Once upon a time, there was a young girl.  We’ll call her Ashleigh, and Ashleigh loved making up stories.  Ashleigh also loved movies.  One thing Ashleigh didn’t love was the small town that she grew up in.  So when Ashleigh was old enough, she moved away to the big city, watched lots of movies and wrote “stories” about them, and she lived happily ever after.

Ok, so my life isn’t quite that storybook, but it is kind of fairy tale-ish that I’m getting to write movie reviews.  When Daniel asked me if I were interested in contributing to CultureFeast.com, I thought, “That would be pretty cool, but I bet movies are already taken.”  Luckily, one of my New Year’s resolutions was “no excuses,” so I decided to go ahead and give it a shot, and much to my surprise, movies weren’t taken.

So here I am blogging every week about something I absolutely love – MOVIES.  One of my best friends loves music.  Everything reminds her of a song.  I’m like that with movies.  Nine times out of ten, something that happens in life will remind me of something that I’ve seen in a movie, which, ironically, reminds me of a line from You’ve Got Mail when Meg Ryan says, "So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?"

I’ve been telling stories or writing or “making believe” for as long as I can remember.  I’m an only child, whose parents liked to travel a lot, and I can keep myself occupied with the best of them, but one can only do so many word searches and read Ramona Forever and play solitaire so many times before one’s head will explode.  So I started telling myself little stories in the backseat on all those long car rides through New Mexico and Texas.  Who knew that it might actually serve me well one day?

I began reading blogs in late 2004/early 2005.  Someone told me about This Fish, and I immediately fell in love with it.  I read every single one of her entries (the first ones were posted in 2002 or 2003), and I’m not ashamed to say that her blog played an integral part in my growth as a young woman.  For maybe the second time in my life, I felt like I wasn’t alone, like someone else actually “got it.”  Then through This Fish, I stumbled upon Dooce, and I grew even more.  Her candid portrayal of her life through her blog simultaneously brings me to tears of joy and sadness and love in almost every single post.

Writing has always been easier for me than face-to-face communication.  I have the time to get my thoughts together and make a coherent argument, rather than sputtering and stuttering my way through a confrontation.  My personal blogging has been another leg on the journey of writing and telling stories, and not unlike the effect that This Fish’s blog had on me, my blogging has opened up new worlds for me.  I’ve discovered parts of myself to which I would have been completely ignorant.  I still keep a private journal, but sometimes, being able to send a somewhat anonymous diary-like entry into the great “unknown” of the internet is extremely liberating, and I find that other’s comments give me an insight and point of view to which I would have never had access otherwise.  The whole experience has made face-to-face communication much more pleasant for me.

I did actually grow up in a very small town out in West Texas, and I did hate it.  Now, hindsight being 20/20, I can appreciate it for what it was, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to move back anytime soon.  I got my undergraduate degree from Texas A&M in Journalism, and I’ve been working as an assistant of some sort ever since my graduation in December 2003.  Most recently, I’ve been the executive assistant to the CEO of a captive insurance company.  I like the work and the people, and it gives me time to do the things I really like, i.e. spend time with friends, daydream, read, write and watch movies.

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