Los Angeles, California
Shohei Ohtani just hit his 300th home run, but I beat him by ten. Ok, not home runs, but blog posts. Still, while it's not 310 dingers, I think it's an accomplishment. Back in the day, when I started this blog, the blog universe was packed with blogs of all kinds. I didn't pay a lot of attention, although there was a food blog, Orangette, that I loved. I knew someone who started a blog, and I think I wrote about this in an early post on my own blog. I sent her an email to check in on her and her life, and she responded : If you want to know how I'm doing, read my blog. That seemed a little self-involved (which frankly confirmed what I already knew about her), so I didn't.
It would have never occurred to me to start a blog had I not had a conversation with someone I met in Lake Tahoe. She was a recent graduate with a master's degree in Journalism. And she had just started a blog. I told her about my misgivings about blogs but she pointed out that it could serve a function for my writing. Even on my second martini at the bar where I met her (she was a part of our group and I had been introduced to her), this seemed to create the necessary lightbulb over my head. As she described it, I could make it a writing practice. I let this marinate for about six months, then decided to utilize blogger.com, which she had recommended, and I designed and started this blog. I made a contract with myself that I would write two posts every month. As you can see here to your right, I mostly lived up to that, though there were a few years when I relied more on my personal journal for my writing, as I utilized it as one of my tools to dig out of a dark hole of grief. Later, just before the pandemic, I decided to say sayonara to my blog. And then, with all the time I had each day as we hunkered down, I pulled back that final farewell post, and kept writing.
I don't know how Ohtani feels about his 300th home run. I mean, it's not like he isn't doing phenomenal things in almost every series he plays. If I were, heaven forbid, to go back and read every post I have written, I am sure I would be chagrinned to read some of them. Certainly during the demon President's first term, I unleashed a lot of what our team was feeling: Frustration; disbelief, and intense embarrassment. A case could be made that I should have saved that for my journal, but what the hell. It's part of the 310. And maybe if I were to go through all of my posts, I might find a gem or two.
Inspired by Orangette, I started with the concept of including recipes. But the formatting was time-consuming, and I let that go so I could concentrate on what I really needed to do. To write. While I have the philosophy that I do three things competently (cooking, dancing and writing), the truth is that writing is the one thing that comes naturally, and always has. I don't know how or why, but when I put fingers on a keyboard or hold pen in hand, words and phrases flow. They're not always good, but that's where editing comes in to play. But, sometimes I do go back and I read something that I cannot believe I wrote. Not that it is so good, but that I have conveyed something and now, in reading it, I have no idea from where those words, and the composition of those sentences, came. It's just something I can do.
I was a fairly proficient figure skater. I took to dance from a young age, but salsa was something I worked hard to learn by attending classes, and workshops, and practicing, practicing, practicing. Cooking has certainly come to me through a lot of trial and error., starting from a young age. Writing is different. While I do think my voice can be heard in my writing, as people have commented that my posts "sound like" me, I know I am not as verbally articulate in speaking. That flow only comes through writing, almost as if I am channeling someone else's words. But they are mine now, as are these posts here. All 310 of them.
