Start With "Once Upon A Time"

So I've been blogging and reading blogs for a couple of weeks, and have decided that most bloggers are not very interesting. I have found only one blog that really reads like a story or memoir, Instructions to the Double, which was the inspiration for starting my blog in the first place. "Tessy," at the time a 26-year-old nanny living in Brooklyn, was not only an excellent writer but was also very open about all of her experiences and let-the-reader-be-damned... whether the reader happened to be anonymous strangers like me, her Boyfriend, or her employer. Unfortunately, she "learned her lesson" when her employer slammed her in a New York Times Sunday Styles piece, and since that time, her writing (in a new blog) has become far less open.

Through BlogExplosion (see link in my sidebar), I've had the opportunity to "surf" hundreds of blogs for 30 seconds at a time and, in return, receive more traffic to my own blog. Most of these blogs, including my own, read like a collection of essays on whatever comes to mind, instead of like a diary or collection of short stories. While there are those who try their hand at erotica, most yammer on about their almost always liberal political leanings.

Then again, you may ask, what was I expecting? Perhaps hoping for the best in blogs was like imagining that spam might be interesting?

I actually did make a pledge to myself in a recent journal entry to write more interesting stuff by being more "well-read" -- not well-read in the traditional sense of the word (i.e., the classics... War and Peace, Shakespeare, Plato), but in a more eclectic sense of the word (i.e., the classics plus...The New York Times, The New York Post, Wall St. Journal, Cosmopolitan, trashy beach reading, other people's blogs...and so on).

In that vein, today I received a nice box from Barnes & Noble:
The Interruption of Everything -- Terry McMillan
The Lake of Dead Languages -- Carol Goodman
The Mermaid Chair -- Sue Monk Kid
The Sweet Hereafter -- Russell Banks

So I am saving up all the traffic credits that I earn from BlogExplosion by surfing O.P.B. for a day when I have some really compelling content here...perhaps the day the Desperate Housewives DVD comes out, or the day after the new season starts in October...I'll let you know.