Contradiction

"An introduction is to introduce people, but Christopher Robin and his friends have already been introduced. . . So this is the opposite. When we asked Pooh what the opposite of an Introduction was, he said, "The what of a what?" which didn't help us as much as we had hoped, but luckily Owl kept his head and told us that the opposite of an Introduction, my dear Pooh, was a Contradiction; and, as he is very good at long words, I am sure that's what it is."

-- The House at Pooh Corner

Hello everybody! Here I am at last. When Dan first proposed the idea of a blog I was a bit dubious about it, because I am trying to be very smart with my priorities right now. I am very focused on starting to write again, which eats up time by the bushel, and I keep cherishing the dream of actually reading everything on my booklist, although given the fact that said list evolves into a yet more complicated life form about every two months, I don't see this ever happening. But Dan convinced me (he's terribly good at that-- you should see him try to convince me to watch a movie instead of do homework. Got it down to a science, let me tell you), so here we are.

Now, as to the Contradiction: you will all remember, no doubt, that in days of yore I blogged under the moniker of 'fa-so-la-la.' You may also have noticed that on this blog, my name is Margaretta. There are reasons for this. Frankly, I was getting a little tired of the old name. I mean, how old was I when I started using it? 15? And Things are Different Now. I don't want to use that name any more, because that was then and this is now. However, 'fa-so-la-la' still exists-- I decided to leave that be and just create an entirely new account, because I wanted the old Beehive posts to stay under that name.

So, to explain Margaretta: when Claire and I were very small, we lived in a house where our room had a square walk-in closet. This being long, long before Claire and I discovered our deep and unshakable attraction to shoes, we had plenty of room in this closet. We were subscribed back then to a marvelous little newsletter called "God's World News," a children's 'newspaper' produced by the same folks that publish World, and one week the cover article was about the Leaning Tower of Pisa (which we of course mispronounced as "pizza"). The Tower was undergoing some major reinforcing (it had started sinking into the marshy ground it's built on), and for some reason it caught our imaginations. We decided that our closet was the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and that we were two Italian girls who lived in it. We would take all our toy dishes and our trunk of dressup and anything else we could snitch to make the closet look like a home, and then we would spend entire days living there-- we even ate meals there sometimes. Our names were Margaretta and Roxanna, and we travelled all over the world, raised cows and chickens, wore beautiful dresses, and caught scarlet fever regularly.

Margaretta and Roxanna had marvelous lives. They carried little baskets to the market. They cooked spaghetti constantly. They were orphans, very glamorous. Occasionally they would break a limb and go around on crutches, and every now and then someone would leave a sickly infant or kitten on their doorstep and they would nurse it back to health, and then risk their lives wandering in the snow (this always happened in winter, naturally) all day and night searching for the poor little one's family.

The Margaretta-and-Roxanna game lasted for several years, until we moved out of that house. Margaretta was probably my favorite in my long string of alter-egos, which was why I used it as my IM username, back when Dan and I were first becoming acquainted, which gives it an extra claim on my affections. Our first-ever conversations were on IM. We went from chatting in an incidental sort of way every now and then, to having crazy hours-long conversations almost every day. Every now and then it would be a little bit flirty-- terribly exciting, and exactly the sort of thing that would happen to Margaretta. Then there was the murder mystery dinner, and then we started talking on the phone, and the rest is history.

So now you all understand Margaretta. And heavens look at the time. Good grief. I need to be working on my paper. Bye.