You can connect to me at anythingyourbraincanthinkup@whirlygirl.com. But before you do, you may want to read the following little cautionary tale.

So last September, just as the weather picked up a chill and the waterbugs in her apartment were packing up to head South for the winter, Marianna emailed me from out of the blue. It had been a few years of only Christmas card contact and then suddenly, there she was in the ether-- her charm and wit and loveliness as sparkling as ever. She told me about recent travels in Arizona and New Mexico and the current state of her karma. A note so brief and yet so meaningful.

So of course I let it sit in my Inbox for 382 days before sending a response. Because that, my friends, is my M.O.

Recently Julia took me to task for not actually just freaking calling or emailing her-- instead of WRITING about calling or emailing her on whirlygirl (guilty as charged!). And in a sputtering moment of frustration and defense and exhaustion, I aimed some of the following words into the ether in her direction:

I suffer from guilt paralysis-- where situations get so out of hand (days, months, years, *poof*) that I cannot move forward at all. I'd like to think it's a coping mechanism that allows me to get out of bed everyday without feeling like complete shit-- but it's taken its toll on a lot of relationships and friendships. I truly have emails in my Inbox that are from last September/October that I have never responded to-- I bear no grudge, I just cannot find the time to do it. My days get swallowed up so quickly while I make feeble attempts to stay on top of a million different things-- and personal correspondence always loses in the end.

All of this is my paranoid and guilty way of saying I'm terribly sorry. I am. I wish I were better at keeping in touch with people, reaching out to let people know how they touch me, thanking people for reaching out to touch me in such amazing ways-- but I'm not. If Douglas Coupland's character Wendy Chernin in Girlfriend in a Coma is correct, "Researchers learned that no matter how hard you tried, the most you could possibly change your personality--your self--was five percent." Perhaps if I meditated on it, I could focus a few of those percentage points on making these connections more timely and frequently. But then I'd have to give up my dream of becoming a dancer in Vegas.

In my very first entry of whirlygirl I touched on this theme.

But even more importantly... why whirlygirl: the web site?

Because at some point I ceased to be the kind of girl who makes the effort to contact those people that drift in and out of her mind too frequently to count. A place to put all the finely-tuned sentences and random memories and unleashed verbiage that litter my life. The words have always been there, but now they have a home.

This is me. I started whirlygirl because I knew that I could handle putting down all of these crazy, fleeting thoughts in one place so much better than I could be trusted to keep up with personal connections. I wanted just one space so that people could know that I haven't forgotten or I'm not trapped under something heavy or I'm not completely careless-- but I have limits. Limits that I try to improve, but exist just the same.

So if you dare... connect to me. Even if you don't hear back right away or in the same season or in the same year or--let's face it-- EVER, please know you've touched me. And if you mentioned your waterbugs, you definitely made me smile.