Stay of Execution

What I've Learned From This Blog

I wanted to sit down and write you a nice thoughtful post summing up carefully what I've learned from three years of playing with this medium.  I wanted to write it both to give it to you and to figure out just what those things are, because the way I figure out what I know or what I believe is to write.  Words come out and make clear what's gooey and confused inside. 

But today was instead spent on other things, things that took longer than I predicted.  And I don't want to break more promises to you so instead of a dissertation about the interesting and scary and challenging and liberating possibilities of having a weblog, I'm going to tell you a story about my underpants. 

The End

I have been writing this blog since September 9, 2003.  That's 1198 days, or 3 years, 3 months, and 11 days.  It's more than 170 weeks.  It's longer than the original Scheherazade entertained the Sultan and kept herself alive. 

Including this one, I have written 2665 posts.  Most of those I've published, although a few are just drafts.

You have left 9562 comments so far.  Some of those are spam, and some stung me a little bit, but most of them made me laugh or made me think. 

We've had two birthday parties.  We've played games.  You've seen me happy and sad.  You saw me as a lawyer and as a sailing coach.  You were there when I crashed my car and when my dog lost her leg and when she died.  You stepped in to help when my mast toppled, and that generosity and grace made me cry.  You were there during food poisoning and heartbreak and sadness and still morning walks and rowdy parties and all kinds of things.  You've talked about books and music with me, and we've talked about love and sadness and finding your path.  Some of the things you've said to me, here in front of everyone or privately, by email, have made me gasp and my eyes water with your courage and your honesty.  Thank you for that.  Thanks for the friendly forgiving eyes with which you've witnessed my life.  Thanks for keeping me company as I fumble along trying to figure out my way in the world.

I've made friends through this blog -- some of whom I've gotten to meet in person and many of whom I still hope to have a chance to meet.  I've fallen in love with someone I met through this blog, bizarre as that still seems.

Tomorrow I'll turn 34, and I'll stop posting on this weblog.  I have a present for you, but you have to wait until tomorrow to get it. 

Party With The Ladies, Eat Some Shrimp!

The second annual Stay of Execution Blog Party has begun, and what a scene it is.  Only two dogs and a cat, so far, and so far they're getting along quite nicely.  We've got a few more women than men, so far, but perhaps some more gentlemen will be rolling in, fashionably late.  Not too many children, yet, which is too bad because I've got a huge pile of Legos in the next room and need someone to help me make sense of them all.

And this year we have a buffet table, with goodies provided by the Stay of Execution tribe.  Y'all are good cooks, and I don't mind at all that so many of you are bringing shrimp dishes. 

You are invited to join the party by emailing me a photo from your life (and a recipe and something to eat or drink.  This is a hungry and thirsty crowd.).

I hope you will mix and mingle in the comments, and visit one another's weblogs.  Please let me know if there's anything I can do to make things more comfortable, or more fun.  The bathroom's right near the kitchen door, and I'll just go hang your coat up in the front hall.  Help yourself to some shrimp....

Party Time

Let's have another blog party.  You're invited.  Help me think of ways to make it even more fun than last year's.  The party will get started on December 1st. 

Here's what I hope you'll do.  Send me a picture of you, between now and December 1.  I like pictures that show your face, but that's not necessary if you're shy.  It can be your family or your pet or a place, but it has to be a real picture from your life -- no cartoons or clip art or celebrity pictures.  If it's you, all the better.  Especially if it's you having fun. 

You can include your name or blog moniker if you want, and I'll put it, and a link of your choosing, in the caption of the photo.  If you don't want anyone to know who you are, that's okay, too.  I'll give you a number, so you can talk to other people at the party. 

What else can we do?  I was thinking about party games.  What if we made it a potluck, and everyone brought a dish (via photo) and I could post the recipes in the photo caption of the dishes?  Or you could bring something special, a virtual gift, and we could do a virtual yankee swap?  Or everyone sent a picture of the view out their front door, and we tried to guess whose front door was whose?  I dunno.

