As Bri had some choice remarks in response last time, I will offer a redress. I would like to point out that nothing said either here or previously was meant to be antagonistic w/r/t blogging or bloggers, but rather my own thoughts on what is either a solitary hobby or something of a cult. Second, I'm grateful that anyone reads this at all (actually, mixed feelings re: that. I don't know if I have enough readers to actually warrant writing for an audience, and the fact that I have any readers precludes me from writing blogs a la "Why come no one loves me?"), so take my rantings with two grains of salt and a shot of tequila.
So. I am actually surprised that anyone reads this, as I do write in something of a "found journal" sense. In addition, the few blogs that I read are conducted in a similar fashion. Common titles may be "What have I been up to lately?" or "Why, despite my latex allergy, I can engage in anal sodomy!" Blogs like this are of only one variety, and it's a sort that mine falls into. Obviously there are more specialized ones, but I don't think that I know enough about anything to write that specialized of a posting. Of course, I could just post lists of things that I like or dislike, in the hopes that some frantic reader will be able to parse together a profile of me, and therefore come to some Great Understanding about both me and the Real World At Large. /glare.
As I said, chronicle of my thoughts and whimsy this shall stay. Not to disappoint, here are some of them. I am now in Denver, fighting crime and bad spelling/punctuation. I went up a mountain on Sunday. On the top, there was snow and a yeti. Upon closer inspection, it wasn't really a yeti, but rather a heavyset man whose Ford Mustang had overheated halfway up the mountain. We considered stopping for him, but reconsidered when we realized that our initial assumptions may have been right, and he was, in fact, a yeti. We rationalized our decision by telling ourselves that, if he were not a snow-creature, he could certainly use the exercise one way or the other, and we continued along our way. That was with my friends Dave and Michelle (no relation).
There has been fairly little of note happening since then, which is probably due to the fact that I am prepping for a career of sitting in front of a desk by sitting in an auditorium for nine hours and some change a day. Don't ever let anyone tell you that sitting isn't hard work, or even anything resembling rest. One works up a sweat trying to screw around and not be noticed.*
What else? Denver very cool. I discovered that my spirit animal is a fox, as one guided me home while lost on a run on Saturday night. I celebrated by finding really good new beer (by New Belgium, called Mothership Wit. It's organic, and fantastic.), drinking a whiskey sour and eating a shrimp sushi roll, and then going with my cousin to a club that had a cage dancer and waitresses wearing identical dresses and platinum blonde wigs (PBW, in the future, should I require additional reference).
Finally, a haiku:
Acorns and acorns,
Pandering to my readers,
Don't choke on candy.
Love,
Derek
*This last is either greatly helped or hindered by my new skill: iPodding. While it looks like I am doing extensive equations on my mini-computer/music player, in reality I am updating my facebook status or checking my email. I have, in the past twenty or so hours, complained about the title of an essay I wrote, responded to facebook messages (several times), found tickets to a Deathcab for Cutie show (which I later found out I won't be able to use, and therefore didn't buy), and gotten directions to a place where we may play Ultimate Frisbee, all without leaving my chair.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
On Blogging: A Memoir on the Craft
Well, been a while since we've last left our hero, eh World? Much has happened, one would think, in the meanwhile, but perhaps not so much. Graduation come and gone. Finished the whole Ivory Tower thing (www.ivorytower.umn.edu). I have since been accepted into grad school and a graduate certification program (one at MSU, one at DU) and am doing both. Hell, I'm leaving for the latter of them tomorrow, which is actually the impetus of my writing in this thing again.
One of the things that worry -- I only use the word 'worry' here because I can't think of a more accurate one -- me about blogging is that there is potentially no one out there reading what I've written. It's kind of like secretly writing in your journal, and then leaving it out on the kitchen table for the world to see, and deep-down hoping that someone is going to stumble across it on some rambling trip through the Internet/Kitchen, pick it up, and exclaim to him or herself: "Aha! This is the sort of wisdom that I can get behind. I need to read this and rejoice!" The fantasy ends, some time in the future, with the blog writer being given a large sum of money for his or her clever witticisms.
I mention this because -- and this is largely my own fault, one must pay advertisers in this day and age even for one's own personal blog -- I'm not sure that I have a reader base larger than one, perhaps two. To be honest, I'm counting myself in that reader base, as I will periodically check up on this thing, click "Refresh, Refresh" (anyone?) and see if anyone has left that long-awaited message: "Derek. You've changed my life with what you have written here and left in public domain. Congratulations on being the Single Undisputed Master of the Written Word [caps mine]." In reality, it would probably be written in Internet-Speak, so it would read something more like : "dreek kewl blog. check out this lin kfor great sex leg panty!" Or something like that.
The reason that I have so few readers, and that I suspect most blogs have so few readers, is that no one is nearly as interested in my own life as I am. Though I don't read many blogs myself (perhaps an indicator of where I fail; one should always imitate if one can't initiate), I'm always drawn to the ones that just recycle old news. For example, blogs that keep me reading are the ones that reference things from the New York Times website for example, and then make marginal comments on them. It's kind of like getting your news from the newspaper and finding that someone has already filled in the crossword, but instead of being angry, you're pleasantly amused to find all sorts of esoteric minutia about the day's news. The key to this sort of blog is that you have to update it pretty much daily, as if you don't, your O-So-Faithful-Reader will find another equally witty place to get the same news (obvious exceptions to this are people like David Sedaris or Ariana Huffington, whose either wit or complete lack thereof are the reasons to read the blog in the first place).
