My Orphan Blogs

Here is an interesting factoid.  And by that, I mean interesting to me.  However, this will be of very little interest to you.  Given that, don’t feel the least bit obligated to read this or to contemplate the difference between a fact and a factoid, or to employ yourself in trying to determine which word is the most descriptive.  And whether the phrase “interesting factoid” is redundant.

Here is the fact/factoid:  I have an early history of blogging.  Early if you buy in to the ridiculous and highly prevalent definition of early as “anything that took place before last week” because we must constantly congratulate ourselves by calling ourselves early adopters among millions and millions of  similarly described early adopters.

At any rate, I started blogging on the Blogger platform,  for fun and folly, way, way back in 2005.  No reason.  Wait!  I just stated a reason:  “for fun and folly.”  But that is the only reason and it didn’t turn out to be enough of a reason for me.

At the time, I was persuaded that I didn’t want an audience for my blogging–that instead,  I was “trying to find my voice. ” I didn’t know what I meant by that.  Actually, I knew exactly what I meant by that.  I meant that while I loved the idea of banging out my thoughts on the keyboard and watching them appear as fonts, so fetchingly, on my computer screen, the very idea that others, known and unknown others, could then read my words—well.  Well that made me a little queasy.

That is a total overstatement.  It didn’t make me queasy.  But it made me uneasy.

Because even though I live my life in public, much of the time, I am also very private.  Sort of.

Not only that, uncharacteristically, I was unswayed by the wonder of it.  The wonder of encoding my thoughts and ideas into words and publishing them to the world wide web.

Regardless, I created several blogs.  Why several?   I suppose it is because I am prone to “too much of a good thing behavior.”  And on blogger, setting up blogs was easy and it was free.  And I was trying to “find my voice.”  Right?

Anyway, even though my blogs have long been abandoned, they are still out there.  Doing the important work they were intended to do.  The work of being ignored.  I think it is fitting that I should claim them here.  My orphaned blogs.  My Darling Orphan Blogs.

First, there was my main blog, Kiosk.  It was a personal blog of a sort.  Actually, I don’t have the slightest idea what it was about.

I created a blog called Jummy Speaks.  It was kind of a warped topical blog.  It featured a character named “Jummy,” and his weird, ungrammatical, third person, one sentence commentary on a specific New York Times article that I would select each day  Each post linked to its corresponding article.  And, each post purposely looked exactly the same and featured a pen and ink portrait of the Jummy character that was drawn by my father, who is a retired physicist with the chops of an Outsider artist.

Since I am an art collector, I made a blog I called The Kay Ballard Collection and posted low resolution, casual photographs of some of the pieces I own along with brief commentary about the artist, the size of the work and the medium of its execution.

I wrote a few posts for a blog named after my Cowgirl Philanthropy brand.  Not a lot there, but in my final post I dissed Johnny Depp which is proof that my disdain for the man predates having the strangely Depp-infatuated Patti Digh as my Mortal Enemy.

I did a blog about some remodeling at my Virginia mountain home, the Moonlady Ravine.  And a few short entries in a blog called Tax Diet. And started–only started–two blogs, Development Divas and Planned Giving Martini, related to my philanthropic work.

Whew!

One more.

In my own strange head, the only strange head in which I retain almost total access, I considered this final blog a little piece of conceptual art.  Newly divorced, I created a blog designed to document a list of prominent men who could not marry me.  Because they were dead.  I selected them from the New York Times obituary and speculated about what it might be like to be their wife even though, alas or thank god, depending, it was not going to happen.  Can’t Marry Me was/is a very strange blog, no question about it and only slightly more so when you realize that the URL for the blog is actually http://pleasemarryme.blogspot.com/ even though anyone would acknowledge that it is fruitless to make such a request to a dead man.

One final note:  It is entirely true that I didn’t seek an audience during those early blogging days and it is entirely true that the world didn’t suffer for it.  So imagine my surprise when early in my Twitter experience one of my new online friends, Queen of the Click,  told me, “Oh yes!  I remember you from your blog, “Can’t Marry Me!”  LOL!!!!   And astonishingly, she followed me anyway!

My Darling Orphan Blogs.