There were a couple of links to articles on the Blogger homepage about people who blog and how drekkie the blogs are. I first started blogging because I read an article in the Washington Post about blogging and thought how fun - online journal. Writing is my hobby and I saw it as one more way for me to write.

The blog for me is like a mini journal. I have another journal that I write in and then this is my online journal. There are thoughts that I've written in my personal journal that I never want anybody else to read. Sometimes I take thoughts from that journal and post them here, but I never take things I write here and put them in my personal journal.

I got my first fanmail from someone on Sunday who had read my blog. That was shocking because it's someone I don't even know and I'm like my blog is so boring, I can't believe someone read it. But at the same time, how cool is that! There's someone out there who read my ramblings and I guess liked them enough and was kind enough to send me an email.

As someone who writes for a hobby, you have to live with the fact that probably no one outside your own personal circle of close friends and people who you might in writing class or writing group with, will ever read your writing. So if no one reads my blog I'm used to it But it's fun to think that other people that I don't know and will probably never meet, have read my blog and enjoyed what they found here.

It's sort of like what I heard about in a sermon about praying. You pray to reaffirm your relationship to the person you're praying to. God doesn't need you to pray to him, you yourself need to pray to him. It's an odd concept I know. In the movie Shadowlands, a student of CS Lewis tells him "we read to feel we're not alone." I think writing for me is the same; I write to feel I'm not alone. When I write about my characters, especially the ones that are so unlike me, it gives me comfort to know that their experiences are the same as mine. Maybe I get that from my acting training. In acting, you have to have to find something from your own life sometimes to get the emotion right for the character you're playing. In writing, I do the same thing.

Still, it's sort of weird to know that other people might be reading my blog but comforting at the same time, especially when someone tells me they enjoyed it. I'm hoping that means we're all the same type of human being, just in different bodies, from different cultures and with very different experiences.

Okay, I just checked the TV guide. It's not Othello. It's The Italian Girl in Algiers by Rossini. How embarrassing! I think I thought it was Othello because I read article about the opera version of Othello in the Pink Section and I just assumed it was now on TV.

Speaking of The SF Chronicle, they had three essays/articles in there today that after I finished reading thought "who the fbombing hell cares!" Honestly, is it any wonder that people in the rest of the country think we're freaks. The three essays were for such stupid issues, not big issues like war or homelessness or poverty, but a stupid dumb issue that honestly only people here care about. Everyone but me that is. It's so not even worth mentioning because it is an issue that I know I have a politically incorect view about and just mentioning it makes me mad and makes me want to move to another city.

There are so many other big events affecting our lives and so many other things the newspaper could be writing about, but they devote three articles/essays to an issue the country and the rest of the world doesn't give a rat's ass about. Didn't these people, who are obviously writing to promote a point of view, take a marketing class? They really need to figure out how their cause better because the way they're doing it, just makes there cause irrelevant and I'm sure that's not their intention. Their good intentions in my humble opinion, do nothing to further their cause but instead harm it by not making it relevant to what is going on with the rest of the country and the world. It's sort of sad really because the cause has merit but not if it's being marketed by complete idiots who should know better.

Othello is everywhere. The opera version of Othello is on TV right now and a few weeks ago, they had the modern BBC version of Othello. The BBC mod Othello was very good although I agree with one reviewer I read, when he said that it was hard to believe that a top notch police detective like Othello could be fooled so easily. The Iago character or Jago was much better in the BBC version and they give him a bigger part to where the veiwer sees him reaping the rewards of his treachery. How very realistic of the Britts.

I saw Othello on stage at ACT a few years ago and it was very good. The Othello actor was very strong and he has to be to make the play work. I saw another version done by a director friend of mine and the woman playing Desdemona was so bad. She played Desdemona like a valley girl air head and spoke that way, all whiney and nasally and so spoiled, that at the end I was so happy that Othello killed her. I don't think that was the right reaction to have at the end of Othello.

I love opera. It's all so dramatic. It's soap opera story lines set to great music. And the costumes and sets are great. I saw a Stravinsky opera a couple of years ago. The famous welsh tenor Brynn Terfel was in it. I don't remember the name of the opera but the story was quite good and the plot reminded me of the dot com failures that were happening at the time. Stravinsky is not the best music for opera, but the costumes were beautiful and the set for one of the scenes was spectacular.

I got so peevish from my last post that I went into my kitchen and cleaned it. There's something energy releasing about cleaning. Sometimes if I get too freaked out, I bake because it takes alot of concentration and I lose my freaky feelings. But baking isn't very good for weight when you're the only one eating your creations. Sometimes if I bake and don't want to eat it, I take it to work. It never fails that every company I've ever been at, if you put free food in the kitchen it's gone in half an hour. What is about free food in the kitchen?

I'll try to post more stories on my ISP webpage today. There are couple of stories I finished for writing classes I've attended. Since they were assignments, the quality is not very good. But I have this new theory, that I have to write about five really bad, country song, Lifetime television or Hallmark movies (which I secretly love because they're so bad), stories before I write a story that's even semi-decent. Maybe it's true whoever said, if you read junk, you write junk. Well, I love Temptation Island 1 and 2, Lifetime television movies, Hallmark movies, Anne Rice, Stephen King and every now and then Danielle Steele (she's the best trashy writer there is), so is it any wonder I write trashy stories. I like these stories because they were good teaching tools for me and I guess I could work on them to make them better, but I want a record of my bad trashy writing so if I ever get really good and famous, which of course may be never, I can look back and see how far I've come.

There's even a story I might post which was my final in one writing class. What a final huh? Write a short story on the given topic. I got an A on that final, so I'll have to post that story. Then there's those other half written stories. One of my writing teachers, Peter at UC Extension, said that not finishing your stories is bad for you psychologically. Well, I guess I can add "not finishing stories" to my long list of what's wrong with me. Some of these story ideas started out as great ideas, but something got so lost in the execution that I'm not sure it's worth raising them from the dead. You know, how you think something is a great idea, then when you actually do it, you're like, "Oh My God, this sucks!" It's like that with some of my half written stories. Does it do anyone any good to finish really bad stories? I just don't so. Better to just chalk these stories up to "Great Idea - Bad Execution" and be done with them, and that's what I've done. These stories will always be there if for whatever reason, I "feel" like I need to finish them, but until then, I let them stay raw, bad and unfinished. Wow, I think that phrase makes for a great title for a story, "Raw Bad and Unfinished."