so we begin

Wow wow wow, a mom with a blog. Just kidding, I’m not a mom. But I do have a cat. She’s enough.

I started a YouTube channel over the summer and I have two videos. Yes…two. What started as a promise to myself to upload every week has quickly subsided into coming up with vague ideas for videos in my head during work but those slowly morph into what recipes I want to make for dinner which turns into what could I accomplish in this world if I could only cut out sugar...? I haven’t been able to commit but if I’ve learned anything about a creative endeavor, it never goes smoothly. Think of Rome as the ultimate creative endeavor: wasn’t built in a day, much less two.

I finished House of Leaves last night and I was so excited that it catapulted me into starting this blog. I was beginning to plan a video but it turned into an impassioned review instead and I figured: why keep it to videos? I miss writing so much, why not write about books? Has no one thought to do that? Surely, this is the first original thought any white woman in her 20s has ever had.

My description on the “Book Reviews” page of this website pretty much sums it up: I loved books we read in high school, but when it came time to discuss them in class, I would suddenly have nothing to say. I knew I was not only getting graded on the content of my comments during “round table” discussions, but I was being graded on how often I spoke. This unfortunately led to a lot of my peers (myself included) saying “I’m going to piggy back off of what Olivia said…” , which, discussion-wise, creates a big dull circle. After the class, I realized there was so much I wanted to say, about Slaughterhouse-Five, The Things They Carried, or 1984, but I was quiet to begin with in class and didn’t feel comfortable letting my excitement run wild.

Now thanks to the World Wide Web, I can make those thoughts heard without feeling graded. The videos give me a chance to speak, and this blog will give me a chance to write. There are so many books that *almost make me wish I was in school again and I just had to write an essay on them. But this time, there are no grades on this blog, no As or Bs or the one time I got a C on my essay on The Picture of Dorian Grey junior year that I obviously have forgotten about and don’t harbor any sadness over.

No grades, no peer pressure, just thoughts on books. And plenty of snacks in my big mom purse to keep me going.