10 posts tagged “blogging”
This wasn't a quick decision--it's one I'd been mulling for months. I started this Vox blog in November '06. It was never meant to be my full-time blog. I started it as a side blog just because I thought it was kind of a cool interface. When I began to feel suffocated at my TypePad blog, Vox was an easy escape.
Vox, you've been good to me, but I miss the flexibility I had at TypePad. I miss being able to have the kinds of sidebars I want. I need to move on for other reasons, as well. I toyed with going with Wordpress, but it just didn't feel right (at least not right now).
On Saturday I cleaned up and organized a bunch of paperwork at home. I completely de-cluttered the top of our desk...and I can't tell you what a difference it made in how I felt sitting down at the computer. That process, combined with reconnecting with a dear blog friend yesterday--and where one of her posts led me--made the time feel right to make the change.
So, without further ado, here's tongue and groove. And if you're wondering about the name, it's what I wanted Jeffrey to call his jazz trio when we lived in Portland, but he went for a self-titled group...so I'm claiming it. Tongue and groove is a method of fitting similar objects together. That's what I'll try to do there. You'll find links in the sidebar to , Moojo Cafe, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, Bloggers for Darfur...and, oh yeah, I started a tumble log awhile back. ;)
Those of you who choose to follow me to the new site, thanks for hanging with me. xoxo
It's the Third Annual "Thank Your First Commenter Day" at Neil's Citizen of the Month. (I'm a day late, but I'm still going to play.) :) Always a fun exercise. I've had so many blogs over the past 4+ years--several maintained for only short periods of time. Since this is the third annual, I thought it would be fun to see who the first commenters were at the three main blogs I've kept.
As I've written before, my very first blog didn't have comments when I set it up. If they were included in the template, I sure never found them. Then Blogger did some upgrades and suddenly...comments! I blogged for 6+ months before comments had even been enabled on my blog. (I know you probably doubt me when I say I blog mostly for myself, but I really do mean it. I was used to doing it that way.) The day I enabled them (May 10, 2004), I received two comments from the same person. She commented, and then commented a second time to let me know who she was. Imagine my shock--sitting there in the living room of our island condo on that little rock in the Caribbean--to find out that someone in Amsterdam was reading my blog! My first commenter was Lynn at Two-Muses, and I love her still. She still sometimes leaves me comments on Flickr photos. If you read her blog, you know what a talented and fantastic photographer she is, so why she'd comment on any of my (unaltered) photos is beyond me... Thank you, Lynn, just for being you.
About a month before we flew to California--as we were in the midst of packing and shipping our belongings--I started a new blog to go with a new chapter in our lives. The first comment at California Fever was from my beloved Liz(ardek), who wrote "What goes around comes around. She'll get hers." She was commenting on a long, rambling post that was essentially how the woman who'd been hired as my replacement at my island job had done some stuff to piss me off. (This was a woman who'd held the job for many years and returned to it after three of us held it after her, even though she claimed to hate the position and the place.) Oddly, I seemed more pissed off in that post about some smaller stuff she'd done than over the fact that she'd been hired at nearly double my salary. Then again, I was pissed off at my employer about that.
I started this blog a year ago, but only used it occasionally until a few months ago. I needed another blog like a hole in the head, but I really liked the Vox platform. I also liked that it had privacy settings and that you could write posts that only 'friends' would see. Rather than single out just one commenter on this blog, I'm going to list the three who commented on the first post I wrote here (a 'friends only' post). It was about a job opportunity that had fallen into my life completely unexpectedly. But even as I was trying to consider it as a possibility, I had my doubts that it would come to fruition. And I can tell you a year later, it didn't. It's not that someone else was hired for it--the job was never even created. Even so, three of my dearest blog-pals left comments of support and encouragement on that post. They were Lori-Lyn at The Dream Life...Jill, my partner at Bloggers for Darfur, who blogs at Eye Level Pasadena...and Sam at Sunday School Rebel. They were all already friends, so it would make sense that they'd be the first to comment on a private post here.
