Tag Archives: Blogging

Taking the role seriously

Because every blogger’s opinion about the world at large is valued and unique, I have decided to weigh in on some of the day’s top controversies. By doing this I hope to prove that I am a woman of broad social engagement. A political being who won’t be silenced. A tastemaking culture vulture whom other people turn to when they want to know how to think about things.

The World Cup

I’m totally for it. What began eight years ago as my excuse for day-drinking has now blossomed into an aggressive spectator sport that has me rooting for any number of obscure, rowdy nations that somehow manage to exist outside of America’s borders. But as much as I enjoy learning about the soccer players’ family backgrounds and signature hairstyles, every once in while, because I am a refined and cosmopolitan person, I vaguely wonder what’s going on within the homelands of these athletes, and where those homelands reside on a map. So it would be helpful to me if this information could be printed somewhere on the team’s jerseys. The players can still keep their numbers and their names (as long as those names aren’t interminably Greek or Russian), but the jerseys should also incorporate a news headline or two from the originating country, and maybe a diagram so I can tell how far that country is from America.

Student debt

I have very few friends who aren’t at least $100,000 in debt. I write that, and I’m shocked. Shocked. What am I doing hanging out with such impecunious people? From now on I’m only fraternizing with peers who never made it past the eighth grade, so they can buy all my drinks.

Sexism

This bizarre and hurtful essay came to my attention last night as I was trying to decide which of my poorer friends to de-friend on Facebook. As far as I can tell, Ed Champion (a popular literary blogger known for being persnickety) had a playground crush on Emily Gould (a writer and Gawker gossip alum), which Emily never reciprocated, so Ed stole all the Number 2 pencils from Emily’s classroom desk and then stabbed her with them a million times. Then he had a mental break and got sent to reform school. If Ed’s rant (and I was almost with him until the third paragraph) hadn’t been written in misogynistic earnest and didn’t involve real people and was included in a first-person novel about a narcissistic boy who never grew up or learned how to use English properly, then I would be thoroughly entertained. But the whole thing made me want to protect a difficult woman’s vagina, and that is a weird place for me to be. I will continue to relish literary eviscerations, but they shouldn’t be so ad hominem that every female writer in America feels the need to rally around the victim. That is just too many voices, and we all know there can only be one authoritative voice in random cultural affairs—my own.

Racism

How can Ta-Nehisi Coates allege that racism still exists in America when every once in a while we white people look up from our gimlets of Grey Goose to the martini bar’s high definition television set and cheer on a BLACK man in an uninformative soccer jersey? How?!

Income inequality

This one really bothers me because yesterday I discovered that my roommate has an entire BOWL full of dimes and quarters in her bedroom while I could not come up with ten cents to help my boyfriend buy a loosie cigarette from the bodega downstairs. I even looked under the couch cushions because in movies these often conceal a great wealth. I am okay with my roommate having more change than I do, but I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to know that some people in the world have their pockets bursting with coinage while I have to scrounge around in filth so I can buy a soda. Hey rich person, you were in the right place at the right time to beat the slot machine, so just take your winnings and go. But if you stay, and you want to live on this great green earth with the rest of us (or potentially share my microwave), then at least scatter some pennies under the couch cushions from time to time so we can keep the bodega in business.

The oceans

Say goodbye to the whales, everybody. I would not be surprised to find out that an early version of man existed around the time of the dinosaurs but we kept putting poison in their food and water dishes again and again until we killed them off and sterilized their babies and then we were all butt-hurt because the dinosaurs didn’t share our superior survival skills and then a meteor came and wiped us out because we suck.

Iraq

I’m not afraid to tackle the hard stuff. At heart (when they haven’t been exploded), terrorists are miserable, desperate people. Let’s find out why they are so miserable and desperate so those conditions can be addressed. Maybe they can all play in a soccer tournament with their grievances stitched onto their jerseys. I would definitely watch those games on TV. But from a bar in a well-off, gentrified neighborhood. Not in person because that would be terrifying.

Watermelon

Still delicious.

Kesha

She is probably going to be okay.

My time being the wise and lucid spokesperson of a generation

Up.

I am a good old-fashioned humanoid

Last night I finished Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and began reading Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. When you really think about it, these two books are not so different. Yes they are. This blog post is off to a bad start. QUIZ! Which dreadlocked computer pioneer wrote the following excerpt, Conrad or Lanier?

As long as you are not defined by software, you are helping to broaden the identity of the ideas that will get locked in for future generations. In most arenas of human expression, it’s fine for a person to love the medium they are given to work in. Love paint if you are a painter; love a clarinet if you are a musician. Love the English language (or hate it). Love of these things is a love of mystery.

But in the case of digital creative materials, like . . . the World Wide Web, it’s a good idea to be skeptical. These designs came together very recently, and there’s a haphazard, accidental quality to them. Resist the easy grooves they guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!

