Mom Blogger that I Follow

The creator and author of http://www.dooce.com/ came to Portland tonight and spoke at Powells on Burnside.

When it comes to "famous" people, I don't consider myself to be a "swooner", as I like to call them. You know the ones, the people that are speechless, appear comotose, don't hardly blink as they stare helplessly at the celebrity, and barely catch the drool that is starting to exit the mouth. It's exciting to actually SEE a celebrity enter into your own bubble of reality, don't get me wrong. But I find myself wanting to approach them as they are: just another human being.

So when Heather Armstrong came to Portland from her home town in Utah, I decided to go and listen to her give an exerpt from her new book, It Sucked and Then I Cried- How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita, that she just recently had published. She is a straight-forward person who read a funny passage about boobs during pregnancy, but in all honesty and aside from her passage, her visit and seeing her in person made me realize how extraordinary life can be.

She was a single person, working for a large company, when she began her blog in the early 2000's. She wrote about her everything in her life at the time, even her office experiences. That is, until someone from her work caught on to her stories, told management, and later got her fired. She met her future husband, and had a little girl. She experienced depression, which even landed her in a mental institution for a stint. She got through it, and she credits her blog and her fellow readers. Just recently, she has been able to make enough money from her blog (through ads and such), that her husband was able to quit his own office job and help her work on the blog from home as well.

I guess it's nice to know that even though people go through the depths of crisis, it can land them in a wonderful predicament: working from home, making money on a blog, being able to write books, and being able to travel and meet extraordinary people because of it all. And I suppose that is why I wanted to go and listen to her. I wanted to be able to see for myself that such a transition is tangible. It made me think a little about the possibilities that my own blog that I had created awhile ago (centraloregonmandy) could have achieved. But then again, it was also easy to remind myself of the amount that I would have had to give up for my life to be so public.

But gosh, Heather was hilariously quick-witted like myself, and she is pretty brave to be so "out-there" about her personal life. I'm not sure if I could honestly be like that. But I guess only life and time will tell.