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Bloggin' A, here I am

So here I am. Blogging. On the blogosphere. I blog. Does anyone else have a problem with this word? I realize I'm like 3 years behind the trend, because that's usually how long it takes me to jump into any new techno-thingy; I'm usually just getting started when everyone else has very much moved on. I s'pose I'm old-school. (And someday, remind me to return to the point raised on page 4 of the Britannica article linked above, about whether blogging will replace traditional forms of media. God, I hope not!)

But I've put off jumping on the blogwagon because, frankly, the word blog is just ugly and I don't really like it. However, I was thinking about it today -- I often think about words; it's my job, really -- and it's starting to grow on me. In fact, it's starting to crack me up. For instance, when I told my husband, Chris, that I was going to start blogging, without missing a beat, he said "oh, you're full of blog, all right." It's starting to remind me of another ugly word that has become a People's Choice award winner: The Big F. Someone once told me you can use the Big F as any part of speech (though I haven't thought that through too carefully...I'll let you know if I ever do.) But it made me wonder, Can we use the word blog as all parts of speech? Maybe not, but I can think of a lot of ways to use it that will continue to crack me up: I'm going to blog that tomorrow (I personally love verbing nouns); That's blogalicious; He's a blogophile.

There's another reason, too, that it's taken me a while to get my bloggy on. Does anyone really care about what I have to say? Probably not. And for someone like me, who talks to anyone in the listening area, that's a tough truth to admit. After all, my life is not so thrilling that I have amazingly creative or inciteful things to say. I'm a wife, a mom, a book editor, a friend, a church deacon. I swap zucchini recipes with the women in my neighborhood, and I take my son to the playground to dig in the sand. A big night out for me lately is my book club, which meets at a different house every month, but always within 3 blocks of my home. (These are fabulously fun, smart, women, by the way, and I'm sure I will blog about book club from time to time; we're currently reading The Quickie by James Patterson.) I spend most Sunday afternoons pulling weeds out of my (pitiful) flower garden or mopping the floors in my house. This is not exciting, folks. But it's life, and I bet the majority of people in the world are living this same kind of suburban stupor. So maybe the interest in my blog lies in the fact that there's commonality among us; maybe someone will stumble on my words one day and think, "hey, I can relate to this woman!" But really, it doesn't matter if anyone ever reads this. I'm hoping it'll be fun to just spew my thoughts onto a page, albeit an electronic one.

And maybe blogging will get me back into the habit of writing on a regular basis. I'm embarrassed that my younger brother and sister have both beat me to Blogsville. I'm supposed to be the writer in the family, people! But they're both really good bloggers -- interesting, funny, thought-provoking -- so I'll take some notes on their style, and hope to do the family proud. If you're curious, my sister's blog can be found at Life in a Mello World, and my brother is at Nate Mello dot com. My siblings are amazing, and I'm so proud of them. They're the people who have seen me at my best and at my worst -- and they still love me. I am a very fortunate girl, for many reasons, but most of all because I'm surrounded by love. (But I like to think that I give love pretty willingly as well. You reap what you sow, after all.)

So read on, blogophiles. Here I am, blogocizing, bloggerating, blogginating, gettin' bloggy wit' it...ok, now I'm also showing my age...and my dorkiness...


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