Meeeeee (well, cuter and skinnier)

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Permission

I've decided to give myself permission to accept that i'm never going to be a standard blogger. I love reading everyone else's blogs, and I admire them for posting tns of pretty pictures and life-news.

However, since I was 7 years old, people have been trying to get me to keep some form of journal, and it's yet to stick. I can write. I don't mind writing. Sometimes I love writing. But in terms of writing consistently, I can't seem to do it.

A recent (good but rather long) conference on literacy gave me time to realize why. I tend to discuss things when I'm emotional, or trying to entertain people. These are two totally different purposes. When I'm emotional, I write to express and release. I vent. When it's all over, I feel better, and vaguely guilty aboout having bothered others with an excess of emotion I no longer feel.

When I'm writing to share humourous things in my life, I find it's more fun to see my audience. Blogging, alas, doesn't let you actually watch the tea being spit across another person's keyboard, nor does it give yoou the ability to share a belly laugh in that one-encouraging-the-other-can't-stop-laughing kind of way.

So I write a little in one vein, drift away, come back, re-read and think "Blech, I wouldn't read this person." Then I write a little in the other vein, come back, re-read, and think "Tee-hee, but if people have read that, then I oughtn't burden them with this."

Either of these two reactions makes me toddle off towards the safer, instant-reaction land of verbality.

But then....

But then I see Stephanie, who makes me laugh AND cry with her - whose talks I attend feeling mildly like a stalker, and who writes nearly daily - and I feel like I ought to somehow live up to her example.

I see Mamacate, on whose blog I am normally a silent lurker, but who is where I hope to be in the coming years. She doesn't blog as often now, but she has reasons. I have excuses.

I see blog after blog, and all these wonderful women (and men, but for some reason I seem to read women more often) who write regularly. I think "I write, I think, why aren't I doing that?" I think "I'm sitting at home staring at walls and screens, and not writing. Why am I not writing?"

Perhaps its the same reason that the laundry is a pile, not a memory, the dishes in the sink, and the butt in the chair rather than wombling about the neighbourhood.

I'm lazy. *grins* And anti-social, cranky, curmudgeonly, slow, slothful, and generally a poor role-model.

Except when I'm not.