Happy New-ish Year! Or soon-to-be Chinese New Year, whichever you prefer. Your own intrepid, if reluctant, blogger is not much of a resolutioneer. Also, she is not very timely. Still, it is past time to change the content on the top of this blog, so allowance must be made, something must be written!
So it is with this humble mission in mind that I come to you with my PLAN. It is a PLAN to be less of a sissy. More seldom a sniveling poltroon. Quit being such a bland baby. Dust off the chain-mail that my fearless interior lady knight wears and come out of the brave-deed-doer closet (and perhaps also stop using mixed metaphors). Okay, so maybe nothing so brash. BUT! Nonetheless, I have always been a bit scared to do as I pleased, and I have decided to have done with it. What the hell could possibly happen?
“Life expands or contracts in direct proportion to one’s courage.” — Anais Nin
I read the above one morning a few weeks ago and said, “YES! She has idenitified my problem. Here I am, contracting. How awful!”
Be it so RESOLVED: I will do at least one thing that scares me every week.
Sadly, it does not take much to scare me, so this is easier than it seems. I am not scared of bodily harm. I could skydive easily. I rather like rock climbing and white-water rafting, but you other people with your own thoughts, you are terrifying. You might even NOT LIKE me. And then it’s possible I would DIE, from not being sufficiently charming and smart to have EVERYONE like me.
BUT I have enrolled in Gender Studies 101 with a bunch of terrifying 18 year olds, and I have found that I can speak out even though I feel like I have no right no be there being a faculty member and, no exaggeration needed, the oldest person in the room besides the professor by a fair few years. After several weeks of class, I am waaaay less intimidated, but I was, and now I am not, because I registered instead of making excuses. So yay!
Join me if you like. I might even post here more, because I am mostly terrified of all of you judging me and my possibly drab and shallow writing. (Don’t think I’m not afraid of telling you all how afraid I am, because I am.)
It appears that the only way to motivate myself to write in this bedeviled thing is to make rather large, silly lists. Since I haven’t been in a terribly silly mood this spring, it has indefinitely fallen by the wayside, but THINGS have happened, many THINGS. As a result, you, gentle reader, are entitled to one (1) fanciful picture of an octopod, and a list.
Except for when, of course, I do believe. Or did, anyway. It’s been a long time since I hid my head beneath the sheets, terrified to peek out and behold the grim horror that surely awaited me. I could probably have been awarded a medal for my performances in the little girls’ long jump from the light switch to my bed to avoid the gory monster underneath or the 50 yard dash up the basement stairs.
I say Ma’am and Sir to my elders. I grew up in a town of fewer than 10,000 where everyone knows me and who my parents are. I smile at people I don’t know on the streets. I’m pretty sure that most of the people I meet in my current Deep South haunt think I’m respectful, kind, non-threatening. They’re pretty sure I’m “one of us.” But they might be a lot more suspicious if they knew the truth. I’m a progressive, feminist vegan (and possibly other labels people might find even more threatening if I was willing to lay it all out there for you, but I’m not). I’m participating in a blog carnival today drawing attention to young feminists. Apparently, some young(ish?) women like myself are none too willing to tag themselves feminists. 
When one fails to post on a modest little blog like mine, the need to make the next post that one would post be a uber-fantastical post blossoms and grows and consumes until it is nigh impossible to post any post at all. After considering for weeks now what knowledge I could possibly share that would be of interest to anyone other than myself (and perhaps my grandmother who would celebrate any small accomplishment of mine, but hates pretty much every topic in which I am personally interested), I have decided to disappoint anyone who comes here to read this at this moment rather than allowing my own (or any one else’s) expectations to unnaturally balloon any further. I turn 27 next week, and I haven’t the energy to think that I might have something amazing to say that no one else has said on the internet ever before any more. Perhaps, in my soon-to-be advanced age, I will have the proper life experience to know that if one fails to write on a blog for such an infernally long time, the necessity to do so transforms into a giant, yellow-eyed, furry, 14-headed manticore of suckage. So let me delay no further with my pitiful effort,
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