What happens when you can write forever?  Edit yourself pretty decently?  But the outline and what is this about?  Ha!!!!!!

I need to get this book finished.  I have never wanted something so much.  I’m beginning to lose focus and one thing I’ve always had when it came to writing or work in general was focus.  I don’t want to be “she has NLD, so of course she can’t do it.”  No I don’t want that at all.

Shayna did the graphic years ago.  I would use it for my blog template as I love it but white writing on black–no!  I’m thinking of getting cards made with the info on the back. Whenever I can’t do,  I design cards.  Kind of like a nervous tic

And when I don’t design cards I do home improvement.  Constantly.  Eldon, the contractor turned handyman turned house husband replaced some boards on the patio deck this morning.  I looked at Darryl’s house next door and wondered why when he had his deck redone he used the same ancient boards–new ones would cost $400-$500 total; composite about a thousand.  Too pricey for me but if my boards looked so bad nobody would want to set foot on the patio I would borrow from myself for the bazillionth time.  (Our homes are called patio houses as they have large decks on the second floor; I love living in a beach cottage all year round)

I only wondered about Darryl’s boards because Darryl told me how much federal taxes he paid this year. Did I ask?  Of course not.  Were we discussing taxes or money or anything like that?  Of course not.  I like Darryl a lot. He’s my de facto attorney and has given me great legal advice.  But in NY while money is the primary subject of conversation, next to real estate and schools, nobody ever says specific numbers except for real estate sales.  Here people spout out numbers.  Find that strange.

Next week the gate to my downstairs deck will be painted.  Then I hope home improvement spring 2010 will be over.  Though I welcome the distractions.  But please, I need to work.  Really work.  I’m losing faith in myself and that’s always a bad thing.

Though I’m calm enough to lie down on a chaise and read.  I’m never this calm.  Never!!  I hope calmness doesn’t equal lack of ambition.

I didn’t mean this to sound so sad.  I’m attempting to do my taxes for the first time totally by myself.  They’re complicated.  My damn accountant was angry at me last year for sending him my audit during tax season.  Well duh that’s when I got it and it was due 30 days later.  He let it sit for months.  The tax thing is complicating everything in my life right now.  My Dad was a CPA who would have never been angry at a client for….My dad died suddenly at the end of this month 19 years ago.  These couple of weeks always make me sad and trying to do taxes, uh!!!!!

I fear that someday, not soon I hope, I will die and not leave a legacy; no permanent marker, except for a headstone in Mount Hebron Cemetery that reminds the world I was here once.

People will argue that is selfish to want to be remembered.  That if I wanted to be remembered I should have had children for parents did something important.  But not all children are worthy of being remembered by their parents and parents, sometimes, very sadly, outlive children.

Then of course there’s the career legacy.  As somebody who has had three and a half careers, a bunch of newspaper articles published and a five and a half year old blog, I can be remembered for knowing that one career wasn’t enough for a lifetime long before that was fashionable to think.  But many other people can lay claim to that thought also.

They can’t all lay claim to saying some of the things I have said in this blog at the time I did, and I made sure to put in original thoughts. In the 70′s and 80′s before the era of instant communication and social networking,  my sister claimed a New York Times reporter was following me around recording my every thought.  For I would say something and a month or three later an article would be in The Times with the very same thought and/or lines.

I had no faith in myself then.  No belief that I could write for such a newspaper or write an entire book.

Now I’m not sure I can market myself properly.  Just writing this seems so egotistical.  Yet what are most bloggers, Facebookers, and Twitterers doing but trying to make a mark on the world so that they will leave a legacy?  A lot of money is good too.

I have friends who will be remembered for their careers.  Their writing. Their wit.  Their skill and talents in other areas.  And their spouses, kids, grandkids and I’m beginning to feel very small in statute.  I want what they have.  I can’t have the kids and grandkids, that’s impossible and probably not the adoring spouse, but the career….Of course I’m convinced I’m becoming demented so I probably have about two good writing months left…..

