Obligatory Intro Post: I'll Regret This Later

My decision to start this blog was largely the result of

1) the suggestion of one of my coworkers, Drew, who may have recommended it more out of the hope of redirecting my verbal barrages away from him and toward a virtual audience than the belief that I have anything worth blogging about; and

2) this, which I wrote in a blank text message document in a fit of boredom earlier today:

In retrospect, it was a stupid idea to sit up here without bringing anything to do.  It's like going to a cafe on a blind date without bringing anything to read in case the other party doesn't show - you wind up twiddling your thumbs and feeling like every minute takes an unreasonable amount of time to pass.

I'm staking out my professor's office.  It seemed like a logical course of action when I first realized she wasn't there, but it's been five minutes and I already feel like a psychopath.  

Okay, trying to type out some weird kind of journal entry on my phone was a mistake.  I lack the finesse necessary to type both quickly and accurately.  But Jesus Christ, what do you expect?  I'm not some kind of texting god.

Wait.


I just entirely stopped the presses, saved this to my Drafts folder, and lost whatever pathetic little train of thought I had going because I got a text.  Which turned out to be from my mom.  And consisted entirely of punctuation marks - a colon, a hyphen, and a closed parenthesis. :-), if you will.  I'm not sure what

HOLY SHIT.  If you turn it sideways it's a smiley face.  An emoticon - light dawns.

Incidentally, are you familiar with this phenomenon?  Emoticons happen when people send each other seemingly random combinations of punctuation marks, which aren't actually punctuating anything but rather represent various facial expressions.  It's like a code.  A code that could be broken by an infant with the motor skills required to turn an object sideways.

Personally, I think emoticons should only be used in special cases, in order to convey something too difficult to express in words alone.  An example:

}:-)> = a goat.  This can be used to indicate that the individual sending the message is a goat.  A goat may not be able to express this verbally because do goats even have a sense of identity as a species?  I don't know, I'm not the Goat Whisperer.  Only the goats know.

That's the point when I felt too self-conscious to continue lurking around the department offices and left without ever speaking to my professor.  Anyway, what I wrote seemed amusing at the time, and again when I reread it later, and I kind of wanted to pull somebody over to read it and say "Look what I did!" but you don't just yank random strangers out of their chairs and force them to look at your phone.  But then I remembered Drew and what he said about these mystical "blogs" where you write whatever you want and people might read it and even respond.

So I made one.  And that's the birth story of my blog.  It would have been better if Drew's suggestion had smoothly wine-and-dined my brain, got my brain all tipsy and slutty because my brain's a lightweight, got lucky in the back of Drew's suggestion's Honda, and then nine months later this emerged and even though my brain had been considering giving it up for adoption, it decided to keep the blog after all.

Wow.  That came out a lot creepier and run-on-sentence-ier than I originally intended.  I didn't actually want to conjure up images of an idea date-raping a major organ.

But now I can't get the picture out of my mind.

...Oh god.  What have I done?