First impressions are big with me. BIG. How big is big? Let me give you an example. When The Husband and I were touring wedding venues, I would judge sites by the way the wedding coordinators shook hands. Not kidding. After a while, The Husband “grounded” me from shaking hands. When that didn’t work, he would muscle his way between the coordinators and me, moving them in another direction before I could strike down my judgment on them and their venues. The Husband has, at best, one athletic bone in his body, but the blocks he performed to do this would make NFL linemen hang up their cleats in shame. Again, not kidding. Does this give you a good idea of how big first impressions are with me?
My First Impression Obsession is partially what’s taken me so long to write my first blog posting. I put my blog page together weeks ago but am just now making my first post. Why? It’s not that work has been so stressful that I’ve wanted to come home and eat ice cream every night instead of spend more time on the computer. (It has.) It’s not that I’m in Week 10 of recovering from hip surgery and have to do some form of PT every day. (I am.) It’s not that I have to work housework, couponing, bridal shower plans, and whatever else my little Perfect Melancholy brain puts onto my to-do list (more on that later, I’m sure) in around paying attention to my better half and furbabies. (I do.) It’s that I haven’t been satisfied with any of the “first” blog postings I’ve written. And I’ve written several—both on paper and in my head. None of them, though, has struck me as “the one” I want to kick off my blog with.
This morning, after reviewing everything I’d written or thought of over the past few weeks, I made an executive decision—I scrapped everything and decided to just write and see what came out. As an English weenie (a term coined by The Husband) and editor, this annoys the SNOT out of me. In fact, I’ve given it it’s own term—Stream of Consciousness Writing (or SCW for short)—and whenever I come across writing like it, my mind clicks into Dante Mode and starts devising a circle of Hell for these “writers.” Yet I find myself committing my own pet peeve…and strangely, it feels right. Strangely, I think I’ve written my “first” post.
So I’m ending here before my brain has a chance to overthink this and do a take-back. I promise not to do this too often—engage in SCW. Otherwise, I just might have to doom myself to something like trying to stay afloat in a whirlpool of my own thoughts for the rest of eternity!