For awhile I think I thought I could leave a legacy as a blogger.  It was different three, four years ago.  When you were known, many bloggers knew you.  There weren’t thousands of different groups all competing for bloggers and fame.  There was competitiveness, of course, everything is.  But we knew we were in the earlier days of something bigger then ourselves something that could change communication.  Then came Twitter.   It’s all too much for me.

Friends are having grandchildren.  I’m glad for them, so excited sometimes you have no idea, but a bit sad for me as I will never know that feeling.

My book is that most egotistical of genres, a memoir, but I do think I have a more interesting than most story to tell. One I won’t go into here as everybody who reads this blog knows it.  If you know me through Facebook you don’t really know it.

You don’t know that I’m much more than a collection of symptoms.  Hey, I met John Gotti and lived to talk about it.  That will always be one of my favorite stories sick as it is and it’s very sick.  It’s me, girl who couldn’t keep her Marilyn dress from doing a Marilyn.  In my memories I have short blond hair, and big red lips.  In reality I had long red hair done 40′s style or maybe I had cut it recently to just shoulder length with volume but not big–it was the last year of the 80′s.  My lips might have been red but they were never big.

That’s not one of my best stories just one of my favorites.  I don’t know what my best stories are.  I have no way of judging my own work.  I no longer have any semblance of a site meter so I have no way of gauging what pages are peoples favorites.

I did that on purpose.  The whole get-to-love-me-through-social-media frenzy sickened me.  I had come early to the party.  Too early as I didn’t realize I was supposed to have a plan, enough energy to spend the hours I wasn’t exercising or writing on social media activities.  I had done that with blogging solely because I’m obsessive and I was burnt out as I burn out of everything.

I’m vain.  Oh so vain I think the story of not knowing I had non verbal learning disorder and living anyway is a good story.  I spent my late teen, 20′s and 30′s being adorable, looking like a generic soap star, and I worked hard.  I confused my bosses who couldn’t understand that the spacey klutzy but adorable girl did such complex excellent work.

Then I broke down.  Though I did brilliantly in social work school I don’t think my work ever equaled the work I did in my 20′s to 37.  Maybe it was the medication.  More likely it was still not knowing what was wrong with me and being more aware since I broke down, had the testing, and found out I was supposed to be incapable of just about everything.  I had always believed in myself before underneath it all.  Always believed that tomorrow I would understand more.  Tomorrow there would be magical answers.

The answers weren’t magical.  There was some relief in knowing at first but then there was anger.  I’m still working it out.  And that’s the problem.  A book needs a happy or tragic ending and I don’t plan on giving it a tragic ending.  I want the happy one.

My life is good.  Very good.  But is buying, all on my own without help from one person, a house, and almost gut renovating it a good enough ending?  Even if girl has problems that should preclude her from being proud of this?

Is girl coming to a city where she knew almost anybody at a stage in life when almot nobody moves except unhappily for a job or for grandchildren, and forging a life for herself, a happy ending?

Actually now that I read the above two paragraphs I realize that it’s just as happy an ending as girl meets boy.  This hasn’t been Ozzie & Harriet’s world for sometime.

Or maybe I’m being defensive.  And what I think are accomplishments are nothing important really.

I wrote a truly long post because I began as a long winded self-absorbed blogger.  I’m going through the blog one post at a time.  Not a fun project, but I must do it.  Again I thank Cooper the magnificent.

Courting’s undergone and still undergoing major retuning.

Last week I watched Julie and Julia.  I’ve never been a Meryl person.  I have always appreciated her brilliance but many of her performances have left me feeling nothing.  I watched Mama Mia with eyes and mouth wide open amazed that she would subject herself to that role when I seriously doubt she needs money and her kids aren’t in the pivotal ten to fourteen year old range that would love the movie.  Abba is a band that has always reminded me of the worst of pop.  No it’s not even pop.

Her performance was a revelation.  She not just captured Julia Child but made me love her.  Stanley Tucci!  Wow. He made a little, ugly to be honest, man into one of the sexiest men I have ever seen.  I was captivated.

