Like the Boy Who Cried Wolf, I Tell You Dear Tina is Back!

Dear Tina,

It seems like only yesterday I was a mere 23 years old with a dream in my heart and an idea in my head. A spunky young sprite who decided it was time to take control of her life and follow her career passions to the brink. A woman who loved attention and spewing her own opinions no matter how vague or misguided. And so a blog was born.

Alas, that was a whopping 365 days ago.

Now I’m 24, still living in Chicago and essentially jobless. (Note: I say essentially because it takes some of the heat off the fact that I am completely and utterly jobless.) Over the last four or five months there have been a lot of “I’m sorry I’ve been away from my blog! I’m now totally focused on this thang!” posts. And while my intentions were sincere, they were by no means executed. Leaving some, mainly my sister, to wonder what it was exactly that prevented someone without a thing to do from taking an hour out of her task-less day to write. The answer is…er…what’s the emoticon for an apathetic shrug?

If I may roll out an excuse, I will say that I am the kind of person who has a hard time deviating from the original plan. And the original plan with Dear Tina was to write a post everyday. So when it became November 1st and I had 67 posts to write, my brain ceased to function creatively and I spent the next two months developing a passion for House Hunters and tropical Starbursts.

You see, the mass amount of time and effort required to complete the task, well frankly it reminded me of Homer’s The Odyssey. Did you also have to suffer through that treachery freshman year of high school? By the time the class was on chapter 27, I was still on 4 and I had no other choice but to borrow my sister’s copy that she had used the year before and pass her annotations off as my own. Classic schmassic, that book is a snooze.

Confessions of plagiarism aside…

Now that I am in the process of resurrecting Dear Tina, I have decided to make a few adjustments. The first and most important is that I am no longer going to pressure myself to write a post everyday for fear of a similar fate that we saw in 2010. If I can casually come around after a six day hiatus and mention to you and other readers why the women of The Bachelor are holding my sanity hostage as they continue to promote the idea that the only thing stronger than love is our competitive side, then that would take a lot of pressure off me.

The other adjustment you may note is that not all posts will feature titles in the form of 30 Rock quotes. Once a feature that I prided myself on for it being a creative cut above the rest, had developed into a task that would add an additional 30 minutes or more of Internet searching in order to complete a post. Plus, after already featuring 430 30 Rock quotes (including 30 Rock Quote of the Day), that fountain of wealth is running dry.

I think that’s it for now. I would like to figure out a way to design this bad boy so it looks slightly more personal. I’d love it if this blog looked less like online newspaper archives and more like a fun party with pretty colors and maybe something floral. If anyone knows how to do that, I’d be interested to hear. Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed the read! More to come…I swear.

Here’s to another great year Tina. 2011. The year of Cath 2.0.

I really need a job.