I suppose it was inevitable--everyone's blogging now, right?

I remember years ago running into random people's blogs while doing internet searches on everything from brownie recipes to BNL. The blogs were pretty much all lame, cluttered, and obnoxious--seemingly the product of some pathetic teen angst. This was back when there weren't a lot of good blog sites and people just set up their own websites for blogging, which meant that page designs were all painfully ugly (like pink backgrounds with red text) and the sites showed up in search results on Yahoo (this was before Google took over the world). Whenever, I ran into one of these blogs, I thought, "Wow, blogging is really stupid. And so are the people who do it."

Then I started hanging around with some people who were always talking about their friends' blogs. Their friends' blog were apparently very funny, and these acquaintances (casual friends, I suppose) also felt that their own blogs were very funny, not to mention very important. But I was already so biased against blogs that the more I heard the word "blog," the more I determined I didn't really want to be friends with this group of people, and I eventually gave them up altogether.

Then my good friends and former roommates started sending me links to their blogs.

I remember the first was Beck (aka Erin), my MTC comp. She moved to Boston, so she wanted to start a blog to update her friends and family back home. (Not an unreasonable desire.) But when she sent me the link to her blog, and I clicked on it and really realized that someone I already knew and respected had a blog, a little part of me died inside.

So I ignored Beck's blog, and those of my many other friends for the next almost two years. Friends kept sending me links. I kept pretending they didn't.

This year I started warming up to blogs as my coworkers kept showing me (in person, not just sending me the links) posts, pictures, and videos on their own blogs. It's hard to ignore the blog when it's already on the screen in front of you and the person who created it is sitting two feet away telling you which post to read.

Finally, this week, former roommate Melissa emailed me links to her blog and to our friend Peter's, and I actually clicked on them. I read posts. Voluntarily.

And I liked it.

Peter's blog was funny. I laughed out loud. Melissa's was great, too. After I read Peter's and Melissa's, I went to Lindsay's and Kay's, and finally . . . I set up my blog.

So, here I am, blogging. But since I still sort of cringe at the word "blog"--it's one of the uglier words in the English language--in future, I hope to use the actual term as little as possible.