I have read a lot about how Julie’s (Amy Adams) story was horrible but I’m a blogger and in some ways it could have been my story.  These are the exceptions:  Amanda Hesser of The Times went to her house for dinner.   The book taken from the blog  turned into a best seller.  The subsequent movie was one of the top movies of the year.  And she wrote a new memoir about the affairs she was having during that time that did almost ruin the movie for me as she and her husband seemed so solidly together.

Oh yes we have so much in common.

When I began Courting I didn’t realize people read blogs.  She knew more, and knew enough to have a theme but at first didn’t know if anybody was reading. When her husband read that she was the third most read blog at Salon, they called the people “fans.”  When I became the most read blog at that place we don’t talk about it I called the people who read “readers.”

She felt obligated to post everyday.  My readers know my verbal diarrhea though it has tapered off. Somebody from The Christian Science Monitor called her.  Somebody called me.  You can see we have a tremendous amount in common. She was coming up to her 30′s.  I was in that place called “used to be 30something when it was on.”

It’s not that I’m ashamed of my age.  I’m just so darn immature that I have a hard time believing I’m going to be 60.  Therefore all my friends have been on notice for months they better come up with one giant celebration because it is an age to celebrate.

Julie got nasty comments. Blogs were begun just to diss me.  But hey any publicity….Not frigging true.

Unlike Julie I didn’t get a book contract.   But my life changed as dramatically.  As much as I talked about moving from New York I was scared.  I know New York.  New York knows me.  We went together like seltzer and vanilla syrup in egg creams which contain no eggs, but seltzer, syrup and milk.  I have an incredible support system in New York.  Yes I had been living the life so many dream of down to the luxe doorman building in the heart of the Upper West Side.

But my dreams had changed.  I knew to continue living the life I lived I needed more space in a way less pricey place.  I didn’t count on a house.  That never entered my radar until I found North Myrtle Beach and realized I was capable of buying, renovating (not with my own hands) and maintaining a house.  My house isn’t architecturally significant.  I could get a lot more house that has higher ceilings, is fancier, and has more room for much less money just across 17 but it wouldn’t be a five minute walk to the beach or a two minute walk to the center of town.  My house has decks, lots of decks and I love decks.  It thrills me to sit outside in the middle of the night looking at stars.  It thrills me to be able to run to the beach for just a few minutes whenever.

I haven’t been a “good” blogger these past three years and I’m not just talking quality.  Too much was happening in my “real” life to seek out new blogs, to make new blogging friends.  Julie didn’t have to comment, email, chat up people.  I’m not saying that all that is bad.  It was difficult for reasons my readers are all too aware of.  The problems I had were all interrelated (something I had intuitively known) had a name, and I operated at a level where I had compensated for almost everything.

Blogging brought the problems back. I couldn’t master the computer language of blogging, HTML.  I couldn’t blog socialize as much as many people wanted yet I couldn’t set limits.  I political blogged long after I knew it wasn’t healthy for me.  When I found out about NLD I began to take charge of my life.  Yet I had never felt “disabled” before.

Damn I was smart.  I had been eligible to skip grades but my parents didn’t believe in that.  People always took me for bright.  Yes I had gone through this before but blogging once so great for me began to make me feel like a collection of symptoms.  It’s not OK to have a space to pour your heart out into, unedited.  Since I generally wouldn’t talk about my friends in the present, blogging about NLD filled up space and let me vent.  Something I probably needed to do.  But will never know if the venting led to feeling worse.  I very much believe in the power of positive thinking, and not dwelling on problems, yet….Did it have to be so public?  I love having less Google entries.

So I lost readers, didn’t court new ones, and do you know how many blogs have begun in the past three years?  Many millions.  When I was “on top,” I think there grew to be sixty million.  I alone had five.

Yet it was the greatest feeling in the world in the beginning.  People read me!  People who weren’t classmates or relatives.  An illustrator/cartoonist said to me: “you have the feedback I have always craved.”  I was shocked as I’ve known him all my life and thought he was a person who shunned the spotlight.  And he makes mucho money.  But I knew what he meant.  There’s nothing like that first feeling of wonder; of going to a from “blogger to writer” seminar knowing I had a higher Technorati rating than the speakers.  Yes of course I looked.  I was hung up on stats then.  I have always resented that title.  I was a writer a long time before I was a blogger.

