Stand up, and tell us a little about yourself

Hello everyone - my name is Angelle (Hi, Angelle!) and I am a . . . well, a lot of things, many of them not very pretty in the light of day. A book-aholic. An information junkie. A serial apologizer. An outrage addict. A recovering Catholic. I have admitted that I am powerless over shiny new boots and turned my credit cards over to a higher power.

My friend Val says it's passe to riff on 12-step programs and she's probably right. But it's also a useful cultural shorthand to indicate a project of personal recovery and growth. Which is what this is meant to be. So forgive my use of it here, just this one time. I promise not to do it again. Much.

Welcome to the Good Soap blog!

I started Use the Good Soap to help me think/work through a lot of the ideas I have about guilt, self-worth, and why even if we CAN have nice things, we often feel too shitty to enjoy them.

This little corner of the internet is my laboratory, a place for me to throw lots of ideas at the Web, and see what sticks. If you happen by, I hope you'll stick around and join the discussion. The concept is shamelessly borrowed from Chris Anderson and his Long Tail blog, because I believe in always stealing from people smarter than I am.

My plan is to talk about about big ideas and nitty-gritty specifics, with personal anecdotes and probably some content on books and music and movies thrown in because, well, it's my blog and those are things that matter to me.

Oh, and pictures of my cats. Because if there's one thing the internet needs, it's more cats.