How Do You Choose?

We're heading off to Hawaii on Sunday to spend a week staying in a house in Kona with Ian's family, including our 2-year-old niece. We're very excited to have several days with her and really get to know her. Ian's parents, who, much as they love us all and are looking forward to the week, also love the Napili Kai resort on Maui, and so they left yesterday morning for 5 days there first (Ian and I drove them to the airport at 6:00AM, which is to say that Ian drove and I marveled at being up in the middle of the night), after a night at our house.

From what I have seen in the last ten years with Ian, his parents are like no other people on earth. They are very sweet and interesting and active and appear to be decades younger than they are, and I love them dearly, but their habits are not necessarily always what one might expect. Perhaps it's simply that they're better at knowing what they like and doing those things, and certainly there's no harm in their choices. But Ian and I were both entertained that they brought their sleeping bags to spend the night at our house, and even though we had the bed all made up downstairs, they insisted that they would rather just use their sleeping bags. At least they slept IN our house—several years ago, they stayed the night with N&K, and insisted on spending the night in their (own) Eurovan parked in the garage. They considered it to be the height of luxury—familiar beds, yet a perfectly flat surface to park on and complete blackness. But I think N felt that he wasn't really doing right by his parents.

Anyway, J, my MIL, asked a valid question about my blogging, and I thought you might all (lots and lots of you, still, it turns out!) like to know. A bit of a metapost, this will be. And so: J wanted to know how I choose what I'm going to write about.

There are actually lots of particulars that I think about when planning a post. For one thing, I don't want people to be bored, and so even though I frequently have episodes of anxiety, or mild nausea, or frustration, or deep sadness, or continual surprise that I need to sleep more than I used to, or (recently) extreme annoyance at the Insurance People, I don't write about it much. It's tedious enough to live with—who would want to read about it all the time? And so, I can't be bothered to put it into words very often. Also, my superpower is Full Disclosure, but even so there have been one or two things that were too painful, or too difficult, to share in this kind of forum. Of course, at the moment, I can't think of what they were. Maybe they were simply too scatological.

There are also a lot of things that, on the other hand, I do want to write about—I do want to share—and that day-to-day life (and travel) get in the way of and I run out of time . . . and then I forget what they were, even though I'm sure they were VERY insightful and wise.

But occasionally, I think about things that are VERY insightful and wise, and I have the right amount of time, and I'm not in some tropical or horse-infested paradise, and I sit down and write them out.

I'm not so sure, after all, that this was one of those posts.