For the love of blogging.

My love of blogging started just a few short months before I started college. At OC, every student is given a laptop (and by given, I mean, they have upped your tuition enough that they can provide you a laptop). They started the program probably eight years (or more) ago with IBM ThinkPads and my freshman year they changed to Dell Inspirons. And of course, the year after I graduated they started MacBooks with a free iPhone.

Ok, back to my love of blogging. I got my laptop from OC right after I graduated from high school and had it for the entire summer leading up to the beginning of my college career. By providing thousands of students in a small area with laptops, you are encouraging marketing. What I mean by that is, one student finds a cool website or a funny video and literally within 30 minutes the entire campus has seen the same website/video. I saw it happen a thousand times. The first craze was Xanga. Ah, Xanga. Everyone and their pet fish had a Xanga at OC including myself (minus the pet fish part).

I had never liked writing before Xanga came along. Term papers, essays, all of those pretentious forms of writing are such a burden to me and I can hyperventilate myself into getting the best help from my husband on them. How do you think I got through Comm III? Having a mini freak out in the dining room the night before a paper was due, and my big brave husband came to the rescue, that’s how. The idea that writing must have a structure terrifies me. Opening paragraphs, thesis statements, closing arguments, they all make me want to jump off of a bridge. But you give me a notebook, or a letter or a blog to write with and I can produce stuff that (sometimes) makes for great reading. I won’t toot my own horn too much; I put the word sometimes in there for your benefit. So Xanga was a relief for me. I could write about whatever I wanted to write about and I could change from past tense to present tense in one sentence without getting an F. I loved writing on Xanga.

I met my husband on Xanga. I don’t know how many people know that, but we met because we were blogging. Sort of weird? Yes. The fact that we are married isn’t weird (because we are perfect for each other) but the idea of how we met is weird. I would have never imagined in a thousand years that I would have met the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with by writing about the “unknown gravy boats of death” that were being served in the cafeteria and that he would live 1,000 miles away from me. For that reason alone, blogging and Xanga have their own little corner in my heart. I, to this day, still have not deactivated my Xanga account even though I have not written on it since before we were married. A) Its sentimental and all of our stories and things that were happening when we met are on there and B) I am a little too lazy to dig through the website to try and figure out where the deactivation information is.

I didn’t realize how much I missed blogging until I started this one. I wanted to (and sometimes still have the desire to) post nine or ten time a day. I had (and have) so many things to write about but i've refrained. I love coming up with things to write about and finding photos to post even if my husband is one of three people who reads it (and he hears it all and sees it all anyways).