Daily Handbasket: Excuse My Wholesomeness

 

 

My daughter has been tweaking me lately that this blog is…wholesome. That gives me pause. In uncool-mom parlance, “Dude, wholesomeness isn’t cool!” The idea of being wholesome appalls the rebellious teenager inside me. Wholesome is like…parents (mine, anyway). Wholesome is Mary Ingalls, not Laura. Wholesome is Melanie Hamilton, not Scarlett O’Hara. I would never want to be Melanie. Ugh.

It leads me to ask: What exactly is wholesome?

Here’s what Merriam-Webster says:

 

I’m amused to look at these definitions to see if they fit the blog–and perhaps, by extension, me.

“Promoting health [including body] or well-being of mind or spirit.” I love the notion that I might promote the well-being of your mind and spirit. (Your body is totally up to you, though if you get any pointers here, feel free to remind me of them. My brain is a sieve, but the rest of me is way more holdall than sieve these days.) There’s enough negativity in the world. I want to give you the mysterious, the interesting, the silly, the enlightening, and encouraging things. You can find plenty of negativity out there. Reach out for any button–radio, television, computer–and get an ear/eyeful. Really I am rather tired of it all–particularly of alarmism and politics. Occasionally I post about serious subjects because I’m a thinking person, but I’m not worried about pressing my opinions on other people. Feel free to agree or disagree. It’s all good.

Sound in morals? Um. Sure, I have a moral code, but it probably won’t exactly match yours. Battles have been fought for millennia over such things. No swords here.

“Having the simple health or vigor of normal domesticity.” I rather like this one. It sounds so delightfully normal, doesn’t it? Taken as a whole, I’d say this fits. Though I’m old enough to know that there is no 👽such 😺 thing 🦑as 🎭 normal. Ever. Normal is subjective. Normal is a range. Normal is a made-up thing. I heartily approve of domesticity, though. My real life is pretty darn domesticated, and I rather like it that way. It’s one of the reasons my fiction is comfortable crossing so many moral and creative boundaries. I used to think that creativity had to be executed out of chaos. What a precious notion that is. Creativity may be born in chaos (much of mine is), but it’s way easier and pleasant to work out of a fairly calm space.

“Based on well-grounded fear: prudent.” Boy, do I own well-grounded fear. I have a wholesome respect for both chaos and order. Impulsivity is fun, but it can get inconvenient very quickly. (Witness my second marriage and that “wearing Walmart clothes for a year” experiment that I chose to do after thinking for about 5 minutes.) We have all the time we need to explore what might work for us in our lives. But life is too short to embrace the complete unknown. You can still go very far with just a modicum of prudence. It’s one of the reasons I don’t work hard to offend or flatter people just to get a reaction (also because I think it’s rude). Trust me.

“Safe.” Ugh. I’m exhausted with everyone requiring that they be surrounded by safety. It’s a great way to have a really boring life in a bubble. That said, I have been known to be a smidge co-dependent (working on it…), so you’re unlikely to find much to freak out about here.

This is my real world. My fictional world is very different. In years past, I tried to keep the focus on my professional life, and the subjects of supernatural, crime, and the writing life. But it’s all writing life. Everything I do, think, observe, photograph is part of me. And my writing is just one aspect of me. If you’re here, you get pretty much all of me.

I guess you get some wholesome, too. Who knew?

 

June 4th Words
Journal: 126 words
Long fiction: reading research
Short fiction: 0 words
Non-fiction: 0 words
Blogging: 678 words
Exercise: 40 minutes exercise bike