My apologies to Judy Blume

I hesitate to venture for a second time into the world of blogspot for a multitude of reasons:


1.) Empirical evidence shows that when I attempt to write in an organized fashion (diaries, journals, blogs, what-have-you), it can become sporadic, forced, trite, or just disappear altogether.

2.) Do I really need to give myself another digital identity beyond Twitter, Facebook, Xanga, etc.? Not to mention the sheer timesuck of adding another site to regularly read/post to...

3.) Although the last three months have been a re-birth of sorts, it has been awhile since I have considered myself a true "writer." Nagging insecurities hijack my desire to be heard and convince me that what I bring to the table is narcissistic, shallow, and not worth sharing. Plus, I have a tendency to ramble, which is not always appreciated by reading audiences.

Fortunately (I think), I have decided that these reasons are all bunk. And in a typical ex-debater fashion, I will tell you why.

Off my 1: This blog will serve more specific purposes and have a much more selective audience than the other venues, which I hope will allow/cause me to be more productive. As the pirated and bastardized title suggests, this will at least partially be a place to document/discuss my first year of teaching (yep, signed a contract yesterday, pretty pumped about it). But because there are too many of those blogs, my musings as a novice educator will also be interspersed with more artistic wordplay - or at least that's the goal.

Off my 2: In a word, yes. My tweets are too flippant and fleeting, Grandma's eyes are on Facebook, and the schlock I post to Xanga is not only inane but isolated in its antiquity. Now that I've got a big-girl job, it's time to balance out the others with a big-girl virtual identity. No updates on what's for dinner or who cut me off on K-10 or who's macking on who on Glee. LOL speak will be kept to an absolute minimum (for realz), and no memes allowed. These things I promise to you and to myself.

Off my 3: I'd be a hypocrite if I let self-censorship stop me. Just last week (or maybe the week before... things are getting blurry), I advised my creative writing students (via William Stafford, via my personal Yoda, Bill) that, "a writer is not so much someone who has something to say as (s)he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things (s)he would not have thought of if (s)he had not started to say them." Translation: "Amanda, stop claiming failure before you've even tried or nothing will ever happen. Some of it might suck, and some of it might be absolutely terrible, but because it's yours to say, it has value." It may have taken a team of Williams to convince me of this, but here goes.