Alpha Betchya

You'd think I'd get enough of challenges. Such is not the case with this particular wordy gypsy. Beginning Friday, April 1st (no foolin'!), I'm going to be joining Lee and the gang over at Tossing It Out (here) for the A to Z Blogging Challenge. The idea is to blog every day of the week but Sunday, using a letter of the alphabet as inspiration each day. So, lucky you... you get to read my blogs on Saturdays for the month of April. Lucky me. I get to come up with an extra day of writing. I'm actually pretty excited about it. It speaks to my lexical wackiness.

Words have long been what anchors me. If I can find a word for what I'm feeling, or a way to describe it, I'm okay. I don't mind digging for understanding of other things, but when I flail (and fail) to describe my own path, I tend to get really frustrated. This is why I'm a better writer than a talker. Words get tangled when they leave my lips - if they even make it that far, but they flow from my fingers. I've tried to analyze that, I've tried to change that, and it's gotten a tiny bit better over the years as I've become more confident in my own skin, but I still don't feel like I've made much of a dent.

I think that's why art appeals to me so much. As my friend Jessica and I have concurred, it speaks where words fail. Even when the end product may not be quite what I envisioned, the act of creating art is a voice in and of itself. It's like mindless humming... making music just for the sake of making music. It's like dancing without a beat.

I was one of those strange kids who actually liked it when a word didn't start with the letter it sounded like it should start with. Example: I love that phonetic doesn't start with an "f". From there came digging into the word to find out its origin, from there came a love for other languages. From there came the notion that no matter where we're from or how we speak, we're not all so very different. Words united me with the world.

So, Barb goes Alpha - Zed... it'll be like a very twisted month on Sesame Street. Fasten your seatbelts.