I miss exercising a mid-range attention span, at its height circa 2006 when blogs were THE mode of sharing. My feed was full of damn scribbling women: I loved it. I could turn to smart, creative, funny voices to learn what they were up to beyond the limits of a Facebook post, how they managed a day. I felt a little less lonely, a little more inspired.

Enter opportunity: I’m looking for a new job and need a web page to post writing samples. And now that I’m living the freelance life, my days feel akin to embracing a cloud (and using it to pay the mortgage); I need some semblance of form to structure my work week. Enter the inclination to start a blog. Ok, stop. I can hear you laughing. Sure, the Age of Blogs may be over according to a New York Times headline circa 2012, but here I am anyway. Maybe I’ll start requesting the Battlestar Galactica reboot dvds from the library, too. Holy Cylons, Katee Sackhoff, who plays Starbuck, is Vic on Longmire, which I HAVE watched. I’m in. Again, can we hold off on the laughing? I’m often late to the cultural table, people, but the food still tastes good.

I hope this blog will help me balance the abstract in my life with the concrete. Being deliberate about balancing the two is how I’ve gotten through such amorphous times in the past when life put me into a cloud. I’ve found that intellectual structure paired with hands-on tasks helps me grapple with the chilly moisture and lack of visual clues in the middle of a cloudy phase. I plan to follow a variety of threads in my posts, from knitting projects to scientific concepts to favorite last lines in literature I’d like to share with you. The emphasis is on casting threads (=thoughts, get it?) and plying them into something substantial.

One of the first things I did after leaving my job was to dye yarn for the first time; I decided to use Kool-aid: it’s cheap, easy, doesn’t take itself too seriously, and I can purchase it four blocks away (my general requirements for most things in life). I’ve developed a knitting obsession this past year and needed to change the color of something I could hold. So I grabbed some white alpaca yarn, searched the web for how-to, and made some orange yarn for the rainbow blanket I plan to knit this winter.

Why? Just one of those instincts we all have that bubbles up. A few days after the dyeing, a memory surfaced of a time in my early twenties that I spent with a friend who was going through one of top ten most painful and challenging life events you can imagine. The morning after the hardest act she had to make during that time, she didn’t want to get out of bed. Her clever sister, who has a care-taking spirit, made her get up and tie-dye some shirts outside in the Georgia summer sun, an act seemingly at odds with what she had just gone through, yet so brilliantly fitting. It made some first steps possible for her, this playing with color and liquid and fabric.

So I’m moving forward in the cloud, spinning the atmosphere into threads, adding some color alongside the mortgage payments. Hope you keep me company along the way!