Half-Baked

So, I want to be a better blogger. I’m trying to post more frequently and substantively, ocassionally featuring educational things or highlighting uber-cool people and organizations doing awesome work. I have several cool posts I’m working on, and a dozen more ideas swirling around and taking shape in my head.

I appreciate my readers and want them (um, I mean you) to come back to Dog & His Boy often. I want to inform, inspire and entertain you. I want us to engage and interact with each other. I hope you’ll share your thoughts with me and, the best of all compliments, share my blog with friends and family. I want to be a Blogger, capital B. A better Blogger. A good Blogger.

So, in an effort to kick-start my blogging skills into the next gear, I had a half-baked idea. Literally, I was probably half-baked at the time: let’s buy bunny ears for the boys and take a bunch of cool photos. The project even had a name: National Dogs Wearing Bunny Ears Day. Epic, I know.  So yesterday, I bought these silly, fuzzy bunny ears with an elastic chin strap in new-baby-boy blue.

 I imagined a series of staged shots, featuring the right dog into the right position in the right spot of the room with carefully manipulated ambient lighting and dozens of iPhone photo filters at the ready to mask my deficiencies as a photographer. Let’s just say it was a complete bust.
 

  

So then I tried my hand at candid photos. For three hours, I carried those bunny ears around with me, randomly attaching them to the boys’ heads and snapping unstaged pictures because, you know, it’s totally natural to see dogs walking around with bunny ears.  At first, the #photofail motivated me: the next one would be #epic. 

But when #epic became an #epicphotofail bound to end up on Ellen or a viral yet snarky BuzzFeed post, I threw in the towel. I licked my wounds with a glass of wine and I admitted defeat. 

I then realized something, I’m not one of those bloggers who puts their dogs in clothes or costumes. I’m not one of those bloggers because I’m not one of those people. It’s not who I am.

I’m not good at sweet, ain’t-this-cute? blogging because it doesn’t reflect me. Hell, I barely groom and dress myself, let alone these perfectly-imperfect, hairy, unclad and unshoed creatures who inhabit my life.

To be a good blogger, to be better, I need to be authentic. My blog needs to represent my truth, and frankly, I don’t excel at cutsieness. I’m kind of grumpy and serious and sarcastic with a dark sense of humor. The glass is most definitely half-full. Of arsenic.

In some ways, I wish I was more light-hearted. At times, I wish I could be more palatable-for-the-masses with a sugary coating, but I’m pretty sure I’m not. And that’s okay. I’m perfectly-imperfect just like my dogs and I’m choosing to lend my voice to my blog and let it speak for me.

And then this happened… 

 Word of advice: don’t lay bunny ears on top of burning candles. #nailedit