So what do we (*I*) take away from this exercise? For me it's that the biggest gifts blogging gives me are genuine connections with other bloggers and a sense of community. A sense of finding my tribe. A sense of feeling like no matter where I go in the blogosphere, my tribe goes with me. Hope you've found your tribe, too.
I woke very early on Tuesday morning...with a cold. It took me awhile to figure out it was a cold. I rarely get sick. I'd been sneezing and blowing my nose for what seemed like hours before it dawned on me that it was more than 'allergies.' I've got weeks of sick leave banked, so I used two days of it to stay home on Tuesday and Wednesday to take care of myself.
I haven't felt like doing much the past couple of days, except try to make myself comfortable. I've spent a lot of time lying on the couch, lying in bed (both reading and dozing), watching TV. I've gone through lots of Kleenex and imbibed plenty of herbal tea and water and juice, and the first day I even had a Jamba Juice Cold Buster with an extra immunity boost. I have no idea if it helped, but it sure felt good going down my scratchy throat.
By 4:00 yesterday, I was feeling antsy. I was tired of lying down, tired of reading, tired of watching movies...tired of being passive. Jeffrey was doing some chores outside, so I threw on some clothes and walked around the corner to Peet's to grab us a couple of gingerbread lattes. (I like their version--not too sweet.) It felt really good to be outside. Thankfully the weather has been gorgeous while I've been recuperating, so I've had the front door and windows flung open to let in lots of sun and the low 70's air.
It seems odd that (with the Veterans Day 'holiday') I've had five days off. Between sleeping half the day on Monday and then being 'laid up' the past two, I really let go of the 'shoulds' for a few days (not that I like to spend a lot of time with them to begin with) and just got back to basics: sleep and self-care.
Yesterday afternoon I found "The Enchanted Cottage" on Comcast on Demand. I hadn't seen it in years. Spoiler alert: if you've never seen it or plan to, you might want to skip this clip since it's the final scene. When J arrived home from work, as he walked through the living room he looked over and asked, "What are you watching?" "Shhhh! It's a pivotal scene!" I'm sure to him it looked like some incredibly corny movie from 1945...to me it's a paean to the power of love. Behold...
There's been a lot of dialogue going on over at Michelle's about the nature of blogging and our feelings around comments and the sizes of blog readerships. You might want to check it out if you haven't been following along. It's a complex mix of emotions that surrounds this unique community, isn't it?
And I'm still curious to hear if anyone's got a personal anthem they'd like to share. See this post.
I'm re-entering the workforce today and thankfully only have to work two days and then I'll have nine days off for Thanksgiving break. Staying home with a cold for two days allowed me to get completely back to basics, and on some levels I think I really needed that. It was a time of...STOP...slow WAY down...be STILL...just...BREATHE.
However you spend your day, hope it's enchanted. xoxo
Busy day today. Picking Carolyn up at the Goodyear place this morning where she's dropping off her car. Then we'll be swinging by the store for ice cream to go with the pies I picked up after work yesterday at Bakers Square. Our male counselor (our token male in the office--poor guy, surrounded by all those menopausal and perimenopausal women) turns 30 today. Before I left yesterday I got on the computer and made little squares comprised of an old bald guy slumped over with a cane and "30" next to him. I cut a dozen of them and taped and pinned them all over his office. After the kids go back to class after lunch--when we sit down to have ours in the office--we'll have a pie party. (Pie, rather than cake, at his request.) Faculty heads off to a staff meeting after final bell, and I'm meeting a teacher friend for dinner after that.
But that "project" thing is still rattling around in the back of my head. It's making me want to dig around in my files for that list of "101 ideas" I typed up (on a typewriter!) about 12 or 13 years ago. Ideas are never the problem--I've had a boatload of them--it's that whole commitment thing.
(Hmmm...guess I had time to blog after all.) :)
The turning point in Erin Gruwell's (the real-life teacher) classroom came when she gave journals to her at-risk students and told them they could write whatever they wanted. Such a simple assignment -- to just write -- but a life-altering one.
