Writing a blog presupposes one has interesting, intelligent, relevant, and possibly humorous things to write about. Or not, and instead one is a narcissist and assumes one has witty, intelligent, relevant, and possibly humorous things to write about. Regardless, I have been encouraged to start a blog for several years, and so I have finally started one. And you know what? I have writer’s block. The pressure is too much. I think that is very funny, actually.
I always think of Anne Lamott’s book “Bird by Bird,” where she describes her dad helping her brother write a paper about birds back in junior high. Of course, the brother started the paper at the 11th hour and didn’t know where or how to begin. Her dad, to the rescue, said, “We are just going to write one bird at a time.” And so the dad and her brother wrote the paper, bird by bird. (I won’t even talk about what it would be like to have a dad like that – that is a different blog entirely.)
So I am going to put out of my head that this is a blog, that successful blogs need tending to, and that the writer needs to be able to engage and hold their readers’ attention for more than 5 minutes. I am going to forget too that I really can’t spell, don’t have a clue where to put commas, and should never send anything out into the public space that hasn’t had an army of proofreaders pouring over every line, and just start writing – one word at a time.
Tomorrow we head to Turkey. We were there a few years ago, but aside from a marathon day trip to Ephesus, we stayed in Istanbul the entire time. This time we will be heading down the coast, first to Ephesus – a city to rival Rome in ancient times and the home of the Temple of Artemis – then onto Antalya and the southern coastal region. After that, we’ll take an overnight bus trip to Cappadocia and the famous fairy chimneys. We will ultimately end back in Istanbul before flying home.
Traveling with us are two friends we met dancing, Bill and Bert. After Kevin and my last trip to South America and our adventures there, this is a huge leap of faith for Bert and Bill, and we appreciate them for it! While lots of friends say they’d love to go with us on some overseas adventure, when the moment comes, nobody ever really does, preferring instead to stay home and just read about the whacko border crossings, the long lost drives on foreign highways, and the scary, scary spiders.
