processing time

The big reasons for doing this blog were: 1. to "experience" the blogger lifestyle (understanding, of course, that the "thing" about blogs is that they showcase individuality -- still there are obvious patterns among them). 2a. as a repository for my embodiment reading notes that I can access from any computer. 2b. same, that I can direct others to for feedback and ideas on the direction(s) of my research agenda 3. a place to tie together ideas, and have a visual link/location/record of that progress (ie. a journal of ideas). An unexpected benefit that I'm really beginning to notice is that is forces me to stop and reflect. Back in the day, weeks, months, and even whole semesters would run their course and I'd get so caught up in the day-to-day that I'd not stop and process, or reflect on, what I was learning. With this structure, and the self-imposed rule of daily entry, I force myself to take time to reflect on what I'm doing. And this is bringing back states of being that I am familiar with, states that I encountered when working on a creative writing masters degree -- I was assigned to take time to write/create/reflect and wrestle with words/phrases/ideas in a creative manner. Taking that time to mess about with words resulted in some decent poems (and some less than decent). I would often get into the inspirational "flow" space where things worked almost effortlessly. And I feel that space starting to happen again, in part through this blogging process.

It's not there yet, however. With poetry, I was using MS Word (for Mac), and making internalized use of my expert knowledge of that program. For example, I didn't struggle with finding the thesaurus in the menu because I'd been using Word for 10 years and it was "in my fingers" (Command-R). The system and structure disappears at that level and leaves a direct connection between the mind and the page. Blogger.com isn't there for me yet. It's still awkward to type in the html codes for italic or bold or for hyperlinks, and there are formatting tricks that seem like basic requests that I don't know how to do at all (first line indent anyone?). I'd like a built in spelling check please, although I am usually pretty good with spelling. And I'd like a bigger window. I understand that it's *not* a word processor -- but, really, it is. I'd also like drag and drop image placement with automatic wrapping (ala Apple's "Pages" -- very cool btw). I'm not asking for too much, am I?