Display X number of characters from an entry I want to display just a short blurb from each blog entry. I dont know how to display my { entry.blogentry } without having all of the text show up.

Is there a way to just show the first 100 characters OR first few lines?
You can use the Twig slice filter do do this, e.g.: entry.text |slice(0, 100)

If you want something that looks a little nicer, and you're using the SEOmatic plugin, you can use the truncateStringOnWord filter, which will truncate to the number of characters you want, but only on word breaks (and it'll add an …).