BipolarLawyerCook

About this site:

This blog started out over at Blogger, but due to my laziness about learning html/css, and my desire for more template flexibility and customization, I e-migrated to Wordpress in January, 2008.

Begun in January 2007, BipolarLawyerCook is an online journal. There are recipes, photographs, musings about the law, life, and dinner. I was diagnosed bipolar in 2005. I graduated from law school in 2000. I’ve been cooking, in one form or another, since I was six or seven. I am married to a wonderful man whom I call the Better Half in these here blog entries.

I am also a contributing writer at Real Mental. I take digital photographs with a Panasonic DMC-TZ3, a glorified point-and-shoot, and maintain a Flickr page under the BipolarLawyerCook handle. If you are interested in purchasing a print of any photo shown here or in my Flickr stream, please email me. And no, I don’t have a cookbook deal. I do have a basic four burner gas stove and oven, and a lovely array of kitchen gadgets and cookbooks. My computer is a truly ancient Dell Inspiron 2600 laptop with an external wireless card and a permanently fraying power cord. The battery life on my laptop is -2 minutes.

I can be reached by email at bipolarlawyercook at gmail dot com. Please feel free to email me any questions you don’t feel comfortable posting as a comment, or which aren’t germane to any current post.  If you comment, especially for the first time, I’ll try to respond directly by email.  I don’t usually comment back in my comments section.

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Blogging Philosophy:

I started my blog because being diagnosed as bipolar has given me a new lease on life– I have a new perspective from which to understand myself and others. The diagnosis means some things will always be harder for me than others– but it’s also given me the insight to understand what’s worth pursuing, and what’s just bad for me. That perspective is worth all that came before.

I choose not to name my friends or family beyond nicknames or first initials. They have lives to live, too. If it’s anything at all personal, I’ve probably cleared it with them before posting.

I also choose not to air real dirty laundry, most of the time. I think I owe it to the people in my life to talk to them first, and to try to resolve things that way. It’s far less to do with whether they read the site or not, and nothing to do with a fear of what they would think– they know I am a firmly opinionated person. This personal choice should NOT be read as a criticism of the way others write their blogs. To each their own– really.

I also try to keep things generally positive. I am not a Polyanna, by any means. However, there is already a lot of bile out there in our culture and in the blogosphere– I don’t need to add to it, usually. Add to that the fact that much of my mental life to date has been spent being insecure, negative, and depressed, and the choice to accentuate the positive becomes more important. When I’ve posted something negative, or rant-y, or cranky, it’s because I’ve judged the post necessary to my mental health, politically/socially important, or something so trivial or general that the harm I am doing to the universe by not keeping my mouth shut is negligible.

I don’t usually moderate comments, but if someone is leaving comments that endanger my vision of this blog as a safe space for my readers, I will moderate as necessary. Feel free to leave me as many critical comments of me as you like, however, keeping in mind that I am both crazy and a lawyer, such that I am an unpredictable and vindictive person to annoy.

I do keep a paper journal, a moleskine notebook, for some of the more negative, personal, or otherwise unpublishable stuff. I also use it to record notes from therapy and doctor’s appointments, write poems, record ideas for blog posts, and otherwise get the voices in my head to calm down enough to let me think.

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Other Miscellaneous Stuff:

I am a member of BlogHer. I used PictoBrowser to make neat slideshows from my FlickR stream on Blogger– I am currently using slide.com for the WordPress platform, since WP doesn’t support Flash. I participated in NaBloPoMo 2007, met tons of awesome bloggers, and will do it again next year. I use Google’s Reader to keep track of all the sites I like to read, and keep my blogroll up to date.

I am mostly anonymous– you’re not going to see my name of the names of friends and family all over this blog. In March, 2008, my first freelance article was published, and after jumping up and down like a five year old in anticipation, it seemed mean not to link to the article for all those readers who have so generously encouraged me with their compliments about my writing, even though my full name appeared therein. But the thrust of the site is of the new perspective I’ve seen through the BLC persona, so I intend to maintain the fiction, for the most part.

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Blogging without obligation (sort of):

I try to produce something for this site at least five times a week, even if it’s just some links.  I try to visit the sites of my readers.  I try to respond to comments with some level of frequency, especially if you’re commenting for the first time.  And I try to respond to direct emails, too.  But life happens, and if I am slow in responding to a comment, a question, or I haven’t been by your site in a while, please don’t take it personally.  It’s just life, it’s not you.  Really.

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Copyright and Legal Disclaimers:

All photographs, adapted recipes, original recipes, poems, and writing on this site are the exclusive property and copyright of BipolarLawyerCook. Please feel free to link to the site– please email me or leave a comment regarding republication of any material appearing here.

Any statements set forth at this site are the opinion of the author, and do not constitute legal advice. No legal relationship is intended or created thereby. Unless you have a retainer agreement from me, signed, in ink, with my legal name and not my blog handle, no legal relationship between you and the author of this site exists.