I want to share something with you. It’s something I came across when I was still more worried about choosing my domain name than writing the First Post. But after I read it, I knew this was how I wanted to introduce myself anew. So here it is – written in September, 2011 – and it begins:

I started thinking about Writing on Tuesday.

Tuesdays are good days, because you have the whole week to look forward to, with one day already under your belt. And, if you’ll allow me to digress, the second and forth Tuesdays are wonderful excuses to show off a little. I think every one one of my flesh-and-blood connections has heard of how astonishingly horizontal my job is – how each person is content to control his or her little patch of paper work with only a few unofficial treaties to allow documents to flow easily between boundaries. It’s not necessarily bad, it even works really well and provides a wonderful sense of autonomy which I do enjoy. But, dear reader, there is a dark side to every light reflecting orb. In this instance the result is that when our office memo system changed no one really knew what to change it to, because no one was really in charge of it anymore, so they turned to the junior staff (me) and said “you do it.” So I did. And then they liked it, and so now I’m stuck doing it. But I don’t mind because, as I said, it’s an amazing opportunity to show off. I love to write, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and I work wonderfully with deadlines. The office memo gives me both without me having to worry about finding it lying around at some later date and wondering “how was I not expelled for this massacre of the English language?” I was never really fond of The Essay and have never written one I’ve felt proud about more than two weeks after getting it back. The office memo, however, not only obligingly dissapears  from my sight by Wednesday, it also doesn’t require me to be intelligent. It’s like a research paper (my favorite kind) only without field work or formal language. So Tuesdays are good days because I get to enjoy that feeling of creating something, of molding and forming, of drawing – out of dry facts and terse reminders – laughter and warmth and wit. They also lead to ego-inflating Wednesdays, but hey: everything has a dark side.

All that to say, it was perfectly normal for me to be thinking of writing on Tuesday, and I haven’t really stopped all week long. It has finally occured to me that saying I have nothing to write about is inaccurate. Surely an office memo has to be somewhere below “nothing” as far as content is concerned, and I refuse to describe my life as less eventful than an office memo. So what can I use as an excuse? There is nothing, really, but I do think that what I’ve meant all a long was that my life has no cohesive focal point. No plot, if you will. Writing about seemingly random events would work if I thought of this blog as, say, a strip in a newspaper, but not if I try to see it as a chronicle of life, or an epic novel. And, of course, that’s what I read. Knitting blogs, Sewing blogs, Cooking blogs – all of which have a very obvious thread running through them. We see the fabric bought and the patterns purchased. The pieces are cut. Then tragedy strikes. We read disaster in a crystal goblet. What will happen? Will all that work, all those dreams, be doused by a burgundy stain? The dilemma described, decisions must be made. The solution, perhaps drawn from the readers themselves, is finally settled on. We breath freely again. Or perhaps we mourn, why did she try bleach? Then, a month or year later, there it is again. The skirt she tie-dyed, worn with her new white blouse. That pattern (first blogged here) remade out of blue navy, with these and these adjustments made.

This is what I’ve been trying to emulate. It’s not strange, is it, to copy what you love? But it doesn’t appear to be working all that well yet. I may be the center of a sprawling saga, but I’m still on the farm plot wise. During the week when I originally wrote this post I saw The Phantom of Opera’s 25th anniversary performance – the recording played in theatres, that is. I made beingets and scones, and successfully sewed the front of a jumper. I did my homework, un-aging a picture in photoshop. I tried to sew the back of said jumper, only to hit a snag when my bobbin holder mutinied. I spent hours trying to find a book to read – I was all over the place. Even just this week I’ve been here and there, girl-lyfying my wardrobe with shoes, studying Japanese, moving songs I never heard before off of their native vinyl and onto my computer, and, of course, trying to cram a whole world’s worth of geekiness into one week as I prepare to move from Blogger to WordPress.

Even though most of this posts was originally written back in September, even though the idea for Pandamonkeyum was started a year ago, in that strange period of time where I worked as a nanny, they still ring true. I’m not sewing, or baking, or candle making, or any of those nice artsy, focused things. I’m a dabbler. I’m attracted to beauty, whether it’s pure ingenuity, unvarnished, or an attention to detail that leaves a bit of the attender’s soul. Sometimes the beauty is only skin deep for me, a sparkle or flash that I feel no need to return to, and sometimes it’s like a river which refreshes and renews the land it flows through. In that case I’ll mark where it lies and vow to return and drink from it again, but I probably wont set up store. Maybe one day I will, we’re supposed to settle down as we age, right?  But I haven’t yet, so I’m going to admit that my real hobby is joy, and that talking about interesting, cool, intriguing, sublime things is one of the most joyous things I know, especially when talking really means writing.

And that is why I’ve started Pandamonkeyum. It’s chaotic and sprawling, like me. It has strange categories that don’t always seem related and then suddenly overlap in a way that makes you wonder if they really ought to be grouped together after all. It’s a little bit of everything and all things, with quite a lot of potential for something, even if that something isn’t ever really specified.

I hope you enjoy your time here. I hope we (the blog and its author, and whoever else may come along and add their thoughts to the fray) can make you laugh a little, or just shake your head and smile. That we inspire you to try your own attempt at making beauty, or help you see how much wonder there is already in this topsy-tipsy world: not just beyond the pandemonium, but in its very midst.