I Love It When A Plan Comes Together...

Rumination: The Pits

...but with all apologies to the A-Team, I love it even more when unexpected paths put you onto awesome things that you SHOULD have known existed but that had somehow eluded you.

Such is the case with The Rumpus, which I just stumbled upon during a passage search for work. A hyperliterate blog devoted to music, comics, poetry, literature, and culture, it has both a monthly book and a poetry club in which each month, an advance copy of a given book arrives on your doorstep PRE-PUBLICATION, and you participate not only in an online discussion of the book with other enthusiasts, but in an online discussion with the author--how many opportunities do you get to talk to an author about their work? In my case, not many--especially not fiction authors.

The comic I attached above is from a series called Comiques--one of many awesome comics featured on the site (they had me at Tony Millionaire, but my ardor intensified at the sight of all the artists I'd never heard of, like Anne Emond). This one resonated with me simply because this is a phenomenon that I have experienced many, many times--obsessive rumination over a perceived gaffe, no matter how trivial, could potentially enmesh me for a whole day, sometimes even more. I don't think I understood that not everybody has experienced obsessive rumination--what is often referred as being "trapped in your own head"--that it's not a universal state. Some people have the gift of "getting over it," of letting things go.

And I don't think I even realized, until reading this comic, how long it's been since I've obsessively ruminated over anything. I've felt bad or silly about things, but I haven't been paralyzed by them, and that--well, that is something to be incredibly thankful for.