Update of information

The jigsaw is practically finished (this picture is more than 24 hours out of date)

It's a big week for workplace food. The above is happening every day. It's a fine line between pleasure and pain with this genre of catering, I find 

 

Lastly on the updates front, the dirt heap has followed me to work. I felt quite moved to see it in the cold late autumn sunrise, squatting silently at the top of the southern lawn. It has smartened itself up quite a bit but I'd know it anywhere.

Alright well, as usual, I'm in bed. I have wanted to write but life hasn't been providing me with the little pushes, or invitations, that I need to find my way into the words that will resonate at the proper pitch and frequency. And now I have received a prompt that I can use. Indulge, tolerate and forgive me please, because this is going to get kind of meta. 

Today I looked at the Blogger dashboard to see if anyone had left a comment here that I should read and publish. Nobody had, but in a different section that lists search queries made by visitors in that box on the top left, there was an interesting list of words. Just the words and the time of the search - no other information. It's almost always empty, this section, but today, in two bursts, someone searched my blog's archives for these words:

pregnancy

latrobe

midwife

diabetes

breastfeed 

breastfed

breast

brunswick

sold house

renting

east brunswick

2011

psychiatric

Once the initial wave of paranoia subsided I had two parallel responses. First was a kind of irascible curiosity about who the searcher could be. After all, this is an inquiry made by someone who does already grasp some version of an outline of some important stations in my history, and yet who also seems to not know as much as they'd like to about them - otherwise, why investigate at all? You see, I have no way of knowing who is reading my blog unless readers choose to make themselves known to me. I can see visitor numbers, countries of origin, what kinds of operating systems they use, and that's about it. It has become a kind of discipline that I accept this situation and indeed it has many really positive aspects. I try to respect the terms of the bargain implied in the format and in my preferred way of deploying it. But something about this list interested me. It perhaps adds up to a presumption of a chapter in the story of a life about which the subject might perhaps feel vulnerable, were it to be known about by others. And so I considered what kinds of people in my environment might possess that sort of curiosity, and whether I could conceive of benign interest in these topics or whether it could only feel like a dirt-digging exercise. And then I thought of a couple of people who might fit the profile - and then I felt much better - because I immediately saw some motives that I could accept and that made sense to me. And then I thought also that in a way this list of words is a strange kind of invitation to reflect and to string together a story and see where it might lead to. Tomorrow I will begin stringing together that story.