Category: Weblogging

Take your hands off the keyboard, and back away slowly.

I received this advice years ago in Boston, and it always resonates within me when someone I know makes a conscious decision to spend less time at (pick one) the computer/work/the computer at work, as Jeneane did this week when she went to a part-time work schedule:

I’m worn out. And I’m doing my best to change one part of the equation that’s burned out my passion. By going part time I think I can give the BEST of me to work and the BEST of me to myself and my family. It’s a start anyway. One change at a time, so to speak.

Though I’m disappointed that Jeneane isn’t moving to St. Louis, per a recent suggestion, I’m very glad to see her giving herself more time to spend with her family and, more importantly, herself. Time for a slow walk, a banana split, or a funny movie. Time for a bubble bath.

Everyone needs to have enough time in the day to take a bubble bath if they want. It’s as essential an ingredient to living as water, air, moonlight, the scent of lavendar and sea, the touch of silk, sex, and chocolate.

My roommate received a catalog from the local community college and I decided to use some of my own bubble bath time to take a few classes. For instance, there’s a class on B & W Photography that includes instruction on using the dark room. That one’s a must, as is the day long photography class at one of the local parks.

And then there’s the astronomy class that meets four nights at an observatory, spending hours gazing at the moon, the planets, and the stars. If that’s not a good use of bubble bath time, I don’t know what is.

This week I drove to an isolated park next to the Meramec River, pulling up to the river bank between the trees that overhang the area. I put favorite music into my CD player and opened all the windows of the car, letting in the steamy warmth. Leaning back against the seat, through half closed eyes I watched dragonflies playing catch-me-if-you-can among the bushes as the late afternoon sun painted the area emerald green-gold.

You can almost see the bubbles if you squint at the words hard enough.

Sometimes I read something that reaches out of the page and touches me between the eyes; the touch vibrates throughout my body as if I were a wire strung between pegs, played by someone with infinitesimally deft skill.

Jeff Ward:

In the winter of 1989 I started experimenting with infrared flash photography. The success I had with it made me stop driving much farther than the local bars. It’s hard for me to date daylight photographs taken after that— they were few and far between. When moving some boxes around today, I stumbled on a box of 3 ½ inch floppies. I haven’t used them in years. I looked and saw that they were the letters that changed everything— private letters that changed my life when they became public…

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

A scant two weeks ago I bid you all a tearful farewell, and now here I am again, in your face, on your blogrolls (I hope, still), and cluttering up weblogs. com.

Wait, though! Before you dismiss me as yet another weblogging addict (holding up cardboard sign saying ‘Links for the hungry! Will blog for food!’), hear me out. Give me a chance. I have excellent reasons for restarting:

Reason 1:

PorridgeBoy must be held somewhat accountable, with his dastardly plot to get me to weblog again. I had to give him something to pull that terrible photo of me, and he wasn’t interested in sex. Well, with me that is. (Maybe it was the photo — I really have to get one of those glamour pics…)

Reason 2:

Then there was Dave Winer’s Why We Blog. There are very few things that could have interested me in returning to weblogging more than reading the following, yesterday:

From there, I want to start an outline about what a weblog is, because there’s more to say. Maybe it’ll be a three-column table. In column 1, a topic. For example: Fact-checking. In the second column, how centralized journalism does it; and in the third column, how it works in the weblog world. That way, if someone understands how fact-checking works in the print world, they have a basis for understanding how it works when done in the open.

I’m sorry, but this was more than a flesh and blood woman can take. I mean really — did anyone think I would let something like this slide?

(I wonder if Dave did this deliberately?)

Reason 3

Josh Trevino had a bet with Meryl Yourish over at i330 about how long I would be gone, and I thought I wouldn’t disappoint either of them since they seemed to miss me so much.

Hi dears! I’m back! XXOOXXX

Reason 4

My friends, and this time without any preface of ‘weblogging’. I’ve had an extremely patient group of friends in the last month as I’ve literally bounced over every wall, and twice off the ceiling.

In particular, it was a phone call with a friend tonight that made me realize that the weblog wasn’t the root of my problems, and keeping it, or not, wasn’t going to make these problems go away. All I was doing was giving up something I really enjoy, and not gaining any peace in return.

(There’s a long, complex, and difficult story attached to this, which would only bore all of you. So it’s going unsaid.)

