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Gift from Hil Part 2 - 2014-12-30
A Gift from Hil - 2014-12-28
There was A LOT of turkey. - 2014-12-04
Can we just jump to January please? - 2014-11-14
A (don't kick the) Bucket List - 2014-10-28

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2:16 p.m. - 2014-12-30
Gift from Hil Part 2

So more stuff from the fabulous Hil.

What inspired you to begin blogging?

I had been having daily message board 'conversations' with an astrology group over at Lycos for about a year and had gotten into the swing of having online communication. (Anyone remember Lycos?) It had been a positive thing and I became friends with someone I am still friends with, gads, 16 years later. (Hi, T!) So when we bumped up to a dedicated phone line with a 56K modem I got brave and started poking around the scary wilds of the internet and somehow stumbled into D-land. Utterly delighted. At the time I saw D-land as more of a forum for me to try out and hone my skill at domestic comedy writing than any kind of personal confessional. I'm guessing for the first 6 months or so I worked on being funny. Determined to be the new Erma Bombeck, I suppose. And I was funny. Been told I still am on occasion, but this is more due to turn of phrase than any deliberate comedic writing. About half a year in it got harder and harder to wring the funny from my life. You'd think with a tuba-playing teenager, an ever-changing assortment of exchange students, a clueless husband, 30+ cats, and THE most TERRIBLE two year old on Earth all living in a haunted 27 room Victorian farmhouse that the nuggets of comedy gold would just be lying there to be picked up and used. Yes and no.

Did you have any reservations about becoming a blogger?

Lord, no. I didn't have a clue that things you put on the internet had a half-life of 89 million years and they'd follow you like a tin can tied to a dog's tail. Plus back when I started blogging everybody had handles and was deliberately vague about their exact location. Your online persona was /yet wasn't you. Cyber cosplay of a sort. Everyone was pretending to be a better, cooler version of themselves. All cloaked in the quasi-anonymity of a universe made almost entirely of text. There were no camera phones, no Snapchat or Photobucket. Hardly anyone had a digital camera and the means to upload images. So it was just your constructed persona and your words. It never occurred to me there would ever be real life consequences and that there'd be obsessive nutballs who relentlessly combed archives and kept score and lived for the moment when they could crow, "You went to Chipotle yesterday? Well, on March 12, 2003 you said you hated guacamole! You are a hypocrite and a flip-flopper and a lying cunt!"

What have you found to be the most rewarding aspect of being a blogger?

Friends are wonderful, obviously. 99.9% of the people in my life these days have some kind of cyber connection. To me. To each other. Bloggers were the original Facebook. We predate MySpace. We were a gang of digital pirates intensely involved with each other's lives, both loyal and cutthroat. I love my friends and cannot imagine a life where I can't 'talk' to my buds every day even though we are spread out on every continent except Antarctica. (I do have two friends who've been to Antarctica, but they don't live there.)

Yet...the most rewarding aspect of blogging? My life. I am only alive because I found blogging. Stone truth. Without blogging I'd have killed myself. No shine. No drama. Before I found my blog and thus my voice and eventually confronted all my pain and fear I was dying. Yeah, yeah, signing up at D-land and for the first several months I was a fat housewife Pagliacci. Tears of a clown, baby. Funny, funny LA with her crazy laff riot stories about grocery shopping and washing machines gone rogue. But I cannot remember a day when I didn't long to be dead. Just fucking dead already. I was so weary of the hurt. No hope of better things to come, the best I could imagine was the cessation of pain in death. It had felt like that for so long. No drug, no distraction, no amount of sacrifice and work made a dent in that pain. And the longer I lived the worse the pain got. Everything hurt and left bloody gouges.

Excuse the graphic metaphor here, but blogging, the daily look at what was going on with me at first made pinholes. Teeny little pinholes in the scabbed crust over the horrible infected crater inside my heart. But the more I looked, the more I wrote, the bigger those holes became until one day the whole thing broke open and all that misery, the poison inside me, the infection that was killing me, it all came pouring out. Not an easy process or a clean one. It took a lot of time to drain that wound. Even longer to begin to heal. But blogging did that for me. It honestly saved my life.

That's enough for today.


Love you always, ~LA


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