Finding Myself - One Blog at a Time...

I spent a lot of time last night thinking about blogging - far too much time, truth be told. I watched Julie and Julia, the Nora Efron movie that used a double narrative to describe the lives of Julia Child, America's French cooking instructor, and Julie Powell, the woman who became famous for blogging about her adventures trying to follow Child's recipes.

My thought process went like this:

First off, as Julie's audience grew, I found myself wondering for the umpteenth time (How many is "umpteen"? Does that fall between 16 & 17 or 13 & 14?) how on earth she got so many readers. My green-eyed monster came out to play, in other words. It happens a lot when I see a really popular blog. I start to wonder exactly what I'm doing wrong. Not enough self-promotion? Not using the right keywords, to be picked up by search engines? Is there somewhere I'm supposed to list my blog so that people will find it? Or do I really just suck?

Then, while I was still contemplating my failure to generate readership, the scene came when Julie and her husband, Eric, fight over her obsession with her blog. At one point she asks him, "Isn't that what blogging is about? Me, me, me?"

At the same time, I was surfing around looking for ways to promote myself (still having follower-envy) and one directory listed their criteria for listing a blog:

1) Must be topical - no personal blogs (AKA No "Today we went to the market and I took this picture of Little Bobby biting on a lemon.")

2) Blog cannot contain material copied and pasted from other sources.

Okay, this one gave me pause. I make it a point to always credit my sources, so to me, that's not the issue here. But isn't the point of a blog to be writing?

I started my other site as a parenting site. I thought I'd have a lot to say about that. I really didn't want to blother on constantly about my own kids, though. I wanted to write about issues. I wanted the site to have some journalistic integrity.

But the fact is, being a parent is only a part of who I am. I found myself dying to comment on other issues on which I had an opinion - and believe me, there are many. All of which led to the spur-of-the-moment creation of this site.

Much like Julie and Julia, I think I'm trying to find myself these days. That's a concept I've always mocked, but I'm really starting to understand it now. My earliest ambition was to be a writer, so I suppose that's a logical place to start. Which is why it's all the more disappointing to me that I'm not doing a lot of writing. Copying and pasting someone else's article, and then doing a one paragraph, or even one-sentence commentary on it might work for someone like Perez Hilton, but it's not good enough for me.

I really do like this blog, and I have no intention of quitting. What I want to do, though, is assume intelligence on the part of my readers - at least enough to be able to click a link to an article if I feel more information is warranted on an issue. Me, though, I'll be focusing more on my opinions on the issues, rather than on trying so hard to be a reporter that I'm just regurgitating others' work.

One thing I liked about that movie: Julia Child was 37 when she started to learn to cook. I'm 33, at least for a few more weeks (I'm still 33... I'm still 33...) Despite my inner voice telling me that I should have it all figured out by now, I guess it's okay that I don't. Someday I'll figure out what I want to be when I grow up.