the fallow season

Who needs perfect teeth when you have a bedazzled face?

I started this blog almost exactly seven years ago. I’m sure I have at least seven more years worth of posts in me about movies, books, babies, Taco Bell radio commercials and other pressing matters. But I think it’s time for a hiatus—probably somewhere in the network sitcom range, not the HBO range, length-wise.

I’ve been thinking about living my life in public—something I started doing accidentally as a result of being a writer, an all-too-willing Facebook addict and someone who generally can’t shut up. As much as this blog is not a diary (my actual diary sounds like the most boring therapy session in the world), constantly documenting my life in any capacity has created a weird obsession with presentation. It’s like I visit my blog or my Facebook page to find out what I’m like. The places I need to visit are church, my friends’ houses, my therapist’s office. Maybe some poetic mountain or freeway underpass (depending what kind of poetry you’re into).

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to lurk and listen, and I’ve been trying but often failing on many fronts. I need to stop trying to tell myself the story of myself by telling others. In art and, well, farming, there’s a harvest season and a fallow season. The Facebook/internet break is becoming a regular phenomenon, so I know I’m not alone in craving some fallowness. Constantly trying to sell peaches when the soil in my field is crying out for a little Miracle-Gro is not doing anyone any favors.

I know, that’s really abstract. But I just wanted to say adios until further notice. Which will probably be the next time I binge on a TV show I really want to talk about. (Don’t get me started on RuPaul’s Drag Race. I mean, seriously, I’m not going to start. But I heart Sharon Needles and Latrice Royale so much that I may devote my whole blog hiatus to sewing poodle boots and pasting rhinestones on my eyelids.)