Back on the Columbia. I couldn’t find a picture that was reflective of the post topic, so I found an oldie but a goodie. Ps. Notice how pasty we are?
I’m a perfectionist by birth (don’t know where I got it from though, must be a recessive trait) and I’ve gotta say that sometimes this blogging business can get me all worked up. I can’t stand when blog posts are out of sequence, when they don’t hang together in perfect chronological and narrative order. There are always formatting errors and the pictures are different sizes and there are sometimes two spaces in between paragraphs rather than one! It’s the mental equivalent of nails on a chalkboard for me. I can’t resist the impulse to go back and edit old posts. But…everybody’s gotta get over their hangups at some point. Who knew that blogging would help me work through mine? Or maybe it will exacerbate it, I have yet to find out.
Just to give you some indication of the degree of perfectionism I have battled with…a couple anecdotes for you to munch on:
- When I was in elementary school (we’re talking like third grade…let’s just establish that third grade doesn’t matter) I came home with an N in art class. I didn’t know what an N stood for, but it wasn’t an E+. I had an E+ in all of my other classes and an N just wasn’t acceptable to me. So as a third grader (!), I went home crying, begging my mom to talk to the art teacher on my behalf (sorry mom). My mom really wasn’t terribly concerned about my N in art class, but she humored me. It turns out that the teacher had accidentally given me Star’s grade. He had gotten us confused because we were the only two blonde girls in his class and our names were similar (in the hippy vein). An honest mistake that I was happy to sort out…as a third grader. Having teacher friends now, I’m sure I was one of those nightmare students I hear stories about.
- I used to write at least one, sometimes two drafts of letters to everyone (even my grandma) because I couldn’t stand having words scratched out in the final draft. It used to take me a couple hours just to write a simple card. Glad I got over this before writing wedding thank you cards (though it still took a year + because I had to deliberate over each one).
- I’ve never been able to maintain a journal because journals can get messy and I’d go long periods of time without writing and feel the need to back fill a ton of material. Then I’d re-read entries and determine that it was all poorly written and trite. Eventually I’d just start a new, fresh, clean journal altogether and run into the exact same problem a month later.
I’m telling you this because we’ve been away from internet for about a month and things are starting to get a little bit wonky with the blog posts. Things might be out of order…or they might be about something that happened a month ago…maybe two months ago! Jeff has asked me to stop hiding my blog posts (I post them in the past so that they can remain in chronological order). I agreed (more or less), though I still may hide one or two.
How many perfectionists do we have in the crowd? Hopefully you’ll bear with us as things start to get a little crazy up in here. Wooh! Gonna let it all hang out!