The view from here and now

I realized something this morning as I lay in bed unable to get back to sleep.

My internettery is all about contact and community, about not feeling alone and lonely. I started blogging out of curiosity, but kept on because of the community of readers and commenters that developed. As I became ever more deeply immersed in SL, the "hotter" and more immediate community feeling there took up more and more of my time and attention. It also shifted my "day" later into the evening and night. I used to be a very early riser a few years ago, but I couldn't tell you when I last saw the sun rise, unless you count the time I played Dragon Age: Origins until after 5am. The reason I stopped blogging regularly is indeed, as somebody once asked in a comment, that I am spending in Second Life the time that was previously my blogging hour.

The reason I stopped reading blogs is different: as fear and unhappiness took the upper hand in my life, nearly two years ago now, the pressure that I felt to read — and to comment insightfully and with compassion and warmth — came to be too much for me emotionally. I simply didn't have enough emotional resources to spread around, or so it felt. And for what it's worth, I was retreating in SL at that time too: there were evenings when I'd just log in and literally stand around alone in a park, unable to gather the strength to find and talk to anyone.

My absence from your blogs is not a sign of disinterest, dear friends. On the contrary, it is in a perverse way the proof that they and you were valuable to me, because I did continue to read sites that I didn't give a damn about. That was OK because there was no emotional load in them. (That is also why I was able to follow you by reading your RSS feeds: there was no personal involvement in that, no pressure to reply.)

Most lately, of course, much of my compositional energy has gone into Twitter, the internet-literary equivalent of eating peanut M&M's while a fine meal lies on the table before you: superficially appealing but essentially worthless. And most lately, I've been writing about my "coming of age" in SL and the meditation group. I might be posting those here, but not for a while and certainly not in their current form; if anyone is interested to read them drop me an e-mail at the address in the left sidebar.

It's been a long dry season, my dears, but there are signs of change. Thank you all so much for bearing with me, for enduring my silence and neglect with such patience and forebearance. "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion."

Thank your first commenter day

According to Sass, yesterday was "Thank your first commenter day." I missed that somehow, so I'll make up for it now.

My first comment came eight minutes after I posted my very first piece on my brand-new blog (not that I saw it arrive, I was by then already on the way to work). TheLearner bid me welcome, in the first and far from last example of the kindness of strangers that is the Blogosphere. (There is still a Blogger with the screen name "TheLearner," but it's not my commenter: he was an American, the current Learner is from Madras, India.)

As I said previously, the immediate response of comments from all around the world is a major part of the pleasure that I get from blogging. Blogging isn't about writing, it's about community: wondering why Dale hasn't written in a week, or being pleased to see that Jean has posted again, or watching Zhoen roll unstoppably towards the 50,000-words mark, or commiserating with Philip over his stolen laptop (ah well) and the not-backed-up photos of his kids that were on it (disaster), or keeping an eye on Marzipan and Mermaid Girl as they grow up.

So, in the spirit of, er, yesterday: wherever you are, dear ex-Learner, thank you very much for your comment.

In other news my mother is back home from the hospital, weary and sore but basically OK. She's able to walk around the house, and wrote a mass e-mail to tell us (family) how she's getting on.

Twenty-three down, seven to go.

Metablog the fourth

(In which our hero attempts to obscure the lack of interestingness in his life by posting a two-month-old note from his Moleskine.)

I was on a Vaporetto crossing the Giudecca Canal on the last day of my holiday, when I heard a jet flying overhead on its way to the airport (a rarity: Venice airport is fairly busy by small-town standards, but planes seldom fly over the city). The situation reminded me of Noorster's recent series of photos of her arrival in Venice. I looked up at the plane, and thought to myself "Wouldn't it be funny if Noorster were on that flight?"

By the way, don't call the stalker police just yet. This is not about Noorster, she simply happens to have triggered it. I could have written this about any blogger whom I regularly read, or for that matter about myself.

