Sunday, June 3, 2007

My first Blog

Wow. I guess I'm doing it. My first blog. I'm not quite sure where to begin. But here I am. I've been peeking in on other people's blogs for a while now, and have felt drawn to start one of my own. It was reading a meme about blogging at Beck's site (someday I'll figure out how to insert a link here) and then linking from her site to read more people answer the questions... I'm drawn to the idea of the online community. What I've seen, particularly in the Mommy blogs I read, is a great support, a common interest, an investigation of thoughts and the struggle with the day to day. And now I've decided to draw up a chair to the great blogging table. I'm not quite sure what it will be. Will I talk about what it's like to be the Mom of a fabulous 4 year old? The wife of a pastor? An avid reader? An actress yearning again for the stage? A yankee finding her way in the southland? Probably a bit of all of the above. I'm drawn to the idea of struggling with things in a community, and also of sharing those joys with a community. And I spend so much time on the darn computer anyways, why not one more thing? And this one for me.

As I begin, I struggle with the questions of what do I reveal? How intimate do I want to get? Will I scare my readers? (will I have any readers?) Will I scare myself?

One thing that has held me back from blogging, frankly, is my acting. I read a blog written by a local actress, and while I find it fascinating, I'm also horrified about it. She is not always nice about people she works with, and she often exposes problems within a theatre or production. One thing I'm very careful about is trying, as much as possible, to not speak ill about other theatres and theatre artists. You just never know when you may work with them again. And in the theatre world, the gig is up every few months or so, and you're auditioning again. How honest can you be and still get a job in this town?

A question I have for all of you out there in the great blogging netherworld is this: How do you decide what to reveal, and what not reveal? For instance, many of the mommy bloggers don't list their children's names, and I think this will probably be the route I go, as well. I have yet to decide. But I would love to hear how you arrived at the decision. And how you continue to keep it up. And how you decide what is off limits. And what other things you don't reveal for "Safety" sake (names of towns? last names? too much revealing information?)

And so... with all of that rambling... a bit of myself. A rough day today, with stresses all around, but as I put my beautiful daughter to bed we laid there together in the semi-dark, and discussed what it would be like if our noses were in different places. On our head. Our cheek. Two noses on top of each other. We giggled together, and I wondered how on earth we could ever make a hat if some people had their nose on top of their head. I am often in a rush to put her to bed and get on with all the things I need or want to do in the evening (being a night person and all), but I love those moments we have together, just us. It's really the best time to get her to snuggle, and just about the only time she'll say that she loves me. It's our time. I'm trying not to rush it.

2 comments:

Beck said...

Hi!
I don't use my kids' names or the name of my town and that keeps me feeling more comfortable. Not that I think my blog is read my stalker killer ninjas or anything, but you never know who will be reading AND I do feel like my kids deserve their privacy.

Bea said...

I try to fix it so that nobody googling my name (or, eventually, the names of my kids) will land on my blog. I have not tried to fix it so that nobody who reads my blog could ever track me down - that would be too limiting for me.

I avoid talking too much about work, especially anything that would approach a privacy violation for my students. The only time I did a post like that it immediately got picked up by a big academic site which sent millions of hits my way and FREAKED ME OUT. So now I don't say a whole lot about my job.

Adding links:

a) put (b) between these: <>
b) in between put this:

a href="url"

c) then put the words that you want to light up all linky-like
d) put (e) between these: <>
e) in between put this: /a

(We'll see if that worked - it's hard to talk about HTML in HTML.)