small victory: an actual post

Here's the deal:  I set up this blog in August 2008.  Yeah.  Almost two years ago.

I will pause here to let you judge me for my slackerness and lack of follow-through-ness (and to give you time to be impressed with my ability to make up words).

I can think of a few things that possessed me to try a blog back in the day.  We'll start with the easiest:  People told me I should.

Since college and in various situations, I've been saying “Jane Austen didn't prepare me for this.”   I pull out the Jane line at the ends of stories about blind dates and eHarmony {mis}adventures and getting a mortgage and that career girl panic that periodically sets in.

I pull out that line for an easy, relatable laugh.

Because it does always get a laugh.  And the laugh is almost always followed with a comment like, “You should write about that.”  Then I laugh and the other person laughs some more.  Laugh laugh laugh.  They compliment my wittiness and how I can charm words like they are snakes and I'm one of those Egyptian snake charmers with that thing that sounds like an oboe and...ok, that doesn't happen.

The true part is that lots of people say I should write about this 20-something life of mine.

The other true part is that I laugh because I don't want to be one of those millions of girls with a blog who thinks she has something original to say about this 20-something life.

But I do want to write—I have a degree in English, after all.  I'm a writer by day, but I want to be a writer by night, too, someone who writes things not related to work.  Besides, “writer by night” has a much more dramatic ring to it, as if I were a superhero{ine} with a netbook.  I’d like to reconnect with that little creative corner of me that somehow got a bit smaller in the post-college jump into work-a-day world.

And so back in 2008, I became one of those 20-something girls with a blog, and I already had a name for it, a name that always got me a laugh:  Jane Austen Didn't Prepare Me for This.

{Quickly, then, I became one of those 20-something girls with a blog she never worked on and a very refined sense of guilt about that.}

There are other reasons {two, in fact, and I'll explain those soon} for why I started a blog and then abandoned it, but for right now, I need to celebrate this small victory:  an actual post.