I had just been thinking yesterday (before I watched this film) about how free I feel on my poetry blog. When I stepped away from my main Typepad blog, I made my poetry blog the default one in Typepad, so that's where my stats come from now. I'm not a stats junkie--I could care less about Technorati and generating hits and increasing readership and all of it. I occasionally look at the stats only because I get tickled by the kinds of searches that bring people to my blog. I've even written poems using nothing but those search strings. With the abandonment of my previous main blog, my Typepad readership has gone down to a trickle. What freedom!
Yes, I still sometimes write for Sunday Scribblings or (now) Writers Island prompts. But I don't just post to my poetry blog on Sundays and Tuesdays only--I try to write a poem most mornings. It's become a sort of online poetry journal for me. And since I hate to write longhand anymore (and my handwriting has grown abominable--sometimes even I can't read it) that's a handy-dandy thing. It's not even 'real' poetry--it's just not prose. I don't know anything about craft or form or rules or any of it. And frankly, I don't plan to learn about any of it either, because I don't care about that stuff. I don't even edit or pretty any of it up. It's my own little first draft paradise. And it reminds me regularly what freedom can be found...in the simple act of writing.
My Sacred Life
Show us a snippet of something you're writing.
The old adage says that "the clothes make the (wo)man." But I don't want something on the outside to form what's inside. And that's how I was starting to feel at my other blog. Perception's a tricky thing, and often our self-perception is out of alignment with the way others perceive us. At what had been my main blog, I began to feel over time like I'd been pigeonholed. As if a blog persona had been crafted for me and it was my job to step into it--like a suit of armor. (And it felt about as flexible as chainmail.) One day I suddenly realized there was this whole aspect of me that people seemed to think was all there was of me. And the more I felt stifled by it, the harder it felt to break free of it. Until it had reached the point the past few months where I'd sit down at the keyboard literally unable to think of anything to say. I felt paralyzed by what I thought were others' expectations of me. Once people start throwing around words like "inspiring"...well, trust me, it's not as good as it sounds. At least it didn't feel that good to me. It was like being back in Catholic school where the nuns expected me to be good...all the time.
So today, four years to the day that I began blogging and 2-1/2 years after starting my current blog, I stepped away from it. That big sigh you heard? That was me...exhaling with relief.
What are the positive and negative associations that you and those around you have with blogging? Have attitudes changed over time?
What DOESN'T blogging mean???
It's done nothing short of completely turn my life inside out...and that's a good thing. It's been a life-saver, a life-giver, a support system, a transformative tool, a gateway to unleashing my creative juices. I'm convinced that, for me, the path to authenticity passes through the blogging portal.
And yet... I still find myself hiding my blogging life from most of the people in my non-blogging life. What I do in my blogging life feels utterly and truly REAL to me--sometimes more so than what I do away from blogging. And I think that's why I'm so protective of my blog-life--it's sacred to me because it gives me so much. And it reinforces for me the idea that at this stage of my life--in all areas of my life--one of my primary goals is to steer clear of people who aren't safe to be around.
It surprises me that, as commonplace as blogs have become in all avenues of life, there are still so many people who: a) don't begin to understand what it is, and b) think it's the devil's work.
Over time, we all tend to develop blogging personas--it's inevitable. And they're often not preconceived or thought out. Often they're a reaction to others' reactions to what we put on our blogs. The way others perceive us can morph our blog writing into something we might not have originally intended--we can fall into the trap of trying to give our audience what they've come to expect. For me, this is one of the biggest challenges of blogging. It can be hard to step away from what's familiar when we don't know how others will react to us moving away from the expected. Thankfully, I've been blogging long enough to have reached a place where most of the time I can let go of those expectations. I don't care about boring you, but I do care about boring myself. And nothing is going to bore me faster than doing the same and expected thing all the time--to be the same person every moment. And I think that's a place that can only be reached over time, because as new bloggers, we're all about acquiring readers and getting comments. It's the fuel that keeps us going. Until one day we realize that we're no longer blogging for you--we're blogging for ourselves. It's what 'they' say about writers--that they're not writing for an audience or to sell...they're writing because they have to.
