In the Beginning...

I will be 45 in one week.  I am good at writing, this I have been told, and I enjoy it…for the most part.  Besides that, I am just as lost and confused about what my life is, and what to do with this life as I have ever been.  I am not gonna go all existential on you now and bemoan the meaning of life, I am simply wondering whattheheckamigonnadonow type of thing.

Throughout my 44 years, 11 months and 51 weeks of life, I have used writing from time to time as a coping mechanism.  I have written letters to lost loves, never sent them mind you, but wrote them to get what was in my head, out, on to paper, or in most cases on to the electronic void of the computer.  I have written to my mom who passed away, and have even written to my dog who after almost 16 years of love and devotion, had a stroke one morning and needed to be put down.  Now my writing seems to be bubbling up to take a new purpose.  I want to write, not just need to.  I want to find a way to write for a living and I am not sure how that will happen yet.  Why is this coming up now?  I guess I need to go back a bit.

I am an American love refugee living in the southern part of Sweden.  That's right, if you put faith in Fox News, I live in that empire of socialistic evil in northern Europe where all the women are 5'10” blond haired, blue eyed supermodels and tax rates are 246%.  I live here because my wife is Swedish and once we started a family, we decided that this would be the place to raise them.  The quality of life for families with children is very good here.  Crime is very low, we get the choice to send our kids to a private school at no extra cost, college is free, maternity and paternity leaves are the law and we receive many other benefits for children's families which just aren’t available in other places.  Upon arriving here in May of 2004, we began to look to start out own business, a long time dream of mine.  The fact that my Swedish was barely passable at the time and the limited number of English speaking jobs made it imperative to do something on my own.  Now 6 years later, my dream turned into a nightmare for more reasons that I care to recall, my wife is running the one location we have left and I am searching, in earnest, for a job for the first time in over 12 years.  A daunting task at any time, but throw in cultural and language differences, economic instability and more rust around my edges than I knew existed, and it is a frustrating, emasculating, down right depressing way to spend the better part of ones day.

I have an MBA.  I have a great professionally written resume.  I have wide ranging experience and, according to hiring professionals, I have the skills, education and experience that companies are looking for, yet, I can't get a job.  I am not sure it would be different if I was trying this in the US, but at least I would have a home field advantage that I just don’t have here.  In many ways, I feel that getting a full time job would be a step backward.  Owning my own company has had MANY problems, to be sure, but I have gotten to be very flexible with my time, a great thing to have when you have 3 kids between the ages of 4 and 9 in the house.  On the other hand, having a place to go to every day, with preset responsibilities and expectations sounds pretty good to me right about now.  The issue is, I can't sit around waiting for something to happen, I need to make something happen, and one of the ways I think I can do this is to begin to write for a living.  The best of all worlds’?  Perhaps…if I can actually get paid for it.

I have found some great sites that help promote freelance writers, find writing jobs and obtain the skills they need.  However, I have yet to read a job announcement which didn’t want an experienced writer.  Thus the age old catch 22.  How can I get writing experience, without a writing job, and how can I get a writing job without the writing experience?  At least for a writer, blogging would be one way to get ones writing samples put out there.  Thus the Blah Blah Blog began as a little seed in my head, until here it is, being put down into my word processing program, and then posted into cyberspace for enquiring minds like you to read.

Why Blah Blah Blog?  Why not Aspiring Writers Blog or something more specific?  Well, I have many interests and I didn’t want to be tied down to one topic.  I am a devoted husband and father, my family is the number one priority in my life.  I enjoy sports, politics, reading and have begun working out in earnest for the first time in my life.  I am 40-60 pounds overweight, depending on which reference you use, and I could easily write about that too and my battle to finally shed those unwanted pounds.  So, Blah Blah Blog.  It’s about life, love, writing, being a foreigner in a foreign land, even though you live here and are a citizen.  Food, exercise, weight, job searches the agony and ecstasy of being a father, you name it.  Maybe sometimes, like a good Seinfeld episode, it will be about nothing.  Well he didn't do too poorly with that tact did he?  Whatever I am feeling that day, or moment, or what ever.  And perhaps the things that you are feeling and thinking too.  I hope someone out there reads it and enjoys hearing about the antics of a middle aged man who is trying to figure out what direction to take to obtain life’s greatest joys.  A cold beer at the end of the day, and a warm body to snuggle up to at night.

Welcome to Blah Blah, more than your average chit chat…