What's in a Blog?

If you're reading this blog at some point near the time it was written (note to self: find some readers) you may notice that it is, in fact, ugly. It is a very basic layout with no pictures or visual interest. The main reason it looks this way is that I am not a visual person. Maybe it's because I am almost legally blind without my contacts (which is true) or maybe it's just the workings of my brain. I have no interest in Pinterest. Not my thing.

What is my thing is words. I've always loved reading and listening to stuff that other people have written. I am a devourer - and sometime regurgitator - of words. As a true testament to my obsession: I just spent several minutes pondering if what I just wrote about regurgitating is part of some weird etymology of "bookworm." Not enough to look it up (Wiki-Worthy), but it still went through my head.

And for as long as I can remember I have been writing - articles and stories and poems and letters and emails and diaries and journals and status updates and anonymous political comments on websites. In high school and college and my first big-girl job, I was a journalist, and I loved it. Seeing my name in print was the coolest thing I could imagine in my little word-nerdy world. And then it stopped.

The break wasn't entirely a bad thing - I think I needed it in order to make a transition from the writings of a child to the writings of an adult. The words were there, but the messages didn't have a lot of depth to them. During that time, I had to climb over a few hurdles in life. If those hurdles give me the ability to put more depth and heart and gravitas into my words, they will be worth having staggered over.

Another reason for the no-effort-whatsoever look of this blog is that it's "temporary" - not that I plan to stop, because I don't. I won't. But I wanted to take some time figuring out what I wanted this blog to say, and what I hoped to accomplish with it. First and foremost, I want to talk about the farm and market project, and there are sub-categories of goals there which I'm not going to discuss now. What I really needed to identify was how personal I wanted to make this, and how much of my deep-seated freaky issues I'm going to reveal.

This blog marks my first foray into public writing (okay, semi-public right now, but I'm hoping to actually attract some readers, and if necessary I will start begging my friends and family) since 2001. I mentioned in my last entry that I had suffered from depression, and one of the many things that illness took from me was the ability to believe I had something to say. I For 10 years, I could not feel that my talent and passion for words were worth sharing.

I didn't stop writing in those years. In fact, I wrote more than ever, but all of my writing was either in a private journal, online anonymous, or representative of someone else (primarily my Dad, as his administrative assistant, and as Southwood in a marketing capacity). In this blog, I'm going to be fully present, and the views here will be mine, not Southwood's.

So I guess I've answered my question: What's in a blog? I am. It will be loosely affiliated with the market/farm project, but it's going to be from my perspective. I will do my best not to embarrass my mom and kids (everybody else, not so much) but my life, my politics, my experiences, my insanities - I'm going to spill it out there. *Tries to resist urge to close this paragraph with sentence using the word mop. And fails.