Yesterday, I realized there are some very important issues that need to be addressed here on my blog. The State of the Blog, if you will. Yes, I only have 12 posts and no, I don't think any of them are earth-shattering revelations. Mostly whining, but isn't narcissism really the reason most of us blog in the first place?

But here's the thing - this blog is actually a secret. Not from my husband, or even from a lot of my friends (hello, Tricia, Erin, and Timmy). But it's a secret from my family, my in-laws,my classmates, my school...some of my good friends know I have a blog, but they don't know what it's called, and they are not the kind of people to read or write one themselves and therefore don't look at mine.

My mother-in-law found my old blog. She found it through my sister-in-law, and pretty soon they were printing out entries, and she was checking through my archives, and I got scared and stopped writing there. I read back through every post,and for some miraculous reason I had never written anything horribly snarky about my in-laws, about sex, about alcohol, or my high school escapades that could have easily filled out an episode or nine of Girls Gone Wild. My mother-in-law actually thinks I am very funny,and I think she enjoyed my adventures in nursing school and newlywedded-ness. That's nice. But in this blog I use words like "bitches". In my real life, I occasionally drink to excess (um, please see last night) and I am a bleeding-heart liberal and you better believe I will be writing about the election (a woman and a black man fighting it out for the Democratic nomination, politics does not GET any better than this). Call me chicken, but I am not at the point in my life where I want to defend myself on these things - not to my in-laws and also not to my own family.

Ever since I was little, writing has been "my thing". One of my short stories is still used in the elementary school I attended, as an example of what 4th grade writing could be. A poem about Jesus that I wrote in 3rd grade won a blue ribbon in a creative writing contest, and everyone in my family still knows all the words. I am reminded of that poem - creatively entitled A Candle in the Darkness - every time I go home. I think I am supposed to have written a best-seller by now.Probably about Jesus.

My parents are 110% supportive of me being in nursing school and becoming a nurse practitioner. They supported me when I didn't go to college right away, and they supported me when I moved 3,000 miles away at age 19 and got engaged a week later to someone they had only met once. But I think they still wonder why I'm not writing, and I don't know if they even know what a blog is. It's certainly words on a page, and I definitely wrote them, so I think that counts. It's pressure on me that I know they don't intend, but it's also a lifetime of people telling me what I'm good at and I don't like being told anything, really. It's so strange - why do we feel so comfortable throwing it all out there for strangers, when we are really hiding from our own families?

(I just re-read that last line and realized it was so Carrie Bradshaw that I am a little sick inside. I was going to delete it, but I could just hear Sarah Jessica Parker's voice as she typed away on her little old-school Mac and I'm going to keep it in here, just as an homage to the fact that I've watched every single episode of Sex and the City approximately 27 times.)

I think I've exhausted the State of the Blog. After all, I slapped a picture of my smiling face on here, so if anyone happens to stumble across this page - well, I would be the worst-kept secret since Hilary Clinton's presidential ambitions. Also, I mentioned that last night I drank to excess. We had some friends over for dinner, which involved two roasted chickens, practically every dish we own, six bottles of wine, a hookah, the first season of Boston Legal, and a glorious ending where I fell asleep on the couch and missed the part where our friends left. This morning, Joshua made me french toast (yeah, he's amazing) and then ran off to band practice leaving me with the mess that accumulates when you make two roasted chickens, drink your own personal bottle of wine, and have to get carried to bed by your (slightly) more responsible spouse.

So...I don't have time to write anymore. I'll be doing the dishes for months.