Cheating or Efficiency?

I'll confess that I haven't been the best about awareness journaling. It's not for the lack of awareness, the lack of love for writing, or even the lack of a journal (I have a lovely one with Wonder Woman on the cover; I'd say she's pretty vital, yes?). I just can't seem to remember to end the day with note-taking; I prefer to the end the day with a cocktail and TiVo, but to each their own.

As I sat this morning thinking about how to make up for weeks' worth of lost entries and/or come up with a good excuse (my cats ate my journal?), it occurred to me that, in a way, I had been keeping an awareness journal this whole time -- my blog.

I keep a personal blog that I write in at least once a day, sometimes as many as six times a day if the mood strikes. And it's just that -- my mood -- that really is the essence of the "frames" that Andy talks about.

I don't sit down and say, "okay, Rhiannon, it's blogging time. What shall we discuss today? Think, think, think... the weather? Okay, go." No -- I go about my day as I do every day, and when something catches my attention, or something has been weighing on my mind, that's when I pause, open up my blog, write it down, and once finished, then go on with my day.

A simple survey of my blog topics of the past week will show you that on Thursday I was thwarted by an irritation of my father invading my personal space. This was preceded Wednesday by my happy-go-lucky evening being derailed by my father's evil cat (I'm taking care of her for a few months while he is between homes) breaking glass and otherwise wreaking havoc in my house. It wasn't all negative father-related frames, though. I also enjoyed whimsical observations whilst on a business trip (for a good time, I recommend reading SkyMall from cover to cover), as well as warmth and a feeling of vitality from nearly being smothered by my large cats on a lazy Sunday morning.

Sure, these vignettes aren't being written down on paper with Wonder Woman boldly guarding the cover, and they're not specifically designed to analyze my daily train of thought, but much like dreams can offer hints to deeper issues lurking beneath the surface, I think that my blog -- even if the post is merely discussing the virtues of SkyMall's selection of spy gear -- offers much the same coded message.

And on the plus side, my blog always provides a filter for me to know when my thoughts are teetering on the edge of distracted to fully co-opted, as I realize that writing the third post in so many days on how I want to "accidentally" lose my father's cat would come across as just plain repetitive. Mental health/fresh topics for blogging -- whatever it is, it's more than Wonder Woman could provide me.