You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile

I realized this week that my blog has a mission statement. I’m sort of pleased about this and sort of horrified; I’ve decided to call this state of being cringigrin. The mission statement for the last five years has been Somewhere in the world, Quinn is being an idiot. It’s best we track her.

I’ll admit, for the first few months, I worried I’d run through every stupid thing I do and then I’d be left with taking pictures of each and every bean and cheese burrito I eat, but I came to understand that my idiocy is an endlessly replenishing well. The bean and cheese burrito would show up in the blog, not out of a lack of material but because I’d eat it while driving and then spill it and then I’d swear loudly and then I’d notice my open window and the open-windowed SUV full of nuns in the next lane. When you’re me, there’s often a nun-laden car somewhere within earshot.

In September, when I started home-schooling, I won’t say my first thought was “...and so much material of me being an idiot to blog,” but it was in the top five thoughts. And yes, there is an embarrassment of riches of my embarrassment, but it always involves the kid. She swears she doesn’t mind if I write about her, Consort gives me permission as her father; the pets remain indifferent. I could write about home-schooling her and all the idiotic things I do and the funny things she says and I’d be typing so fast and so often that I’d wear off my fingerprints.

And yet.

And yet it’s my kid and it’s her life and not source material and there might be some time when hearing, “Say, aren’t you ‘Daughter’ from Quinn’s blog? I read all about you!” won’t fill her with delight. Or having large chunks of her childhood out there, being read by thousands of people will fill her with delight which will nauseate me. Because it will mean she bought into the collective lie of modern culture which says being known for no good reason is the highest aspiration a person can have. So I need to create a slightly different blog and it began with the new mission statement:

Come to the QC Report party and leave happy nearly all the time.

Sometimes, I’ll lead you to a Q-Tea video blog. If I find objects I think might please you all, I’ll link to them. I’ll still be doing idiotic things and we’ll be tracking them, because if I’m not shaming my family name in public, you can safely assume I’m dead. But I’m giving myself room to widen what a QC Report blog entry will be.

I put up a blog earlier this week. It was meant to commend parents who were divorced from their partners but still showing up for their lives and their children’s lives; I’ve got a few people in my life right now who aren’t having much fun in that capacity and I wanted to send them an unsightly-but-sincere Valentine of a blog. But the first person who wrote in made some very perspicacious comments about the other side of divorced parents, the selfish and mean side. She wasn’t wrong, I wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t feel like seeing what happened in the comments. I thought about my new mission statement and did something I’ve never done before; I took the blog down. I might put it up again it some point, but right now I feel like keeping this part of my life, the writing part, happy and carefree. Obviously, if something icky or sad happens in my life which needs mentioning, I'll mention it. But until then? Buoyancy.

In sum, I’m not going anywhere. I might even put something up more often, whenever I find the right mixture of happy and goofy or whenever I fall up a flight of stairs in front of someone important. The QC Report party will continue until such time as the punch runs out.