joining in

Like my mom used to say, "if johnny jumped off the roof, does that mean you have to, too?" Well, that's kind of a little bit how I feel about blogging. Everybody's doing it and so am I just following, like is it just the price of admission these days? Or is it that it's something so wildly unimaginable back in the day, that you could send your writing out into the wild blue yonder of cyberspace (which wasn't even a twinkle in much of anybody's eye when I was a kid) and have someone comment on it from like, a tree farm in Australia, someone who you would never, prior to the internet, have had any contact with? I mean, don't you sort of HAVE TO take advantage of that. I mean, isn't it another way to reduce the size of our giant world and connect to people in a whole different way than we've ever been able to do before?

Having been an advertising copywriter for more than 20 years, having a journalism degree, and having taken dozens of short story classes over the years, at the very least, maybe I can put some writing down everyday and save it. For me. As a practice. And maybe as more, if anything comes out of me that actually makes any sort of sense. The thing that's always prevented me from trying to be a professional fiction writer or essayist is just this one little thing: you actually have to write. All the time. And keep doing it everyday. And then again the next day. And the day after that. Even when you have other things to do, or you have snot running down your nose, or snot running down your kid's nose, or epic infertility, or a horrific work assignment which you'd rather have all your teeth pulled than do, or you have a migraine that feels like little your eyes might pop out of your head, or you have a death in the family, or a fight with your husband (which I definitely do on occassion), or your best friend (which I never do), or you're producing the play at your kid's school for 160 kids, or you're trying to figure out what to do with the rest of your life (again), or you have to drive one kids East and the other kid West, or you know, whatever stuff you have that eats up your time and prevents you from doing what you're supposed to be doing. You just have to keep writing as a priority, despite whatever the heck else is going on with you. And that's always been an obstacle for me. So, maybe blogging will help that. Maybe it will magically force my fingers into submission and some words onto the screen.

It's interesting to put yourself out there for anybody to mistakenly bump into. I've read some blogs which are so highly personal that it's almost embarrassing (and even more embarrassing is when you see someone who's blog you frequent and know everything about their lives without them knowing you know everything about their lives). I am known for my candor and out-there-ness, but I mean, you do have to walk down the street, show your face at your kid's school and ball games, now don't you? I'm not being presumptuous that much of anybody will be reading this if I don't announce I'm doing it, but I mean, I guess you have to decide how much of yourself you're comfortable with uncovering.

So, there. My first post. I did it. Looks like Johnny got to me, mom.
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