Who is Noorster? The question is not as trivial as it may seem. I've never met her, probably never will, and I'm sure that the great majority of (my and her) readers are in the same boat. We know quite a bit about her from reading on and between the lines: she is "an atheist secular Jew", travels a lot (and some of us know why), smokes, reads in at least three languages - and is learning Hebrew, loves dogs, has a wry and dry sense of humour, and is very intelligent: I was astonished to discover (after reading her blog for nearly a year) that English isn't her native language.

Sounds like a nice, interesting person, somebody you'd like to get to know. The problem is that "Noorster" does not exist, she is a work of fiction more or less true to life - just as "Udge" is. Udge is very similar to me (my sister recognized it as my voice) but he is by no means all of me: my fears and weaknesses, my bad habits and petty incompetences are grossly underrepresented here. A blog identity is a literary construction, like the hero(ine) of a novel: saying "Noorster is a nice woman" is similar to saying "Inspector Brunetti is an honourable man".

On the other hand, I believe that a successful long-term blog has to be based closely around the personality and life of the blogger, because of the enormous difficulty of maintaining this voice if it were purely fiction. How many thousands of words have Mindy, Philip, Lioness, et al written? The length of some blogs exceeds that of many novels, and the speed of publication precludes the amount of planning and coördination that I feel would be necessary to sustain an invented character; add in the rapid-fire communication that arises in comments and blogging-about-blogs, and the task seems to me pretty well impossible. Blogging in that persona would be a tiresome and tiring full-time occupation, and who would bother to expend that amount of time and energy on a blog when they could as more easily write a novel?

Which brings us back to my starting point, with myself on a Vaporetto looking up at an airplane and thinking about Noorster. I wondered what would happen if she and I should chance to sit at adjacent tables at the Café Florian in the Piazza San Marco that evening. If we started a conversation, would we recognize each other?

Other Metablogs: first second third

Metablog the third

or, happy birthday to my blog. One year ago today, the person who had just christened himself "Udge" said:

Hello, world. You know you're a geek when: Having created a brand-new squeaky-clean blog, you first look through all the Settings pages before typing a single word.

I was a late adaptor, I had been reading public-diary-thingies on the Internet (I hadn't even registered the word "blog") for nearly a year, before it occurred to me that I might play that game too. This was partly because I had tried to play a similar game a few years previously on my professional website, and found that wrestling with HTML, CSS, RSS, FTP and all the rest of them was just too much hard work. It took longer to debug the entries and crosslink them with the rest of the site, than it did to write the words; plus needing four separate programmes to write, debug and post the damned things - what you might call "a serious cost/benefit imbalance". Naturally, it didn't last long; I stopped updating the site several years ago (without actually admitting to myself that I had done so).

I don't remember what prompted me to click on that big orange B in the early hours of August 20, 2004, nor which blog I had been reading; but I did, and from the start I loved it. Getting immediate positive feedback (my first comment was waiting when I came home from work that day) was probably a major factor in the "feel-good-ness" of blogging.

Blogging and the reading of blogs has become a significant part of my life; as Tim Bray said on the occasion of his blog's birthday, "it scratches an itch that I didn't know I had." Blogging has taught me things about myself and my life that I didn't know before I started, and has introduced me to some great new friends - even if we never meet.

Apart from how amazingly easy blogging is, the most obvious difference to a static website is the presence of comments on a blog. I published a link to my e-mail address on every page of my website but in all these years I have had just one (1) response. The reason why is obvious: it's just too much bother to change to a different programme and type in a response to something that you can no longer see because it's back in the first programme. I know this is true because I do it too: neither Sass nor Mimi allow comments, both say that they love e-mail (and I can confirm that they read & reply to messages, even if in Mimi's case the reply comes two months later ;-) BUT it is just too much effort to write an e-mail reply unless the post is something that got me particularly worked up. (This is probably why bloggers who don't allow comments get large amounts of hate mail: responders are more likely to go to this kind of effort to say "that was appalling" than to say "that was pretty good.")

