Welcome To My Life

      Blogging is kind of a weird thing to do. It's like writing a journal online for everyone's viewing and reading pleasure, which is something I definitely never had any interest in doing until a few weeks ago. I used to be so good at keeping in touch with friends and family members. It used to be so easy for me to just call someone up on the phone or send a text message and start some intriguing conversation about life, but now I do good to talk to somebody on the phone once a month, and most of the time that doesn't even happen!

     

So why am I blogging? 1.) Because over the last two years I've managed to morph into a horrible communicator and this is my way of letting those who care know what's going on in my life. 

2.) I've always liked writing. In my high school year book from senior year my English teacher wrote, "You must continue to WRITE!" And he wrote it just like that, except it was in cursive, and he wrote it over the top of all the other teachers' pictures in the yearbook which makes that note a pain in the butt to read...poor guy was a hippie and probably burnt out the reasoning portion of his brain at Woodstock, which is probably why he was my favorite teacher. So I'm following the advice of John Paul Abbott and am continuing to write, even though I'm pretty sure this isn't quite what he had in mind. 

3.) I have discovered that my favorite thing to talk about is....myself! I'm taking an institute class this year called Dating and Courtship (feel free to make fun of me, because it really is pretty ridiculous that at one point I actually thought that class might actually be normal. Normal? No. Amusing? Absolutely!) and in one of my lessons I learned that there are actually people in the world that either have a hard time talking about themselves, or that just don't like to talk about themselves. This came as quite a shock to me as I could probably talk about myself constantly as long as there were people around who were interested in listening to me. 

Anyways, we had to do this "exercise" where we got paired up with a member of the opposite sex (naturally...this IS a dating class) and had to talk about ourselves for one minute without interruption from our partner. My partner went first, and I'm not sure if it was harder for him to talk for a minute or for me to go a whole minute without interrupting! After telling me his name and how many people are in his family he ended up talking for 45 seconds about how the sky is blue and how the chairs in our classroom are hard and he thinks they should be more colorful (in case anyone missed it, the point of the exercise was to talk about OURSELVES for one minute...poor boy just couldn't do it.) When it was my turn I don't think I even made it to my name before the minute was over. Pretty pathetic, I know.

Something else I've learned from that institute class: I am a bad listener. I guess when people are talking I'm supposed to be doing this thing called listening, which involves actively thinking about the things people are telling me and not just sitting there being quiet and going to Catherine land. This is something I am bad at, but working on. I just have a bad habit of sitting there with an inquisitive look on my face (this tricks people into thinking I'm listening) and nodding every once in awhile when really I'm just thinking about myself. This is not listening. I could tell you what else is involved in listening too but after my teacher said that first thing about actively listening and not just sitting there being quiet, well...I just kind of stopped listening and started thinking about myself some more! 

So those are the main reasons why I am writing a blog, not to mention I think I've had at least 10 people tell me over the course of my lifetime that they would really love spending a day inside my head so they could see what goes on in there, so hopefully this is entertaining for them. So aside from the part about me loving to talk about myself, this blog really is kind of unselfish, because I'm doing it for all those poor souls who try as they might, just cannot understand what goes on in my head. Plus, when you aren't around somebody everyday (and even sometimes when you are) you tend to forget or just miss out on the person they really are or maybe you just take it for granted. 

I'm pretty sure I change on a daily basis, and I'm sure there are good friends and possibly even family members that miss out on the person I am becoming everyday, and I would hate for the people I love most to not know who I really am. So...friends, family, and people I don't really know but who don't have anything better to do but read my blog, welcome to my life. This should be an interesting experience...