Adventures at Midlife

The Backstory: Once upon a time, there was a blogger named msmeta, only she didn’t know she was msmeta and she certainly didn’t know ANYTHING about blogging or the Blogosphere. She just knew that she liked reading about ideas and the arts and women’s issues and, oh, all sorts of things. She was a bit of a geek, actually.

Our protoblogger particularly liked reading things by Terry Teachout, the prolific arts writer and observer who is, among other thing, the theatre critic for The Wall Street Journal, which she reads every morning with a Diet Coke and a handful of Frosted Mini Wheats while seated at her desk at The Rubber Chicken Factory, Inc. (where she is a senior beak inspector).

One day, a year or so ago, she noticed that Sir Teachout also had something called a blog, called About Last Night. She had heard about blogs over the years, but, after spending WAY too much time with her children, convinced herself that she was so old and outdated and out-of-touch that she would probably be denied access to anything so technological and hip. But, hoping that she might be able to sneak in without anyone noticing, she sat down at her computer and typed in Teachout’s IP address.

VOILA! Her universe expanded exponentially! Not only did Teachout have a blog, but he had links to all kinds of other blogs! Maud Newton! The Old Hag! Culturegrrl! Arts & Letters Daily! And they had links to other blogs as well! It was a symphonic choir of voices, all chattering away on all sorts of delicious topics. Our heroine was hooked, big time, and spent many happy hours wandering from blog to blog, like a honeybee in a flower garden.

After many weeks of aimless blog browsing, our nascent blogger began to have an astonishing notion: “Could I start, you know, my OWN blog?” It was, at first, a fearsome thought, but, at a crossroads in her life and with some time and excess energy on her hands, she took the plunge in January 2008 and logged on to WordPress, home of many of her favorite bloggers. Dismayed to find that her first name choice, Footnotes, was long since taken, she came up with metaFootnotes, and a blog was born.

msmeta (as she would be known) quickly realized that anonoblogging was her best option, but wondered what to write about, and how to write it? She originally meant to create a book blog (old English majors never die, they just keep nattering away somewhere) but soon discovered that she was interested in writing about much more than books. And so msmeta began blogging about whatever struck her fancy, and waited to see what took shape and if anyone could possibly be interested in what she had to say.

[msmeta is starting to sound like Suede in Project Runway. How annoying is that?]

And My Point Is: Teachout had an influence on msmeta in another way. He has a self-imposed rule not to use profanity on his posts, and his contributors conform to this rule as well. Hmmm, thought msmeta when she read this. Not a bad idea, particularly since msmeta’s sons are always on her case about not using “Mom’s favorite word” (which rhymes with spit). It would force msmeta to work on her vocabulary and self-expression.

Now, gentle reader, lest you think msmeta is some sort of a prude (msmeta will pause briefly here for her friends and family to finish rolling their eyes at the thought of msmeta as a prude), msmeta is not above appreciating — or employing — a well-placed epithet to make a point. It can be extremely effective and very satisfying.

What msmeta has become weary of is writers and bloggers who cannot seem to finish a single sentence or fragment without dropping a major profanity. These are not rants. (How msmeta enjoys a good Julia Sugarbaker-style rant!) No, these are everyday expressions and descriptions. (Like Swing Vote’s Bud Johnson before he gets redeemed.) After awhile, overuse of such words makes them lose their power. The former English teacher in msmeta suspects lazy writing and thinking. These are the unfortunate souls to whom msmeta sometimes wishes to send thesauruses (thesaurae? thesauri?). And, if msmeta may be so bold as to say, they seem to be mainly male bloggers, although some female bloggers can swear like rap stars when they want to.

And if they want to, they can, and should. The Web is the last frontier, msmeta believes, and it deserves to remain free and unfettered. Let’s all raise our hands for the First Amendment!

And, so, msmeta will soldier on, writing her little self-edited posts on midlife and shoes and books and blogging and thrift stores and all the other junk floating around in her head, and hopes that all her favorite bloggers — and bloggers everywhere — will continue to express themselves in their own fabulous, inimitable voices.

It’s a wonderful World Wide Web.