Hey! Look! My first blog post ever!

Four days ago I went to bed feeling very excited.

“Wow! I don’t have to work tomorrow! I don’t have any appointments at all! I don’t ever have to leave the house, so I can just sit on the couch in my bathrobe all day! This makes it the perfect day to write my first blog post! This is gonna be awesome!”

The next morning I awoke discombobulated from a night of anxiety dreams about taking my special-needs rabbit to a new veterinarian, and less inclined towards excessive use of exclamation points. I felt a great deal more skepticism about how my blog-starting plans were going to work out. My mega-mug of coffee did nothing to assuage my sense of trepidation.

So I visited my favorite blogs, looking for clues. I was hoping to find their first posts to see what they did.

I was strangely unable to locate those posts. I did some poking around in the archives, but nowhere did I find anything that said, “Hey! Look! My first blog post ever!”

I don’t know why this is, but my suspicion is that they were deleted. Those folks have been refining their skills for years, and their personal standards have gone up considerably. At a certain point, they probably went back and eliminated the evidence that they, too, had to start somewhere without quite knowing how to do it.

Beginnings are messy — at least for me. That first reaching out to test the waters can be all the fun of a cannonball into the deep end of the pool, but often it’s more like teenage forays into sex — exciting, awkward, vulnerable, and not something you want to be reminded of in any detail years later. To get to that “years later” point where sex is awesome, you have to go through the blundering beginnings of it (hopefully you have no idea what I’m talking about). I also think that if you’re doing things even a little bit right and making a habit of challenging yourself, life is full of beginnings — and all of the floundering and false starts that are part of that. It’s not a matter of knowing what you’re doing so much as becoming more comfortable with the process of figuring it out. I tend to figure things out as I go. So here we are.

I’m supposed to tell you what my blog will be about. I don’t think I can do that yet. I can, at least, tell you what I’m about.

I currently work for a small local nonprofit. Most of what I do is behind-the-scenes communications work for a capital campaign.

I believe that communication is really about storytelling and creating connections, and figuring out the best way to do both across a variety of different media. I experiment with words, sketches, graphics, and photos.

I’m interested in a wide range of subjects: bunnies, community planning, bicycle infrastructure, the intersection between culture and personal choices, inline skating, digital art and design, what’s going on in my neighborhood, tech toys, cats, fiber arts, learning new things, and connecting with new people — in no particular order. Sometimes I like to dig in deep and carefully sort through the details of a thing. Sometimes I just want to share a cute bunny pic. If any of that sounds good to you, I hope you’ll read, respond, and make this a conversation.

C’mon, hit that “follow” button. Come along with me as I sort this out. I’d love your company!