Blurbs from the Blog-o-sphere!

Greetings Blog-o-philes! 

Welcome to my virginal post in the land of the Blog-o-sphere! 

(I imagine this glowing Blog-o-Sphere to encircle the globe in low-Internet orbit, creating an electronic Matrix-style aurora-borealis much to the delight of the web denizens!)

While staring at my freshly-laundered, stark white and deceptively innocent blog entry box, I find not only the quiet comfort of a beckoning blank page, but also a familiar conundrum with which I find myself facing yet again. My age-old personal question: why start a new project? Who would care what I have to prattle on about? Will the effort be worth it? Aren't there enough bloggers out there already? Do I need an ego-stroking or some sort of justification for my adventures into the land of blogging? Or is this merely a selfless sharing of the random stuff floating through my head for the enjoyment of all? And, most of all, why start this NOW!?

Permeating my gray matter (actually, fairly pinkish in all the brains I've ever seen) are all the reasons one may wish to blog, pinging around in my brain like overly excited particles in the Large Hadron Collider. A blog is a creative outlet. Here I can feel free to recall funny memories, preserve a moment in time, and keep an electronic diary-of-sorts. Please note, this is not the kind inscribed in my semi-cursive amalgamation of middle school handwriting. The ones recounting in specific and grisly detail whatever juvenile occurrence inspired a scrabbled entry onto ridiculously small, spiral-bound, hideously pastel pages. No, nothing like that. (Well, at least not hand-written. And I promise to use less pastels).

Also colluding with these more concrete facts of what a blog IS and what it can DO are the more nebulous reasons that filter my thoughts like a Brita on the tap (or other water-filtration system of your choice, let's not be prejudiced. No Cryptosporidium here!) I'm obsessed with words, concepts, ideas, BRAIN FOOD. I assign myself research topics at random (including spending the better part of a year attempting to read a book about Glacial Lake Missoula - in which the mere mention of alluvial soil and glacial moraines would instantly produce a near-narcoleptic stupor! I did, however, eventually finish the book, and consequently had excessive enthusiasm evaluating every road cut for signs of glaciation, spotting glacial erratics scattered throughout the scrublands of western Washington state and gushing about the ice dams while driving through what most people consider a very boring landscape!)

Other signs of my word obsession are present in my life. I positively CANNOT look anything up in a dictionary without getting sidetracked and reading half of the dictionary. Worse, if you're on the toilet while doing so, you get the suctioned backside ring of shame, and also... a numb butt. I love words. I play crossword puzzles and wordgames on my cellphone while waiting. For anything. Even standing in line. I love words, I love the way they feel, ideas they elicit, and how they can be combined to create a movie reel in the mind of the reader. I have no idea why I keep working in jobs where I have to deal with numbers. The only numbers I truly like are the ones adhering themselves to the positive balance column in my checkbook.

Moreover, the paradox inherent in the idea that digging into my own personal feelings and publishing them on a public forum that still somehow makes me strangely anonymous calls to me like a Siren. And the allure of the simple, yet somehow complicated desire to make people laugh. (This appears to be one of my primary motivating goals in life! Breathe-check! Ambulate-check! Masticate-check! Make dental hygienist snort and shake with laughter while holding dramatically shiny and dangerously pointy objects perilously close to my tender gumline, unprotected eyeballs and other vulnerable pieces of anatomy-check!) This is part of the reason I'm banned from calling my mother until she recovers from abdominal surgery (The causing of laughter, not my personal oral hygiene - to be perfectly clear).

Additionally, because at times I have the attention span of a gnat-squirrel hybrid drinking triple-shot espresso laced with methamphetamines, shorter posts often work better for my personality than attempting to finish my novel which I've currently spent more than half my life compiling. And while not everyone likes my sense of humor, those who do seem to find me particularly entertaining. All 3 of them.

But why, with my notably ADHD-inclined brain, (not officially diagnosed), my proven propensity for starting projects (but not necessarily completing them) and limited time available to even create, compose and conjure, would I possibly want to create a social obligation (albeit slight) to post on a blog?

Masochistic self-inflicted punishment. It's the only answer.

And.... I have opinions. Lots of them. Ranging from my intense hatred of eating any type of seafood (well, more specifically, anything that formerly inhabited any underwater abode, so as to include freshwater fish, not specifically limited to sea-faring creatures), an irrational fear of changing car tires, an extreme dislike of both Kristen Stewart and llamas (but more on them later...) to my personal feelings about RomComs, the pitfalls of an overly-sensitive palate when foods touch each other, the fact that I'm addicted to both chewing gum and PEOPLE magazine, the joys of drinking coffee, why I believe that discalculus (mixing up numbers) should be considered an actual disability, and why I resolutely believe anything that comes in colors *should* by rights be organized in ROYGBIV order. (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo & Violet - for those that missed elementary school.)

I guess I have a little OCD about some things. But as I remind friends, family, co-workers and the occasional stranger, "It's okay that I'm a little weird. It's a harmless kind of weird, not the stab-you-in-the-back-with-a-machete-while-you're-innocently-doing-dishes-in-the-kitchen kind of weird. Besides, my husband loves me."

So if you can handle the weirdness, the slight off-color humor, lack of proper grammatical structure and often mis-used punctuation, (I'm personally notorious for run-ons), the blatant overuse of parenthesis (see preceding use of parenthesis as well as present use), the nearly catastrophic preponderance of exclamation marks, and the errant catapulting about of ideas like the afore-mentioned accelerated energy particles inside the Large Hadron Collider.... then WELCOME to the world of my wacky imagination, and ENJOY!
-Sirens Echo

Today's profound thoughts of the day:
Learn more about the Large Hadron Collider here: http://www.lhc.ac.uk/
(And thank goodness we haven't all died due to a miniature black hole being created inside the LHC and engulfing the earth! Yes, these types of things can & do keep me up at night! Thankfully these incredibly smart folks are doing great work and I'm still around to thank them for it and read more about neutrinos!)

Why is Cryptosporidium a problem and is it filtered? http://www.brita.com.au/help/faqs-on_tap 

Cryptosporidium is a parasite which can cause severe diarrhoea. Cryptosporidium can live as a very resistant cyst of 3-4micron size in the water and will not be killed by chlorine. But the carbon block from BRITA is able to filter it mechanically (99,99% certified by NSF).


What does my mental image of the Blog-o-sphere resemble? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_australis_20050911.jpg
Thank you Wikipedia! This one's southern - hence Aurora Australis, but I envision a northern and mid-equatorial overlap in it as well... Hey! It's my Blog-o-sphere, it can look how it wants! Don't you judge me!!! (nods to "My Name is Earl").

Enjoyed my first post?
More to follow!