In my never-ending quest to improve myself, I figured creating a personal blog would be the optimum way to cultivate my writing “skills.” Step one, obviously, was to set up a blog. Clearly this would have to be a free blog. I’ve made some creative life choices lately, notably quitting my job without any other prospects in sight. This leaves me with what I like to call a “shortage” of money (it could also be called “aneurysm-inducing fear of the future and my impending homelessness” but I like to phrase things positively for the benefit of the reader). My thought process is this: get a blog; cost to me is $0. Become e-famous thanks to my hilarious anecdotes and chronicles of my day-to-day antics… by mid-July become the next Tucker Max… EASY! You all rolled your eyes when I deserted my steady income for the chance to screw around all summer, but who’s laughing now?! (I like to set realistic goals for myself.)
Anyway, lesson #1 of the day is that picking a free blog is much more difficult than one would think. First of all, which host site do I choose? The top two choices seemed to be
Blogger or
WordPress. (Oh for the days of inappropriately public teenage internet whining, when
LiveJournal was the obvious and perfect choice! Anyone who knew me when I was 16, you know what I am talking about. Yikes.) I’ve had previous experience with Blogger (aka last autumn when I attempted to bolster a career in food writing by starting a recipe blog… after one half-hearted review of
Top Chef that dream died) but I wanted to branch out… be more professional (because nothing says “professional” like a free blog about my daily escapades that I advertise via my Facebook)… so I decided to give WordPress a shot. After spending about 20 minutes editing my template only to realize you have to purchase some weird “CSS Editor Package” in order to save your changes, I returned in a rage to Blogger. Are you kidding me? I am not
paying to change my link color from blue to pink. My lifestyle can’t afford that kind of luxury.
So there I was, step two, pick a username. Well, with the amount of assholes out there who want free blogs, at this point there is seriously nothing left. NOTHING. I found myself trying to register under completely ridiculous names that I would be embarrassed for anyone to even read. (At one point I had tried out the title of every ABBA song, then after the travesty of all that rejection, something like “magic-pegasus-diary” left my fingertips, are you kidding me?! What does that even mean?!) In the end, I just settled for a variation of my name for the address and no real “title” at all… I guess that years ago, all my Googling of Fiona Apple lyrics for my high school LiveJournal used up any shreds of internet creativity I had left. Apparently my dramatic literary choices will haunt me even to this day…
Now you know how I created this moronic blog with a vaguely moronic name (and a 100% MORON for an author!). Enjoy the ride to the top. I know I will.