Post suggestions here for making the blog party fun, and email me your photo, with the nickname you'd prefer and a link, if you'd like.  Please put "blog party" somewhere in the subject line so that GMail can store them properly. 

The Narrative Arc Has Stalled

An anonymous reader has announced that s/he will no longer be reading this blog because "the narrative arc has stalled."  Goodbye, and godspeed, anonymous friend. 

There are lots of good reasons not to read this weblog.  It is small in scope, and its author is inconsistent, judgmental, haphazard, and has many blind spots and personal flaws.  She's fixated on personal growth but keeps faltering on her own path, and she's indecisive about how much to share.  I've been trying to decide whether 'a stalled narrative arc' is a fair criticism.  I don't think it is. 

The question has been interesting to ponder, though.  Because I'm pondering it on two levels: one -- does a successful (or meritorious, if you prefer, because 'successful' is such a loaded term) personal weblog HAVE a narrative arc?  If so, how do the authors do that, without being contrived?  I still haven't managed to do a good job predicting out which events in my life will later become significant and which ones will shine bright for a short time and then fade away and disappear.  How, then, do I foreshadow and underscore and build tension to the meaningful moments in my life?  I mean, do your friends have narrative arcs?  When you hang out and have coffee with a good pal, do you ever get up from the table saying, "Damn, I'm out of this friendship, because the narrative arc has stalled." The closest I might come is to implore someone who has been perseverating endlessly to drop out of school or quit their job or break up with the girlfriend, to fish or cut bait already.   Sometimes the narrative arc of life stalls. 

But I suppose good bloggers can create a satisfying sense of motion and continuity out of the planned and unplanned moments of life.  I think it's fair to say that sometimes I do that here and sometimes I don't.  Dooce does it better than any blog I've read, and Stephanie Klein does a pretty good job, too.  What Dooce manages, and where Stephanie Klein falters, is to convey continuity and spontaneity in an authentic way, without appearing contrived, without suggesting veils and editorial spin.  I mean, the whole project of blogging, especially with the audience those two have, is contrived.  You sit at your keyboard and you feel like ranting or whining or daydreaming and the sensible, cautious part of your brain says, um, yeah, you can't say that on the Internet.  I think the most interesting weblogs are the ones where people post that stuff anyway.  And it's a fair criticism of this blog to say that I don't, always.  I have three or four posts I've written in the last week that I haven't published, just because they felt risky for one reason or another.  And I know that the risky stuff is the most interesting.

On the second level, if we assume a personal weblog (and a life) needs a clear narrative arc to be worthwhile, is it fair to say that mine is stalled?

Imagine You Wake Up And You Can't Move

That happened to Valerie a few years ago.  She has MS, and she woke up paralyzed in half of her body.  She got her movement back and retrained herself: to play the violin again (listen here), to dance the tango, to do things more deft and skillful than anything I've learned how to do without ever having been paralyzed. 

She still has MS, and it could come back any time and take away her movement again.  She writes about that sometimes and it always kind of knocks me out. 

What I think is really cool about Valerie (besides her intelligence and talent and temperament and humor) is how this experience has made her aware and grateful of how precious it is to move.  Yesterday her arm fell asleep, and it scared her into thinking that it might be her last day with her body, so she went up to the Eastern Prom and swang on the swingset overlooking the ocean, in the setting sun.  I've never even been on that swingset, but you can bet I'm going to go now. 

All Requests: Comments on the Blog

Jenny asks me to write about what I think about blog comments. 

What can you say about the role and purpose of comments on your blog?  .... How do they affect what you write about, how you feel about your writing, and you in general?

That's a good question.  While I think about it, I'll direct you to what I've written before about blogging, and my thoughts about the relationship between blogger and audience.  I try really hard not to tailor what I write to y'all.  I try really hard to write honestly, about what I'm thinking about, whether it's light or descriptive or introspective or polemical.  But I am not unaware of having an audience.  I know this is a public project.  That's part of the fun of it.  There are some topics that I avoid even if they are on my mind because they don't seem easy to reconcile with the relationship I want to have with this indeterminate public audience; it requires too much trust, or it distances me in what feels like an artificial way, or it doesn't make a meaningful contribution to whatever identity or tone I've established here.  [I break these boundaries almost as often as I honor them, however.]

