Besides the constant thoughts about wedding planning, I'm thinking about blogging. I'm also thinking about writing, but the two are different. Thinking about writing is thinking about story and craft and audience and narrative. Thinking about blogging is thinking about audience, and the instant reaction that your writing may or may not garner. There's something fundamentally interactive about blogging, and that makes it different than other writing I have done. There's something quick about it, too, and raw, which is both compelling and also problematic.
I miss Stay of Execution. I don't use this blog in the same way. That's deliberate, and on the whole it is good for me. I live much more in my actual life, and less in my imagination, as watcher and observer and thinker and commentator. Of course I have another blog, an anonymous one, that isn't connected to my real, persistent, professional identity, where I still write every day. And I find that daily urge to blurt about what is happening with me, to process my feelings and my thoughts, has not diminished. I have paper journals going back to 1986 containing the same sort of writing: self-absorbed and full of questions. Navel-gazing is a long habit of mine. But conversational navel-gazing is what blogging is, and I got sort of addicted to the practice of trying to watch my own world and share it with an audience in a way that felt meaningful and authentic and inviting.
I learned a lot by trying to walk the line between intimacy and appropriate distance: how can I write something that is honest and real, but that I would be comfortable having Google connect to my name for any possible interested person to find with a click? There are things you have to leave out in such an exercise, just as you don't tell the stranger on the bus or the acquaintance at the office party about how anxious you are about the tests the doctor recommended. I met my future husband because of my blog, and I trusted him initially because I had read his blog. Being honest in public is a good practice, I think -- good for individuals and good for the world who witnesses honesty.
It was my new years' resolution this year to make my life smaller. Make no new friends in 2007 -- that was one explicit goal, at which I have already (happily) failed. Stop trying to engage the whole world in conversation. It was the right decision, I think. I'm watching another blogger struggle with the pull of that engaged conversation and the energetic toll it can take, and it's got me reflecting. When what I should be doing is planning a wedding.