Lanier thinks that current technology is inadvertently circumscribing our humanity, limiting users to behaving more like machines than people. A few months ago Zadie Smith followed up on this idea in The New York Review of Books:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

You guys understand what I’m getting at here, right? That I have a personal WordPress blog so I’m doing okay, but you, on the other hand, might not be? Good, glad to see we’re on the same page. You should now leave a lot of eccentric comments below or I will consider you further enslaved to the hive mind. This post is so 2010.

Speaking of not being a gadget, my friend’s comedian kid brother (Gidget?) has been messing with people on Craigslist forever. Here is Dregslist, his new website, a compilation of greatest hits.

JOHN DEERE JS46 LAWNMOWER, RUNS LIKE NEW (possibly haunted) – $30

I also like this lady who makes visual art on her typewriter, and this guy who crochets traditionally masculine objects like urinals and handguns. We should all do more crocheting of bullets and less shooting of bullets. Whoa, sorry for that political rant. You know what a crocheted bullet would look like? A tampon for Jared Lee Loughner’s vagina. And I’m out!

I wonder how long it’s going to take my little brother to realize I’ve been blogging about him

Whenever he runs into me in our mom’s house, he’s like, “Oh hey, Wistar. Where’ve you been? Blogging?” All sardonic. And the more I deny it, the more he insists that I blog 24 hours a day, every day of my life, for nameless people in Brooklyn. I told him he could join me and my friend Leslie for dinner tomorrow night and he’s like, “Why? So we can all talk about blogging? No thanks.” And lately he’s been alternating his blog taunting with literary taunting, like, “What you doing today? Writing one of your novels?” He is such a bully. If he knew Stephen Hawking, he’d be going up to him all, “Wassup, Hawking? You doing your hipster physics? You got yourself some theories? By the way, I like your oversized, retro, prescription eyeglasses” [hehe, high fives]. Our situation is exactly like that. Meanwhile my brother is at the gym “getting his swell on” for the spring season, so I shall make fun of him from my secret hiding place on the internet.

Baby brother, you stink and your hair is too long. You’re probably not even the hugest guy on the lacrosse team. P.S. Hurry home I’m making quesadillas.

This thing still works

Even without me, the internet goes on. In fact, several of my friends have been writing on it. I give you:

Casey Plett! Dai George! Herpreet Grewal! Mary South! Barry Hannah (not actually my friend, but he seems like a wonderful man and I wish I had known him. Plus he scores major points in this interview by defending John Grisham, also not my friend (yet))!

For all the times when I can’t directly endorse the web’s existence with my bloggings, at least you have these other fine people to read online. No one said anything about second best. No one said that. That was just something you were thinking to yourself, but that’s really uncool of you. When, one day, god willing, I mature enough to be able to balance work and play, you will have your blog back. In the meantime my work is going down the toilet. This holiday break I’ve become so paranoid that I will never write fiction again that when I was sick in bed yesterday I refused to think about my novel for fear that I’d start associating it with my nausea and then whenever I wrote in the future I’d throw up. So that’s work. Play, on the other hand, seems equally doomed. On New Year’s Eve, play amounted to drinking wine with my mom until I tried to tickle her feet while she did floor exercises and she promptly kicked me out of her room (at 10:30PM). Last night I lay in bed listening to my 21-year-old brother and his friends play Monopoly for hours and the game sounded incredibly pure and wholesome until I decided that the whole posse must be on drugs. But then one has to wonder which drugs could possibly make Monopoly so fun? Methamphetamines? Steroids? It could be that I have lost touch with what is fun, which, come to think of it, people have been telling me forever. But I’d like to challenge my little brother to live a day in my shoes, to sit alone in front of a window, thinking about bon mots, sipping iced coffee because it contains less stomach-upsetting acid than hot coffee, periodically checking the internet for emails that never arrive, with no access to dice or plastic hotels or meth. HE WOULD BE CRIPPLED BY BOREDOM. And then I would . . . win?

See, this was fun. I should do this more often. Unfortunately I now have to figure out how to make a living as a writer, i.e., how to collect my $200 without having written a good novel, which is going to require more hard-looking out this window, maybe some lunch, definitely some websites.

My only job tonight is to write a blog post

That’s the first indication it will turn out badly. The second indication is that I have nothing to say. Here is what time is doing lately: inching, edging, creeping, lurking. It is twisting in my back. It doesn’t spare me, it doesn’t take pity on me. It doesn’t let me sit by the side of the road for a minute to rest my legs. It treads, it marches, it drags me along with it.

In class the other day, my professor quoted this poem by Bill Knott:

The only response

to a child’s grave is

to lie down before it and play dead

I have been trying. I have been motioning surrender with my hands and my feet. I have been telling time to stop, to reverse. I’ve been holding as still as I possibly can. I’ve breathed in nothing but dirt and November. I’ve frozen my mouth so it’s beyond words. And yet I will wake up tomorrow. Tomorrow I will wake up.

Frightening egocentric thought to pass the time before bed

In 13 months and change this blog will be a public record of who I was in my late 20s. There is a reason most of my favorite writers don’t maintain blogs. If only my existing blog posts could become wiser with age, like my mind is planning to do in its early 30s, just as soon as it quits goofing around.