Yes, I do need to find a life, and today I went hiking in the woods and I didn’t think about weblogging, at all. (Of course, I was very sure there was a bear uncomfortably close and I was hiking by myself, and getting a pretty good adrenaline rush from the whole thing — but that’s a story for another day.)

And, yes, I do need to spend less time weblogging and more time with my professional writing (particularly since I have a tough RDF book deadline). But as Dorothea stated:

Blog however you want, whenever you want, as often or as seldom as you want. Use as much or as little of the technology as you care to. Adhere to common blogging formats or not, as you choose. Watch the big bloggers or not; pay attention to bloglomerations or not. If you feel you need permission to do any of these things, you’ve got mine, no questions asked, not least because I don’t believe you need it.

Fucking good advice. So I took it.

Reason 5

Sex.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. 

What a marvelous party this has been, and what wonderful people I’ve met, but it’s time, and past, for me to move on. This posting will be Burningbird’s last.

I wasn’t sure how to close the weblog down. Should I just quit abruptly? Spelling out “GOOD-BYE” with no hint of why I’m leaving? However, as tempting as it was to play woman of mystery, I’ve never been one for brevity and I wasn’t about to change my style here at the end.

I started this weblog for two reasons: writing and community. Twisting time into a moebius strip and coming full circle, these are also the reasons why I’m closing it down.

If you’ve been reading Burningbird for some time, then you know I love to write. To compliment this, I also love reading and I’ve met some potentially great writers among those webloggers I’ve been honored to call “friend”.

Potentially great writers. I say this not to insult the writer but because I’m finding that the characteristics of weblogging that allow us to meet great writers are also the characteristics that prevents the writers from showing their full potential in their weblogs.

It’s so seductively easy to write to a weblog. Open a tool, type in some words, push a button and “Hey now”, you’re a published writer. Yet writing is more than putting words out for others to read – it’s also a process of thinking about what you want to write, researching your subject, working with the words, writing and re-writing the same phrase over and over again. It’s effort that takes time – lots of time – and involves change. And, above all, it’s a very personal process.

The very nature of weblogging is that we post regularly, we don’t pull the postings, and we do only minor edits. If we pull postings we leave broken links from other weblogs, or comments that are left orphaned. If we edit, we’re breaking trust with those who’ve commented on the original writing. Weblogging is writing that’s been externalized.

And once the words are out and the writing is finished, no matter how terrific the post is, it’s slowly pushed down a page and hidden among other postings and blogrolls and blogstickers and other graphics until it eventually falls off the bottom of the page, never to surface again unless some strange person puts a bizarre request into Google that leads to one of our archives.

Truly great writing must be allowed to persist through time and if there’s one characteristic common to all weblogs, it’s impermanence.

There’s no reason why the weblogger can’t write for other publications – many do. I do. However, I’m finding that, for me personally, my weblog has become a creative relief valve, something that’s not as positive as it may sound.

Writing is as much a discipline and an overcoming of inertia as it is a product of creativity and skill – you need a build-up of creative energies to start a work and see it through to the end. Since I started weblogging, I’ve found it difficult to focus on my books and my articles, and it shows. In the last year I may have written more than at any other time in my life, but I have the least to show for my effort. No articles, and only one book finished.

What a twistie – to continue writing I must stop writing.

Stop writing to the weblog. So much harder than it sounds because through weblogging I’ve met incredible people from all corners of the world. Not writing to the weblog means I’m also leaving this very special community.

And this leads to another twistie for you – to become part of a community I must leave a community.

In the last six months, I’ve kept myself wrapped in amber. Closed, static, sitting in a chair with computer on my lap, connected to the real world through your eyes, hearing your song, living in your dreams. I’ve managed to avoid dealing with the world and issues in my life that need resolving by folding myself into the community of wonderful people I’ve met here.

My weblog has become more than my avatar, it’s become me.

I need to walk among forest paths with thoughts other than “I must remember to post this”. I need to meet people and look into their eyes, and to laugh and hear something other than the echo of my own laughter back. And I must stop using this weblog as a surrogate for life and the only way I can do this is to quit cold turkey. Walk away, and not look back.

Walking away – this is going to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done because I’ve come to like and respect, and even love, the members of my virtual neighborhood. You.

I have no regrets leaving the artificial world of weblogging – the Daypop and Blogdex ratings, the arguments of “webloggers as journalists”, the occasional and unthinking nastiness, the obsession with outlines and links and Google and quizzes and memes of the minute.

But I do regret leaving you.

So long my friends. And thanks for all the posts.