margaret edith

In honor of my little bloglet’s 4 year anniversary, I thought I’d shed a little insight on what the heck my blog is called.

At the time of my first post on January 18, 2008, I was working in email based customor support.  Maybe one day I will talk more about what that was like and how it made me feel about human kind, but for now, let’s just say it didn’t leave me with a lot of warm fuzzies.

Here’s a particularly influential example.

Customer:  Will I get my order on Wednesday?
Me:  You should expect your order to ship no later than 6 business days after the date of order.
Customer:  Are you just a very clever robot?

Even though I didn’t tell him that no, I’m not a very clever robot, I decided it was important to be clear with the rest of the universe.  Ya’ll.  I know what it must seem like, but I’m not a very clever robot.

Which I know must be especially confusing because sometimes I do just beep.  R2D2 beeps and he’s a robot.  So comparisons may be drawn.  But some days, saying “hello” seems so banal.  I can be so much more expressive with a beep or two.  Which I know will make no sense if you’re just reading about it.  But I assure you, conversations with Maggie can be had using only beeps.

Anyway.

Despite what you might think, I’m not a very clever robot.  Sometimes I just beep.

4 years ago today I was gearing up to write my first blog post of ever.

I had recently discovered just how incredibly connected you could feel to someone through her blog.
She Just Walks Around With It was my first.  I didn’t actually know her for real, but she was a friend of a friend sort of person and lived in SF.  And I loved her.  Still do.  (Incredibly, Kristy went from being single in the city, to thoroughly boyfriended, to married, to mommy x 2 in the time that I have been reading.)
She included Dooce.com on her blog roll and woah nelly.  I fell hard for Heather Armstrong.  So funny.  Such a good writer.  Snarky and fiesty and tall and pretty.  And man, the tales she could tell!  I had no idea of the rabbit hole I was falling down when I started delving into the archives back to the beginning so I could read her blog in its entirety.

It was under the influence of those two that I started a blog under the impression that I could just tell whatever stories I wanted to tell.  I didn’t know that you were supposed to have a niche to have a good blog.  And at the time, I wasn’t really worried about having a “good” blog.  All I wanted to write about was how mad and sad and broken apart I was as I suffered through the tumults of a terrible relationship.

I might as well have just been writing an angsty emo diary, but in a secret, dark and squirrelly way, I wanted him to know just how profoundly and poetically he was alternately making me woozy with love and lost in despair.  Writing a public blog was a way that I could pretend that he might read what I’d written and that it would burn his mitochondria with shame and remorse.  But I kept the blog pretty hidden and he never saw it.  As far as I know, anyway.

After a time, I stopped lapsing into the self destructive behavior of seeing this man.  Not so very much later, I met the David and I didn’t feel so very mad or sad any more.  The things I wrote about changed.  I wanted to write without the commitment of having to write a whole thing.  I liked the idea of writing something just a little, instead of trying and failing to write something big.  Although as easy as writing little things seemed it would have been, there were still long chunks of time in which I wrote nothing at all.

I have turned almost all of the posts that talked about the so very sad and heartbroken times to private.  They never really were for public consumption.  But sometimes I read them just to remind myself of that person that I was.

And I’m glad now that even if I don’t have weeping and melodrama, there still quite a few days that I still something to write about.