My Fantastic New Blog Template (or How I Look Like A Serious Blogger)

Please enjoy this donkey.

I chose this new template to reflect my serious stance on humor. I think it works well. It gives the illusion that I'm up to lots of things at once, and that I have many, many important things to blog about. Or perhaps you look at it and assume I have a staff of people cranking out lots of articles. None of the above is true, but there's nothing like throwing people off your small-time scent and making them think there's something going on here that is larger than all of us.

I will, however, be adding some interesting categories. I haven't entirely picked them out yet, though. So hang tight. We'll get to it, and I'm sure it will be impressive. In the meantime, enjoy the random photos and the generic text and the links that go nowhere. I'll get around to attaching them to something as soon as I can figure out how that all works. Or maybe I'll get just someone on my "staff" to get working on that. I'll ask during a "board meeting" in which I am the boss of all bosses because I provide both "bagels" and "doughnuts."

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How You Should Really Be Practicing Martial Arts

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Talking to Myself for Health and Profit

I've always talked to myself. It's a family trait, and I grew up thinking it was perfectly acceptable behavior. Many a day I'd find my mother chatting to the laundry, yelling at a broken door handle, or conversing with the checkbook register. My father has been known to have involved "discussions" with things like lawn mowers and car engines, and my sister -- well, she would talk from the moment her eyes opened in the morning, whether she had an audience or not.

Me? I'm not entirely sure what spurs on my conversations with myself because I'm not often aware I'm doing it until someone else points it out. A former coworker with whom I shared an office would tell me I was talking to the computer, and would I please knock it off. An old roommate used to drive me insane with her interrupting of my personal conversations by yelling from three rooms away, "What?" Once again, I'd have to explain to her that I was talking to myself, not to her. She never did get it and claimed she'd never known anyone else who talked to themselves. What a sad thing to have to admit.

I guess that's why when you have a relatively small blog with a teeny tiny following, it's good to be okay with talking to yourself already. I have to admit it feels a bit odd this time around; I've started many a blog in the last eight or ten years, but I haven't been at ground zero like this since the early days with a brand new mommy blog before the term "mommy blog" was invented, let alone before the term "mommy blog" made people cringe and make mean jokes behind your back.

I'm okay with blogging to myself. I guess it means I can screw everything up here and there's no one to see it. Like the time I wrote a mommy blog post about which disposable diaper was the better choice, somehow forgetting that it was supposed to be a natural mothering blog. Or the time I had a book review blog in which the very first book I reviewed was of the worst book I have ever read in my life, and I said so. Even though it was a tiny press and a one-time author. (I'd feel bad about that, but the writer was an open, vicious chauvinist, not to mention a crocodile poacher.) So I hope you'll bear with me, whoever you are, because I'm sure to throw something in here one day soon that's horribly embarrassing. Something that, later on, I'll delete and deny I ever wrote. But if you're here, you'll still remember it. You're welcome to it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some bills to pay and it's time I have a long chat with myself about my stamp choices. I really don't think I should be sending cute animal stamps to the bill collectors. Clearly, they don't deserve it.

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There's Something Else I'd Rather Be Doing

Ever start enjoying something so much that it overtakes your time until you really don't want to be doing anything else? So you don't do anything else. But then someone comes along and says, hey, why don't you do something else? All you ever do lately is this one thing, and I'm sick of looking at you doing it. Can't you try another something? Read a book. Tap dance. Levitate. Anything but that one thing.

So you stop.

And then you're not doing that one thing, but you keep thinking about it anyway because, let's face it, you don't want to be doing all that other stuff you've been forced into doing. Which makes you squirrelly. Or maybe you develop a twitch. This is not healthy, you say to yourself. If I still got to do that other thing, I wouldn't have this embarrassing facial tick, you say to yourself. And what's up with this other person wanting me to levitate instead of doing that thing I was already perfectly happy doing, albeit way too often. It's not like it was drugs or drinking or chewing my nails. I was having fun, being productive, surrounding myself with a hobby sort of thingie. And what's more, when you have a hobby sort of thingie, sometimes you can SELL it and make a PROFIT with it. What's up, other person? I should be doing this hobby in my sleep because eventually I could become RICH and maybe even FAMOUS because isn't that what happens to people who become totally obsessed with something? They monetize it? This is America, for Pete's sake. We monetize the stuff we love to do so that we can keep on doing it, or so that we can become so successful at it that we have to hire other people to do it for us so we can administrate then whine and groan that the only reason we got into the business in the first place was so we could spend all day doing what we love to do but now we never get to do it anymore.

No, this is taking a wrong turn. All I wanted to say is that sometimes it's good to get all wrapped up in something until you don't want to do anything else. Isn't it? Or is this where a therapist steps in, takes my hand, and gently leads me to a couch where I start crying because someone took my blankie when I was two and now I'm trying to replace it with a hobby that no one can throw in the garbage when I'm not looking?

This is too much. I'm going to do that thing.

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