Dawn of the Misssives
I don’t blog about blogging as a rule. But I have been tagged to write about the evolution of the Misssives by the Flying Tattooed Atheist, Mr American Scot, and he’s bigger than me, so I better get to it. I’m not going to take you on a trawl of previous Misssives, you can do that yourself (good luck with that one! Maybe get yourself a hobby while you’re at it?)
I am going to write about The Dawn of the Misssives.
Last year I went on two mammoth trips. In April I took ten college students to Finland for a two week exchange. Then in July I accompanied my husband, a couple of his schoolteacher colleagues and twenty-four school pupils on a school trip to Sri Lanka.
I had never even heard of blogging really. And I had only ever read one blog; that of a friend who blogged about her leukaemia that was discovered whilst she was carrying twins (all now healthy!). It never occurred to me to blog anything.
I have always done a good bit of travelling and during those times abroad, I have been a prolific letter writer and latterly, emailer. Finland was no exception. When you are the the only lecturer in sea of teens/twenty somethings, you need to vent somewhat. So, I wrote a series of emails to a group of friends and family, which helped me not only cope with the responsibility, but see the funny side of potentially horrendous incidents.
All of these stories will come out in the Misssives in time, as each one is worthy of its own post, but I’ll give you an idea of the content of the emails that came forth from the Arctic Tundra of Finland and plopped into the inboxes of my people back home:
1. Oh my god, naked sauna! With the students? You are kidding me!
2. Oh my god, a Finnish traditional food banquet! Bleuuurgh! Fish eyes?
3. Oh my god, Finnish blokes are like something out of Lord of the Rings, I must photograph the worst of them!
4. Oh my god! Two of my male students did a three way with a Finnish girl! And I know about it! Whyyyyy?
5. Oh my god! How do I get out of staying at the dull Finnish male teacher’s house for the weekend?
6. Oh my God, I went ice swimming! I can hang wet duffel coats on my nipples, four hours after! (See photo)
7. Oh my God, I met the presenter of Finnish “Have I Got News for You”, or as they say in Finland “Uuitisvuouto”(see photo!)
8. Oh my God, some of the students are doing my nut in! And I’m not allowed to kill them!
What was annoying about the Finnish emails was that I now have no record of them. I would love to read them now and have a laugh at what we did.
After all these epic emails, my people kept on telling me how funny they were. Mainly, they were laughing fuelled by Schadenfreude, I guessed. So, when Sri Lanka came round, they expected more of the same, but I had to find a better way of doing it.
So, like in most situations where I don’t know how to do something new fangled, I asked my students and they put me onto Myspace, which apparently has a blog function.
For the whole of the Sri Lanka trip I told stories via my Myspace blog, and it did the job just fine. After about two months of being home, I missed the writing part. I wanted to tell more stories; I realised I didn’t have to be abroad to have stuff to say. I used the myspace blog and I began to get more and more readers.
Then, I saw my friend Cammy’s blog on something called blogspot and it just looked and felt more serious, so I flipped over to blogspot and this is where you find me now.
I post on here, and I copy the posts over to myspace for my readers there a day later.
I think about blogging the same way I think about tattoos. Don’t decide you want a tattoo and then choose whatever comes to mind to have done like you’re at a Pick ‘n’ Mix counter in Woolworths. Have something so beautiful and personal that you absolutely must have it emblazoned via some permanent medium, like a tattoo.
The same goes for blogging, in my opinion. Don’t just decide to write a blog. Have something you want people to know, stories you want to tell, and then use the medium of blogging to do that.
And don’t blog about blogging. It means you’ve run out of stories.
Damn!
