About Me

When I was in first grade I wanted to be President of the United States. In a not so nice (or PC) manner, my teacher, Mrs. O’Neal smirked and told me to pick something else because I could never be President since I wasn’t born in America. Then I swear she pointed at me and engaged the whole class in a round of cackling. After this incident I decided to be a pediatrician. I held on to this goal for many years. In college I realized I needed to reconsider. Failing calculus, chemistry, and physics wasn’t going to get me into medical school, at least not an accredited one. Now I didn’t scrap that plan and dream of being a blogger. It was 1989, and “blog” hadn’t blasted our vernacular yet. But I did fancy myself a writer. 

And so I crept up (or down, depending on how you look at it) the food chain and set my sights on being a writer. By real I meant, published. I wanted to be the kind of writer people paid money to read. I did write a training manual about money so that sort of counts, right? Being an unmathy person (rare for an Indian girl who’s the daughter of an engineer), I found myself enamored with words. So enamored that I like making them up. Ahem. In third grade I tried to write a list of every word I knew. I’m still working on it. At the beginning of my career at a financial company I started a spreadsheet of homonyms and homophones. This proved to be a fine antidote to all the numbers I stared at all day, and having the spreadsheet up on my computer made it look like I was working. 

I’m a word geek. But I never realized the power of words until I started blogging.

I got a chance to write about beauty products for my local paper for a while. When that stint ended, I felt sort of naked and incomplete. I was getting such good feedback from my little bit in the paper that I was energized to continue writing. I had already bared myself to the public and decided to continue to feed my inner writer by starting a blog. My old friend Tony had done so, and I figured I could too. I started writing about things that amuse me, things that fire me up, and things that move me. It was 2008, a hot election year with a historic cast of characters taking center stage, especially in North Carolina. I wrote about current events and social issues through the lens of a mother of two sons. I wrote about an extraordinarily personal heartache when I was struggling with my older son’s temper tantrums. My inbox swelled with notes telling me I was not alone and people exhaling through the interwebs to tell me I gave them courage to seek help. 

To lighten things up I started my weekly feature called 5:00 Fridays, where I post an original cocktail recipe and tell the story that inspired it (This is now a book proposal that will hopefully make my writing dream come true. Fingers crossed!). It proved to be a good mix of advocacy and folly that resonated with my readers. What I found is a community of people who cheered me on and followed my lead. I learned from my readers that my words changed people’s minds and led them to the polls. Eventually my words would help fill boxes of food for the hungry and drive people to speak out against tremendous cuts to education and slashing of teacher pay. My blog has given me a voice that shows the ripple a small stone can make.

I’m not making money yet, but I am making a difference.