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 |   Thoughts destined to be washed away by the tides of life. |
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I've been studying my cover photo for a while now, and it seems to me that it is more than just a photo of what is there that can be seen, more than just three white rocks stacked on a beach. It contains an important question about the future, about what happens long after the photographer has gone. What will happen to our pile of stones when the tide comes in? Will it topple or has the architect built this structure at a safe distance? I don't know what will happen to these words that I stack here on the sand. They may prove safely distant, or they may be swallowed up by a rush of self-doubt. They may be here for a season. They may lose their balance and be scattered by the shoreline, or be hidden away under shifting sands. Perhaps someday, the tides of life will reclaim them. Or maybe that's just a bunch of poetic, romantic nonsense. After all, this is just a blog. |
| This is an unusual blog post for me, and it’s not the sort of thing I am good at, so bear with me. The important thing to remember is that this blog post is not about me, nor is it trying to elicit sympathy for me, despite the relating of some truly tragic details of my life in recent days, so we will have none of that. This blog post is about something else. It’s about WDC, or WdC or however one wants to stylize that. Through circumstances we won’t discuss, I ended up with quite a long stay in the hospital for a large chunk of July. And let me tell you, being in the hospital during a pandemic is not the luxury hotel experience you might imagine. For one thing, you spend a few days isolated while they test you for Covid. Until such test results are received and prove negative, no one can enter your room without several layers of protective coverings, so no one enters your room unless they have some pressing medical need - like puncturing your veins one more time to fill vials of blood, or checking that you are asleep by waking you up to take your vital signs. As I am extremely lucky, I got to stay in two separate hospital settings with three admissions and four rooms. And even luckier for me, the fact that I was running a fever meant that I got to have two invasive, up the nose and poke your brain Covid swab tests. Then, when I was transferred, I got to have two more. All of them negative, I mean, no worries about that. Four tests in two weeks, all negative. But being Covid free does not completely negate the discomforting experience of having someone stick a ten foot Q-tip up your nostril. But none of that is the point of this blog post. Because that’s all about me, whining about my life. The point is, that throughout the rather annoying month of July, there was one thing that made me feel normal - as soon as I was feeling well enough, I could log onto WDC and enter a world where all I needed to interact were words. Of course, the extended isolation meant that I had to log onto WDC through my phone. I am not going to pretend this was easy. I had to learn to navigate the mobile version of the site, and once I had done that, I had to figure out how to post. First tries were limited to Newsfeed posts, but I soon graduated to answering the Question of the Day. The true test was trying to compose on my phone and then manage to transfer those words into an item in my portfolio and then to enter said item into a contest. I am rather proud of the fact that I won a few contests with my hospital poetry. And I kept up my participation in an ongoing poetry challenge, a feat in itself. I learned some very useful things. Phone keyboards are tiny and missing one or two things that nearly kept me from succeeding. Like the curly bracket. The curly bracket is essential to posting on WDC and there was no curly bracket on any of my phone’s downloaded keyboards. I would love to tell you that I was clever enough to figure out how to make a curly bracket on my own, but what really happened is that I was complaining about it in a text while speaking the text into the phone, and when I said “curly bracket”, one appeared on the screen. It was a miracle! And it didn’t take me very long (a little while, though) to figure out that saying “close curly bracket” produced the closing bracket. But the main point is that during very long days, spent mostly alone and with little to distract me (hospital television offerings are uninteresting, to say the least), WDC gave me a reason to think, to write, to learn new things and challenged me in new ways. All of which makes it worth the price of admission. I don’t want you to think I was all brave and stoical and heroic, though. I did my share of whining. Here’s an example of whining hospital poetry: And a little shout out to some of those forums and contests that inspired me while I was confined: And many thanks also to WDC for the little prods and prompts on the newsfeed that kept my mind from atrophying. And always remember - your phone knows what a curly bracket is. I may never get over that... |
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