The Bluestocking

When I started out with this blog I gave it the title Romancing the Ordinary, which has been my motto for some time now when approaching so many things in life. Be grateful for the little things, find beauty in what you already have and all that surrounds you, find the good in people and, to borrow a favorite phrase of mine from the movie Unfaithful: enjoy this moment, this moment is your life. This philosophy is still very dear to me. But yesterday as I was writing my entry on the Katrina disaster I realized that I wanted this blog to be more encompassing. I wanted the opportunity to write about any topic and not limit myself to expressing just one side of myself. Yes, I am a romantic and my life philosophy or outlooks have not changed, but I wanted to open the door for myself to anywhere that such an open door might lead.

I am in the process of starting up a women's book club for the women in Chris' family, now also my family. There are a lot them! Dianne, my mother-in-law, has three sisters and there are enough female cousins and cousins-in-law to start a good sized book club with. Having just recently left behind all of my own close friends and my family back in Canada, I have been looking for ways to make friends here and to somehow get out and do something with other people. Naturally being the nutty bibliophile that I am I could think of no better way of getting out there than by starting a book club. In the last few days I have been working on a nice invitation for the book club and have been struggling with a name. I guess I just like names. I wish people still named things like they used too, like houses! Finally yesterday I realized that it was staring me in the face. Dianne had given me a book catalogue from a bookseller called Bas Bleu. Bas Bleu translating to none other than bluestocking. So there is was, Bluestockings! How perfect ! Literary women! Women having intellectual or literary interests.

And the more I thought about it and the more I mulled over in my head all the things that I had written about Katrina and about all of the things that interest and intrigue me, about all the research I do on a daily basis about this and that, the more I realized that I am in fact a bluestocking. I love learning, I love discussing literature and I thrive on intellectual conversation. And so I realized that this blog needed a make-over, not that it didn't look great before, but I suddenly felt that I wanted it to represent my many sides, my many ideas and aspirations.

I hope that the book club will turn out to be a success. I have already managed to sell a few girls on the idea. And now the challenge will be to find some books that we can all enjoy and get a good discussion out of. But I have high hopes.

In the meantime, I look forward to all the other new endeavours that I am embarking on. Currently I am taking an online course with Barnes & Noble called "How to think like an editor" which is aimed at people trying to write non-fiction, a genre that I hadn't actually thought of myself writing in but which has been appealing to me very much in recent months. I am also doing an online book club with Barnes & Noble on The Jane Austen Club, a book that I am really enjoying and the discussions so far have been great! I have also been very fortunate in that I am sitting in on one of Chris' graduate classes. Victorian Literature, something that I never really studied while at university since most of my comparative literature classes were primarly Russian or European literature but rarely any British. So far there has only been one class but I am already very intrigued and have a suddenly newfound attraction to critical theory, and anyone who knows how I felt about critical theory after my own experiences with it in university will see this as being a very big transition for me.

I think that I am just hungry for learning, as I have always been, but having left university where I was constantly feeding that hunger with more courses and great discussion has left me yearning for more. I won't start here on my whole philosophy about whether or not university is the only place that can fill that void because otherwise we would be here for a long time, I will save that for a later blog, no doubt. But for now I guess it is enough to say that I am looking forward to taking on any opportunity I can where I get to read more, learn more and of course, write more!