The Christening

So. I’m starting a blog. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now, record the day-to-day events of my new(ish) life in the Pacific Northwest. Gentle reflection, biting objectivity, wry wit, occasional pictures and stupid videos from the internet. All of this and more.

And then I went on Blogspot.com and set up an account. Wrestled with different names, finally settling somewhat uneasily with Confessions of a Post-Oklahoman. My first choice was Recovering Oklahoman, but that seemed too negative. Recovering seemed to imply that there was something wrong with being from Oklahoma, something that needs to be recovered from. And while it’s arguable that there are many, MANY things wrong with the state as a whole (all 77 counties voting Republican, rampant intolerance, Sally Kern, etc.), there’s nothing at all wrong with being from Oklahoma. Funny that it took moving over two thousand miles away to finally make me proud to hail from Oklahoma.

Anyway, back to the creation of the blog and its inaugural post. I picked a title that I wasn’t dissatisfied with. I picked a generic starting layout. I picked a title for my first post, envisioning a middle-aged woman in furs shattering a green glass bottle of champagne on the massive iron hull of a giant freighter as I typed. Then I opened up a new word file, staring at that blank page, daydreaming about the untapped potential that I would coax forth.

Three days later, the page is still blank. While pondering how I should begin my post-premiere, I thought I should check on my ever-expanding Travian kingdom, just to make sure no one was trying to raid my online stash. Then I checked on my other kingdom and attacked some poor defenseless noob. Then I thought of something clever to say on the AEN’s message board. Then I hopped on Twitter, then Facebook, then I slummed around on Myspace. Then I checked the news on CNN’s site, then watched the newest episode of The Office on Hulu. And so on and so forth. The word file, my newly-created blog, and another page about organic gardening I found last week but still haven’t gotten around to actually reading, are all minimized and waiting on my task bar.

Thank you, high speed internet. Thank you for whittling my attention span down to that of a mynah bird. What’s the downside of a tool that can provide almost limitless information at your fingertips? You inevitably end up wasting all your time trying to touch everything. Or at least that’s how it is with me. I can follow links holistically for hours on end, simultaneously checking and rechecking favorite sites for any scrap of an update. An innocent trip to Facebook quickly devolves into a never-ending string of quizzes that reveal what literary period I’m most like (post-modern), what bad guy I have the most in common with (Castro), and what “evil, evil fucking sea monster” I resemble (a jellyfish). I don't even want to think about Youtube.

It’s become apparent that if I’m ever going to be productive again as a writer, the internet must die.

So in an effort to pull myself away from that endlessly informative and distracting möbius strip, I’ve decided to write from my laptop. In the laundry room. With no wireless card. And while I was lured back to my PC several times in the last couple hours to wallow in online poker and gmail, I’ve somehow managed to repeatedly come back to the laptop and finish this first damn post. And maybe once I’ve saved this onto a flash drive I’ll even remember to upload it after staring at this week’s batch of celebrity upskirts.

Thank you and good night.