Eat with fava beans and chianti

Every blogger (or nearly so) seems to go through these periodic reflective spells where they do this meta-musing on what their blog is all about. Am I a lifestyle blogger? A humor blogger? Do I specialize in snarking? (Yes, I made up my own word. Is there a problem?)

It's normal. We do this same kind of reflecting about everything, probably. I went through this mini-blog identity crisis when I first started. You can kind of see it in the domain name of my blog. "Read and Write Stuff." Of course, mostly I just focus on the writing stuff part.

In the beginning, I thought I would blog about my writing journey and review books that I read. That lasted for a couple of months but I discovered quickly that as much I love both reading and writing, I can say only so much about writing and then I'm ready to move on. It's just not something I can talk about all the time. Sometimes, yes. But not for a year-and-a-half. Reading I could talk about forever, but I have a book group and Goodreads for that.

I got to thinking about this whole identity thing a couple of weeks ago when I think some of you wandering by thought I was having one of these blog identity crises. It was due to a post I did about how I feel guilty that I'm too shallow to spend much time on some of the deeper, richer blogs out there. Several commenters seemed to think that meant that I was thinking I felt I needed to get deeper and . . . stuff. A lot of you were like, "No! Please, continue to be shallow! We need more shallow in the world!"

Never fear. If you fall into deep waters around here, consider it a cosmic accident. Swimming in deep water is neither typical nor intentional on my part in my blog or life. I DO spend quite a bit of time in deep doo doo, but that's typical (although also not intentional). It's also literal more often than I'd like.

Anyway, I know my category and I know it well. I'm not a lifestyle blogger (and we'd be in a lot of trouble of I was. I'll post pictures of my house some time so you can see how much this would be a BAD idea) or a mommy blogger in the sense that I don't really focus on my kids (IN MY BLOG!). And I'm not a reviewer although I'll tell you when I love something. For example, I could tell you where to find some great lifestyle, mommy, and review blogs that I LOVE and read daily. And maybe I will later this week.

Maybe the closest is to say I'm a slice of life blogger. But I thought about that label and realized it didn't fit either so I found exactly the right one: I'm a slice of brain blogger. I just pluck out a cross section of my brain and plunk it down and it is what it is. This blog is my place to spew all the things that I had a talent for writing but no forum to write it in. And the comment box is my personal network of kindred spirits who stop by and confess to being equally crazy.

I love that I can find whatever I want in Blogland. I daily visit slice of lifers, funny ladies, deep thinkers, diligent mothers and reviewers. But for me, it's enough to have a space to dump out the random thoughts that regularly dart across my mental television screen like snippets of the sitcom that is my life or a sound bite from the arguments that occur when my multiple personalities gather in their own version of The View to bicker about . . . whatever.

Thanks for hanging in my neighborhood.