Here Goes Nothing

Some years ago, when I started writing for a living, I stopped altogether writing for or about myself. These days I write about parties. (More specifically, I write about the flowers and table linens at parties, but we'll get to that, I'm sure.) Six months ago I moved to Los Angeles from New York to do the same. And since then, for a number of reasons (theories include: the extremely comfy yet unmotivating quality of Los Angeles and some short-lived but undeniable romantic contentment), I've not challenged myself to do anything especially great, and I recently realized how unbecoming that is on me. So, I'm hoping that taking up the cliched pursuit of blogging (lord knows I am not above cliches) might choke some inspiration out of me.

Some anxieties about this include but are by no means limited to:

• What self-respecting person who ever wants to keep a job or her friends or meet a man can be completely honest writing about her life online? And what's interesting that's not completely honest?
• I'm afraid I'll approach this with some grave seriousness--precisely the opposite way I approach writing emails to girlfriends that turn out to be really funny because I let it flow and have no expectations of any sort of greatness or sharing-with-posterity appropriateness.
• I want to write my memoir. This is my pie-in-the-sky life goal. And if I jot stuff here, aren't I robbing it from the future book I ought to be working on?
• I'm lazy. I'm likely to forget my own Web address or something. I do stuff like that sometimes.

A note about the title of my infant blog: In college at Berkeley, before I'd ever lived completely alone, I had a lousy tendency to rely on my devoted and detail-oriented roommates to do stuff for me that I might have done myself. Like, my idea of cleaning the apartment was taking all of the books and papers and putting them in neat stacks (I really can't stand clutter). Et voila! Done. Whereas I would let the girls take the Q-tips to the switches on the oven to get out the grit, for example, or bleach the bathroom floor. I handled the clutter, they handled the filth. They used to tell me that my attitude about cleaning was: "You get the gist." You know, look, I put forth a little effort, it looks better in here, yada yada. In some ways that may be the way I approach the other areas of my life. I'm a broad-strokes gal, not a details gal. I'm a writer and editor, but copy editing is my worst nightmare. I don't really like the buck to stop with me. This is not self deprecating; it's simply true. I know myself. And that's half the battle.