What Blogging is Like for Me: Tight Pants.

A while ago there was a sentence making the rounds on the blogs: "If, as you live your life, you find yourself mentally composing blog entries about it, post this exact same sentence in your weblog." (I saw it here first.)

Yes. But I also have a reverse condition where if, as I mentally compose a blog entry or even as I begin the actual physical typing of a blog entry, I don't finish, no other entries can come out through what then has become a blockage. It seems to reside in my head somewhere, the blockage. The blog becomes just one more thing on an endless to-do list that I put off or avoid or have to get the groceries first because it's ten-percent-off day.

Blogging: it's problematic. This is because I am a girl between genres so this is a blog between genres. Sometimes I want to use it to vent, sometimes I think I'll use it simply for the regular composition of little essays, sometimes I want to have that kind of blog where it's just all the time funny hopefully-commercial-style writing about daily life, sometimes I want to expound on academic topics or go on ad nauseum discussions about whatever, sentence styles say. Sometimes I want to be more like an academic blog, to join more often into the academic reindeer games in the friendly circle of the discontented; sometimes I want to go in the other direction and stay narrative and practice that.

"Practice": this is part of the question. What's this blog for? Is it for joining a community? Is it for creating a persona that can eventually take over the world? Is it just for practicing for "serious" writing projects that some day I'll get around to sending to magazines? Or is it for entertaining my in turn very entertaining friends, who have all lately begun blogs themselves? Am I trying to join a world, or to create one?

I think there is after all something politically important about the honest presentation of everyday suckyness: the dissection of anxiety, the stories about failing to get teaching at my institution at this stage in my academic career, all that bullshit. Raising awareness, acknowledging, all that. But the thing is I want to be loved, liked at least, and I want to think and write about things that are sexier. Like Frank O'Hara's thing about poems: their purpose is like a tight pair of pants. I want my blog to be the well-cut tight pants that will make people adore me and also my booty. But I also want the freedom to be ugly and bitchy 'CAUSE THAT'S REALITY SOMETIMES, DUDES.

This schizophrenia results in a very sporadic blog style, as days and days go by with nothing, or with a stupid little something, and then a day comes where I'm like "that's it, time to finish up this blog entry that's been blocking me" and then it comes out and another and another. Altogether, it doesn't seem a very effective method for gaining a regular audience who can rely on my blog, that it will be updated, and that they will enjoy or find engaging (or, given my logorrhea, will be able to finish) what they find here.

I feel like the Dave Chappelle of blogging*. I want my own show BUT OH MY GOD, STOP PRESSURING ME. Yes. And bring on the weed.



*With the obvious caveat of being far, far less popular.