Lioness once said words to the effect of "let me know whether I can play with the big kids". Well, part of the joy of blogging is that there are no big kids. We are all amateurs here, we are all just making it up as we go. A good blog is a personality (not necessarily a person, Udge is not all of me) and the most trivial pieces are often the most interesting. My pieces about doing the laundry or flowers or the sound of car tyres in the rain get many more comments than the earnest, important, change-the-world ones.

Bloggers who disable commenting are depriving themselves of a great joy. The community that develops around a group of bloggers exchanging comments, is what makes all this worthwhile; or rather, what makes it better than just writing in a book that you hide under your mattress. When I see e.g. Late Edition leaving a comment on Sleeveless in Southern Utah, or DM commenting on the Blue Sloth, I feel a sort of happiness to think that I probably brought them together, Late probably picked Heather out of my sidebar or from comments that she left here. This must be how matchmakers feel on seeing a prospective pair hit it off together.

The world is full of wonderful, interesting people, and I am so very happy to be a tiny leaf on the tree, a fly on the wall of this marvellous worldwide conversation.

Thank you all.

Other Metablogs: first second fourth

Metablog the second

This meme has apparently been going around for a while, I saw it first chez Suzanne.

If, as you live your life, you find yourself mentally composing blog entries about it, post this exact same sentence in your weblog.

Well, of course. The thing is, I did this even before I had a blog: rehearsing how to tell the story in letters or at the pub.

For newcomers: the first Metablog was one of my better pieces (if I do say so myself).

Other Metablogs: first third fourth

Metablog the first

Here we are again: it's 04:22 and I'm wide awake, blogging away until my hot chocolate is ready. Insomnia is the pits.

Well, that's overstating the case. I'm often quite calm about it, as tonight/this morning. Insomnia is like a dear but insensitive old friend who drops by at inconvenient times: sometimes you shout and throw things, but most of the time you chuckle and make allowances.

Insomnia is the reason I started blogging: I was going to call this blog Confessions of an insomniac or something of that ilk, but all the relevant titles I could think of were taken. Actually, Something of that ilk would have been an exceedingly fine title, had I but thought of it. Damn. Anonymous readers in search of a good title may take it, with my blessings.

How's the milk? warming up nicely.

In pre-blog days, I would be lying in bed reading at times like this (I keep a stack of boring-but-necessary-for-the-day-job books at hand). And indeed I shall return to bed as soon as the hot chocolate is ready.

As I started the blog, I imagined that I would write about the existential horror of being awake every other night (as it seemed), but three things changed that plan. First, I noticed that it didn't happen nearly as often as I had thought. Second, I noticed that when it did happen, it usually didn't bother me - in fact there were times that I was glad to be awake.

And third, I discovered that there were so many other, better things to write about - even in my simple, dull-as-dishwater life. For this insight, dear Blogspot, many thanks.

The milk is nearly ready.

My thanks also to you, dear readers, for your responses. I had hoped but not really expected, that people might read my blog and perhaps even comment on it. But when I first read a reference to myself on another blog - well, I was high for the rest of the day. I wanted to show it to all my friends (as I have now done).

Beginning bloggers misunderstand the nature of the beast, because people talk more about how to blog than why to do it. Come closer, let me whisper the secret into your delicate, shell-like ear: The point of blogging is not the writing. The point of blogging is the reading and commenting upon of other people's blogs, that these people might then find and read (and perhaps even comment upon) yours, and the community that this creates. Only connect, as the man said. Without this feedback, a blog is no better than a paper diary; after the feedback starts, you will feel differently about yourself and your blog.

The way to describe this new feeling is: Better. Perhaps even: Happy.

And with that, dear readers, my hot chocolate is ready and I am off to bed again. My next post will be from the frozen wastes of rural Canada, God and terrorists willing. Sweet dreams be yours, my dears, if dreams there be.

Other Metablogs: second third fourth