so I'm moving to England next Tuesday.

Not this Tuesday. The Tuesday after it. 

And I am full of conflicts. And terror. And delicious chili. Sometimes it's easy to mistake chili for terror.

While I am a committed Anglophile with an unhealthy interest in British media, this move isn't by choice, and I'm not doing it for pleasure or work. I'm doing it because my handsome new husband is going back for non-optional reasons, and I will have to accept that I'm going to be a Kept Woman for a while. 

The husband is excited because, in his innocent little heart, he strongly believes that I will use this inspiring free time to write an amazing novel. And I am terrified because I'm not sure that I can. And also because I'm leaving a great support network, an interesting and rewarding job, steady money, great hobbies and lots of snacks to trot around at the heels of a boy. A truly wonderful and beloved boy, but a heteronormative life partner nonetheless. 

An accurate depiction of noodly-armed terror disguised as apathy

I feel the absolute clarity of my position. I will either raise my chin, draw confidence and dignity around myself like a cloak, and walk into my new life with grace and courage, slipping through one of the Greatest Human Cities of Earth like a fish in a larger shoal. OR I will chew off my own foot and run howling into the woods, where I will subsist on maple sap, berries and cynicism - like any other creature of Darkest Vermont. It's not too late to run away.

Actually, it's way too late. I've already bought the plane ticket. I am going to have to face up to London, somehow.

Arglehargleblarglebibbly.

Love,

Cinna

P.S. The formatting of this post is truly horrific (WHAT IS WITH THE WHITE PATCHES, BLOGGER? WHY ARE YOU SO BAD) but I'm going to leave it because I'm too cool to care.

Shouting like a kitten in a bucket.

The above illustration is how this blog would come across if I was to do it in real life. I would be running around naked in a silly hat, shrieking about cats. People would not make eye contact. But here you are, reading it, redefining normal.

There is something so lulling about living in the age of readily accessible Internet and equally accessible nudity and hats. You are surrounded by people gibbering in every corner, and it blinds you into thinking that you, too, are absolutely fascinating.

It's enthralling. Liberating. Five hundred years ago, if your child had a shit, you would carefully scrape it into the wooden bucket that you left out for the local werewolf, and you would say no more about it. Children do practically nothing else but poop; they are lovely, but they are grubby tubes with a mouth at one end, and this is expected of them.

If you made a larger deal of it, or ran around with said shit, showing it to people, you might find one other person - probably another mother, or someone related to you - who would show interest in it. Once. The second time you ran around showing everyone your precious baby's shit, you would be stripped naked, covered in cleansing salts and penned out for the bears to eat, because the corrosive nature of your insanity would cause the cows to abort, or the wheat to grow backwards, or something. (The salt would keep your craziness from contaminating the bears.)

That shit had to be nipped in the bud, figuratively and literally.

But now your craziness is something to be licked and nuzzled and shared with people. Now you can detail the digestive processes of your very own baby mammals on Facebook, WITH pictures, and nobody thinks it's weird at all! You can join entire clubs devoted to the intricacies, consistencies and vagaries of baby poo. TRULY, WE ARE LIVING IN THE FUTURE. We created it, and here it is.

I would like to say that we're doing the Internet wrong - but we aren't. That's what it's for. People can openly flaunt their craziness, coddling and nourishing it, reinforcing themselves with other like-minded people. It's a hothouse of people all convincing themselves that They Have Something To Say.

And that's just it. They do. We all do. We all have something to say. Every human being is unique and powerful and gorgeous and strong and completely broken, and every human being has a story to tell, and every human being is convinced that everybody else wants to hear it. And that's wonderful. In the Internet, we have the Voice of the People, writ large across the whole planet. And the People want to show you their poo.

The end result is that everything you blog about is Something Nobody Wants to Read . 

So with that being said, I here vow only to blog about only the very highest quality poo, and I promise not to find myself too fascinating.

Hello, world.

Love, 

Cinna