The Queen's Rambles

Day 12 – Tell us about the first time you got drunk or tipsy (as far as you can remember…) Do you ever stop yourself from telling too much when you write on-line or do you think you tell too much?

Read more: 31 Days of Blog Juice at Creating Motherhood

I guess I skipped a couple of days, there. I will go back if the prompts are interesting. I’m sure you all want to hear about the first time I got tipsy. On my honeymoon. My group honeymoon.

That’s not as kinky as it sounds.

Huh. Looks like I am going to talk about that since you can’t say group honeymoon and not explain, especially if you are not a polygamist.

Mike and I lived alone in Sweden in our little love nest so we had plenty of honeymoon type opportunities for three years. We never got to see our book club friends. We met in this online book club; we are a very tight knit group.

Several of our book club members were able to come to our wedding in my hometown in OR. Instead of going off to Hawaii or doing something super romantic, we thought it would be more fun to hang out with our friends that we never, ever get to see. A big group of us went to Brookings, OR, a typical chilly Oregon beach town, for our honeymoon. I was 29, I think? And I had a margarita and got tipsy and I became very talkative and apparently funny.

I’d only had alcohol on a couple of occasions prior to my honeymoon. Having an alcoholic father made me terrified of drinking. Being heavily involved in a fundamentalist church didn’t help, either. Even now I rarely drink. I never developed a taste for it, plus I have enough addiction problems with chocolate. I don’t need to add alcohol to the mix. I know first hand how that can destroy a family.

As for the second part of the question, yes I do stop myself from writing certain things. I have been doing this a long, long time and have learned some hard lessons about writing for the public. I have learned to be a lot more tolerant and not talk out of my ass so much. There’s always someone who is going to be offended by my opinion. That’s one of the good things about being an unknown blog.

I try not to talk about my friends on here because that’s a good way to lose friends. I used to tell lots of fun stories about the crazy people I know, but it’s just not worth it. Sometimes I have to get those stories out, so those stories go on LiveJournal under a friends lock. My blog was a lot more fun when I was young and naive and writing about people is a not always complimentary way.

Unrelated, but I just have to mention it: The other day I forgot to answer a question about blogging in education. I’ve been going around and reading a lot of the summer camp posts and am surprised by the number of people who don’t think blogging has a role in education. I didn’t answer the question because I forgot, but also because the answer is so obviously yes.

As a former teacher I can think of tons of uses for blogging. First and foremost, a classroom blog that lets parents know what’s happening would be super useful. You could remind parents of when big assignments are due, when progress reports go out, and so on.

I can think of tons of other uses just off the top of my head. I taught English so anything that would get a kid to write would be a good thing. Of course the problem would be making sure bullying didn’t happen on any public blog you allowed your students to take part in. There’d have to be serious consequences in place and checks and re-checks before posts went live. Blogging would be a good way to get the kids to write about what they are reading or to share their writing and to get some sort of feedback. Writing in a vacuum is hard, which is why I love blogging. Writing workshops don’t work in a HS setting because the kids usually refuse to give any criticism, negative or otherwise. Maybe a blog entry could get the students to talk a little. It is a form they are used to growing up in the digital age.

In elementary schools you could use blogs to have different kids report on happenings in the classroom.

I’m sure there’s a ton more ways to use blogging in education, but I’m too tired to think of them. Anyone who does lesson planning day in and day out could come up with several uses.