Gets Nostalgic About Blogging Innocently
Where the magic used to happen, circa 2003.
Just as I’ve been re-designing the outward look of this blog, I’ve been thinking to myself about what it’s for, content-wise. I miss the old Too Much Katherine blog! Blogging was easier then, and I have been wondering why that is. I think it’s because I was totally naïve about it. I didn’t read that many blogs, there weren’t that many blogs, and more than that—most importantly of all—I didn’t have any sense of myself as a professional person. I was 23 or something, a kid. New York City seemed unreal and completely interesting. It didn’t feel at all self-indulgent to just report on it. And I didn’t think anyone was reading, except for maybe a couple of friends. Certainly there wasn’t this consciousness about what was going to come up when other people Googled me, or anything.
Blogging got harder when I moved to Ithaca and suddenly there wasn’t much I could write about that other people I knew hadn’t experienced, too. In New York, it seemed as though almost every day I’d experience something strange and random—an overheard conversation, an event I’d be dragged along to—and that these things were sufficiently anonymous for me to write about without getting bogged down in wondering what I owed to the subject, or thinking about whether and how what I wrote might get back to the subject. Nothing anonymous ever happened in Ithaca, it sometimes felt. It was hard to be a flaneur there.
And then I went to SF and then came here and got a job and at some point I was definitely no longer completely just a wide-eyed kid playing around with Dreamweaver and not worrying about whether what she wrote made sense or appealed to anybody but herself. And you can’t write about your job, of course, unless you’re deeply anonymous, and ditto your personal life, and every time I tried to spin off charming, Too Much Katherine-esque posts about things, they just didn’t feel right. It was as though everything I’d learned about the blogosphere, including the fact that there’s a thing called the blogosphere, made me self-conscious and messed it all up.
But I’ve been wanting to invent a way of blogging that is right for now, yet feels true to what I was doing back then, somehow. It seems to me that blogging, as a semi-public form of expression, is all about crafting a form of address that one feels comfortable with. Coming up with a, you know, discursive style. And that that’s hard but also really interesting, and a good exercise for anybody who writes. I am tempted to blog anonymously and write with abandon about what I had for breakfast and the inner workings of this and that, because I’m good at confessional writing and I enjoy it, but I have a diary for the truly intimate details. Is there some way to write things that are fit for public consumption, but also personal(ish) and interesting? Which is to say, can I use my blog to help figure out how and whom to be as a writer?
I might decide that this is dumb and it would be better, or would have been better, to blog at an anonymous-ish space, and not deny that it is me so much as not advertise it to all the world. It would be like one of those semi-exclusive cocktail clubs in Manhattan, the ones that don’t deign to publish their telephone numbers, even though everyone knows that if you want their telephone numbers, they really aren’t all that hard to find. Yes, that would have been nice, right?
Well, we’ll see. I’ve been thinking lately that weekly-ish is the right amount to blog. I’ve been thinking that caring about pageviews is passé. And I notice that toomuchkatherine.com is for sale again, though just the act of checking it out might cause some robot algorithm to buy it again.
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