Oh my.
As I write the heater is out of fuel.
My glasses are sitting right next to my sleeping daughter. I don’t dare get them for fear of losing
these ten minutes. What else is there to
do? At least I can make the words on my
screen big.
This week as I was re-making the face of
this blog, I couldn’t help think about the point of blogging. My husband reminded me what an ugly sounding
word “blog” is, like a snot ball or other phlegm. I used to be put off by blogging; I considered
blogs to be a reductive essay-diary. Some kind of less-than form. A kind of embarrassing form of
self-publishing.
Now I’m more struck by how democratic
blogging is. Anyone can publish their
thoughts without a lot of money or any go-between. Of course this means there’s a lot of bad
writing floating out there. So what. For
a lot of folks writing isn’t even the point.
People are taking the time document their lives and passions, and I
can’t help but think the world is a better place when people attend to the
things that make them happy.
But what brings me to this blog? For me writing
is the point. Anything that engenders
more writing in my life is good. I start
writing a blog, I drift to a draft of a poem.
It’s more productive than surfing the web. It’s
good to have a weekly post, and to have the audacity to put out something that’s
not perfect. I cringe sometimes when I
go back and look at my over sights. But
that’s okay, it’s out there, I can fix it, and it’s evidence of me engaging in
a writing life.
My posts are an effort to log some of
the places my mind has been drifting.
And I’m okay with letting this blog evolve as need be. Having an hour in the morning to myself to
read and write is ideal, but honestly it doesn’t happen as much as I wish. So I carve out moments here and there, and when
I get that precious hour I take my notes and snippets and assimilate them, sometimes
into a poem or essay or this blog.
I hear the summons of my 2 year old. Time to get my glasses now. Until next
week.-Mercedes
Great new bookshelves!
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you found your short, blurry-eyed time this morning.
I think it's so easy as writers to focus just on writing and nothing other. But there's something so cool about the fact that blogging can really be about anything--so for us literary types, it's writing at a 'meta' level that's interesting, but for thousands of bloggers, writing is simply the technology for discussing their passion. Truly miraculous, compared to much of human history, what huge 'interest' communities there are.
Yes, "blog" is a hideous word. To me, it's even worse because it's formed from "weblog" at a place other than the syllable break. Irritates me every time, even though I know that if it were broken _with_ the syllable, it would be simply "log" with no distinguishing feature. Making a verb out of it annoys me even more and I avoid it.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend--I hope you get your heater filled up!
Looks like spring here though...
Heater is filled up and fire is going! Yay! Glad to know I'm not the only one who finds "blog" to be an ugly word. Enjoy the rest of your weekend too, I'm getting a lot of reading done. Hope you're in a cozy place with a book too.
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