My first, un-blank page.

At the beginning of each notebook I own -- you know, those notebooks that us wannabe writers have everywhere, full of little bits of everything, sketches, bad poetry -- I leave a blank page. An English professor once taught me that the first page of each notebook should contain a quote so inspiring, so profound, that it would guide the writer to greatness on the following pages. I spent a week searching for that quote before giving up. When the professor asked why I hadn't written on my first page, I told her: no matter how crappy the rest of my writing was, I could look back and see that anything's better than the one week I waited for genius and wrote nothing at all. It soon became superstition.

However, that was about ten years ago, and my writing habits haven't improved. So I'm taking a break from the notebooks and starting a blog.

This is a thing for me, the whole blogging thing. I'm a privacy freak. I make the ACLU seem cautious. While most people believe Armeggedon will begin with the rapture or religious war, I believe it began with e-mail. We trust e-mail with some of the most intimate details of our lives, even while knowing information transmitted online is about the least secure form of communication we have. Can't you see it? Someone learning to open all e-mail accounts to a public search engine? Every word typed in anger, each note written thinking that only two sets of eyes would see it? Wars sparked, marriages destroyed, friendships ended, all of us fired for what we really think of our bosses? The college population would be picked up at their dorms the following morning by parents with shackles. The less posted online, the safer. My theory is that we should only write/buy/post online if we are comfortable that our children will one day see it, because they probably will. Sure, this sounds like a scenario conceived by George Orwell with a screenplay adapted by Oliver Stone, but it's my thing. A privacy thing.

So blogging seems like the last thing I'd want to do. And that was always my excuse: do I really want to post my thoughts and rantings online, where they'd be Out There? But then the obvious struck me...

I want to be a writer. If my worst-case scenario was that my words would be read, then maybe my ambitions are misdirected altogether.

So here I am.

Next up... something to say... (starting off with a blank page would've been so much easier)