This is My Blog

This is my blog. That’s my opening line? Hmmm…off to a poor start! Being a language arts teacher, I insist that my students begin their essays and narratives with what we, in class, call a “hook.” My hook, here, is weak.


As a child of the TAAS generation, and now a teacher who taught seven years of TAKS and now one year of STAAR, my mind goes to the holistic scoring approach (my teacher friends know what I mean), and I would probably give my paper a 2 completely based on my opening statement. In fact, if this was submitted by one of my students, I would immediately hand it back to him or her and demand that (s)he go sit down and apply the writing techniques that (s)he has been forced to endure in my class for going on five months.


But this isn’t my class, and I am not my student. This is my blog. Perhaps I should say that this is my attempt at a blog. I’ve never blogged, before, and I have never been one to remember to do this kind of thing on a daily basis. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve decided to take a daily vitamin, regularly, only to have a bottle of 40 vitamins last me for nearly three months. I’ve honestly never consistently followed anyone else’s blog. Sure, I’ve stumbled upon many blogs in my OCD Google quests to discover what some stranger believes about running, fashion, raising children, movies, and (last night) Peanut Butter Cheerios. I’ve also clicked on people’s blog links on Facebook, when they post that they have written something truly inspirational, but I have the attention span of a twenty month old (I know this, because I am currently raising one), and I almost never return to the same blog.

So why am I attempting to write a blog? I’ve been told by those who have read my writing that I should become a writer, and I feel like this might be a good outlet for me to gather some ideas about a good topic for a book. I must qualify this by saying that “those who have read my writing” generally have some sort of other connections to me. My mother would be one of these people. She is all of the time telling me that I should become a writer. My mother is the same person who came to my high school tennis tournaments and clapped and cheered for me no matter what I did, even if I executed each serve with precise trajectory directly into the net. This is partly because my mother knows very little about anything related to sports and mostly because my mother is, well, a mother!

The ease with which I could impress my mother was not limited to the tennis courts. When I drew an imaginative picture of a gumball factory within a gumball machine, where tiny men drove space-age floating gumballs through a complex assembly line in order to create a deliciously fruity treat, Mom said that I should become an artist. After I gave my first speech in middle school, Mom said that I should go into politics. I love making my mother beam with pride, but she’s my mother, and she’s an easy audience. So, I’m not so sure if her, “You should become a writer,” advice is an objective observation or if it is the utterance of a proud mommy.
Then there’s my husband. He tells me that I should become a writer, but he frequently follows that up with “…because I would be perfectly happy to become a stay-at-home-dad and let you rake in the dough.” In fact, when I told him that I wanted to begin this blog, he was very encouraging, stating that it was a wonderful idea, “and not just because Baker and I would love to spend our days on the golf course and at the lake fishing.”


I honestly like to write, but if I did write, I don’t know what I would write about. For me, writing has always been an intimate sort of thing. Maybe intimate isn’t the right word…vulnerable, perhaps? And having other people read my writing sometimes feels rather invasive. I don’t know why I feel this way. I mean, walk into any book store and the bookshelves are filled with hundreds and thousands of books written by real authors who clearly do not feel as though their very existence has been molested by the eyes and hands of total strangers who casually thumb through the pages of their minds and may or may not even think enough of the work to make a purchase.


When I think about other people’s blogs, I frequently see a theme. Hungry Girl blogs about food and recipes to help our fast food addicted society learn how to eat more apples and fewer potato chips. I’ve seen blogs about running, but I don’t know that anything interesting enough ever happens during my runs that I could write about it on a consistent basis. I once had a skunk chase me on an early morning run, and I once saw an armadillo digging a hole in the park on another early morning run. But that’s pretty much it. The whole story fits into one compound sentence, hardly worth blogging about. I’ve also read blogs about parenting and making cupcakes that look like reindeer with pretzels for antlers. These blogs tend to have the self-esteem boosting equivalent of reading a beauty magazine, for me, because my baking prowess stops at creating a cupcake that actually looks AND tastes like a cupcake. I don’t need to complicate matters even further by trying to make my food look like one of Santa’s beloved.
So for now, I guess there won’t necessarily be any theme to my blog, which makes me wonder if anyone will read it at all. But if you care to comment, perhaps you could give me some ideas to blog about?