HERE IT IS!

Growing up in the 1950s, family travel was a real trip. Hot summer vacations with six of us packed into a 4-door sedan with no air conditioning, no seat belts and no entertainment (unless you count the white noise of an AM radio). No cell phones, game players, iPods or electronic devices of any kind. We quickly tired of the few toys and travel games we could pack into the crevices of space limited by the essentials for the length of the trip. That included an ice chest and picnic basket full of food, since eating out was virtually nonexistent. Our amusement was dependent on our own creative imagination. We passed the time with mind games like 20 Questions and Button, Button, Who’s Got The Button? The latter was not much of a mind game, but my mind has now forgotten the others except for Here It Is!

So why did this memory pop into my head now? I had worked on another post (now gathering dust) for the official launch of my blog. I posted a teaser on my FaceBook page. That got me to thinking about how to proceed, since this is actually the third post. That was the trigger.

I remember playing Here It Is! Someone chose an object outside the car in the distance. The kids hid their eyes and waited until they thought we had reached it. One would yell “Here It Is!” and open their eyes to check. If you guessed too soon, you could try again in the same round. Whoever got the closest was the winner and got to choose the next object. We actually enjoyed this.

As the youngest, I had the least developed sense of time and space. I would frequently pop up too early with “Here It Is!” only to see the object still far in the distance, go down again and wait until surely it must be past us by now. But my second “Here It Is!” would again baffle me. A sibling was the closest with the final “Here It Is!”

Here I am, repeating an old pattern. My first actual blog post was in 2008, a placeholder for some dream of the future, since I was totally disabled. A very weak and timid “here it is” with no idea when or even if it would arrive. My second post was in 2009. I needed a place to post My Amazing Recovery story online linked to my YouTube channel. That was certainly a stronger “Here It Is.” But, I still wasn’t sure what kind of blog, if any, I wanted to do.

I surrendered my resistance to blogging when I realized I have a story to share and I am the one to tell it. My first post was to be my resistance revealed. Why blog, what do I write, who wants to tell their secrets publicly, who will read it, etc.? Before that, I needed a visual space I could tolerate inhabiting. After decades in graphic design, I couldn’t stomach the canned blog templates, but design career burnout left me resistant to design it myself.

My son, Josh, has my favorite blog design, Pi Po Pa. I asked him for help. He was generously willing in spite of working full-time teaching English in Japan, raising a family of babies with his wife while living traditional Japanese style with her mother, brother and sometimes her sister. I gave him general ideas like “I want it just like yours but different,” and “I won’t be too picky, anything you do will be better than the templates.” Then I had to admit my unintentional lie and start working out some designs of my own. Josh is responsible for the wonderful red and black dragonfly texture of the sidebar frames, which became my jumping off point for the background. He also did all the html coding, which I could or would not have done. Kudos to Josh!

Finally, HERE IT IS!



BTW check out Josh’s great design and content at Pi Po Pa.
Copyright B. Grace Jones 2010