For the past two years, I have hated Friday afternoons. I like Friday morning and Friday night, and I like the weekend, but I never feel like doing anything on Friday afternoon.
People are coming for dinner and the house is dirty. I have three new library books to read. I have several projects I want to start, but I don't want to do any of them. I didn't really want to post this either, but now that I've gotten my computer to work I am glad to be here in blog land.
Here's the first question for today: do all you bloggers or readers of blogs see the blogging as more of an escape from the rest of life and society, or as a way to take part in "life" and "society"? Explain. (Can you tell I'm a teacher? What an essay question. Feel free to ignore this or any other question.)
Question 2: Define "blog."
I like my new blog, even though I can't figure out how to put pictures on it OR put google ads on it. But I am trying to figure out what it-- the blog-- is. I feel like it's secret from everyone in my "real" life, even though it's not full of secrets. Maybe I'll send out an email about it to everyone I know so I don't feel like I am starting a second life no one knows about.
I feel like I need a third question.
But I don't have one, so again, only two.
5 comments:
1. For me, it's really come to be both, and it's intertwined real life and blog-escape-life in interesting ways. At first, it was all about escape, catharsis, and finding a new medium for writing. Try as I might, it was very difficult to render a poem from the stuff of Heroin Crisis 2007, but I felt brimful of things that needed to be written. I thought up the name "The Junky's Wife," and I imagined it would make a good blog. It did make a good blog. It made a healthy, crazy, fun place to write and write and write about my assinine, beautiful madman of a husband, which, as you know, is something I've been doing for a long time now. So it was escape...
But then, it took on this life of its own. I've got these electronic friends now, and I socialize with them, advise them, bicker with them, get jealous when they make friends or have relationships that I'm not part of. It's really it's own culture...so there's that way that it's part of real life in that it's an alternative to real life...and then, I started trying to find ways to make my blog have a "message." I started posting about anything and everything in the news that I could find that was relevant to heroin because researching the shit made me feel less alone, obsessed, and crazy. So my blog started having this new, weird purpose. I think it's losing some of that now, though. It's getting to be more and more just about writing...
And real life-blog life get intertwined in weird ways that are generally unpleasant-ish. Say, for instance, I want to tell some big story to Meagan on the phone. Usually, she has already read the story on the blog, so it eliminates a real source of satisfaction in my life, which was telling Meagan stories. Another way things can get ugly is when someone reads it who then finds out that my husband is a crazy heroin junky. That's no fun at all. He handles it very graciously, but it's still a violation of his privacy, and I've been trying extra hard to make it less private.
2.
A blog is a new medium, I think. It's changing writing, possibly for the better. There is an audience, ready and waiting for your posts. I think that it might be really useful for teaching, too...there's a new source of material to ask students to read, and a new forum to encourage them to write, to respond to others' writing, and to critique work they find online or in real life. Sometimes, I'd love to go back to teaching composition just to have a chance to make all my students blog.
But I think there are important implications for Barthes and the death of the author and all that hootenanny bullshit. The author isn't dead...the author is still alive and well. I get about 400 unique visitors on my site every day, and there are about 10 folks who regularly comment and interact with me about my writing, my life, and my world view. It's really validating. I think I'm becoming a better writer for it.
Now:
To add pictures to your posts, there is a little button at the top when you are in compose mode that looks like a picture. Click on it, and you can upload there.
Duh.
And to add pictures or Google ads or whatever to your layout, you have to go to the "edit layout" section, and there's all this stuff about adding elements to your blog.
P.S.
I think 3 questions would be too many, anyway.
Thank you for your comments; A+.
I SEE the picture button, duh, it's the "upload there" part I can't do. How embarassing. I'll just ask my sister.
1. Most writing is a form of escape, a way out of your head into a sphere where other people can participate. In that way, you are escaping to somewhere, instead of away into nowhere. You are escaping and intertwining at the same time.
2. A blog is a diary that is open to the world, and one in which your thoughts can be augmented by other people who care about the ideas you are sharing. It can be validating, or humiliating when you find no one gives a damn. Pictures are easy because they draw people in with little effort on the writers part. What is more magical is to find images that create a dialogue in the viewer's mind -- like the underwater tigers on the junky's wife's page, in such a way as they are compelled to answer the question raised within the image. Ads are to be wholly ignored anyway, unless you get a product that congeals with your audience.
Blogs are something of a fairyland for me. I have a list I read (which yours is now on since I have it! -- thanks be to heaven). It's more like really cool letter writing or something. It's not part of my regular life because I don't see the bloggers I read on a day-to-day basis. It's a connection to those I wish I could see more. My own blog is a reason to write.
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