Re-tooling the Blog

As you may or may not know- I actually have a blog. I started it months ago as an inspiration to get myself to start writing ago. If you've read my blog at all you'll soon realize that this ploy failed rather miserably.

What it all boiled down to is that I'm rather paranoid. I discovered that I did not want rough drafts of my writing out in the public eye. It wasn't that I was fearing scrutiny but I was fearing plagiarism. My original plan was to use my blog to work on writing pieces that I would someday potentially consider submitting for publication. The thought that my potentially good ideas and hopefully above average writing would be out there where anyone could walk away with it prohibited me from posting much of anything. On some level this is a rational fear- blogs are not policed and I would be hard-spent trying to prove something was my original work. This is also a highly irrational fear because it makes the huge egocentric assumption that masses are reading my blog. But paranoia won and the blog has remained untouched for months.

I did think about it from time to time, however. But I couldn't quite think of what to do with it. Yes, I could've turned it into one of those generic "here's my life!" blogs but I find those so frequently self-centered I couldn't imagine attaching myself to such a thing. I do not believe for one nano-second that anyone other than my mom gives a damn about what happens in my daily life, and since she gets a phone call at least once a week providing those updates, why write about it? Blogging about your everyday life just seems like the lazy (and often self-absorbed) way of staying in touch with people. Personal life blogs often scream "I'm so important that you need to know what I ate for breakfast!" and "I'm too important to actually talk to you and learn about your life. We both know that knowing about me is SO much better!" Yes, this may be an exaggeration to some respect and yes, I have probably insulted a few people by stating my opinion but if the shoe fits...

I briefly contemplated turning this into a blog about being unemployed. However, I quickly dismissed this idea as well. I didn't want to write an electronic version of a prison diary: Day 97: Still unemployed. No interviews. Prospects look bleak. Frankly, being unemployed for six months is depressing enough without writing about it on a daily basis. And what was I going to write about in regards to months of unemployment? It would have just been a whine-ridden pity party.

Then it occurred to me: Food. I love food. I love cooking it. I love shopping for it. I love eating it. I love reading about it. I love watching about it on TV. I also enjoy writing about it though I don't do it very often. I wasn't sure I wanted to do a solely-food based blog- retyping recipes would get tedious. So what else am I obsessed with? My cats! Hence the blog name, "Cooking With Cat Hair" was born. No, I don't actually purposely cook with cat hair but when you have cats who go on the counters, tables, and the top of the fridge, cat hair in food just happens.

So here is the first entry to my re-tool blog. May it be used more often than my previous one!

Sidenote: I should've known I'd never have fully utilized a blog which used a play on Virginia Woolf as its title (I do still think "A Virtual Room of My Own" was one damn clever title though) since I have never managed to finish reading anything written by Virginia Woolf, even when I was supposed to.