Part Time Pop Star

I tell my husband all the time that I was funny in Kansas. I'm not sure if the state changed me or if the people I hung out with were really inebriated or if I just have a Kansas sort of sense of humor. Maybe all of the above.

But I was never the funny one in high school. I got in the occasional good one liner, but not often. Then I went to college and I sort of found myself. I mean, I didn't realize I was lost until I really came into my own personality. Now don't get me wrong, I was your typical pompous, self-saturated little girl away from Mommy for the first time. I made mistakes - big ones. I pissed off people who were really important to me and broke bonds and did all the terrible stuff one usually does in college, but I did it as me. Not as the facade that I presented in high school in a desperate attempt to maintain my not-quite-bottom-of-the-social-heap status.

And I was moderately popular. Not in the way the cheerleaders are popular (although at Bethel the cheerleaders are not popular but you get what I'm getting at) but I had lots of friends, everyone knew me, a few hated me (which is imperative to popularity). And why? I wasn't suddenly gorgeous, if anything I felt less intelligent there than I had in high school. But I was funny.

Then, I came home. Back in Georgetown, I assumed that I would still be funny. It was me, after all, right? Wrong. No one here laughs at my jokes and people often just stare at me like they don't get me at all. My husband (who is the king of complimenting me) reminds me occasionally that I am not funny.

That's one of the reasons I started blogging. I wanted to funny again. I figured if I opened up the pool, the people who liked my brand of humor (whatever it is) would gravitate toward me and I would find some common ground. Get some lol's in my comments. Feel like I had brightened someone's day. Sunshiney and all, you know?

I also wanted to track things. Mom was constantly telling me to write down the funny things Brynna said. She called me mum-mum until she was almost 2 and said set for yes until she was 3. I knew that if I didn't write them down, I would lose them. And I am not a writer-downer of things. I mean, I write things down and stick them in a drawer or a computer file and don't have any sense of why I want to keep them, so I don't know where to put them. A blog, I figured would be my there. I could stick all the cuteness, all the humor, all the frustration and love and skinned knees into one hole in the internet. People would tolerate me because I was "mommy blogging" and in the future, I could look back on my mommy blogging archives and say "Mum-Mum. I loved that. I felt sort of Brittish whenever she said it and I loved that."

That's another. The third reason I started blogging was to write. Just to put fingers to keyboard and write. Get something out. Extract words from my skull in hopes that getting back in the habit would hasten the appearance of the Great American Novel.

Then I started. I found that I never seemed to write down all those things here, and that I was still only sometimes funny, but instead I found I needed the outlet. I needed to pour something out into the keyboard and see where it landed. Some days it's my soul, or sort of my soul and some days it's something else entirely.

But no one read it. No one. I mean, like my mom and that was it. So, I started promoting it. I joined some sites and I posted announcements sometimes on my Facebook and I read other people's blogs and commented and linked to my own. And I started meeting people. Some were new to me and some were estranged. And then I was blogging for a whole new reason. Now, I was community. (Blech - that word is so overused.) I met people I would never have met in real life and I reconnected with people who may or may not have forgotten who I was. And I thrived off the feeling. Better than laughter, that feeling of belonging. Which, if we want to get all psychoanalytic about it is probably what that making people laugh thing is all about is feeling like I belong, like I can contribute.

Redneck Mommy wrote one time that we blog to feel like rock stars. That we are the high school geeks, the nerds, the ones who were denied attention and we come full circle when we are writing and being published on the interwebz! I never felt like that, until today. Today I ran my analytic tool (which is www.statcounter.com, by the way) and I felt like a total rock star. Okay, to put things in perspective, I am not a rock star. Redneck Mommy and Pioneer Woman are rock stars and I am the girl who sells t-shirts for the opening act, but still, rock star related, me.

So, today, and today only, I am rock star material. I am rock-star-esque. Tomorrow I will again be writing about ghosts or four year olds or baby milestones or not wanting to leave my house ever again, but not today. Today, I write this missive to the universe for a plethora of reasons, one of which is that I am rockstaresque.

Stephen King (my most favorite rock star writer) wrote once (and I am totally paraphrasing) that he retired because he wanted to enjoy writing without the deadlines and book tours and yadda, yadda, yadda, but he found he couldn't write without an audience. He needed someone to read the book for the process to be complete. (Again, this is more my reading of what SK said than anything he actually said.) And I wanted to just write, with no ultimate goal. But found, that I couldn't.

So, since of most of you guys (at least the commenters among you) have blogs, why do you blog? Why do you put yourself out there and chance ridicule? Do you feel like a rock star? Do you do it for the audience, for yourself or for some amalgamation? Just curious.