I feel really lucky to have the set of readers at Stay of Execution that has arrived here.  You are an insightful and generous bunch.  I think a lot about the comments you leave here.  "L."'s comment the other day about being on the receiving end of snarky junior league comments from friends really hit me hard, and made me realize how belittling I can be without intending.  Bill caught me out not too long ago equating extroversion and happiness, and he was right to chide me for that kind of thinking.  Those reflections and perspectives are really valuable for me, and are one of the biggest rewards of blogging.  Another, of course, is the feeling that I'm not alone -- that some of my loneliest or most vulnerable or confused feelings are not so bizarre or isolating, and in fact are shared by interesting and kindhearted people of all different ages and paths.

I've been lucky not to have a lot of really scornful and angry commenters here, who tear me down.  I have pretty thin skin and I do think a lot about what y'all say, probably because I think highly of the people who read and comment.  But I don't consider the purpose of this weblog to interact with commenters, or to gain your approval.  If I did that I think I would lose my way pretty quickly, and I couldn't be honest.  That's what this weblog is about, in the final analysis.  It's a project where I am trying to speak the truth about my experience as I fumble along trying to live a life that fits me. 

Is that a good answer?  I don't know if it says very much.  As far as measuring the quality of my writing, I've not found comments to be all that predictive.  Sometimes I write something that I feel really proud of and good about and nobody says boo in the comments, but in person or by email someone will tell me they were really touched, or that they remember it months later with some vividness.  Meanwhile I can guarantee you that if I mention a leaky pipe in passing I'll get 12 comments about fixing it.  [My favorite example of that is what felt like a vulnerable emotional post that mentioned physics.  What part did people respond to?  The physics, not the emotions.  Sigh.]  So although it's very difficult to do, I have learned to unhook my own ideas about the quality or caliber of a post from the comments.  Still, if I hear back from you that something has touched you or struck a chord, it means a ton to me, and sometimes surprises me (as with the responses to this post).

And Another Thing

I really liked this post, by Malcolm Gladwell, about how hard it is to appreciate and convey the degree of difficulty of certain things to people who don't do them.  It's something I think about a lot. 

One thing that's really interesting and different about being a coach, instead of being a lawyer, is that I don't have peers who work with me.  There are other coaches in the department, of course, and I learn every time I sit down and talk with one.  But they don't know much about sailing, and I don't know much about their sports, so it's not like we can offer one another specific advice about the thing we're most focused on.  There are sailing coaches from other schools, and I learn from them, too, but we see one another mostly at regattas, where our sailors are competing with one another,so there's limited opportunity for information exchange.  One of the things I miss about being a lawyer is the ability to poke my head into someone's office and say, "Will you take a look at this?  Am I an idiot?  How do you read this?  Can I bounce an idea off of you?  What's your take?"   

Testimonial

I got an email from someone today who started blogging because of stumbling across this blog.  I wrote back to her, and said this:

I do think that if you blog, honestly, for six months, it will change your life.  I'm not sure why, exactly, but it will.  I think if you get in the habit of first noticing, then describing, the truth about your life and your reactions to it, it will become impossible not to speak the truth.  And when you've made telling the truth and being tuned into your world a habit, you will make changes to things that don't work for you.  And so you'll make room for wonder, and you'll become more fully yourself. 

Enjoy.  I don't think we know what we have to say until we start saying it.  And I definitely don't think we know our power until we start being honest and brave in front of other people. I'm still learning how to do that, but this blog is teaching me how, daily. 

Left Out

I have managed to avoid most of the Internet blog memes out there, which is good because I am put off by the concept, even if I sometimes read the answers with interest.  Nonetheless, I have been excluded from the best meme I've seen yet, by the great Esther Wilberforce Packard.  Sigh.  I'll have to keep to myself who I would choose to have drowned in borscht.