Getting this blog started has proven to be a task akin to that of getting the ketchup to flow from a new bottle. I have too many things I want to write about and don't know how to begin.
I could start by writing about my experience as a new "empty nest mom", but I'd want to mention that I'm a widow, and thus completely alone in my nest now, making the sending off of my only child to university a more life-changing experience for me than it is for most.
This would lead to my mentioning in passing that my husband took his own life, since readers would wonder how he died, but something like that requires further explanation, which would be at least one whole post.
That post or another would have to contain a discussion of Asperger's Syndrome, with which my husband was afflicted, or it would not do him justice.
And then, as an aside, I might want to talk about university mathematics departments in general, and how my husband and I met in the xerox room of the math department in which I was a graduate student and he an assistant professor, because I like to say that as mathematicians go, he was by no means the strangest nut in the bag.
In any discussion of Asperger's Syndrome I'd want to explain my way of understanding it, and autism in general, which is based on my theory that we are all spiritual beings, or manifestations of consciousness if the word "spiritual" has too many religious connotations, enclosed in bodies the way air can be enclosed in a glass jar, and how some jars are more insulated than others and so on.
I'd want to say, though, that despite the difficulties of living with someone with AS, we did have many Good and Interesting Times in the twenty years we were together, which might lead to a whole series of posts on the difficulties of traveling in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, staying in Warsaw as the currency was collapsing there, getting yanked off a train at the border of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and learning to say "Two beers please" in six languages.
I don't know where to begin; any meaningful topic will lead endlessly to other topics. So what has happened is that I've written about freeway construction projects near my home, and the Maryland Renaissance Festival, and I've thrown in a little politics and whatnot and other odds and ends. The point being that these topics have been chosen pretty much because they are all dead-ends. Where to go from here?
