Here Goes… (Nothing?)

Entering the blogosphere is something I have wanted to do for a quite some time now, and yet I write my maiden post with great trepidation.

For the last couple years I have followed the regular postings on both popular blogs with mass followings and private blogs whose readership is reserved to doting family members and interested friends. Each time I grab a cup of coffee and settle in for my daily or weekly read, I seek to satiate my voyeuristic needs by catching a glimpse into what makes each blogger tick. Their blogs give me insight into what they love about their children, why they chose a specific recipe to feed the large group they had ‘round their dinner table the night before, why they did or did not enjoy a certain vacation spot. When I am done, I find myself wondering what it is about me that makes me quizzical about the lives of people I have never met or barely know. The answer: They entertain me. I like the way they weave their words in ways I always wish I could to portray a snuggly Saturday morning at home, the smell of their vegetable soup cooking on the stove, or an epiphany they had while brushing their teeth. But more importantly: I am enlivened with the knowledge that every moment they share from their own lives helps me be more present in my own.

I suppose what I am getting at here is that my fear in taking this little project on stems from my complete and utter belief that I have very little to offer to others by way of putting my experiences into words. And the most disheartening part of all: I stand up in front of twenty college students six times a week and preach to them the many reasons why it’s important that they make their voice heard, and their experiences known through their writing. Yes, in the deepest recesses of my private, non-teacher life I am a hypocrite. Although on occasion I will admit to a class that I have an irrational fear of reading my own writing out loud, how could I maintain an ounce of credibility if I looked out into a sea of inquisitive young adult eyes and said, “The thing that keeps me from writing with reckless abandon is my fear that no one will care what I have to say.”

So… although I have scratched “Entertain others” from my very short list entitled “Reasons to Keep a Blog”, I am holding firmly to the initial muse that inspired me to begin anyway: my desire to create a photojournal of life – a place I can document and scrapbook my “Moments of Being”: a cute Joey moment; a moment of rapture shared among friends on a boat on the lake; the “glow” that emanates from my mother’s face when my whole family is together in one room; a completed masterpiece of Martyn’s...you get the idea. And…since I am baring my soul here, I have one more secret to confide: I always aspired to be a photojournalist for National Geographic, but since Nat Geo ain’t knocking down my door, I’ll have to stick to the world I see around me. After all, Tim O’Brien got it right in his novel The Things They Carried:

“You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you.”

So, Tim, here goes…I am going to take this ride, and put some things down when they come to me.