But Call Me Betsy

Blogger allows you to look at the next blog on the list and I had some time to kill yesterday after work and so I did that and realized anew that there are a hell of a lot of mommy blogs out there. Like, 90 percent of the blogs I saw were mommy blogs. And they were kind of sad mommy blogs, where the writer was this woman who's about 26 and married to her college sweetheart, who has a crew cut. Both are attractive, and you can see that she was probably a popular girl in high school, and the guy is handsome in this new car salesman way and you can also see how he will start to get heavier and heavier and his neck will thicken with time until he will become this formerly handsome guy. And they are on their first kid, a boy named Caleb and in every baby picture, Caleb's nose is slightly running, but they are posed in front of their new house and everything is okay. And each post is about how great everything is--how they had an Easter egg hunt and Caleb found the blue egg, and ...

Seems like lots of people these days are having their blogs made into movies or writing blogs and then making special guest appearances on CSI or going on a talk show or a radio program or a world tour or something. The trick is to have a focus; something compelling and exciting that makes your readers want to come back every day. For instance, we went to see Julia and Julia a couple of weekends ago and the "thing" in that is this woman deciding to make every recipe from Julia Child's French cookbook in one year and to blog about it every day (after the movie, Padhraig said he was going to give himself one year to make every recipe in the movie. All six of them). Then I read an article in The New Yorker this week about a man who decided to force his family in New York to try to live without contributing to the failure of the planet (i.e. produce no garbage, recycle, use cloth diapers on the baby, eat by candlelight, walk everywhere, stop using toilet paper). They create...

Re-re-re-realized the other day that I've been keeping a blog since 2002 and probably a year or two before that time because I used to have a xanga blog in the very, very beginning. The earlier blog(s) I wrote in even more sporadically than I do now--like maybe a few times a month. Lately, I haven't felt much like keeping up with writing here, even on the weekends when I have the extra time. I still write in my journal most mornings for fifteen minutes or so, and I used to make lists of blog post ideas at the conclusion of those entries, but I just don't feel like it so much anymore. Maybe it's cyclical and I'll come back to it soon. It is gratifying and interesting to me to go back and read old posts, you know, from when I lived in State College, especially since I have such a spotty memory and so can be surprised again and again by the same information (in fact, in another couple of months, you'll probably see another post that reads, Gee, I've been keepi...

Picked this illustration because it was the third thing that came up when I googled "awkward" in an image search. Because awkward was how I felt for most of today. Okay, so just got back from the "Push to Publish" event with Philadelphia Stories , a day-long writing retreat. I was supposed to pretend that I was the expert. This means that I was one of the editors in the "Speed Dating with the Editors" portion of the day and on two other panels, "Is the Short Story Collection Dead?" and "Writing for Blogs." I was more nervous about the first one because it seemed like we should all just show up and vote "yes" or "no." But it went pretty well, even though I felt like a total phony--giving advice about submitting your work when I haven't sent out a short story in, oh, I don't know, two years? Strangely, the first panel went better than the second one--I was more confident about talking about blogging but there ...

Shawn (who insists that if I had gotten to mentioning him in the last post about music, would've written that Neil Diamond's "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" reminds me of him. I guess this is true, but it wouldn't have been my first choice) sent me a link to a blog of a woman who has been fighting breast cancer--who went into remission and got married and bought a house and who now is having a recurrence of the cancer. It sort of puts into perspective the dumb shit that I obsess over every day--my appearance, my writing, my lack of savings--and makes me realize that I could be grappling with much, much more. And maybe will some day, but not today. She's doing all of this positive stuff like visualization and meditation and reading and holistic medicine and unholistic medicine--everything she can attempt to fight back. Don't you wonder how you would do in a similar situation? My fear is that I would give up immediately and become a morphine addict right ...