Category: Uncategorized

Songbird

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Cait came to visit me down in sunny, southern North Carolina. Except… it wasn’t sunny, and really, Winston-Salem isn’t ALL that Southern. Anyway, we were driving around the city and discovered that Maya Angelou lives in Winston and is an adjunct professor at Wake Forest University. WHAT!? Maya…Angelou… as in THE Maya Angelou? Yes. You really would think people would wear this fact on their sleeve, like, “Hello, welcome to Winston-Salem, the home of Maya Angelou.” I know that’s what I would be saying.

A few days later, I came across this quote of hers that rings quite loudly in my own life recently, “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.” Hmm. I got to thinking about that… analyzing it, wondering what sparked that thought for Maya. After running through a plethora of possibilities, I began to internalize it. I don’t speak because I think I have the answers; I don’t write because I know the solutions to the world’s problems. I speak, sing, write, cry, laugh, scream… all because I have a song. A story. And the story goes like this: I have been rescued by a God that captured my soul and heart, and to Him, I owe my life.

I guess that I hope that the stories we tell, sing, or write are not for the pure sake of knowing answers. I think all of us would agree that it is much easier to pay attention or listen to anyone that actually believes the story they’re telling. When it’s from the heart, suddenly no one cares about cliches, lame jokes, or even repeats. I certainly long to be heard–not because I found the truth, but because the Truth found me. THAT, my friends, is a song worth singing.

Warning: Perfectionist gone mediocre.

I have this … quirk. Actually, I’m not really sure what to call it. I think it’s a quirk, but it could very well be a huge problem that haunts the majority of my daily tasks. We’ll call it perfectionism. I have recently been re-learning the concept that one’s weakness is also their strength, and in my case, that cliche certainly rings true. Welcome to my world–the world of re-thinking, over-analyzing, re-writing, procrastinating, then worrying about the procrastinating until finally I have worried myself into a headache in which I then decide to actually accomplish what I first set out to accomplish. Exhausting, right?

The good thing about being a perfectionist is that I demand success from myself. Mediocrity is a four-letter word, and I continually ask myself, “How could I do this better?” Of course, the drawback is that I also frequently set myself up for failure. If I am going to do something halfway–I shy away and say eh, another day, another time… then which I procrastinate and the entire process recycles.

This has been my experience with blogging. When I looked up “blog” in the dictionary (conveniently stored in my Widgets, thank you Steve Jobs), it said, “A website on which an individual or group of users produces an ongoing narrative.” Hmm… ongoing narrative, sounds both riveting and excruciatingly boring. At any rate, I have made up my mind to stop being such a perfectionist loser and to instead create a blog–one in which I believe it has been deemed acceptable by those in charge of Blog Land to make grammatical errors, write about pointless everyday events/things, and even misspell a few words. Sometimes I may have something revelatory to say (which is highly doubtful), and other times… I will be a bunch of mumbo jumbo. No matter what the product comes out to, I will make use of this little blog for exactly the purpose in which it started… to be a bunch of mumbo jumbo, that somebody, somewhere will stumble upon, glean from, laugh at, and then move onto another site in Internet world. (Props to Al Gore… you didn’t know? He invented the net.)

All that to say, welcome. You may laugh at me, cry with me, or grow so bored you fall asleep. Either way, I’m starting over in my “blogging experience.” I make no promises.