No drama

My mother's husband, Paul, prefers to spend his life in the village where they live and has no appreciation for anything new. My mother adjusts well to that, even though she loves new influences. I feel it's my duty to introduce these influences every now and then, and so I had planned a trip with her to the other side of the country on the first day of my summer vacation. The trip included a bicycle tour through nature, architectural highlights, a modern art museum with an amazing sculpture garden beside the halls of paintings, and dinner in a small city with an historical centre. That day we had the best weather of the year. Everything worked out beautifully and my mother enjoyed it very much. Only a few days later she started painting again.

My mother loves modern art in general but she has no appreciation for pointillism. I wondered why, until I stood next to a Monet painting in that style and I couldn't see what was depicted; then I realised that my mom, who prefers to look at paintings from up close in order to identify the painting technique, was standing far too close. All I saw was colourful dots, and even when I stepped back I had trouble recognising the subject. It was only after I looked away for a few seconds that I saw it the way Monet had intended it.

I think reading a personal blog is a very nice way to look into someone's life or to allow others a look into yours. It's like looking at the Monet painting from the right distance. Twitter on the other hand is like looking at it from up close. You see all the individual thoughts and emotions, many which don't matter at all in the big picture; they only distract. However, when reading an autobiography the opposite happens: too much time has passed between the experience and the writing. Time to recognise a main story in which loose ends have no place. It's like looking at the Monet painting from afar. You just see the subject of the painting, but miss out completely on the pointillism technique. With blogging the exciting part is that the emotions are fresh enough to be felt when writing everything down, and neither the writer nor the reader have any clue if the next story is going to be a loose end of an important part of the life story. Yet there has been enough processing so that the plain description of the happenings, thought and emotions can be supplemented with some reflection and the omission of insignificant details.

I use my blog as a d... journal (see A public diary) and the two main reasons for putting it online are the hunger for feedback from readers and the fact that, if you write for others, you try harder to write things down well. In my blog I omit stuff that I wouldn't want to read in other people's blogs: I will not write about the empty battery of the remote control -- almost (see Cuckoo!) -- but I pick experiences that made an impression on me, or brought about thoughts or emotions, and I try to write these down as accurate as possible. Having this outlet is very calming: once I write things down I've come to peace with them. Even if dramatic things happen I tend to remain calm, knowing that soon enough I will be able to process, settle and share them easily. Of course, I've always been comparatively calm in situation where most people panic, but my blog amplified that even more so.

A lot happened to me this year. My colleagues already feel I have already had quite a rough year up until now and what they know is only the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even written everything down in my blog. Matthew and Erdem are two of the very few people who know almost everything that has happened to me this year, either because they were present or because I told him in real time. Matthew said that he would have gone into a depression, Erdem said he would have had a nervous breakdown if he were me.

While they -- and most people I know -- admire me for my constructive calmness, Erdem also worries: "Jackdaw, you are completely drama-free. It would be good if every now and then you break down, scream out, or get totally unreasonable, but you have no drama. Be a bit more Mediterranean." Erdem has obviously never read my blog; I have the feeling that most of my readers have the completely opposite impression. In their defence, I do love drama in songs (see Ne me quitte pas).