I was one of the first bloggers. Really. Okay, back then, it wasn't known so much as "blogging" as it was "online journaling" and I mostly did it to impress a geeky guy who turned out to be WAAAY more into the Lord of the Rings movie-based video games than he was me, but still, I was there on the front lines when it was just figuring itself out. Imagine me in a foxhole wearing an old-timey army helmet draped with that inscrutable beige netting, holding the heaviest laptop known to man, while all around me were the defeaning shouts of "BBS, NOW!", "Hold your ISP!" and "OH NO! Here they come with the forum flaming!" Dark days, I tell ya.
I started back in May 2001. Specifically, the morning after my first Matt Nathanson "concert". Irony used there to indicate that I saw him play his acoustic twelve-string in my campus coffee shop and then bought merch from him out of his guitar case, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. The fact that he was hilarious and made really funny "pork sword" jokes with my best friend made him that much cooler and thus worthy of the adoration of my first blog entry. I remember using the word "rock" a lot, and it may be possible that I dumped the phrase "there's nothing hotter than a nose ring" in there, just to let people know that I was really into edge culture. ::rolls eyes:: Every once in a while I will go back to read entries from that first year of blogging just to remind myself that I was 19 once, and thus have no right to loathe anyone their youth because I once licked a tour bus to prove how much I loved an independent rock band.
For me, blogging has been essentially this: A nine year series of misadventures with the opposite sex that has been chronicled in painful detail. Sometimes I used their first names, but I found it was much easier (and less incriminating should the evidence be found) to give the guys in my life cleverly disguised pseudonyms that spoke to a trait or experience that I had with them.
* "Ear Crud Boy" for instance was a guy that I went on a few dates in 2001. One night at his friend's house, I watched in horror as he proceeded to clean out his ear with his little finger, and then clear the deposits of that excavation from his fingernail with his teeth.
* "McPELMy" was a guy friend that I crushed on that was far younger than me but absolutely scrumptious. The acronym P.E.L.M. standing for "Pre-Embryonic Love Muffin", of course.
* "Drummer Boy" played the drums and most of my entries regarding him ended with "parum-pum-pum-pum."
* "Thing 1 and Thing 2" came at a time when I actually had two options before me, the results of both seeming to be exactly the same.
* "Twilight" was the beautiful, funny, charming man that moved into my ward and with whom all the Mormon girls I knew became obsessed. I revealed his nickname to him one day, and he mistook its meaning and thought that I was calling him "Edward". I explained that it was not the character but the entire phenomena he was emulating. He gave me that smile you might give someone who tells you they skin kittens for fun.
After a certain point though, I grew weary of nicknames and chose to simply stick with letters chosen to represent the various players: J, B, D, V, and E. My dating life had turned into the final round of Wheel of Fortune and unfortunately, Vanna White didn't turn over enough letters for any of it to make sense, so I was left screaming nonsense phrases "Dowel Lab! Fable Tod! Caring Brat!" (I know that last sentence didn't make sense, but there really aren't enough references to The Wheel being made by people under 70.)
Other things happened during that nine-year period of course: getting my art degree, realizing that my art degree was useless and going back to school, gettting a Masters in teaching, moving to Portland, realizing my Masters in teaching wasn't bringing me squat and leaving education to work in non-profit, various embarrassing incidents, little victories, two annual conferences for work where I nearly died of exhaustion, tiny tragedies, taking the bus home from Idaho at Christmas and getting stuck in Eastern Oregon with a guy named Charlie who said his last name was Manson (to be funny I suppose), and awkward moments of meeting famous people I really admire and not being able to say a word to them (Hello Sherman Alexie, sorry I creeped you out with my stuttering and battered copy of "Reservation Blues"! And Maya Angelou, you remember me, I was the one who just stood in front of you unable to operate the retract button on the lower part of my jaw.)
My blog has been good to me- it really has. From the experience, I have made four really close friends-- one of whom I have met only 3 times in person but who I talk to on the phone constantly and is counted among my MVPs. My blog and I have seen each other through the various world events and political upheavals (9/11, the war on terror, Obama elected president), fads (loving Benji on "So You Think You Can Dance", "Soldja Boy", obsessing over "The Da Vinci Code"), and the evolution of my pop cultural obsessions ("Lost", "Firefly", "Veronica Mars", Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Michael Chabon, Guster, Led Zeppelin, and Jay-Z to name a few.) Now though, I don't know, I guess I want to start fresh. I want to give friends that would like to read some of my writing the opportunity to do so without worrying that they may look at the entries from the fight that we had in 2005 when I wrote bitingly succinct haikus about their personal hygiene and gum-smacking.
So here we are, new day, new opportunity, new blog. Tabula rasa.
Here follows are reasons why I think you should take the time to read this blog:
1. I am funny. Well, I think I am hilarious, and even though my friends are usually laughing at me, I still consider it a win. Won't you take part in this opportunity to laugh at me too?
2. I was raised by conspiracy theorist parents who fall asleep listening to Art Bell. This makes me skeptical of almost everything and I tend to get vocal/verbose about the things that I think are especially suspect. Things I currently do not trust include: donating my organs (partly because a good friend said he would take my eyes if I died and then almost got us into a car accident that would have only hurt me), the popularity of Taylor Swift, two redheads hooking up, and any house pet that is transported from place-to-place in a purse.
3. In case you could not tell already- I write almost the exact same way I speak: parenthetically and tangentially. I like to use big words, but only to enhance the quality of a good fart joke. (Needless to say, learning the word "scatalogical" changed my religion.) There is a heavy emphasis on proofreading in the work that I do, so I try to use good grammar and punctuation where I can. Deviating from this however, I believe that most run-on sentences I write can be forgiven because that is the way I think and I refuse to write differently than I think because I am who I am and that is all I am.
4. I am one of the five most awkward people that I know. Gratefully, God gave me the skills to be able to play off my awkwardness with incredulous, high-pitched, and descriptive recounts of these events-that-do-not-happen-to-normal-people. You all are simply the campfire friends with whom I wish to share these terrifying tales. (Like the time I pants-ed myself in church getting up from a chair.)
5. I have good but not great taste in pop culture. I like "How I Met Your Mother" but not "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia". Love "Raising Arizona", but never seen "Fargo". I read a lot, and most of it good literature ("Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way" excepting), but unfortunately, many of my favorite books are also Oprah's, and that is just something I am going to have to deal with. My point in bringing this up is that I will never exposit a treatise on the need to return to the writing of the early 19th century Victorians, but I will probably let you all know that "The Bluest Eye" is a book that I think every teenage girl should have to read before she graduates high school. While I do aspire to be pretentious, my love of especially bloody zombie movies and Little Caesar's $5 Hot 'n Readys will always get in the way of any success in that arena.
So there you are. If you'd like to join me, I promise to cardigan sweater-up, Mr. Rogers-style, as often as I can so that you get to hop onboard my tiny train to the land of How-I-wish-it-was-make-believe.
