Of “Evil Scissors” and “Nobler Modes of Life”

[Are these the "evil scissors" you were looking for?  (For more of this, go here.)]

In my last post, I alluded to the search engine terms shown in my statistics that bring people to my blog.  They are great fun to read and are the main reason I look at my stats.  Lord knows, I sure don’t get any pleasure out of that line graph they show where I often see, in one painful glance, the precipitous plunge of my plummeting blog statistics.

But the search engine terms are quite entertaining—sometimes humorous, sometimes happy, sometimes poetic, and sometimes poignant.    And sometimes, they’re real headscratchers.   For example, this one:  “rat collars; I put them on my rat.”  Now this one gives rise to so many questions.  First, which one of my posts did that phrase correspond to?   Do they really put a collar on their rat?  Why?  If so, do they take their rats for a walk?  Are there little rat leashes too?  If they do take them for a walk, what happens when they meet a cat?  Where do you buy rat collars?  Do rats really have a well-defined neck that a collar would work with?   Really, the questions are endless.

In the same “headscratcher” category, we have “evil scissors,” “snake recipes,” “family tree nuts,” and “babies playing poker.”  “Babies playing poker” certainly brings an immediate image to your mind, doesn’t it?  Can’t you just see the babies, with Budweisers in their hands, cigars dangling from their mouths, poker chips piled high, sitting in diapers around a table?

Then there’s the funny and whimsical—“leaf quizzical,” “money spiders,” “bee collision,” and “quiet stupidity.”  One thing’s for sure—I’ll take “quiet stupidity” over “loud stupidity” any day. 

But my favorites are the poetic ones.  “Nobler modes of life.”  “He treasures her like a poem.”  “The forever kind of love.”   What I like imagining are all the wonderful stories behind these searches.  Who are you, sweet man, who treasures your lover like a poem and loves her, no doubt, with the forever kind of love?  A nobler mode of life you live, to be sure.

But there are two that I get on a regular basis that almost bring me to tears.  One of them is “Mama died I miss her” or “Where are you Mama” or just “mama.”  The other is a single word:  “Alone.”  Or sometimes “Lonely.” 

For any of you that find my blog using that phrase, I hope you have found just a little bit of what you’re looking for.   If you are lonely, I hope that, somehow, reading my blog helps by showing you that you are not alone in feeling lonely.  It’s a universal emotion that very few of us escape.  And I hope that reading the kind comments of my blogging friends makes you feel just a little less alone, as it does me,  by helping you see, as I have, that there is goodness and kindness yet to be found in this sad, tired, old world.  And that I, and you, are not alone.  We are not alone.

A small, wobbly step into the blogosphere

Hi there.  If you’re reading this, that means that, against all odds (with all the other gazillion blogs you could have clicked on), you have clicked through to my humble little corner of the blogosphere.  Thank you.  I am most grateful.

Though I have been reading other folk’s blogs for a couple of years now, I’ve resisted the thought of having my own.  While I enjoyed reading about the minutia of the lives of people all over the world, I somehow couldn’t imagine that they’d be interested in mine.  I lead a quiet life here in the heart of Appalachia.  My idea of a big time is sitting on my porch watching fireflies (there are a gracious plenty here) or walking in autumn through the old abandoned apple orchard above our house and gathering those wormy, wizened apples that, though blemished, make very tasty apple bread. 

Really, though, what kept me, up to now, from starting my own blog was fear.  Just plain fear.  So many of the bloggers I read sound like professional writers.  Their ruminations on life are perfectly formed essays, whereas mine might sound more like something I wrote for my seventh grade English class.  And one thing I have noticed is that most bloggers seem to be middle and upper-middle class, college-educated people.  I am not.  I graduated high school and have worked as a library assistant, a secretary, and a janitor.  My husband is a carpenter.  We both love books and learning, but neither of us graduated from college.  It is rather intimidating to put your writing out there for all to see when the most advanced training you’ve had was how to write a ten-page term paper for your final twelfth-grade English project.  
 
Nevertheless, I want more than anything to be a writer.  Someday, I hope to take a college class in writing, but for now, I’ll make this blog my training ground.  Who knows, maybe my writing will get better.  Maybe someone will read my words and have suggestions for making them better.  Maybe I’ll gain confidence   Maybe I’ll make a friend.  I’ve already been fortunate enough to find kinship with one fellow reader and writer through just reading blogs.  (Hi, Wesley!)
 
Or maybe I’ll simply have a sense of accomplishment from overcoming my fear, from stepping out of my comfort zone, and from taking that one tentative, wobbly step towards the day when I feel like I can call myself a writer. 
 
So, if you’re still reading, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.  I sure hope you keep reading.  I’ll do my best not to disappoint you.