My take

OK, so now I have a blog. I worked really hard to design a header that I liked. I have two entries on the page. My son put it up on the Internet. I keep going to it – to look at it – to see if I still like it. That’s what I tell myself each time I take a look at it. But I have a secret. I also keep going to the page to see what new words are up there, to see if something new has appeared, like I do with Facebook. But you know what? Each time I go there, it’s the same words that I see. It’s not like Facebook. It’s all on my shoulders now. It’s up to me to put the words there. I’ve been very hesitant about Blogging, because to me, blogs seem a bit like a modern day version of the Vanity Press. If I’m going to publish myself, what kind of words do I want to publish?

I feel like I should write down a “declaration of principles” a bit like Charles Foster Kane does in Citizen Kane just before he publishes his first edition of his new newspaper. What do I want this blog to be? What do I want it not to be?

I certainly don’t want it to be a record of what I ate for breakfast or what the weather is. You can have a widget on your screen if you want to know about weather and who cares what I eat for breakfast.

About 10 years ago, I was part of a group of bright and creative women, who decided to start a website. We called it ParentNet Sweden. It was a website for English-speaking parents living here in Sweden. We started off with great ambitions for our site. We had different articles each month covering many topics. We had resource pages, a doctors-we-like page and lots of other information for both oldies and newbies here in Sweden trying to raise multi-cultural kids. We kept it going for almost 3 years but then our lives started getting in the way. Our kids started growing up, we found satisfying jobs. We had no more time to devote to it and it faded away. Many of those women were journalists. They wrote from a journalistic point of view, finding information and conveying it. I wrote quite a few articles for that webzine but I wasn’t a journalist. I wasn’t interested in getting facts straight. I wanted to write my take on this experience we call life. I no longer have a website to write for so I guess I have to do it myself.

I’m going to get a jumpstart by putting up some of the things I wrote 10 years ago. Some of them still hold up, some will need some revision, because times have changed or because I have. So here goes. Here’s my take, Just Hilarie’s.