first things first

I've been wanting to do this whole blog thing for quite some time, and now that it's been brought to my attention that this would be a good way to showcase my writing "ability" for potential freelance work - well, here it goes. Of course now I had to choose a name, which took all day on Thursday as I neglected my usual duties at work: reading assorted basketball and MMA (mixed martial arts) websites and hiding in the bathroom while playing games on my cell phone. The two best names I came up with (Jew Jitsu and Aggressively Passive) were already taken, and anything else I could think up didn’t seem to work. Conflict Averse doesn't exactly roll off the tongue and Fear of Violence sounds like some S&M dungeon thing. So I bothered assorted friends and family. My friend Fez recommended several borderline anti-Semitic ideas, the best of which, Jewkbox, was already taken. My cubicle-mate, Ileen, came up with Fein Whine, but the abbreviated version of my last name just feels a little too Third Reich for me. So I eventually settled on Guardedly Optimistic, which was a phrase I used once in a pep talk to Julia. She took it and used it for a short story title, and now I have taken it back. As Julia put it, "It's the only blog name you came up with that doesn't suck."

So I'm hoping to use this as a way to become a more disciplined writer (and figure out how to correctly use a comma along the way) and that maybe knowing that people (both of you) are reading what I write here will help me be more patient with my "real" writing and less likely to prematurely send it to people in the hopes that they'll tell me how funny I am. I can't help it - I'm a praise junkie. Praise Junkie, that's a good blog name.