Laryngitis

I have something that's been bothering me for the past couple of days. I think I might be losing my voice. No, I'm not referring to the cold my daughter passed on to me this weekend or the barking cough you can hear from two states away. (Hear it? Wait - there it was again. Yes, that's me.) I mean my writing voice.

See, I'm one of those people who you could call...impressionable. I tend to pick up on the mannerisms of people around me and unconsciously mimic them. I was reminded of this recently, when my daughter's daycare provider remarked that my daughter is well-behaved, but tends to pick up bad behaviors from other people - she tends to copy them. I thought about that and realized something: she comes by that honestly. I do the same thing.

It's like when you've been in a foreign country for a while (is New England a foreign country?) and when you get home, people around you comment on your accent. (Where are you from? Oh, I'm from London. Aha...I thought so. You have a really cool accent. Uh, no...London, Kentucky.)

But who knows. Maybe you have a cool accent if you're from London, KY, too. Or, some kind of accent, that someone, somewhere, thinks is cool.

My point is, when I read and then turn around and write something, I think I tend to pick up the writing voice of whatever author I've been reading. And since I've been reading blogs lately...and now I'm writing a blog...I suspect I've let myself "sound" like other bloggers. Especially since I think there are quite a few out there with pretty funny writing styles.

I like funny. I like to be funny. I have a pretty decent sense of humor, but I can not tell a joke. For the life of me. If you tied a rope around my ankle and dangled me off a bridge and told me I'd be hanging there until I told you a funny joke...well, I'd probably scream something like, "I'm hanging from a bridge by my ankle! MY ANKLE!!! AND YOU WANT ME TO BE FUNNY???" But I can guarantee that I wouldn't make you laugh. Unless you were mean like that, and then that's just not cool. Not cool.

But I'm not sure how naturally I come by "funny," even in writing. Maybe I've learned to write funny (funnily? - haha, that must be correct, Blogger didn't put a red squiggly line under it). Maybe I'm just copying others' styles. Probably it's a bit of both. I'm going to work on sounding a bit more like me, though...and try to still be funny while I'm at it.

So if all of you stop following me in the next week or so, I guess I'll know why.