blogging

It seems I've lost my blog-head. I miss it.

For years that's how I walked around, my brain full of intros and outros; thinking of a phrase that really needed to be written down; the words I might use in a vain attempt to make you see what I was seeing.

That doesn't happen any more, for whatever reason. I think it started with wanting to keep my love life more private than I had. I think the novel last November finished it. I've been pulled more to fiction and longer pieces, and lord knows I've got a limited amount of time and/or energy for writing.

At any rate, that in part explains why I went to Winnipeg and came back without posting even once. I thought about it, but in that way where you think you should want to do something, not because you're bursting to do it.

But Winnipeg, yes.

I went out there for a long overdue visit to Chris, who I befriended a few weeks into library school and was the only thing that made my life in Halifax bearable - until we added Grace and Greg and Daniel to our twosome and we all got each other through the special kind of hell that is an MLIS.

Right, Winnipeg.

If you stand in one spot in Chris' hall you can see both the Assiniboine and Red Rivers. The Assiniboine is wide and leads you straight east into the sunrise. The Red is a snake's curve through the elms way off in the distance.

They've got a swank pad, her and her man, with two balconies and lots of natural light. I had my own room and woke up to that sunrise every morning, though only enough to think "I should get up and watch that from the balcon-"

We took the bus; we walked. I saw several local characters - Fast Freddy, former shoplifter and pool shark, who takes good care of his shoes - Someone Low, a strange writer-type man with a knack for saying just the wrong thing - Eric Pyle, about whom Chris' man said "Some indie rockers develop job skills when they realize they're not going to make it. And then there's Eric Pile." - and then an Ex who shall not be named, but about whom I'd heard a lot and was more famous to me than all those other people combined.

There was art, a movie, diners, bridges. The Nonsuch at the Manitoba Museum brought on the vertigo I hadn't felt in months. Chris swears up and down it was moored solid, but my inner ear saw fit to inform me otherwise.

There was sitting and reading and talking and talking. We fell easily back into step - we always do, after the first hour or so of disorientation.

Standing at the bus stop early Sunday morning, waiting for the 20 Academy to take me to the airport, we talked some more. Chris told me about flying business class - for cheap - from DC to Chicago.

"It was so nice," she said. "All this room, and food. The man beside me was pretty grumpy. But I didn't care, because I had a beautiful fruit plate."

I started laughing, hard. And crying a little too, a little wet around the lashes.

"I don't know why, but that sentence encapsulates everything I love about you."

She hooted and threw her arms around me. We hugged tight and kept laughing.

Goddamn. I wrote a very amusing blog post about how J. and I were knitting at the Manx on Monday night, her a Parisienne-esque scarf, me a snake for my nephew, right under Dave Tough's elbow as he played and sang his sweet songs.

And how we both fucked up our knitting, me because I was looking around too much and dropped a stitch, her because my knitting drama was too distracting for the moss stitch. How she joked that Rock And Roll Is No Good For Knitting, and that tickled me very much.

It was funny, goddammit. And touching. And I got to use the phrase "snake inches," as in Because I only had 28 stitches instead of 29, I had to tear out 3 snake inches.

And seeing as how "snake inches" is currently my favourite thing to say, this disappearance is highly disappointing, I'll tell you what.

Like every blogger I know, I have a statcounter. I love it. It lets me know how people find me, how many people are checking, how often some of those people check, what they look for once they get to me.

I can sometimes tell who's checking (like if you're the one person I know who works in any given government department), but mostly I can't. My anonymous regulars come to feel a bit like friends. Or maybe like that nice looking person you see walking to work every morning, rocking out to their ipod. A comforting touchstone.

So I miss the mue when it's not there. I love that Canadian Heritage calls their server "beaver" and that the justice department calls theirs "stop.justice."

What I love most is watching how people find me. My name is by far the most popular, which is good, if not particularly interesting. "What's biting me" is a perennial favourite; any variation on "hand job" is always up there, though currently the best one of those is "underpants handjob."

My most favourite recent one is "19 year old girls getting their mouths cleaned out by animals."

At first, I just guffawed. Because that is fucking specific, dude. Not 20 year olds?

I feel almost bad for this person, because it's obviously sexual - Chris' take is that it's a euphemism for giving animals head. How likely is this person to get that itch scratched? Not bloody likely, would be my guess, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's probably for the best.

It makes me feel lucky that my own desires are so pedestrian and reasonably easily satisfied.

