WSS Featured Blogger: Shari of An Old Soul

• Name: shari
• Blog: An old soul...
• Location:http://anoldsoul.blogspot.com

1. How did you start blogging? Why do you keep at it?

Post 9/11, I was so damn frustrated with what was in the papers. I was on a mission to get more info so I went online, only to find the wingnut blogs at first. Ick. Ick. Ick. Hell on earth, let me tell ya. When I found the progressive blogs, I thought I was in heaven.

By this time, I was inundating friends with emails. I'm sure they thought I was nuts. When I started losing track of my emails, I started my own blog so I could have a place to put all the links in one spot.

Funny. In the beginnning, what went on my blog was the same stuff going out in my emails. No more. Now, I send out in my emails the stuff that's all over the blogs. My blog focuses more on just a few of the issues very dear to my heart.

I keep going, even as my life gets busier and I have even less time to be online, because I see education issues presented in a way that really gets me steamed.

2. What are your most important issues?

On my blog: Education. Environment. Issues related to children, parenting, health, problems of corporate influence.

Since my online time is limited, if I see something covered by many others, I don't usually touch it.

3. What's the nicest recognition you've ever received from the media and/or the blogosphere?

Kudos to Kevin Hayden who makes such a great effort to include as many bloggers as possible underneath his umbrella. Natalie Davis, Nurse Ratched and Cyndy Roy were among the first to notice my blog. Meant a lot to me. In turn, I do my best to extend the same hospitality to others.

4. Who is your audience? What is unique about your blog?

Audience? My online pals, of course. Unique? My take on education, which comes from hours and hours of reading policy wonk.

5. Most frustrating aspect of blogging?

Time. Or lack of it. Trying to have balance in my life. Blogging can eat up a huge chunk of time I don't have.

6. What's the one point you'd like a reader to take away from your blog- the one thing for them to really "get"?

Question the meaning of the words that people use, especially words used by the media and by politicians.
Does the speaker/writer come from the same worldview as you? If not, then what do those words really mean?
Education lingo is rife with catch phrases and code words that don't mean what you think.

Quotes I go by:

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.-- C. J. Jung

The loss of liberty in general would soon follow the supression (sic) of the liberty of the press; for it is an essential branch of liberty, so perhaps it is preservative of the whole. --John Peter Zenger (1697-1746)