I think that for many of my friends, finding out that I'm blogging is going to be like Santa going on a diet. I already had to eat my words, and crow, and whatever else when I started letting it leak that we're home schooling, so I don't entirely know why I'm doing this. It was suggested by somebody who wanted to know what our curriculum will be, and to be honest, the idea didn't gross me out. Perhaps I was already so far down the rabbit hole that one more weirdness didn't register as being that crazy.
In a Saturday Night Live skit Will Farrell played an out of touch dad who referred to MTV as The MTV. One night when a friend was visiting we stayed up until the wee hours of the morning looking at her Facebook account. I think we looked up every single name we could pull out of our heads from elementary school on up. The next morning we were a bit trashed and when I tried to explain to her husband why we were so tired I was going to say "the computer," but then switched to "Facebook," and ended up becoming Will Ferrell's joke.
I am not on The Facebook, I only have a very vague understanding of what Twitter is, and I don't Instagram. I do text, but I feel sick to my stomach when people write "u" instead of "you."
Two experiences with blogs -- both bad: 1) quite a few years ago I emailed a blogger of a popular blog. I was in the depths of despair because The Girl was allergic to peanuts, and I felt so frustrated at how awful some parents are (why shouldn't my darling eat a peanut butter sandwich around her -- he has a right!), so I got this bright idea that this blogger should write a post about peanut allergies and educate the horribleness out of people. I pitched the idea in a weirdly crafted email. He sent the nicest reply... and did I leave it at that? Nope. I did not. In my "thank you" email I included a lame joke that I regretted the second I hit send. If I wasn't already suspicious of blogs before then, I certainly had an awkward feeling about them after that... 2) a woman I knew started a blog with her friend and they wrote funny posts after visiting different parts of NYC. I read several of the posts and laughed like I was at lunch with my girlfriends! Oh! Hahaha! Aidez-moi! One day I happen to see Girlfriend and I was like, "Hey!" It seriously took me a second to realize that I actually did NOT know her. She looked marginally panicked. Here I had: let's braid each other's hair in my eyes, and her eyes were like: one step closer and I call 911. The balance is off with blogs. It's unnatural and freakish. Yet, I have birthed this blog. And like all birthing of freaks, it wasn't pretty.
First, I had to come up with a name. Incorporating phrases for never-ever made sense and then extracting the key words for something catchy... Voila! hellpigs.blogspot.com. But not really voila! because there was already a blog with a very similar name... should I keep it? It hadn't had any activity for the past four years and from the entry I read it seemed benign enough, so yes...
From there I purchased a template and had a heck of a time reformatting things. Thankfully I have a 16-year old living with me that figured it out.
I didn't want to use a photo of me for the profile, so I asked Big Sister to draw something... We decided to go with something kind of Mother-Goosey/kind of Dorrie-esque... Her reward for her creation was to get the address for the much-anticipated BLOG!!! Only I got a text back that said: "That's no good -- that's a mega bible prophecy Armageddon site... unless that's your curriculum..."
Yep. hellpigs -- not blogspot, but blogpot (I had texted a typo) -- is in fact that. Which is probably why I had had some visits to my blog even though I had yet to tell anybody about it. I'm sure those visitors were like, huh?!?
Now I had to let go of hellpigs... but I didn't want to let go of me flying on a pig with striped socks and little snowflakes swirling around?!? I was at a loss. While picking the brains of some friends I realized that the name I had used for the email address would work fine. In fact, better than fine. Juxtaposing hellpigs101 (college jargon) with the children's-lit-esque sketch was exactly perfect. As part of my investigating this summer I read a book about a family that home schooled their daughter for one year -- a sabbatical year. The idea that most resonated with me is when she writes that one thing she would do differently is not treat her daughter like a mini-college student, but rather let her act her age. Now I had a built-in reminder of that lesson -- not college students; yes children.
About this time something started to poke around in the back of my head. I had looked up hell pigs and found out that it referred to some wild boar or something... didn't concern me... but the fact that two other blogs had the name made me wonder. So I looked up hellpig -- one word. Oh my good golly. Apparently it is slang for a fat, ugly woman with facial hair. Yipes. But guess what, like any mama-bear the fight to preserve my baby kicked in, so I was like: I'm taking that as a sign, too! When I was throwing out phrases that mean never-ever for the blog title, Friend A suggested something about the fat lady singing... which I liked, but in the end didn't use. But NOW Friend A's suggestion was connected, too! Brilliant!
Full stop. Do you see what was happening to me? Making weird connections all over the place. No joke -- as I was reading the definition of hellpig I was seriously like: well shoot, I haven't waxed in so long I need a different kind of wax (mustache!) -- so this is meant to be! Blogs do that to a person; I can start making meaning for the sake of making meaning. And I think that's okay, just as long as I'm aware and keep the proper ironic distance.
Justification. Validation. Documentation. Legitimatization. Rationalization. It -- the creation of this blog -- is for all those reasons. Two days ago The Girl was excited because she saw the shape of a duck on her glass made by smoothie scum:
She wanted me to take a picture of it. Which I did. The Boy was like, "What are going to do with that?" all sassy like. I made the girl very happy when I answered, "Put it on the blog."
Now her findings were validated for having been documented.
I'm hoping that this is a way to share what we're doing with family and friends, journal our experiences, and maybe in a bassackwards (yet hopefully not inauthentic) way motivate us to make our home schooling experiences a bit better?
