More About Anonymous Blogging

I'm feeling like ranting. And because I'm not anonymous, I can't do it on my blog. And that makes me feel disconnected from this blog. The delight I felt in sitting down and writing to this blank screen, the sense of fulfillment from self-expression, the chance to reflect and connect, the chance to say to the world "Here I am and this is what I think" that felt so immediate and so necessary for me, feels absent right now. Because the stuff that's driving me buggy is all other people's secrets that I don't frigging want in my life.
Other people's anxieties or nutso behavior and the impact it has on folks around them.

I know I have blinders on in my own life, yeah yeah yeah but I can see OTHER PEOPLE'S blunders really clearly right now and damn, people, I have a lot to say about it.

But not on this blog. Instead I'm talking about itchy legs or my long walks or the silly office dare that has me eating snake oil vitamin supplements. All true but not honest like what I feel like pouring out would be honest.

Some bloggers think hard and create these wonderfully composed and contrived pieces that form a part of a highly stylized conversation. "Contrived" has a bad rap but contrivance really is what makes intelligent discourse possible; it's why we revise important writings so they say just what we mean. It permits nuance etc. Yes, I think blogging can be like scholarship when it's done like that. And I'm glad there are people out there doing that, composing and contriving these great points-of-view, from which they begin conversations with other points-of-view that we can all eavesdrop on.

That's not really my style. I don't want to blog as a point-of-view. My point-of-view is still forming; it's going to be a project I get to in my retirement, maybe, refining some internally consistent sociopolitical self. For now I'm just a person and that's what I want to be on my blog. I want to be able to start conversations that are meaningful and honest, about what it feels like to be a young lawyer in a snobby but generally interesting profession, amidst smart people and ambitious people and wise people and some real jerks. And to be a human being trying to be happy, trying to figure out how much I care about ambition and career and money and acclaim and how much I care about walking in the woods with my dog or sanding the bottom of my sailboat.

Anyway, I just feel like it stinks right now because I want to talk about office politics and that would be inadvisable. I want to talk about interpersonal relationship struggles and that, too, would be inadvisable. And if I can't talk about this stuff that's most on my mind why the heck am I doing this anyway? There's no value to me in constructing some friendly online persona who lives in a world that's a mirror of the sunny side only of the world I live in, where people always make good decisions and there's never any tension.

Comments

[Prof. Bainbridge]

Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good. There are conversations to be had in the multiude and some to be had in private -- and, in my case, at least, some to be had only in the ultimate privacy of the confessional. Get what pleasure you can from blogging, but perhaps seek catharsis elsewhere. (Or just rant about not being able to rant, if that helps!)

And forgive those of us who want to believe that you're the town lawyer in Lake Wobegone. Cheers, Steve

[Matt]

hey, i like your stuff. if you would be so kind as to just mention(even negatively) www.thecoolshow.com i would i appreciate it greatly and tell all already at my site to go to yours. Matt