You don't have to read this.

Every so often, something thought-like starts to gnaw at me, and I start boring the shit out of the people around me. This little something will bother me so much that I stew and stew over it, and work myself into a little lather. I bristle with devastating arguments and witty retorts to imaginary defenses. In the throes of my thought-like something, I find a likely victim (often my long-suffering husband), and as I expound about the something--pilgrims, Taylor Swift, apostrophes, etc.--the pitch and volume of my voice rises, my eyes widen, sometimes my ears turn red. I laugh at my own jokes. Perhaps I stand too close. My listener/friend/victim (LFV) indulges me for a time, but cannot possibly participate fully in my rant, which is really just a partly planned-out soliloquy. If the LFV is a good, indulgent friend, sometimes they egg me on a bit by trying to argue with me. But often they are just fellow moms at school pick-up, passing acquaintances, who would rather just talk peacefully about where to buy kids' shoes, or what to make for dinner. Inevitably, far before I'm finished devastating my imaginary opponents, eyes glaze, bodies shift aside, responses dwindle to one-word responses and weakly polite, but not encouraging laughter.

Worse, many of my favorite LFVs have heard it all before. I grow old. In my desire to hone my rant to a fine point, I repeat myself; it's hard to keep track of who among my LFVs has yet to be enlightened. Most of my LFVs will lie politely, "Oh, no, I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of hearing your thoughts on Eric Carle. Are they shockingly unorthodox? Please do go on". I really do have lovely friends.

Only my husband will tell me the truth, when asked if I've already talked about this to him. But too bad for him, he can't stop me from repeating myself anyway, because that's the nature of marriage: an overlong opera where the principles are too old and fat to be believable romantic leads, and many repetitions and variations on a theme are part of the deal. (My husband has his habitual themes as well, for example, how much more powerful computers are than they used to be, and smaller, and for less money. Astounding! For him, it's important to remark on this at least every four to six months).

We have long toyed with the idea of solving the repetition problem by numbering our rants. Then, we chuckle, we could just say, "42", and we would know exactly what the other meant to say, without having to slog through another repetition of the same tired old shit that is somehow still interesting to the other. Interestingly, this lame joke is one of our oldest, and most tired.

And so, this blog. Perhaps it will get things off my chest, a virtual foam-bat therapy. Perhaps it will spare my LFVs some pain by offering them the opportunity to politely lie, "Oh, yes, I remember that blog post. You're so right about children's museums". At the very least it should keep me quiet for a little while.