Spitting in the Face of the Void

A friend wonders in his FB status update "if blogs are dead." Nah. I don't think so, but they've "moved on". Few people really comment here-- I import my blogs to FB and most of my comments happen there. So perhaps the technology of blogs w/ Twitter w/ FB w/ whatever has shifted and people have a 200 letter attention span. It's possible. But I deny the end until it's over.

But I do read a couple of blogs that I am not connected to on Facebook. The Writing as Joe blog, for example, seems a vibrant and wonderful as ever. I long to write more like Joe, to go to a quiet retreat at a lovely monastery once a year, to take such amazing photos. But I'm not as good a blogger as she is, I don't have her amazing rock star life. But I can aspire. :) Maybe that's why her blog lives on-- because she is the kind of writer that inspires us to be better (writers, people, etc.)

I have always written my blog for me. It's my journal, my record of days. For a while, people other than myself read it on a daily basis. And that was kinda fun. And that's mostly over, here, yes. And I probably have put things too personal up on it sometimes because it feels like a personal thing, and I probably have sometimes seemed really self-centered (because right here IS about me if nothing else in life is). But daily life is sometimes fun, sometimes boring, and sometimes worth writing about. *

I'll keep this going until I am bored with it, but since I like the daily or weekly (sometimes) grind of thinking about things I doubt that will ever happen. I don't think, like I once did, about certain events in my life "I can't wait to blog about that". But I do still like this space.

Keep watching. Or don't. I'll be here one way or another.

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* these links are to my old blog, from the "golden age" of blogging.

Howling At The Moon

Yes. Another blog about blogging. This one with more bleayatching power & new management!

When I was in grad school, I took some Education courses thinking I would hedge my bets & possibly teach in high school. (Still hedging that bet-- but that's another story another time). A fellow student & I talked about the tendency in Ed classes to talk about oneself ad nauseum. She called it "howling at the moon". It doesn't really happen so much in English grad classes-- I doubt it does in, say, Engineering or Accounting, either. It reminds me of those commercials for the Bing search engine where people are repeating random unrelated trivia without communicating-- it's kind of talking without hearing and can be a little on the insane side, I think.

I think blogging tends to reinforce a kind of howling at the moon mentality. And this is by no means a ploy to get people to comment on here, so don't feel obligated to do so. I hardly ever comment on the blogs I regularly read anymore... if I can't click a Facebook "thumbs up" and move on it just is too much time commitment. ;)

But if you're writing about stuff without feedback, I think you tend to talk talk talk & I've always been the one who exceeded the page limit on papers. I'm not immune to writing way too much about too little and blathering on about myself for hours & hours. Navel gazing.

I use metaphor & example a lot in teaching too, but I see on other faculty's "ratemyprofessors" that some students really hate it. What we think of as a teaching tool "see, I write too.. I have this problem in my writing too and I'm more experienced in writing than you are so don't feel bad" becomes something students think is unrelated to them and boring. So far, I haven't gotten the "always talks about herself" complaint from any of my students, but it may just be that I'm still young enough to be interesting still to them, and that will change in time. So it's important, when we write about ourselves all the time, to not be too much into the "me me me" moments.

I write this blog mostly for myself, and for my mother & Andrew's mom to see news about the kiddos. Sometimes I use it as a dumping ground for poems I've been working on, themes that are circulating in my head. I don't really blog about politics or current events much. It is about me. It's a journal, of sorts. But it's not ALL of me. It's not the only thing going on in my life, it's also not very deep. It's also not going to be something super duper important. If I just had an earth-shattering moment, there might be a vague poem about it but doubtfully a real explanation. So if I seem shallow on here, or "howling at the moon" it's because I'm not good at nature blogging like some blogs I love, or funny like others. I don't like to post my "real" writing, when I do it, here, because I have a fear of someone stealing everything (not that I think I'm that good, but neither are some of the other blogs I've seen plagiarized.)

What I suggest if it seems like I'm howling loudly about myself is twofold:

Join my conversation & comment (ah, I lied. Apparently this is a plug for comments. Damn.) OR howl at your own moon & direct me there. I'll read it... I may join in and howl a little bit, too. But mostly it's just a thought I'm working out. I could make this all private and anonymous but then I'm talking to myself even worse, and I might get twitchy and weird(er).