I noticed something a few weeks ago – “love” was not in my frequently used tags on my blog’s home page.  The tags that show up in the tag cloud on the right-hand side of my home page indicate first by their appearance and second by their size the number of times the tag has been used.  Tags need to be used a certain amount of times to even get into the tag cloud (my best guess is that it takes about a dozen tag mentions for it to appear in the cloud given the number of blog entries I have amassed).  As you can see the tag’s size is used to indicate the frequency with which it appears – so obviously humor is my most frequently used tag.

It isn’t that I haven’t talked about love in my blog.  Indeed, I am guilty of over-using the word in casual conversation – I love everything from Mexican food to shoes to cars to people – usually with the exact same level of emphasis.  Yet, I have not used the tag “love” for these exclamations of adoration.  I surmise it is because the tag, like the word, in its truest sense to me means more than a statement of feelings or appreciation – it is a statement of commitment.    There have not been many occasions in my blog wherein I am talking about my life at that intimate a level (a statement which may seem incongruent to some of you who have read what you may believe are very intimate musings about any number of things).  In the two years I have been writing my blog I tend to gloss over the depth of my commitment (hence, “love”) to examine some other focus such as parenting, humor, aging or relationships generally. So while I often talk about people I love in my blog it is rarely the topical focus of my blog.  And even while I recognize this, it is not a phenomenon that I would expect to change should the topical focus stay the same. 

But I have been thinking an awful lot about love lately – particularly romantic love.  I have looked around at my life and my past experiences and asked myself some tough questions about what love means to me.  The realization that I had not really used “love” as a tag in my blog was very telling to me.  Why in over seven hundred entries have I passed over the option to talk about love?  Why hasn’t it hit the radar on my blog? 

Why indeed?  I thought back over the two years that have passed and the blogs that I have written about folks who might have elicited the emotions and hence, the tag.  I guess I never really felt like the topical focus of those blogs were actually “love” – I guess the emotions that go with the word were not there when I wrote about those who were in a relationship with me that may elicit that depth level of emotion.  

Ah, but my life is changing…it has been since Michael (a.k.a. Jersey boy) came into the picture.  Suddenly I want to use the tag “love” both as a statement of topic and as an exclamation of what is.  Suddenly, love has everything to do with everything…suddenly, romantic love is a primary thought as I go about my daily life.   And you know what that means if you are one of the folks who regularly read my blog – what is going on in my life shows up in my blog – perhaps not with the depth of details you would find on a Jerry Springer Show, but at least with the emphasis it would get in a one minute blip on Entertainment Tonight.

The universe as I have known it to be is changing…and you will likely see that reflected in my blog and in my tags…and yes, love has everything to do with it. 😉

Day seven hundred and eighty-nine of the new forty – obla di obla da

Ms. C