Middle Ground

I am being a very bad person right now. Not only am I lurking through Blogs on the internet (not inherently bad, but the next part is worse), I'm also procrastinating on some homework that, while not exactly due tomorrow in the strictest sense of the word, I still need to get done so it's not piling up. And if you hadn't noticed, I've been really, really good about that so far this semester, and I have no intentions of discontinuing that line of fabulous thinking and good motivation, but I'm looking for fresh things to look at and read. The search has gotten a little odd, mostly because I keep running across a certain category or type.

Namely, I keep running across blogs maintained by married people or people with kids.

That's awesome! Really, it is. Props to you for maintaining a blog the way that you do, and doing it well, and I'm well aware that my sister is in this group and that's awesome, too. She keeps me more or less updated (and the rest of the 'Net) with what Mads is doing, and how the family is, and that's awesome. I wish we had that back when I was a kid and she was in college, but that's neither here nor there, nor the cause of some of my frustration.

There is a lack of college-age blogging. I'd be alright with high school blogging, too, but I can't seem to find that, either. Which begs this question rattling around in my head: Am I a minority in the blogging community?

At this point, I'm inclined to think that yes, I am an anomaly in the blogging world. Not only am I younger than most other Bloggers (does that get a capital and why is RTE telling me it's not spelled right?) but I'm also single, don't have any kids, and spend my days in college classes instead of a steady 9-5 job (or something close to it).

This bears some thinking, and pardon me while I get a little introspective.

I'm a lot like some of the other Bloggers currently floating around. I'd love to get recognized for my writing, to break into that scene, because, hey, somebody in the publishing industry might be trolling looking for new talent and that could possibly mean a closer look at my fiction writing and maybe a fairytale ending with less hard work and more luck. However, Murphy and his Luck and I have a wonderfully strong, relentless relationship, and that scenario will happen as much as Kirk and Spock will magically drop into my dorm room and start talking Science. Maybe I'll wind up on the Enterprise to scour the known and unknown universes. An entertaining thought, but simply that. A thought.

In terms of a target audience (I know, I'm gettin' a little fancy), the stick is a little short on both ends. I could, quite possibly, be one of the very few out there who fit the target audience that I'm writing to. As much as I like to look back and what I write, I've no desire to read it on a regular basis (and I'm impressed that you people do, but hey, by all means, continue) mostly because I'm thinking it on a regular basis.

It gets better. I was tooling around a couple of places - BlogHer, BlogNash - just seeing the general large scale that blogging can achieve (something that most of us probably strive for, and I'd be a lying moron to say that I didn't, on some degree, want it, too) and I was looking for something that would really appeal to me, not just personality wise, but person-wise, too, if you get my meaning.

I'm looking for someone out there, to read and be read (hopefully, though not mandatory as that might be weird and like a swap thing and those people on Inkpop sometimes never make good on their end), and go, Wow. I can totally relate to this. This is has meaning in my life right now and not so much, Wow...I remember this time in my life. Only, this happened this way, usually, and I remember it like this. Remembering is all well and good, really, it is. But there are some subtle differences between you and I.

I'll use, like normal, my sister and I. I love my sister, and that will never change. And for a twelve year age gap (yes, you read that right, twelve years, same parents, just me and her) we're really close. This relationship that we have (and I'm incredibly glad that I have this relationship with my sibling, I think I'd flail through life and college more than I already do without her) has only been around for about four or five years. We're in different stages of our lives - if you need some numbers, I was five when she graduated high school, turned six not far into her first semester of college, and was twelve when she moved into her first apartment - and in some ways we'll always be in different stages. She has a family of her own now, which by no means suggests that she's no longer part of ours (she always will be, and it's a proven fact that I don't so much live in one house or the other, but rather that I set up a tent on the center line in the road, figuratively speaking) but we're in different times. I'm a college sophomore and she's a 29+3 happily married mom of one who lives in the house we grew up in.

Naturally, she blogs about what she knows - Mads, baking, and general life as she knows it.

I blog about life as I know it - moments of brilliance (not quite, if you hadn't noticed the sarcasm), a tangible Focus named Murfee, and the general fabulousness (use sarcasm as necessary, depending on the situation) that is college life at a private institution in the middle of Upstate New York (and yes, Upstate deserves the capital).

We overlap because we are family, and she's also a really cool person to learn a lot from because she's got this unique view of the world. We blame Mikey's Wisdom on that one, most of the time. And really, when you read us, you can tell that we're related because we have the same sense of snark.

Happy Fact: I've learned alot about having kids and raising them and the challenges they provide by real life (her name is Madaline) and also by the blogs, and Bloggers, I pick up from my sister.

Not-So Happy Fact: I'm not planning on having kids anytime soon, I know they're challenging, and sometimes I'm lookin' for a perspective that's a little closer to mine than a look-back type of thing.

Don't get me wrong, I'll take what I got, and I understand perfectly well the whole grass is greener idea/mindset, but....if I gotta sit happily in the middle ground for the moment, can I at least have someone to sit with me? I'm housebroken, I play relatively nice with others, and I've got a great smile. I'll even say please. Please?

We can work on the whole plays nice in the sandbox thing later......