#1 / I’ve got a funny feeling about this
Hello – and in spite of what you said when you looked outside this morning – welcome to Spring.
There’s a funny story I’ll tell you some day about the struggle I had giving this blog its name – if you think struggle is funny that is – and I hope you do. Some of the options I came up with sparkled right into place and I got all carried away and bought every .suffix in existence, and some that probably aren’t, but the sparkle didn’t last much past the GoDaddy transaction.
All of these domains are now for sale, cheap.
Blog of Recreational Linguistics
Wit and Whiplash
Maria Kondo Knows Jack
Funny Peculiar
My Previous Blunder(s), Further to
Aging Gracefully and Other (oxy)Morons
maybesherrymaybe
Your My Friendly Narcissist (please pretend the word “Your” is crossed out. Also, “css” should have a “u” inserted for greater accuracy.)
Vikings and Wallflowers
Boomer Humour
I’m not sure you can tell but I made some of those up on the fly (another good name!) because even when they’re not, I like my lists to be in tens. Number seven is a nod to my former blog, which you can read bits of under the One Step Back category. Number ten is a thinly disguised version of a blog I pitched to the wrong people, who you can see here. No, no, no. Just kidding. But I see them every day at work, and can easily say hi for you.
This blog is going to be about life and living and discovery and burning bridges when you have to and being colourful and creative and confident and kind and taking chances and checking the stars and finding new alliances and trying different things.
Other interesting things will come up, too, and I’ll talk about the long, half-hopeful-but-mostly-discouraging road to publication, which I am still trekking. The Whispering Gentlemen is being considered by Penguin Random House right now and I am being Patient which is very nearly making me one. Novel number two, The Pool Obits, is coming along nicely – except it’s suspenseful and strange and scary – and not really very nice at all. And although I’m feeling funny about it, I will post short stories from The Story Parade every once in a while, too, starting right away because I have the guts to do it now, and when you don’t do it when you have the guts, the guts sometimes turn into butterflies and you know what happens then, don’t you? Everything goes poof, that’s what happens.
I believe that if you have to explain things – including jokes, overdue bills, or why you named your blog Feeling Funny – those things are too complicated.
I tried to build this blog in a simple and intuitive way, but since I don’t have a test group or anybody to ask besides my dog, who seems uncertain about the whole thing, all I can do is cross my fingers and offer this brief rundown: the Feeling Funny category – accompanied by the Tweaking the Stars logo – is where the actual blog posts go and is probably the reason you are here; The Story Parade is for stories and/or excerpts; FrivoLists is where I put lists, useless except for a laugh; Boomer Humour is where I post whimsey and whining about growing up. You’ll also see Vikings & Wallflowers which is an invitation for guest bloggers. More categories and ideas will appear once they’re worked out – or sooner!
I promise I will never blog about your eyebrows, your clothes, or your hair – but I may blog about mine. I will talk about aging because I think it’s interesting, strange, wonderful, and funny – as in ha-ha mostly – but also sometimes peculiar. I will refrain from making fun of aging for the sake of a good joke, but all bets are off for a great joke, and even for a very good one during lean times.
I don’t really give a hoot about growing older anyway. I like it. Because you can say things like “give a hoot”.
Kurt Vonnegut said this, which is beautiful, and I think we all need to thank him for it:
Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got 100 years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies – “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind”.
Because of this very quote, which I first read when I was 17%, I think of age as a percentage. This is not something I would necessarily recommend, especially if you’re over 50% and sometimes wake up at 3 am surrounded by startling truths.
Most of all, and in a very big way, I’m going to talk about manually tweaking the stars into alignment, because we don’t have forever any more (see above), and last time I checked, opportunity doesn’t knock on closed doors.
Thanks for reading.
