one, two, unbutton my lip.
27 December 2005 | maura dot com | 4 Comments
i’ve spent a good portion of the last hour zig-zagging around the internet, reading the sites of people i’d shared floors and cocktails with back at the turn of this century, when i was living rent-free but spending any money that i might lay out on rent on plane tickets and seared tuna appetizers. one of the sites i landed on noted that the google ads she’d installed were serving as a tip jar for seven and a half years of content — and that number made my jaw go slack, until i realized that i could boast a similar streak.
that is, i could say that i’ve been ‘writing on the internet’ for that long … if, of course, those long fallow periods my various outposts have seen were brushed to the side. moving hosts, and installing wordpress (omg wtf a content management system for little miss pico, WORLD ENDING FILM AT 11 as i told my cadre of livejournal friends), and attempting to keep up the wine blog, has made me think a lot about my writing, and its relative lack of existence in the 21st century, and my persistent defining myself as a “writer” in my head and to other people, even though the largest body of work i’ve accumulated over the past year and a half mostly consists of documentation for my company’s content management system.
an unsurprising confession: it’s been difficult for me to write at all for about four years, now. my ascendance into the pro ranks was paired with a few confidence-obliterating events in my personal life, so while i was churning out band blurbs by the bucket, i was feeling less and less comfortable with writing about concepts that i was supposed to dream up on my own. couple that with a)my complete inability to keep a “proper” paper journal — i still harbor a ton of guilt toward those who have presented me with beautiful, blank books that i’ve only filled up to page 11 or so (never mind that usually at least two of those pages have been grocery lists or attempts to figure out some sort of budget) — and b)my tendency, hastened by technology’s ability to hork up and spit out past-their-prime bits, to pitch (in the trash sense) any items i might own that don’t reflect the me of now in the proper way, and what do i have? scattered memories of a time when i, emboldened by my first-name/domain-name status, took on everything, from wendy shalit to dudes jerking off on the long island rail road, and managed to craft a few memorable phrases along the way.
now, i just find myself bewildered and silent*, reading (blogs! magazines! books! the hfcs-filled log cabin syrup ingredient list!) obsessively and crafting possible frameworks for replies in my head that dissipate by the time i sit down in front of the keyboard. whatever bon mots or good points i might have come up with get blasted out by gusts of low self-confidence — about anything from my boring life% to my slacktastic performance in my college courses — and eaten away by rusting bits of a mind that used to be a steel trap.
it’s making me feel old. scarier: it’s making me feel like i’m settling, that i’m fine with whatever crap might be swirling all around me. even though for the first time in my life — ever since my third grade art teacher disinvited me, and only me, from the lunchtime art club that my classmates were in — i’m starting to feel like someone who can express herself visually, the not-writing i’ve been doing (not doing? no, i guess that makes it a double-negative) has finally reached a space in my consciousness that i’m all too aware of.
so what to do? the answer joe gives me when i whine about my inertia to him (and i suspect others will soon line up behind him in the comments section) is, of course, “keep writing.” so, hi. welcome to the first-ish entry of version 8.0 (approximately) of my site — i’m hoping that more will fill up my wordpress archives after it. it sounds really glass-eyed optimistic to end this entry on such an up, “well, ok then!” note, but really, i just want to stop spinning my wheels in place, because i can hear it happening and it’s starting to hurt my ears way too much.
(also — and i say this because my pazz and jop ballot, which i’m pretty sure will be led by celebration and my chemical romance, is due in 12 hours — soon i will probably post some sort of “best of 2005″ list. it will likely be short, as this collection of days is, even in its final stretch, turning out to be one that’s best destined for the incinerator. but i did get to see unrest (!!!!) and the olivia tremor control, so it wasn’t all horrific.)
* the one thing i have felt pretty confident opining on is, of all things, baseball — a stunning turn of events, given that when i started my current day job nearly three years ago, i couldn’t name two pitchers who were in the mets’ starting rotation. go back.
% this cadre of chattering condenazzi blogs really makes it hard to “keep up,” eh. go back.
4 Comments
Leave a Reply
You can follow the discussion through the Comments feed. You can also pingback or trackback from your own site.
I still haven’t heard the Celebration record. There are about 100 records like that. I’m feeling you on the writing thing. In the last year, the postings on my blog got lighter and less frequent. I mean, the stuff I read at the KWH was a year old. At least you wrote something new. Perhaps you should write more about baseball. There are so few lady sports writers.
Hey Maura,
I too have felt many of the same things about my writing. I’ve experienced the difficulties of gettting my thoughts down in a satisfactory manner; I’ve raged at the amount of fatuous wordsmithing in blogs, sites, newspapers, etc. (and feared I’m part of the problem). There is so much apathy facing 99% of writers in this world. Every little bit you can squeeze out with the right spirit in spite of that indifference is worth something, I like to think.
It’s good to always stretch out and learn new things, but it’s equally important to hone in on the subjects with which you feel a special kinship. So I also think you should give baseball writing a shot, here or elsewhere, especially if that’s where your head is right now.
The older I get, the more I believe that just making it through the day (which you can define more than one way) is more important and inspiring than being witty, well-known or influential.
I also have been doing less writing and more photos
the last few years. And articles and sites I might have written about so I could go back to them I now just bookmark in del.icio.us.
But I still sometimes wish I had actually written about some things (especially since the web can be so ephermeral.
Right now, I am zigzagging too. I don’t do much of it anymore. I miss the web, and my defenses against nostalgia’s emotional byproducts have always been paper-thin. For example, I am now trying to remember how long it’s been since I stumbled upon a link to myself by chance. x = y years spent not writing + z years spent watching referer reports. 2006 - x = some life I used to live once.
Even so. Far from the anticipated (deflected?) “keep writing” response, I have this to say: Don’t feel old. Girl, you are too cool to be old, and you don’t need any creative output to prove it. Cool is not a deliverable.
I’m not saying writing isn’t important. If it makes you happy, then it’s good… just don’t mistake it for who you are. Writing is an artifact. You are the real thing.