Metablogging
Mar. 26th, 2022 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flanerieoconnorPossible framing devices for a blog post:
1. Motivation:
"I was starting to write an overly-flowery metaphor comparing things encountered when aimlessly scrolling through one's phone at odd moments of boredom throughout the day (dozens and dozens of times for most of us, I suspect, taking up a greater portion of our attention than would be anything near comfortable to acknowledge) and flotsam drifting by as we float aimlessly on an otherwise-featureless ocean, driven we know not where by hidden currents. The metaphor got away from me, obviously, but all it really amounted to was to say "lately I've been reading some stuff about the internet on the internet" (or, if we're going to be pedantic, "and listening to", since some of it was podcast episodes), and it's gotten me nostalgic for the experience of writing in my old livejournal, abandoned now for a good decade. And so I thought, why not exorcise said nostalgia by writing something like a blog post again?"
2. Situation:
"It's early afternoon on a cold Saturday in late March, and I'm sitting in my mother-in-law's airy, Victorian living room in Jamestown, North Dakota, listening to an endless parade of pickup trucks drive by on the road outside, my dog (9 year old greyhound) asleep on the couch beside me. I've got the house to myself for the day, since my wife and mother-in-law are in Fargo for a baby shower for my newborn niece (born roughly a month ago two months premature, and still in the natal intensive care unit), the reason for the trip. And so, left to my own devices for an afternoon, alone in someone else's house, why not try to write a bit?"
The irony, of course, is that I'm writing in the sort of diaristic style that feels self-evidently interesting when at 21, but much less so at 40, on a site I registered in comment on a blog dedicated largely to ceremonial magic (not a turn I expected my online life to take), which will be of less than no interest to the readers of said blog, the only people likely to find this. And now, thinking back on it, there are certainly life-stage appropriate reasons why I abandoned my old livejournal, and with it this kind of writing, at the beginning of my 30s, besides the fact that the site was self-evidently dying. I also note that the last time I posted something here was almost exactly a year ago, last March, which leads me to wonder if there's something to do with cyclical energies within the year that give rise to the urge to blog? A time of stirring but frustrated energies, of new life trying to break through still-frozen ground? I was reading recently (hat tip to "readoldthings") of early spring being the traditional season of starvation, when the reserves of winter are beginning to be exhausted, but nothing new has yet had the chance to grow. As a middle-class inhabitant of a rich, industrialised society, I obviously don't experience this physically, but I feel like something analogous still happens in my emotional life, a feeling of exhaustion mixed with an itchy, frustrated wanderlust that seems to strike around the weeks on either side of the spring equinox. So, maybe I'll post occasional updates on what I'm reading/listening to/thinking about here from time to time, as I currently have the intention of doing. Or maybe this will lie dormant for another year, and I'll find myself reading this again next March- interesting, I suppose, to find out either way. In the meantime, this has taken me nearly an hour, and the dog is beginning to stir, and is in need of a walk.
1. Motivation:
"I was starting to write an overly-flowery metaphor comparing things encountered when aimlessly scrolling through one's phone at odd moments of boredom throughout the day (dozens and dozens of times for most of us, I suspect, taking up a greater portion of our attention than would be anything near comfortable to acknowledge) and flotsam drifting by as we float aimlessly on an otherwise-featureless ocean, driven we know not where by hidden currents. The metaphor got away from me, obviously, but all it really amounted to was to say "lately I've been reading some stuff about the internet on the internet" (or, if we're going to be pedantic, "and listening to", since some of it was podcast episodes), and it's gotten me nostalgic for the experience of writing in my old livejournal, abandoned now for a good decade. And so I thought, why not exorcise said nostalgia by writing something like a blog post again?"
2. Situation:
"It's early afternoon on a cold Saturday in late March, and I'm sitting in my mother-in-law's airy, Victorian living room in Jamestown, North Dakota, listening to an endless parade of pickup trucks drive by on the road outside, my dog (9 year old greyhound) asleep on the couch beside me. I've got the house to myself for the day, since my wife and mother-in-law are in Fargo for a baby shower for my newborn niece (born roughly a month ago two months premature, and still in the natal intensive care unit), the reason for the trip. And so, left to my own devices for an afternoon, alone in someone else's house, why not try to write a bit?"
The irony, of course, is that I'm writing in the sort of diaristic style that feels self-evidently interesting when at 21, but much less so at 40, on a site I registered in comment on a blog dedicated largely to ceremonial magic (not a turn I expected my online life to take), which will be of less than no interest to the readers of said blog, the only people likely to find this. And now, thinking back on it, there are certainly life-stage appropriate reasons why I abandoned my old livejournal, and with it this kind of writing, at the beginning of my 30s, besides the fact that the site was self-evidently dying. I also note that the last time I posted something here was almost exactly a year ago, last March, which leads me to wonder if there's something to do with cyclical energies within the year that give rise to the urge to blog? A time of stirring but frustrated energies, of new life trying to break through still-frozen ground? I was reading recently (hat tip to "readoldthings") of early spring being the traditional season of starvation, when the reserves of winter are beginning to be exhausted, but nothing new has yet had the chance to grow. As a middle-class inhabitant of a rich, industrialised society, I obviously don't experience this physically, but I feel like something analogous still happens in my emotional life, a feeling of exhaustion mixed with an itchy, frustrated wanderlust that seems to strike around the weeks on either side of the spring equinox. So, maybe I'll post occasional updates on what I'm reading/listening to/thinking about here from time to time, as I currently have the intention of doing. Or maybe this will lie dormant for another year, and I'll find myself reading this again next March- interesting, I suppose, to find out either way. In the meantime, this has taken me nearly an hour, and the dog is beginning to stir, and is in need of a walk.
