This Is Not an Introduction

Blogs scare me. I grew up writing journal entries for teachers to read, honed my essayist’s pen on college entrance applications, found my voice on mothering forums, so you’d think I’d be a natural. But there’s a pressure with blogs that there isn’t on a discussion board, nor even with college apps: sure, your entire life hinges on how well and what you write — thus the 200 revisions at 2am — but they won’t write back. You’re pretty much guaranteed merely a simple yes or no (or, because I’m special like that, “if there’s room”) and dodge all “man that sucked” or “what the hell do you mean by this?” or “do you even know who Gloria Steinem is?” comments. And if you inspire another person’s rant (“you’ll never believe what I read today!”), you don’t ever hear about it. Which is just fine by me; my ego is not that secure, much as I like to pretend otherwise. And in a discussion forum, one can comment on others‘ stupidities, or crazy fucked-up problems, and pretend to be all wise and knowing and not fucked-up. It’s participating in a conversation, but in equal part with 5 or 50 or 500 other people. Not so a blog.

A blog is one’s own place for airing laundry and pontificating confidently. Sure I sometimes have things to say, but who the hell wants to read it? No one really wants another middle-class-mommy-life sucks blog, and my brilliances don’t come daily (or weekly!), stand-alone, neatly packaged. They strike in the middle of a conversation, or the middle of the night, and to blog about them is to pretend both that other people care enough to read it, and that I don’t care whether they do.

But here I am. Because I may not be a bandwagon-hop-on-er, but five years after every teenager has a cell phone, I give in and get one. I keep having ideas for it, so I might as well. Although, I’ll be fairly shocked if this doesn’t languish in the no-updates desert, or end up over 50% copied discussion posts.

So here’s what the reader should know about me: I am a reluctant, under-confident blogger; I overuse parentheses (and how!); I have a semi-colon key and am not afraid to use it; I swear rather a lot; and I, a queer-identified, male-partnered, fat, mentally-ill white woman, am raising a presumably-straight (though you never know), stick-thin, able-bodied white male, and it’s an odd enough feeling I thought it warranted a blog.