Jory Des Jardins's blog

I wish I had read Tea of Tea and Cookies on those lonely Valentine's Days as an unattached single, when the only way to survive this reputed holiday was to ignore it and insist that even if I had had a paramour that it wouldn't have made a difference--it was just another day in February. I would have seen that I had been missing the point. If, as Tea suggests, Valentine's Day is really about celebrating love in its most universal sense, then I was never really excluded from it.

Blogs are our faces to the world--very public faces. Even the most personal of bloggers are mindful of this. Our BlogHer of the Week, Maggie of Okay. Fine. Dammit. was aware of the potential backlash that could ensue by coming clean to her readers about her alcoholism, but she made an even richer outcome possible with her confession.

Our BlogHer of the Week is more commonly known in the blogosphere for how he can apply storytelling to things simple and often very sweet (see his recipe for Maple Sweet Potato Cake to see what I mean). When applied to personal tragedy his prose remains skillful and evocative, but is heartbreaking. 

In the U.S. we love our emergency room dramas, fictional life-and-death scenarios punctuated with occasional, on-the-job romance.

This week we couldn't help but notice a theme in some of your recommendations for BlogHer of the Week. As I started to read your posts a familiar, but long tucked away, feeling of grief arose, and I was grateful I wasn't in the office at that moment, because the tears came, then again, and again. I remembered how it felt to touch bottom, experience emptiness, and then see life slowly leak back into the picture, sometimes slowly, and other times with overwhelming, ersatz saturation like Technicolor.