Nightswimming

Oh, how I wish I were blogging to say that I've done some summer nightswimming recently, but no. That would be rather too much excitement in my humdrum, utterly ordinary days as a mom and nanny. I've done a hefty dose of dayswimming at the city pool this summer, but that's a topic for another blog post. The city pool is where I ponder economics, poverty, obesity and the summer camp/day care situation. I hope there are teenagers doing some carefree nightswimming in some nearby swimming hole tonight. I would join them if they invited me.

The nightswimming I'm referring to is an R.E.M. song. It's been playing on my mental soundtrack lately. I wonder if the human brain feeds on certain melodies for a purpose. I swear that I've been craving the sound of this song like one might crave a particular food. Do I have a key-of-F deficiency, or are my levels of acoustic sonority dangerously low? It has repetitive melodic phrasing, according to Pandora. I do respond to the repetition. It's soothing. Whatever the reason, I can't get enough of this song right now. I'm playing it on constant repeat as I write. It's relevant to my topic, which is blogging.

Blogging is a strange exercise. There are so many blogging moms now. Most of them are also crafting, photographing and unintentionally making you feel like a chump for feeding your kid McNuggets on a once-weekly basis as they post their "In My Kitchen" or "In My Garden" photographs and recipes. They're baking bread and crushing their garden-grown mint and basil with mortar and pestle. They're freezing their cubes of pesto and canning their fresh-picked berries for winter. I drool over the photos of their fresh food while I open the box of Triscuits and a container of applesauce and consider my son fed.

I realized that, like my affinity for the song "Nightswimming," my affinity for blogging involves chords of wistfulness and sadness. I often write when I'm tired. I write when I'm feeling a bit low, or when I want to work through something in my head--something that is bothering me perhaps. This is not the stuff of blogs! But I enjoy this bit of writing. I like that I get to sit down and see what spills out. I like immersing myself in writing and looking up words like "affinity" and "chump" to make sure they mean what I think they mean. I like forming semi-coherent thoughts on a subject. It's completely unlike anything else I do during the day!

This is not the inspirational mom blog with the amazing photographs and the mouthwatering food. And that's not what I'm going for. There are so many wonderful blogs that already do that. (See my blog links for a few examples.) This is just my space to write whatever I feel like writing when I have the time to sit down and do so. I DO happen to have a photo of a baby calf's nursing bottle on a windowsill, taken at a very idyllic farm yesterday, so that makes me feel too legit to quit just yet. ;-) BUT the photo is in the camera of the family I nanny for, so it will be a bit before I get to post it. And that's par for my blogging course.

xoxo

a completely unrelated photo of some very happy piglets, who might benefit from some nightswimming after a long day of lounging in the dirt at the county fair