BlahBlahBlog Explained
I’ve been telling stories since I could talk, and wrote my first comic book, “The Spooky Boos,” in 3rd grade. When not committing stories to words, I was drawing pictures of them. I thought, “Hey! Some of these are worth sharing!” So, I decided to create a blog. But I got held up for 5 years by the technicalities of creating a blogsite and so the stories have been piling up without a place to put them, until now.
But “BlahBlahBlog?” What a ridiculous name! Why? There are two reasons.
- Have you ever been enticed to read an article (especially online) that begins with a real teaser, but after you’ve crawled through about four paragraphs you realize it reads like a 6th– grader’s padded essay that will never get to the point? So, you start skimming through, looking for the point, and find yourself reading, “blahblahblahblahblah,” after which you give up and close out the page. Wasted time! Sometimes after I’ve written something I realize it might be important to me, but simply blahblahblah to anyone else, so I edit it until I toss it out.
- Then there is the popularity of the name Barbara, at least during the 1940s and 50s. For goodness sake, there were FOUR Barbara’s in my first grade class! Although I haven’t run into a young Barbara in decades, the result is that now you find a bunch of aging women named Barbara.
Several years ago, after we had relocated to Urbanna, built – but never completed – our dream home (although we were living semi-comfortably in it, never taking off our rose-colored glasses); and after we gutted – but never finished rebuilding – our business home downtown (although we moved in and opened the doors, never removing our rose-colored glasses); and after we started the business without ever completing a website or any of a number of remodeling projects; and after we each were each appointed to serve on several committees and I was elected to Town Council; after we realized that because we were “creative people” and not “hard-ass business people” we would never be able to make a profit at our business, but were lucky to keep the doors open; and after looking at each other totally befuddled and overwhelmed, my husband Cloyde thought we needed to take on something else.
He’d seen an ad in the local paper looking for homes to place foreign exchange students. “Wouldn’t you like to take in a kid for a school year and have a teenager in the house?” he surprised me.
“No!” I answered. “We are old. Our children are grown, gone, and raising their own children. What do two old farts like us have to offer an expectant and homesick teenager? They want to live with their classmates and we have no connection with the schools.”
“Oh, just CALL and inquire!” he pleaded. “How could it hurt to ask?”
It seemed only moments later that we were waiting at Richmond’s Airport to meet our new “daughter” for the first time. She was not from France, England, Germany, Italy, or Sweden. She was a 15-year-old Buddhist girl, traveling half-way around the world,
completely alone, from southern Thailand. We were instructed to call her by her nickname which was Kaew (pronounced Gow).
So, blahblahblah, skipping over other cool stories about her and getting to the point of THIS story, after a few days in her strange new high school, she came to us with a compassionate request. There was another Thai girl at school from Bangkok whose placement had gone terribly wrong. No sooner had she arrived than the sponsoring parents split up and the wife left. “Fern” would be sent home if they could not find a suitable family for her.
Enter my friend, Barbara Stutzman and her husband, Dave. They were even older than Cloyde and I, but Barbara felt a little jealous that we were bold and insane enough to take in Kaew and they had no one. So, after a few days of heavy consideration and prayer, they took “Fern” into their home. Suddenly, we had two girls from opposite ends of Thailand living two blocks apart in tiny Urbanna, VA.
Blahblahblah, we’ll skip over the personality conflicts between our little princess and the galumphing tomboy and how that new friendship never quite got off the ground, and cut straight to the Gallery, that business that Cloyde and I owned and poured everything into without ever being able to collect a salary between us.
Every two or three months, our Gallery changed art exhibits, brought in a new artist or two and had a grand opening reception with wine, beer, heavy hors d oeuvres, and lots of fanfare. Barbara S usually pitched in to help me. And for the first time, we recruited Kaew and Fern to help with greeting, food, and clean-up. Mostly they were simply observing the whole American small-town art scene.
It was a great crowd that night. While Barbara and I were introducing our Thai daughters to everyone, we realized there were three additional adult Barbara’s in attendance. This, confused Fern. We found ourselves trying to explain that not all American women were named “Barbara.” The five of us were gathered around the girls in a semi-circle as the explanations continued. Fern, who couldn’t pronounce “R” at all, stood there and in rapid fire pointed to each of us and said, “Blahblah, Blahblah, Blahblah, Blahblah, Blahblah!. Then, with one sweeping motion, she pointed, slowly enunciating, “Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” We all laughed. Ever since that night, Barbara S and I have called each other Blahblah.
And so, as I struggled to come up with a domain name for the website that I finally caved in and paid someone else to create, it occurred to me to name it according to the way this Blahblah scans bad writing, hoping for a better response from her readers.