Howdy, neighbors!

My name is Jen Raffensperger, and I’ve lived in Columbia for almost seven years. This is my introduction piece on  Columbia Patch, which will publish some of my blog posts as part of a community focus on local bloggers.

There. Now that I’ve gotten the important, somewhat dry bits out of the way, I’d like to try to explain what I hope I’ll be doing here.

Writing has always been important to me, from when I started keeping a journal at age 11 to when I was writing very bad poetry in high school; from the deathless prose of a thousand starts-of stories still living in a box in my closet to years of correspondence with faraway friends. In one of those very early journals, I wrote a list titled “Steps to a Perfect Life!” Enthusiastically I scrawled out my pre-adolescent dreams in that speckled composition book, including this one:

“Work for a top paper and win a Pulitzer Prize!”

When I found this list later in life, unpacking a box containing my very oldest journals, I felt at first a sweep of embarrassment for the younger me. She didn’t really know what she was talking about, I thought. It turns out that wasn’t quite a fair assessment. Younger me knew what she was talking about, but she didn’t really know how to say it, and she didn’t know much about how things in the world worked, like newspapers or careers or prizes.

What I wanted to do so badly was to communicate. I found more joy in writing than I did in almost anything else in my life (except reading what others had written). When I was eleven or twelve years old, and a very practical-minded child for all my daydreaming, the only way that I could imagine incorporating writing into my life as a way to make a living was journalism. It turned out that wasn’t my particular calling. I no longer feel shame that I was unable to accurately pinpoint what my calling was in elementary school.

Recently an exciting thing has been happening in the Columbia and Howard County community. The local bloggers are finding each other, through aggregators and social media, through sites like Patch and others. They’re meeting up. They’re talking. They blog about everything from fitness to food to nature walks to television to whatever fool thing came into their head that morning. (My own blog tends towards this latter.) But what blogging does, what bloggers meeting each other does, is establish and embellish communication. I’ve lived in Columbia for seven years, but in the nearly two years I’ve had my blog I feel like I’ve become more a participant in the community than ever before.

All I hope to do here is further the conversation. Sometimes I’ll write about the community, sometimes I’ll write about my cats. Sometimes I’ll write about whatever fool thing comes into my head. I look forward to sharing this with you, and to hearing what you have to say.