CuppaGemma

What is not recorded is not remembered. Benazir Bhutto

Memory is as fickle as a cat. We bend the shapes of events to suit our liking, or to rationalize away that which we prefer not to consider. As the context of our lives changes so does the story we tell. It’s a wee bit harder to recast it for convenience or personal gain if it’s been written down over time.

So why should the reader care?

That’s the first and possibly the most important point to remember as a writer. The “so what”. Maybe on this end of the keyboard it’s interesting or funny, but if the eyes on the other end of the screen glaze and click somewhere else, you’ve lost them. Given the number of choices out there for content, they likely won’t come back.

“You can’t sell anything to someone if you can’t  first attract their attention and it’s precisely their attention you need to hold and convert if you expect them to actually take action on what you have to offer.  With the general public now redefined as the multiple channel public, the competition for people’s attention is even greater.  The fact that we have so much choice to lend our attention to means that we can all be alot more discerning and picky about what we pay attention to, hence the term Attention Economy.

The Semantic web is posed to be the keystone of the new economy because as people are given an ever expanding range of choice, they will choose to focus on those channels that are the most useful and deliver the best return on their attention investment.

Relevance rules.”

http://oxfordseo.com/blog/

Sister Raimonde was our high school forensics coach. She hammered into us, that from the very first moment you entered the room you had to hold their attention. You had to engage them. If you don’t know your material, don’t beleive in it or care about it, then you may as well sit down and not say anything at all. Because no one would care to listen. She would encourage us, require us even with the risk of detention to stand up straight, annunciate and be wholly passionate about our words and with our actions.

She’d get page views.

From the front lines of mothering…

It doesn’t actually end.

The day is nearly to rest, with work done and friends chatted with. Now though is the catch up with the mundane necessities. Has the rubbish gone out, is the laundry done- or wait it is done but needs to be rewashed since the clothes have waited too long wet to be dried. Mind homework has been checked, boys scrubbed and off to bed.

Somewhere in the odd hours, we women come out and slog on like elves.

Except tomorrow is nearly never Christmas and it is the simple matter of keeping the house to be such a place that it feels like home and good and safe. Thank goodness the markets are open late, we can go for milk. Get butter anyway, darn forgot to buy foil and saran wrap last time must remember today. Open window with radio on and feel like you are going somewhere finer than the Boulevard. Consider ditching the whole kit and kaboodle for Europe for a while.

Delete thought. Actually suspend, but only for one more decade.

Return to mental tick list, wander through Stop and Shop with strategic precision, I need these twelve things from these eight aisles, let the wandering husbands who meander in happy dazes from errands that release them from the drudgery of voices, sitcoms and middle class mind atrophy be damned as they consider all the varieties of micro popcorn or canned sundries. We need to procure and move on.

In the cool black of the night, take out the garbage, call in the cat. Enjoy the stars. Consider throwing a baseball at the moon and making a square hit so everything may be dark enough to see how black night can be.

Debate on dusting lamps since you can’t quite sleep with guests coming soon. Lather rinse repeat. Actually might as well just whack the tub with a good deal of tilex and scrubbing bubbles, hose it down twenty minutes later and mop the washroom downstairs while waiting. Whir. Keeping things together is an armor of its own.

Motherhood is restless profession. The goal is to work yourself out of the role and have strong men live their lives on their terms. Smile when you get silence back. Finally catch up on sleep.

Casey is always at bat. The game switches, the neighbors nose around and it all needs to get done. Enter phone call in middle of night from girlfriend in foreign country. Both explode in peals of laughter like schoolgirls in a private moment of detention now sneaking off to talk. Sit outside on bench for the whole call.

Indeed if all the children are asleep and both of you are up- the dishes can continue to glare while you talk. They can finish at three. More pressing matters need to be discussed. The same skit, with several years of nuance worn in.

The brokenness of being a woman who is obligated and responsible who is someone more than “But Mommy…” and who wants to first be considered by her own name rather than the reasons her abdomen has faded lines. There is someone in there somewhere. Dry eyed and organized to a fault, she is grateful for the hours. It is in the relentless slam of busy, churn, change and did the bills get paid that she learns how not to be tired.

She is allowed, second shift.

“Funny business, a woman’s career – the things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you get back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we’ve got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we’ve had or wanted. And in the last analysis, nothing’s any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed, and there he is. Without that, you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings, but you’re not a woman. Slow curtain, the end.”   Joseph Mankiewicz (All about Eve)

“But a woman is checkmated at every turn. Flexible yet powerless to move, she has at once her physical disabilities and her economic dependence in the scales against her. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, is tied to a string and flutters in every wind. Whenever a desire impels, there is always a convention that restrains.”  Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.” Virginia Woolf