Recently I was reading a series of posts by LeahPeah, in which she interviews other famous bloggers. She always opens the questioning with, “Why do you blog?” Usually they have some meaningful and short answer like, “To share my life with my friends” or “To explore myself like a kind of online therapy” or “To tell funny stories about my cat.”

But I say, why give a short answer to a question, when you can blather on for many paragraphs? It’s like my life philosophy!

Way back in the early 90s (told you it was going to be a long story), I was a huge, huge fan of Beverly Hills 90210 (don’t judge me!). After I moved to Ottawa to get married, I had the most boring, stupidest job ever, and as such, I had a lot of free time on my hands to explore this newfangled thing they called the “world wide web.” There I discovered the singular, incredibly fabulous Danny Drennan. Danny was a New Yorker who also loved 90210. Each week after the show aired, he’d post on his website an uber-detailed summary of the show’s events. Every scene was described, down to what the people were wearing and their facial expressions. Danny would give them funny nicknames and add his own snarky commentary, and sometimes he’d digress into hilarious, loosely associated anecdotes from his own life. He’d speculate on the thoughts of the extras and totally dissect the outfits. They took a couple of hours to read — they were pages and pages long — but oh, so worth it. Danny’s summaries went on to inspire the creation of the influential and popular site, Television Without Pity, where I have also been known to waste my employers’ money.

After several seasons of fabulousness, Danny found that life was interfering with his ability to create the write-ups. After Jason Priestly left the show and it kind of jumped the shark, Danny decided to give them up. I was still a faithful watcher, and I missed the recaps so much that I started writing my own. They were nothing like Danny’s — just five or six paragraphs describing, in a non-judgmental way, the major plotlines. I’d write them the morning after the show aired — at work, of course, because I’m serious about it being the Worst Job Ever — and then I’d email them to . She had a free website provided by the university she was attending, so she posted them up for the world to view.

My real name was also on the summary pages and I was quite surprised when, just a few months later, people I knew slightly or happened to meet for the first time asked me if I was that TurtleHead, the one who wrote the 90210 summaries. These were the days before every TV show had a million fan sites and chat boards and whatever, and I guess I was the only one posting a show summary the day after, and it got popular. And that was cool.

So after a little while I started to write other stuff for ‘s website, commentary on other entertainment-type stuff or just my thoughts on life. And then I decided that I had SO much time to kill at work (seriously, WORST JOB EVER), that I’d get my own site. I started Sidekick Magazine with my friend Mrs. Carl Sagan, where we posted up book and movie reviews, Hollywood gossip, profiles of character actors, and whatever I felt like writing about in my columns. Eventually the site grew and joined on as a major contributor and the site’s designer; most of my sisters and girlfriends, including and , also contributed the odd piece.

The site did well — it was profiled in Entertainment Weekly once and I got interviewed on the CBC, which was SO COOL. But after I had the Captain, it was hard for me to keep up with the work involved, and when I got pregnant with Gal Smiley, I decided to close it down. A sad day for all, I’m sure.

But I found right away that I really missed having an online forum for sharing my writing and my thoughts. I just didn’t know what to do with all the writing that was going on in my head. told me about ‘s journal on LJ, and suggested that it might be a fun alternative for me, a way to keep writing when I had time, without any pressure to deliver new content on a constant basis. I checked it out, and it was A Good Thing.

And so, a blogger was born.

Why do you blog?