Salon

De-cluttering is slow going. Mostly because I'm afraid of incurring my mother's wrath if I should throw away something she hasn't approved. I continue to be overwhelmed by how much crap - namely, storage bins and boxes - can fill this place and how little it will be possible to shut it all away for the purposes of a streamlined home look.

Anyway, my biggest plan for the break, other than de-cluttering, was thinking and reflection. I have indeed been doing a lot of that, but ironically enough, it's been mindless in form. I sit and read articles and the occasional blog online all day, pause to read a bit of a book or two, then eat awful food. So I thought I would share, over the next few posts (if I can be bothered to stay invested enough in the theme for that long), the links I've been frequenting.

Salon.

I'm not entirely sure what I enjoy most about this online mag thing called Salon. It could be the Life section dominated largely by advice from Cary Tennis. Or maybe their end-of-year book recap that has left me with plentiful new literary recommendations, ones I will probably never have the time to finish. Their movies section is also getting a lot of traffic from me because I'm real into the ideas of lots of movies right now. That was a dumb sentence.

Anyway the article that really made me interested in Salon was "What your loneliness is telling you," not because of any particular home-hitting value in the article, but because it is intelligently written and reminded me, in the second-to last paragraph, of the very thing I am striving to do this winter.

One of the things that our culture really tries to discourage is thinking, reflection, seriousness. I think that we have to have more confidence in our ability to be thoughtful people.