Drops of Blood

5 Bloggers Who Cheer, Inspire, and Move Me

Posted on 25 June 2007

I was tagged Sunday for a blogging honor and now have the opportunity to pass it on to five bloggers who make me think. The only difficulty is picking just that few. So many bloggers enrich my life with the writing they provide for free online — from their concise commentary on news to writing tips, knitting how-tos, and humor about how they survive their daily lives. I wanted to toss a special hurrah today to a few of my favorites who consistently make me laugh and think. Apparently, I love good storytellers who can mingle laughter and pain in a “you gotta hear this” tale:

• The irrepressible blog of Crazy Aunt Purl, a Southerner transplanted to the Left Coast. She makes me feel like I KNOW her and care about her painful moments and her wacky sense of humor, her love of fried okra, and her glasses of wine on the porch with friends. Self-described as “the true-life diary of a thirty-something, newly divorced, displaced Southern obsessive-compulsive knitter who has four cats. (Because nothing is sexier than a divorced woman with four cats.)”
• She Just Walks Around With It is a funny, touching blog. It chronicles the life of a woman who manages a complicated life of full-time blogging, breezy elegance, dating a newly divorced comedian, navigating grief, taming her bootylicious size, and the occasional bout of knitting.
• Simple words can’t readily define the world of Milkmoney or Not, Here I Come. I love the poetry and the stream-of-consciousness humor, quirky turn of phrase (her body, aka the “meat suit”), observations (”I had so much religion by the time I was fifteen that I was pretty much cured of it”), and the unabashedly honest descriptions of her psychiatric travails and upcoming hysterectomy.
• Dooce is the always surprising, funny, and tender world of Heather Armstrong. I love the monthly letters she writes to her toddler, photos of her amazingly patient and talented dog, and her quirky comments, like “when I die I will be disappointed if one of my cousins doesn’t secretly slip his dirty socks into my open casket” and “So when we decided to put Leta into pre school we were all, maybe she’ll immediately love it, right? And then I handed Jon the bong so I could go stick my face in a jar of goldfish crackers. We had to have been high to have even considered that line of reasoning, because when has anything with Leta ever been easy?”
• The author’s travails with a noxious neighborhood and hoped-for home sale have kept me riveted to Suburban Bliss: Birth Control Via the Written Word. Even her tale of a bad day is a must-read about how her husband cancels their lunch date, her trip to the coffee shop gets shot by a woman’s ill-behaved child, and she’s rear-ended on the way to Chuck E. Cheese’s; she puts her bad day into perspective when she sees the joint’s main character at the door. “There he was, crouched down to greet all the kids, all the wired, hyper children coated in pizza grease. It must be hot in that full fur outfit, I thought, because it’s kind of warm not in a full fur suit what with all the manic energy in this room. And I watched him crouched down with kids lurching themselves at him and he almost fell over. Then I watched my friend’s little girl trying to shove her tickets in Chuck E Cheese’s mouth, thinking he was a ride? And the arms on his costume were too short so he couldn’t block the tickets from being rammed into his mouth. I watched him struggle and I thought, with a sinister laugh, ‘That guy hates his life way more than I will ever hate mine.’ “

Ladies, I mean every honor to you when I pass along the Thinking Blogger Award. Details are below.

Congratulations, you won a !

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. I thought it would be appropriate to include them with the meme.

The participation rules are simple:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

And thanks to Terry Thornton, who enjoyed my post on “5 Reasons the Best Writers Come from Mississippi” enough to tap me for this.

[tags]bloggers, Thinking Blogger Award, kudos[/tags]

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