How Hard Can It Be?

I have decided that I am going to post to my blog once per week. I originally was going to post everyday, but that was when I was young and naïve (last year) when I first started the blog and thought to myself, “How hard can it be?”

Those 5 words have caused me great pain in my life. I said those words to myself when I got pregnant, when my husband and I decided to buy and renovate our old house, when I decided to start running and when I decided to break my son of the pacifier habit. And just about all of those events have nearly broken me in half.

My last blog entry (Deep Fried Broken Heart, 2/2/09) is about my sister. I sent it to her, I suppose as a twisted and bizarre Valentine, and she liked it, although she protests and says she isn’t that harsh (she is) and that I exaggerated (I did.) Her terse email to me was something like this, “I like it, it was good. You should be writing a book, or at the very least become a columnist for a newspaper or something.”

Um, yeah. Sure, I’ll just fire up Monster.com and type in “newspaper columnist” and see the thousands of job opening appear on the page. I saw Marley and Me, I know that the only way to get a job as a newspaper columnist is to marry Jennifer Aniston and get a rowdy yellow lab. Even then, he didn’t seem very happy with his situation, now did he? Ingrate.

I figured, maybe Angelle is right, maybe it is something I could do “at the very least.” I typed “How to be a newspaper columnist” into Google and my laptop actually laughed at me. Really. The mouse guffawed and the F & G keys giggled. I can’t even tell you what the USB port did because it was wildly inappropriate.

The search revealed some nonsense about research and listings of editors and resumes and all kinds of other stuff that seems hard and time consuming and not immediately gratifying at all. But, at the bottom of the list it said to start a blog and, get this, post to it on a regular basis, like every week. Hmph. I can do that. After all, how hard can it be?