Time to Test the Waters

I’ve been a wannabe blogger for more than five years. And if I were an elephant, my baby born at that time would be ready to embark on a joyous trip to adolescence. But, I waited, I procrastinated, I gave myself promises that I would master the art of digital photography, HTML, and graphic design, before publishing a single word. I have carried the cross of a perfectionist and overachiever throughout my life… And as a result, I made sure that I would stay stuck in the limbo between wanting and doing. I read many blogs, sighed with envy over mind-blowing photos, bit my nails with frustration while everybody else, it seemed, launched their personal diaries on the web, and went to bed every night with a  firmly cemented notion that “tomorrow will be the day”.

In the meantime, my very functional camera passed into the very busy hands of my children, aka the two Beasties and the  College Kritter and became a tool for making movies about stuffed animals and Barbies, taking random shots of TV shows, of immortalizing 1000 poses of our two cats, Macey and Dixie,  and capturing the emerging talents of  local metal and ska bands. Oh, yes, I received the book on digital photography as a birthday present from the College Kritter, some three years ago, and managed to conveniently misplace it after the move from Ohio to California. She nagged. I made excuses. And the poor blog patiently waited…

I’ve written journals since I was in grade school. And destroyed them one by one, because they just didn’t measure up to my stylistic standards.  Oh, what would I do now to take a peek into my 10-year old or 12-year old soul! I started “the first sentence of the blog”, just for practice, hundreds of times, and each one was highlighted and sent into oblivion, sharing the destiny of  ”it was a dark and stormy night” in some celestial recycling bin.

Every now and then, when I decide that my grey cells are slowly dying out, I come up with an idea of writing a book, something to connect my children to their Serbian ancestors and the land they live in, a memoir of my life on two continents, a collection of stories and anecdotes told and retold by my Serbian relatives and friends, something that my future grandkids could read to remember me. The “book” morphs into different shapes, gets melodramatic one day and seriously pragmatic the next, its purpose shifts from “a centralized source of all the things my kids will need from this day onward” to loose-knit embroidery of romantic, nostalgic, tragic and eternally funny things that happened in the past and keep on happening, because the life didn’t slow down conveniently for me, to start writing about it, which sucks.

The reality struck and threw me into a panic attack; the Husband was fed up with me whining about not writing, not being able to comprehend the magic of uploading a photo from files to a site, and not being artistic enough to capture the world as I see it and win the Gold Medal Awarded To The Best Photo On Earth ever – I am a perfectionist, after all!

He said: Pick a name for your blog and be done with it. Pressure was on me. I cracked the knuckles, I bit my nails, I rubbed my eyes (my contact lenses didn’t appreciate that), I whined, I tried to weasel out, I used all 300 excuses in my book, but he was relentless and I received, as a result, a blank page of this blog, all adorned beautifully, in my favorite hues of green, orange, and brown, inviting me to ruin it with writing… I didn’t have a choice, peeps. I was pushed into a corner.

The empty spice rack is a symbol. I just love it; I cannot wait to fill it, to label it and use it.  Join me on this tumultuous  ride, help me fill my metal jars with spices of life. And  to tell the truth, I have another empty one waiting to be filled! How fun is that?