Journal Rambling

Every so often I click to check my LiveJournal UserInfo page.  At the top is a list of Friends.  Mostly it is full of relatives and close friends, but a few are people that I first met here and with whom I have had the opportunity to have a second point of contact. 

Also on the page is my Friend Of list.  I sometimes look at that ever-growing list and wonder who are these people who have decided that my journal is worth reading regularly.  On days when I’m feeling bored or clicky I sometimes browse through their journals to try to find out.  I did that just this past week.  I found that I’m not the only one with DVD player woes.  I found a fascinating discussion on the need for community in religion.  Perhaps the most surprising thing was the discovery that there are people who have me listed as a friend and don’t also have Howard listed.  This means that there are people here reading this entry who didn’t come via Schlock. I’ve had people tell me that my rambles were enjoyable, but somehow I still felt that whatever small fame I attained here was still mostly reflected glory.  Now I have proof that at least some of it was my very own little light.

One of the things I found in my journal rambles was a Writer’s Challenge.  This person challenged: “Describe a room so that the person who owns it is described without actually being present.”  That interested me so much that I decided to take up the challenge.

Laundry piled mountainously on the queen sized bed.  There were a few small piles of folded items, but the huge project had obviously been abandoned abruptly leaving a shirt half-folded.  On the night stand next to the bed lay a much abused paperback book.  A bookmark lay next to it, but the book itself was open and face down using its own weight to save the reader’s page at the expense of spine integrity. 

The floor was adorned with a scattering of toys, mostly cars and small horses.  Mixed with the toys were a few items of clothing, which might have escaped from the pile on the bed, but were most likely dirty clothes.  The items of adult male clothes clustered toward the left of the bed, while female clothes tended more toward the right.  Small pink and blue clothes dotted the floor in a couple of places.

Across the room from the bed stood a boombox style stereo system flanked by two tall wire CD racks.  The bottom halves of the racks were empty; their contents strewn across the window seat which held them.  The upper halves of the racks displayed and eclectic mix of classical, modern, folk, and pop music all alphabetized by artist.  Most of the CDs in the rack were dusty.  The CDs scattered and stacked across the window seat were not, but they were more cracked and battered than thei neatly filed counterparts.  The box for Sesame Street Dance Tunes lay open on top of the stereo, its disc evidently in the player.

The walls were bare except for a row of photographs.  The first was a bride & groom smiling bedazzledly.  Next the couple were clustered over a tiny infant.  The bedazzled smiles were replaced by awestruck looks.  The third, fourth, and fifth pictures were much alike save each had an additional child and the parents faces shifted to a grim “we will get through this” fake smile.