What to write? I feel as though I have been very shallow in my writing lately. Friday Five, This or That, rediculous quizzes...because I have nothing of depth to talk about? Or because I am repressing those deep thoughts I might be having? I honestly don't know. I read other blogs and I find witty, clever, deep, thoughtful people and I wonder why I can't be like that. I want to be like that. I strive to be like that. I feel fake and pretentious when I am like that. Ugh.

The things that are important in my life seem so shallow when they are turned into the written word. My students, my cats, my husband. They are so much more...more intense... more beautiful...more...they are so much MORE than I can express. How do I describe the frustration of seeing a little boy suffer from the inattentiveness of his parents and knowing that there is really nothing I can do to change it? How do I create the image of my little gray darling when she is lying upside down in the sun, asking for a tummy rub with the lazy blinking of her round eyes? How do I share the overwhelming depth of what I feel for the man who has seen my worst moments and still promised me his forever? There aren't words for it. Nothing I say can do any of it justice.

So instead I answer foolish questions about music and shoes and my first job. I compare chocolate ice cream to vanilla ice cream and couches to laz-e-boy chairs, all the while hoping that somehow you will take all the little bits and pieces and put them together to see that jigsaw puzzle that is me, that is my life. That puts the hard work, the challenge, on you rather than on me. And it leaves me the slight hope that no one will manage to put the pieces together quite right and notice that I am, in fact, not as deep or as beautiful or as spiritual or as special or as clever as I wish I were. It leaves me the impression that I might still have some of you fooled into thinking that I am all of those things. Perhaps it even leaves me the hope that I might fool MYSELF.

I don't think it's working.