Baby, it's c-c-c-old outside and blogarama

Is it easier to write in the cold than the dead of summer?  Sometimes when it's so frigid outside, being inside with work you love, videos, music, food and people you love sounds perfect.  But we have been feeling housebound of late, so today we all bundled up in scarves and hats and gloves and romped around the freezing cold city. I had a blast humiliating myself at a Karaoke place in the village, then we had Ethiopian food in the east village, then cupcakes  in the west Village and now we are home. 

I am an intrepid blog reader and I must admit that sometimes reading all the blogs, with the gorgeous pictures, and the dogs and the babies and the beautiful homes with wood floors and new pillows, I wonder if people are living a different life than I am. Not that I am not happy--I am--and I count myself really lucky, but sometimes I really want to read a blog where someone is unhappy or angry or sad or pissed off about just how hard life really is (which isn't to say it isn't worthwhile.) 

But is is hard. You kill yourself trying to get a movie made and it falls apart days before principal photography.  You rip out your heart writing a novel and spend most of the time feeling dizzy and nauseous because you are sure you have no talent. You adore people and they vanish and if they don't, you worry that they might vanish or get sick or you worry that you may get sick and this time there may be no way out. You worry about the universe and just the thought that everything came from an incredibly dense tiny speck keeps you up night.  Of course you need the love, and the hope, the magic and the joy, but sometimes hearing that someone is brave and honest enough to admit that they are having a rough time of it (and your being able to help, or not being able to help--just being able to listen) grounds you in a way that participating in pure joy sometimes does not.  It's real.  It's honest.  It's acknowledging the bad as well as the good.

So I am giving yet another shout out to Dispatches from Utopia (when I first started reading it, it was called Dogs Steal Yarn) , Cari Luna's blog, which I greatly admire.  Cari is an uber-talented writer (we share and are both devoted to the same agent), and her blog is honest to the point of being raw.  I think it takes a lot of bravery to bare yourself the way Cari does in print, and I think that is what makes Cari such a superlative writer.

So here is to the joy (the yin!) and to the sorrow (the yang!) and to appreciating and understanding and being brave about both.