I guess I'm warming up to writing in this blog again, because I've started thinking about it between posting. And I did some thinking in the shower just now.
***
I realize those "bitch" quotes had a bit of the shock factor in them, but I don't apologize for that. As you can see, winning a lot of friends is not one of my objectives in writing this blog. In fact, maybe it would be more accurate to say that I would be more pleased to have a any friends I may have at the end of it all be true friends that have been filtered through all the false veneers. That is to say, you, the reader may well not be part of my reference group, although it's also possible that you are - after all I don't know who is reading this.
I don't know about you, but sometimes it's quite irksome when people seem to agree with you but you feel like they don't really understand what you're saying. And then it can be hard to get them to see that they really don't understand, despite their profuse objections to being labeled as such.
That's not why I included those quotes though; I included them because it seemed to feed off of the discussion at hand and it does fit how I feel, at least now. This kind of sentiment, if it existed at all in me when I was in Vienna, would only have been in the very earliest stages of development and as such not very identifiable yet.
***
Another issue that it might be good to clearly identify, although I have been mentioning it here and there all along, is that of anachronism. Although anachronism can take many forms, for our purposes I am specifically talking about when during my life I held different attitudes and the like. For example, in talking about a specific time period (e.g., my Vienna years), I am trying to let you know if a perspective wasn't held (or developed or become conscious) until a later time.
It's hard to avoid talking about things before and after the specific period being covered, but this could result in some confusion for the reader. Some of the texts I'm using, however, are so enlightening regarding other times in my life that I'm afraid if I don't mention the pertinence to these other time periods in my discussion of a text these insights to other phases of my life might go overlooked altogether. Or sometimes it's hard to explain the relevance (or irrelevance, as the case might be) of the text at hand without bringing in other phases of my life.
Nevertheless, I hope you don't come away with a Raphaelesque anachronostic sense of my life (cp. the Wikipedia article on his painting "The Marriage of the Virgin"). Sure, there were elements of my present make-up that were in existence in the 1980s, but I wasn't then what I am now in a whole lot of ways. The same can generally be said of most everyone, but I think some people experience more changes (how many changes) than others and/or greater (more substantial) changes than others, for a variety of reasons. The aspects in my life that have been especially potent drivers of change are, first of all, my pensive and reflective personality, but also my work/career changes and changes in living circumstances. That is, these things were drivers of change, not the change themselves, and there were external and internal drivers that facilitated change.
If you knew my life at all (which you only know precious little of yet, unless you know me personally outside of this blog), I think you'd see that what I'm saying about myself is a no brainer. So I'm saying this for those who don't know me outside this blog or have only known me for a limited time that doesn't include some of these life-changing situations and/or the opportunity to really know my personality.
A final caveat: Although I've thought about many of the things I discuss on this blog a lot over the years and am a relatively introspective and astute person, there is always the chance that I inadvertently involve myself in some anachronism. This is hard to avoid, much in the same way that researchers have a hard time extricated themselves from research to reach some golden objective standard, which may actually be impossible to obtain despite the best precautions.
So what I'm saying is, I'm doing my best to keep the time frames clear to the reader, but I may not be perfect. So do as I say and not as I do: cut me some slack. And if you notice such apparent anachronisms (or just plain confusing mumbo-jumbo) and want to point them out I'm willing to entertain them. It could be a simple mistake (like a big typo) or unclear language, or it could be a more substantial conceptual issue that I need to address.
While I shouldn't need to apologize for some chronological skipping around, since that is a fairly common stylistic tool in literature, it should be clear as to what belongs in what time period even with the skipping around. If the skipping around results in something along the lines of Raphael's "Wedding of the Virgin", then communication has gone haywire somewhere along the line, and my hope is that my writing isn't that glaringly anachronistic! Nevertheless, even lesser anachronisms should probably be clarified.
~ Meg
