Gestation

Today, with a newly gifted fifty in my wallet, I rifled through the shelves of the bookstore in my parents' hometown after excusing myself from football festivities. This was a welcome solo adventure made even more welcome when I came across a familiar book that, no, I never read but had already decided I would like. This past summer I won a contest that the author (the publisher?) organized to promote the book. And there it was! In print, ready for my reading. Of course I wanted The Whole Five Feet by Christopher R. Beha, who sent me one of the volumes from his collection of Harvard Classics, the topic of his memoir. And what did I think in my moment of exaltation? I thought about how I would blog about this story if I had a blog. As I walked toward the register, I was constructing the post in my mind.

This is something I've been doing a lot lately. And I'm not surprised; I read blogs every day. Though it seems silly to write about the tone of blogs since there are a million bloggers with a million different voices, I do think that there is a sound that they (at least the ones I read) share. They remind me of the conversations that I have with fellow students: relaxed, unpretentiously intellectual (to us), humourous, reflective. And the refelective part is the bit I admire the most. One of the biggest challenges that I saw my English 101 students grapple with this past semester was their inability to recognize themselves as thinking people. And they really were. But I couldn't teach them to write until I taught them that they did have things to say. The difference between me and them is that I know there are things I want to write, but I don't do it. No one is telling me to write a personal narrative though I desperately want to. Thus, a blog is born. And that's the best way to put it. I feel like a daddy seahorse. They give birth to like two-hundred baby seahorses at a time ("Open new tab" -> Google "seahorse" -> Wikipedia entry for "Hippocampus (genus)" -> scroll to "Reproduction" -> My factoid is confirmed: 100-200 young released). But, on average, five of those young survive. This is blogging. I'm pregnant with so many posts, and I'm really excited to see which will grow into fully devoloped Hippocampi.*

*apologies to seahorses, or really, any living thing that's ever given birth. I use this extended metaphor naively.