About

A Portrait of a young girl at home…

First and foremost? READ ME.

Of course it isn’t my real name, but you may call me Diz. Well, honestly, you can call me pretty much anything you want. I can’t very well prevent you from giving me another moniker, right? Some of you have been reading since my days at another domain, using a non-alias. Ain’t the internets grand?

I enjoy long walks along the beach, candlelit dinners… no wait. I keep confusing myself with someone else. I am a born and bred Jersey gal and I have a sarcastic streak a mile wide. I thought I’d be a writer when I grew up. Unfortunately, it took me until pretty much the moment I earned my degree to realize I didn’t want to be the kind of writer that writes news. I’m skeptical as to whether there is such a thing as free press. I’m also skeptical as to whether anyone ever truly “grows up”.

My formative years (whatever that means) were spent in suburban central New Jersey, where I was a brainiac nerd with low self-esteem, thanks in large part to the cruelty of the kids in my class. Parents, raise your kids to be decent, open-minded people. Teach them not to pick on the weirdos, okay? Although we moved to northern New Jersey when I was eleven, and I’ve lived in this region ever since, I still feel as though the central part of the state is my home. Seriously. Ask anyone who’s been unlucky enough to venture down the Parkway or the Turnpike with me. We get south enough, and I start waxing nostaglic. I know it’s hard to understand if you aren’t from the armpit of America, but there are different versions of Jerseyans. Some of us say pork roll and others say Taylor ham. All of us, I’m pretty sure, go “down the shore”, though, so at least there’s that.

I’ve been blogging since November 2001, though I’ve had a few domains in the interim. I often get bored with the layout of my blog and change the way it looks. I’ve also purged the archives several times. Do I have backups? No, not really. Do I regret that? Yes, sometimes. I have grand intentions of honing my writing with read-worthy entries, although I’m not sure I’m doing a good job of that yet. I lost a lot of my readership when I started calling myself Diz… I miss them. (Come back, damn you!)

As I near the allegedly life-altering age of thirty, I find myself mindful of things that really never mattered much before. Health. The environment. Spirituality. The question of the year is, am I becoming a tree-hugging hippie? I think that if the answer is yes, it’s only right. My mother’s high school yearbook photo is captioned “our hippie”. Let the label pass on to the next generation.