These new hopes spring from two places:

1. My Stupid Thesis. I can't even say the phrase "my thesis" anymore without adding at least one contemptuous adjective to it ... those of you who know me well are nodding right now. Those of you who have known me since grad school when this mess began are probably howling as you ridicule the fact that I've been "working on my thesis" for a longer time than it took for Michelangelo to complete the Sistine Chapel, which, unlike my little gem, actually possesses intrinsic value. Laughing crowd, I just want you to know that you are a bad friend. And you should feel even worse to know that I suffer from a horrible condition known as writer's block, which is sort of like a deadly bowel obstruction, only worse. So there.

My hope is that by writing -- even writing about which whole-grain breakfast cereal Beckham enjoyed last Tuesday -- I will get in the groove of writing. That writing will beget writing in the same way that scores of people were begat in 1st Chronicles. The idea is that I won't be as pained, terrified, paranoid, depressed, anxious, etc. when doing stupid thesis work because sitting down with the laptop to tippity-type up the stupid thesis will start to feel as if I'm merely sharing a funny story about the contents of Beckham's diaper with friends and family. And then -- before you know it -- wham! Writing a research-based argument for the use of multi-modal visual literacies in the classroom will be just as fun as writing about poop. Or at least that's what I'm hoping. If this doesn't work, then I guess my life is a failure and my tuition money was all a waste and I'll just go back to telemarketing for the Shriner's Circus like I did in college. Which, come to think of it, would make a heck of a blog post...

2. ONE is the loneliest number... when Ryan and I were discussing our goals for 2009, one of the things that sprung to my mind was how little I actually spend time with adults. I need more community. More conversation with grown-ups. Yet, I raise a toddler; I teach teens. Most days, doing those two things is enough to exhaust me. While I have many great mom-friends, I cannot even remember the last time I picked up the phone and caught up with one of them (add my fabulous non-mom friends to the list as well, for that matter). I have become a mommy-hermit. A mom-mit, if there is such a critter. For a while, I was trying to keep up with people on Myspace, but Myspace is not, as you may have noticed in the headlines, without controversy for young teachers, so I shut that down. Now I hope to open this up ... I'm going to become a better "blog commenter," and I hope those of you who read me here will join in. While making a resolution to spend hours on the phone catching up would be the usual sort of doomed resolution-ing, this is one that I think I can actually make work. Let's talk, people!

So ... here's to a new year with new aspirations. And here's to resolutions that don't involve ditching chocolate.