(Alternately: One Day I Promise I’ll Learn To Take Things Seriously, But That Day Is Not Today)

I’ve been experimenting with my blog a lot recently. It felt weird at first. I’ve never really blogged before. I mean, sure I’ve thought about it–who hasn’t–but other than commenting on friends’ LiveJournals in high school and that week I had a Tumblr a couple of months ago, I didn’t ever think blogging was for me.  Now it feels so natural, though, like something I’ve been doing forever. I can barely even remember life before blog.thoughtyouknew.info. I’m a little nervous to tell my family that I’m a blogger, but I think they’ll understand. They know I like to write. They’ve probably been expecting this for a while.

My blog and I started off slow. In fact, we didn’t even really get along at first. There was some confusion with syncing up with the class site and I was embarrassed by how my friends were making fun of me for choosing the Internet over hanging out.

I got over my initial uncertainty, though, and sought out help for our technical difficulties.

I chose a simple theme because, as I imagined our future together, I saw the blog as my own space where I could post .gifs of animals and photoshopped composite images of mine and Andrew Garfield’s faces to see what our future children will look like. The blog doesn’t need a busy background to distract from the obviously high caliber content I will be posting this semester, but I did want a theme that would allow for a custom header. Although I’m not completely satisfied with what I have right now, it will do for the moment. As soon as people visit the page, I want them to know: “This is my blog and I like to make weird faces in pictures!”

It’s been less than a week since I started experimenting with the blog, and though we got off to a rocky start, we’ve already built an unshakable bond. Our relationship is like The Notebook, only better because Nicholas Sparks isn’t writing my blog. No one has to die in the end.

I set up Akismet and Subscribed to Comments, which were so easy. Everything is always so easy in the beginning, isn’t it? Then I read up on Twitter Tools. The theme I’ve installed is already linked to my Twitter, which has been feeling rather neglected since I became a blogger, so I decided to skip in favor of setting up Google Analytics.

Oh, how I long for the days of choosing fonts and background colors.

Signing up for the account went smoothly, but as soon as I tried to connect Google Analytics to the plugin I downloaded, there was a breakdown in communication. I read words that attempted to tell me how to set up the program to view how many other people my precious would be seeing behind my dashboard, but it’s like the words were in another language. The plugin boasted ease and usability for those of us less experienced in the mysterious, yet intriguing world of blogging, but the only thing that was easy was how fooled I was into thinking this would go without a hitch.

I’m not going to give up on my blog this quickly, though. It was there for me the other afternoon when I skipped class, but wanted to feel like I was being productive since I was skipping class the first week of school, and I’ll always be grateful for that.