Remind Me How We Got Here…?
Yeah, I have no idea either.
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way: you’re here because you clicked on a link that you found somewhere on the internet and, one way or another, it led you to this page. But why is this page even here in the first place?
It’s a long story that wends its way back to childhood (and heck, parenting approaches, geographic inconsistency, and the good old days of pen and paper), but I’m going to blame the Muppets. They were the catalyst for all this, anyway. I’ve been circling starting a blog for a couple of years now like some sort of coquettish vulture, sidling up to the idea but never quite committing. I like to write and have been wanting to do more of it in a non-professional setting; I also find that writing helps me understand myself, and forces me to be accountable to what I learn in the process. I just haven’t had a good enough reason to set the gears in motion until now.
...It would be a parade of fluffy puppets that kicked things off.
Allow me to set the scene.
It’s late February. I’m surfing through the last few days of the month on a tide of various changes, big and small. I’m packing up my apartment to move (just a few blocks away, but in a way that feels more transformative than its physical distance deserves). I’ve been dwelling rather nostalgically on uncertainty, and on how, for better or worse, I seem to grow into myself most when things are in flux. It’s like the chaos around me shakes off the dust gathered during the slow times, and suddenly core parts of me that were hidden — either intentionally or simply as a result of the quiet camouflage of routine — come into relief, stark in contrast to how they appeared before.
I’m at a party with new friends who are becoming good friends, and as the evening winds down, someone brings up a profound typology that, unbeknownst to me, will rock my world (hey, I started a blog out of it). That theory, pioneered by the great Dahlia Lithwick, maintains that all of us can be sorted into one of two categories: you’re either an Order Muppet or a Chaos Muppet.
Real footage of me in the midst of my existential reckoning.
I am a Chaos Muppet. I hide it beneath a veneer of having my sh*t together (and deeply appreciating order as a necessary counterpoint for chaos to thrive), but anyone who’s paying attention picks up on it fairly quickly.
But wait… what does this have to do with blogging? Why are we here? And why am I so fixated on Muppets?
All excellent questions. Basically, as I mulled over the attributes of Order and Chaos Muppets, I realized two things. First was that while part of my tendency to masquerade as an Order Muppet really is driven by a love of subtlety and a rather mischievous awareness that I can get away with doing things my own way more easily if no one sees it coming, I also shy away from letting others see that chaos (except via sneak attacks) because I have a secret fear that Chaos Muppets are really just walking dumpster fires. Second was that ten years ago, I’d written a tongue-in-cheek essay for my favorite English teacher that essentially outlined my relationship with entropy (though not nearly as elegantly as Ms. Lithwick’s theory, and without any Muppets).
As luck would have it, I’d moved all my furniture earlier in the day except for an old steamer trunk in which I store basically all the things that I never look at but don’t have the heart to throw away — including paper copies of some of my old school assignments. Thumbing through that essay and others I found with it, I realized how much of a catalyst writing has been for me in terms of self-transformation. I’m a verbal processor; as those closest to me can attest (bless their patient hearts), I think out loud. Creating an online repository for my musings both keeps them in the loop and spares them from listening to me mull at them at odd hours of the day and night.
So, here’s the origin point. Who knows where it’ll go from here? One way or another, I hope it’s an adventure.