I've had a slight problem with a spammer from China admiring my information on Louis Vuitton bags. It seems to be a person, rather than a machine, judging from the stat patterns and the fact that they can get around the stuff in place to discourage machines.

So I've changed the permissions slightly. I'll be approving every comment from here on in.

Obviously, I won't be approving comments about Louis Vuitton bags.

But all the other comments, I love them! You'll just have to wait a few hours or so for your words to show up here.

Oy, I've been having an increasingly blue few days. It's come and gone, but I woke up with it this morning and it hasn't let up since. A lot of it, I think, is PMS. It's got that kind of an overworked edge to it. But PMS Blue always has that crackling grain of truth at its centre.

What's it about? Oldish stuff, newish stuff. I spent five days sitting around with no physical activity, and we all know what that does for my mood.

I may spend some time this week picking at it and writing out for you. Or I might not.

I think I might be tired of blogging.

Going by my numbers, which have been falling pretty steadily over the past few months, a good lot of other people might feel the same way.

When I started blogging, it quickly became a very personal, cathartic space for me. Over the past few months, I haven't been able to do that. For a variety of reasons, not all of which I understand.

Several of the days I spent on the couch, I spent reading the Emily series by L.M. Montgomery. I've probably read them a couple dozen times already, and I wanted to read them again for the "book" I'm "working on."

It's been a while since I've read them, maybe 5 years, and what struck me this time was how deeply I absorbed the language and the sensibility and well, Emily. I don't know if I am like her and so that's why they hit me so hard as a kid, or whether I loved her and unconsciously tried to bend myself towards being like that. Not really answerable, I know.

There was one line in it somewhere, tossed out, about how over her life she would experience great joy and great sorrow and how she would allow people to feel those things - to feel okay about the latter - through her.

That sentence was like someone pouring a trickle of cold water down my spine.

When people have asked me why I write under my own name, that's the answer I've given them. When I write about being depressed, when I write about hating myself, or my body, or crying in the grocery store, I don't want to do it as if it needs hiding. We all feel like this and we all feel like no one else does. I have tried to use my life to tell the stories that I want to hear.

Right now, I'm having a hard time sharing what's going on in my head. I think I'm feeling a great deal of shame about some of it: that it's knee-jerk shame doesn't make it any less powerful. Yet. I think of lots of great personal stuff to write about and then I sit down, and it just seems too: hard, stupid, boring. Boring.

I don't know if I can go further, and I don't know if I'm much interested in blogging otherwise.

Chances are I'll pick up again in, oh, 4 days or so, and get right back at it. But if you don't hear from me for a while, that's where I've gone.

Trying to move the rock.

Zoom is right, I did write an article about local blogging culture for the Xpress. A long long time ago now. It never got published. It didn't get published and didn't get published and then we talked about re-working it and then Matthew H. got summarily canned and I stopped writing for them.

The title of the article is, of course, lifted from Matthew P's delightful music blog. Somehow, though, I don't have an interview with him (did I not ask? did he not answer? I have no idea). Too bad, too, since Calum Marsh stopped blogging not long after and answered my questions like he thought I was an idiot.

Never answer a blogger's questions like you think that blogger is an idiot unless you want them to say so on their blog two years later. We hold grudges.

Safe to say that it's not going to get published. It's old now, and out of season, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

++

I (heart) Ottawa: A Celebration of Local Blog Culture

Most winters, Ottawa is a city of hibernators. Even if you do leave your house, people are damn near unrecognizable, what with tuques pulled low and scarves pulled high. Luckily, the internet is here to save you from getting cut off, even from your local culture. Your community can now come to you: in blog-sized bites.

While blogging is a fairly new phenomenon [did I ever really think that?], it’s taken swift root in our fair city. A random look through OttawaStart’s blogroll shows that you can stay on top of everything from your desk. Sports or politics? You got it. Right wing or left? You got it. Pretty pictures? Scads. Slices of life? More than you could ever have time to read.

This changes the notion of community rather drastically. One side of the argument is that it's for the worse - after all, if everyone stays home and just reads about stuff happening, nothing will ever happen, right?

But this hasn’t been the case, at least for many of the readers, commenter and writers who participate in blogging culture. Zoom now “walk[s] down the street looking for the stories… that could become my next blog entry. In a sense, I feel more connected to my community because I take the time to experience it a little more.” Like many of the bloggers I’ve spoken to, writing about what’s going on around you means paying attention to and telling the stories of those who share your space.

