The Blog Manifesto

I've been around the blogger world long enough to know that when someone stumbles across a new blog that looks interesting, they go back to the first post to see what and who it's all about. Or at least that's what I do, and I'm fond of projecting my habits on everyone else. Horribly self-centered of me, but I'm convinced that only self-centered people create blogs--especially blogs called "The Tiniest Record Player." So my name is Charissa and I'm self-centered. I'm married to Pete, and he helped me come up with this title, so he gets to be implicated, too.

Let me give a stab at this manifesto thing before you get too bored and start clicking on my links to go to another page. I expect that our most faithful readers will be our parents (hi, parents!). We love them. Second to them, I expect that our friends who blog will probably read on occasion, since I try to subscribe to their blogs and will probably start linking to them (hi, friends!). And in the future, when we move out of this country for more exciting locales, I expect that we will pick up a few more readers whose lives are so boring that they need to live vicariously through someone else whose life is more exciting. Woops, did I just put that in print? I just offended half my future imagined readership! What I meant was that we will pick up readers who want to keep in touch with us and pray for us from across the Pacific Ocean. Hi, future imagined readers! Thanks for caring enough to follow our lives!

As far as what this blog will contain, I probably have more ideas about what it will not contain than what it will. Nothing cheesy. Nothing containing the m-word (and if you know what that is, please censor your comments appropriately). Nothing overly introspective. (The ugly introspective stuff is all on another anonymous blog I keep that probably has more readers than this one because it fits so nicely into a particular niche. Trust me, you probably don't want to hear it. If you think you do--well, email me, I guess, and we'll chat.) And no last names. My first name is unique enough, and when coupled with my last name, I'm far too google-able. Beyond that criteria...well, I promise to do my best to keep it interesting and as concise as possible. I'm an English major who just turned in a 120-page thesis, so brevity, though the soul of wit, is not always in my soul. But concise I can do.

Oh, and the title. What can I say? The idea was mine, but you can blame Pete for the fact that I actually went for it. I suspect that each of you will read something different into it, and that's fine by me. Like the best literature, it's up for interpretation.