The Written Picture

Some days

Some days it's just a job.

Some days my fingers can't find the right settings.

Some days I say I just can't

I can't do this anymore.

It's too much.

Some days I can't quiet the voice in my head long enough to see a picture. One picture. Any picture.

And then I get this.

This is why I keep going.

This is what I keep trying for.

This is why.

Geeks on vacation

Sure we were in beautiful Estes Park, Colorado with gorgeous mountains, shopping, and all kinds of exquisite restaurants, but instead of doing all that, my brother and I decided to build a website for me. OK. I decided it. Because that's what computer geeks do on vacation.

Nothing fancy. I wanted to "buy" my name and thought it would be more interesting if it led to an actual page that pointed to some of my spots on the web:

I kind of sort of copied his site because you know, whatever your older brother has you have to have, too. And he's got mad computer skills. So anyway. Now you can stalk me in more ways than ever before. While you're at it, go stalk him, too.

Any other name

I'm suspicious of conspiracy theories. So when a friend lent me this book, I cringed. The whole JFK thing is bad enough, but Shakespeare? Really? I don't buy the argument that one man couldn't have written that much. Anyone ever hear of Stephen King? Or Joyce Carol Oates? And Shakespeare didn't have TV, Barne's and Noble, or an iPad to distract him. Yeah. One man CAN write that much. I think my friend Amanda wrote that much last week.

I took the book and flipped through it. If nothing else, I figured I'd learn some interesting facts about Elizabethan England. What I didn't figure was that I'd get completely sucked in and that by the time the author discussed the word "discommodity," I was convinced (you'll have to read it to see what I mean). And the more I read, the more I believed that the real William Shakespeare was most likely the 17th Earl of Oxford - Edward de Vere. Letters written by him that also happen to use Shakespeare's most frequently used words, his fluency in French, his knowledge of Italy - all of these things tipped the scales. But it was so much more than that. The plays themselves seem to follow Oxford's own life. For me, it was enough to raise a question.

Then a few days ago a friend posted a link to this on Facebook:

 

I can.not. wait.

I know it's more romantic to have a mystery... to have those beautiful words cloaked in secrecy, to believe that one man risked everything just to scribble them onto the page. And I've probably fallen head-over-heels for the story just because it IS that. A story.

But in the end, even I know it doesn't really matter who wrote those words. The only thing that matters is that they were ever written at all.