Rather than keeping me from going out, the blogs I read keep me busy. New bands and music from I (heart) Music, Mocking Music or dial613, art shows from David Scrimshaw, readings from Amanda Earl – the list goes on.

But the change can be bigger than that. Vicky Smallman started blogging about Hintonburg almost two years ago, and found it cemented her place in her neighbourhood: “I'm always running into people who read the blog - folks I didn't know before." She also considers her run for the Kitchissippi ward council seat in 2006 a direct result of her blogging efforts.

Individual connections can be fostered through blogs as well. Lurking on someone’s blog can lead to commenting on someone’s blog can lead to virtual conversation can lead to real world communication. Old relationships can change too. “Where I've known people before, blogging has added to the connections between us,” David Scrimshaw told me.

So don’t give up on your city this winter. All the bloggers I spoke with agreed there wasn’t “an Ottawa blogging community” but a series of overlapping communities that self-organize around common interests or geography. That means that someone in Ottawa is writing something, right now, that you’d find interesting.

Not to mention, as Amanda Earl points out, “anything that makes people turn off the idiot box or stop listening to the propaganda of the brainwashed American media is a good thing.”

See you next spring.

Whew.

Weight is a big issue for me, as I've written about before. And Kat's post yesterday got me up on my soapbox and off on a tangent.

I decided to move it from her comment thread to my own blog because really, what I ended up saying had very little to do with what she wrote. The thoughts I've been having for years strangely coalesced around one or two of her sentences.

So I've spent ages tonight pounding out my train of thoughts, and I think I'm happy with how it came out. I was going to post it tonight with just a quick read through, but I think it needs time to sit. And it may be long enough that I need to divide it into a couple of sections so that you don't skip the whole damn thing completely.

Look for that in the next few days.

At any rate, here it is, much closer to midnight than I expected to be conscious, and my dishes aren't even done.

However! I did get partially packed for my trip to California, to see CT. Truthfully, I started yesterday. I'm only taking carry on, and I'm a little worried about fitting everything in. I had to prioritize something fierce, taking only the important things.

This, of course, means that I don't really have a reasonable outfit in there. Though I suppose it all depends on your definition of reasonable. Nine days of skin-tight jeans and lots of cleavage for certainly fits CT's version. And I do like a reasonable fellow.

You may notice that I've changed up my blogroll over there in the right column.

It was long and unwieldy, so I divided it up into how I think of them, added a few I've been following for a while but hadn't gotten around to putting in the roll.

I did some weeding while I was at it, so you may also notice that you're not there any more. It's not because I don't like you! I figured that if a blog hadn't been updated in about 6 months, that it was pretty dead in the water. You're not out of my blog reader though, so if the content comes back, so will the link.

To highlight a few new ones:

• you can follow Gabriel from ...salted lithium., who writes eloquently about managing bipolar disorder;
• on Exhibit:F, you can track Eric and Grant as they put together an exhibit to open at the Diefenbunker in May;
• It Ain't Meat, Babe (whose URL always tickles me because it reads like I Taint Meat Babe) is a record of Jennifer's very tasty culinary adventures;
• and get your sexy smut fix from Black Heart Magazine and Lickety Split Zine

Please to enjoy!

I do have stuff to write you about tonight, I really do. Interesting stuff, too. Like about pilates, my visit to the doctor, the deeply satisfying grocery shopping I got done, my first 20-minutes-or-bust writing exercise, the half hour conversation I had today with Barbara, the realization that all the single ladies in my circle are dwindling.

But you know what? I'm tired. I stopped taking my iron by accident.* I'm worn out. And my uterus hurts.

Instead of writing you about any of those things, I'm going to fill my hot water bottle, take my second iron pill today, go to bed, and read some Freud.

There may be a connection there.

*Confidential to ST: I know. I was too embarrassed to admit it yesterday.

If you ever think you might have a problem with blogging, what you need to do is have your blog taken away from you unexpectedly for several days. That will outline the magnitude of your problem.

I did much better than I thought I would.

Quite frankly, I thought I'd be a gibbering mess. I was a little twitchy, but not too bad. I had a lot of free time on my hands.

But now, of course, I'm up to my ass in Christmas stuff, and don't really have time to blog, even though so much stuff has happened over the past few days.

And a big thanks to the people who checked in on me. It was good to know people noticed I was gone.