I didn’t know how to handle that recognition.  It came out of nowhere and at times, many times, felt undeserved. At times it made me want to jump up and down with joy.  Other times I wanted to ask people if they knew who I was.  Like they cared. I lived in New York where everybody really does have their fifteen minutes or their best friend did.  Everybody was famous for something real. Not having a money losing blog.  Everybody was younger and better looking than me.  I take that last one back.  But I had begun to feel that I was living in a theme park and I just ain’t a Disney or Rouse production person.

My life was unsettled.  Maybe I will never have that recognition again but hey, I’m prepared for anythng.  I’m settled now.  Everything I have done in the past three years has been to improve my life.

So Julie went onto fame and fortune and I went on to home ownership.  OK she’s lived my dream.  My dream didn’t die.  It went on hiatus.  The long drawn out saga is over, and the fun’s about to begin.  Stay tuned.

My next posts will be at the max half this length.  As usual I reserve the right to change my mind.

First the Monterey Pop v Woodstock debate. I wasn’t at either but did see every showing of Monterey Pop the day it came out. I recorded Woodstock the other day after i realized I have only seen snippets, but only seem to watch HGTV or health care reform centered shows.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqWVOSSmPpc&hl=en&fs=1&]
Hi you old faithful friend. I gave you a little party the other day as keeping you up for five years marked a milestone in my life. It was the longest I have been ever able to do anything. Now that you’re five there’s no telling what we’ll be able to achieve together.

Blog let me be honest. There are a few rivals for your affection. First is Facebook. FB is usually fun. If only I could be pithy clever…sort of like Bill Maher who I spent last night watching, with a group of friends, while eating Southern food. We kept rewinding and I still couldn’t remember all his one great one liners on the subject that seems to have overtaken my thoughts–health care reform.

He did ask, and blog you and I have wondered the same, what plans the Republicans have if they hate our plans so much. The only one I can remember is McCain’s “you can take your insurance with you.” As I was paying $1300 a month because I lived on the UWS and had a faux-Rolls life style, that wouldn’t be doable on a greatly reduced income.

OK blog you’re asking as any sane blog would, what does this have to do with FB? Many people seem to plan their days around putting in pithy clever or pithy zany remarks. If I could remember all the awesome amazing incredible interesting thoughts I come up when there’s absolutely no way to write them down–in the shower, on a walk in the beach usually in the water, or when I half wake up at night, the world would know how truly clever I am. I know, I know, everybody says that, but….

Big Question blog: how are you going to help me? We, you and I, lurk in blogs where bloggers who call themselves writers use “your” when they mean “you’re” over and over again. We’re never sure if that’s done on purpose as some kind of weird affectation that seems to work. People just love these blogs that, well, aren’t very well written. Or, we think, interesting as the bloggers uh excuse me writers don’t know how to tell a story or stand away from the pack and let their quirks show. They are super-friendly, often with alcohol inspired blogging names, attend blogging fairs and often write about subjects that were tired three years ago. Yes there is no such thing as a new subject but there should always be a new way to say it.

Blog we have traveled some roads less taken together and some roads most people wouldn’t brave at all. Let’s find a straighter road, not the most traveled, but not apart from the crowd and finally achieve something that will bring in some dinero.

Deleted posts is I.

I’m spending money when I want to retreat and squirrel it away. The least the Amish people who are making my kitchen cabinets can do is have it on time, but no. The rest of the kitchen work depends on having the cabinets. I need my house. I have been living without my glass, other things, and furniture since a year ago last November. Oh my favorite clothes too.

I need to buy more furniture. This isn’t the fun experience it should have been. I resent so many people having such a great time in the 90′s and earlier this century and me saving, saving, saving–and now losing losing losing losing. Yes I feel good that I have enough to do this.

Of course I might find myself regretting what I wished for. i might never be able to leave home again

I feel as if every nerve in my body is on fire; sort of the feeling after a toothache. I walked to my house via the ocean. It was lovely. I took many pictures. I tried getting lost coming home but met a new (obviously) friend.