This last is my own sort of failing, or at least similar to it. I don't remember that I have a blog often enough for me to update it with any sort of consistency. I'd like to think that's because I have so many Important Real World Things that demand my attention, but it's really because I'm too flighty. Blogging is a kind of escapism for me, and the thing about escapism, with the exception of the Big Three (Sex, Drug, Drinking), making a habit of any of them decreases the allure of said escapism. If I go running every time that I'm upset, pretty soon I'm just going to have some really great calves, but the endorphins won't kick in as quickly or as strongly. It's just the same way with blogging. To make matters worse, I blog only when I can't think of anything decent to write that I would want to work up to a level of publication. Think about that for a minute. My solution to writer's block is to write things and then leave them on the kitchen table of the planet. The big difference, I suppose, is that I don't even perform a rudimentary spell-check on this, which is kind of liberating for me, having just performed a literary jousting match with an editor for some essay I wrote.
The writer in me wants to cook up some really important summation, a la J.D. in Scrubs. "What have we learned today?" sort of thing. The blogger in me, however, really wanted to just stop writing half-way through that last paragraph and then leave you, the Faithful Reader, to decide whether I got sick of writing, did it intentionally, or if my internet just kind of crapped out. Perhaps I suffered a fatal heart attack like the animator in Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail, and with my last failing breath hit "Publish Post." How would you know (especially if this last were the case, and I was, in fact, dead as a damn door-nail) until I came back the next week. I think that's what I forget. My readers here may not even know me in real life. I'd like to think that they do, but really, I'm not describing my own life. All I'm doing here is giving you a sort of snapshot of what I see the interesting thoughts of my life are. The funny thing is, you now know something about me because my choosing of the portions of my life that I think you'd like to read about.
Actually, that wasn't a half-bad ending. Let's just leave it there.
One of the things that worry -- I only use the word 'worry' here because I can't think of a more accurate one -- me about blogging is that there is potentially no one out there reading what I've written. It's kind of like secretly writing in your journal, and then leaving it out on the kitchen table for the world to see, and deep-down hoping that someone is going to stumble across it on some rambling trip through the Internet/Kitchen, pick it up, and exclaim to him or herself: "Aha! This is the sort of wisdom that I can get behind. I need to read this and rejoice!" The fantasy ends, some time in the future, with the blog writer being given a large sum of money for his or her clever witticisms.
I mention this because -- and this is largely my own fault, one must pay advertisers in this day and age even for one's own personal blog -- I'm not sure that I have a reader base larger than one, perhaps two. To be honest, I'm counting myself in that reader base, as I will periodically check up on this thing, click "Refresh, Refresh" (anyone?) and see if anyone has left that long-awaited message: "Derek. You've changed my life with what you have written here and left in public domain. Congratulations on being the Single Undisputed Master of the Written Word [caps mine]." In reality, it would probably be written in Internet-Speak, so it would read something more like : "dreek kewl blog. check out this lin kfor great sex leg panty!" Or something like that.
The reason that I have so few readers, and that I suspect most blogs have so few readers, is that no one is nearly as interested in my own life as I am. Though I don't read many blogs myself (perhaps an indicator of where I fail; one should always imitate if one can't initiate), I'm always drawn to the ones that just recycle old news. For example, blogs that keep me reading are the ones that reference things from the New York Times website for example, and then make marginal comments on them. It's kind of like getting your news from the newspaper and finding that someone has already filled in the crossword, but instead of being angry, you're pleasantly amused to find all sorts of esoteric minutia about the day's news. The key to this sort of blog is that you have to update it pretty much daily, as if you don't, your O-So-Faithful-Reader will find another equally witty place to get the same news (obvious exceptions to this are people like David Sedaris or Ariana Huffington, whose either wit or complete lack thereof are the reasons to read the blog in the first place).
This last is my own sort of failing, or at least similar to it. I don't remember that I have a blog often enough for me to update it with any sort of consistency. I'd like to think that's because I have so many Important Real World Things that demand my attention, but it's really because I'm too flighty. Blogging is a kind of escapism for me, and the thing about escapism, with the exception of the Big Three (Sex, Drug, Drinking), making a habit of any of them decreases the allure of said escapism. If I go running every time that I'm upset, pretty soon I'm just going to have some really great calves, but the endorphins won't kick in as quickly or as strongly. It's just the same way with blogging. To make matters worse, I blog only when I can't think of anything decent to write that I would want to work up to a level of publication. Think about that for a minute. My solution to writer's block is to write things and then leave them on the kitchen table of the planet. The big difference, I suppose, is that I don't even perform a rudimentary spell-check on this, which is kind of liberating for me, having just performed a literary jousting match with an editor for some essay I wrote.
The writer in me wants to cook up some really important summation, a la J.D. in Scrubs. "What have we learned today?" sort of thing. The blogger in me, however, really wanted to just stop writing half-way through that last paragraph and then leave you, the Faithful Reader, to decide whether I got sick of writing, did it intentionally, or if my internet just kind of crapped out. Perhaps I suffered a fatal heart attack like the animator in Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail, and with my last failing breath hit "Publish Post." How would you know (especially if this last were the case, and I was, in fact, dead as a damn door-nail) until I came back the next week. I think that's what I forget. My readers here may not even know me in real life. I'd like to think that they do, but really, I'm not describing my own life. All I'm doing here is giving you a sort of snapshot of what I see the interesting thoughts of my life are. The funny thing is, you now know something about me because my choosing of the portions of my life that I think you'd like to read about.
Actually, that wasn't a half-bad ending. Let's just leave it there.
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