This thing that I thought would be a light and fluffy little diary-like activity completely transformed my life. It infused me with the daring to stop secretly dreaming of doing things...and start doing them. Blogging isn't my life-blood, but it gives me a vehicle to give myself a transfusion whenever I feel like it.
I think every blogger reaches a point where we think we might want to step away from it. Maybe it's become too time-consuming or is keeping us from other 'real life' activities. But for most of us, it always draws us back and welcomes us with open arms no matter how long it's been between posts. We might adhere to blogging etiquette--there might be certain unwritten 'rules.' But for the most part, blogging allows us to gallop all over the virtual frontier wherever we please...being whatever we choose. And really, isn't that the best gift of all?
What were you doing one year ago today?
Submitted by CassandraMorgan.
I started to feel a little depressed reading this question, because at first glance I felt like my life hadn't changed at all in the last year--that I'm still just doing the same stuff. But that's not true. I'm in WAY deeper at my job. I have much more involvement in the activities at school and really feel my niche there much, much more. This time last year I'd only been on the job about 6 or 7 months, so I was still sort of feeling my way in. Now I don't ask anyone's permission--I just do what I think needs to be done, on a lot of levels, in a lot of ways. I do my best to effect change and to be engaged and involved, and it's been very rewarding in some ways. That's on the job front...
On the personal level... One of the biggest changes from a year ago is that I came to poetry. How ironic that this would be the QotD today, since I just set up my first-ever poetry blog yesterday. A year ago I didn't even write poetry! And I've written 40 poems in the last year and two weeks ago had a piece published at Poetry Thursday. So that's pretty cool, I guess. I would have never in a zillion years thought the words "my poetry" would be coming out of my mouth. And now writing poetry (I started to say "my so-called poetry" because it still seems freaky and weird to think of them as actual poems since I know nothing about the craft) is one of my favorite things to do.
A year ago I wasn't here at Vox...or on MySpace...I couldn't have imagined that there'd be a place where I could have my own social network...and Jill and I hadn't created Bloggers for Darfur yet. It's funny, a year ago I would have told you that I thought I had a pretty rich online life (and I did compared to most of the populace), but seeing how much I've added to it in the last year makes me realize just how much deeper and richer it's become. And all of those things wouldn't have come to pass if I hadn't been ready for them.
If I were to answer what I did exactly one year ago TODAY, I wrote a recap on my (other) blog about a weekend I'd spent in the City with two work girlfriends. We had a good time and jammed a lot into a one-night stay.
Two years ago today I would have been in the midst of packing for our move back to the mainland. We flew from St. Thomas to Sacramento on March 31, 2005...after five years in the Caribbean.
For getting some 'housekeeping' done online...
I cleaned up my email IN box. I was feeling overwhelmed by the almost 3,000 messages sitting in there. Had I responded to those that required a reponse? I found one from last summer that I'd received out of the blue from a gospel promoter in another part of our state who'd seen my post about a concert that Jeffrey's sister's group had done, and he wanted to book them (a year in advance) for a show he's doing this summer. I forwarded it to J this weekend (he's in Portland)..."Um, did I ever give this to you to give to Mary?" ;) I got everything organized into folders and deleted what needed to be deleted. It felt so good to get that done--it had been a good six months since I'd cleaned it out. I didn't realize how overwhelmed I'd been feeling by just looking at all those messages sitting in there. Some people can handle a full IN box--I'm a 'file it in a folder' sorta gal.
I also plowed through the 1,200 feeds that had accumulated in my Bloglines while we were gone the previous weekend. I read too many blogs, I suppose. But here's an example of why I insist on at least skimming through them (and thank GOD for Bloglines!) I had 200 feeds from BlogHer and I almost deleted them, but then I remembered that I often find little gems of posts in there. I don't know if anyone else subscribes to their feeds, but in that batch was a post about blogging that was one of the best I've ever read. If I'd just deleted those feeds without reading them, I would have missed it. Here, you can read it for yourself--maybe you'll see why I liked it:
I met the mother of the candlelight vigil girls for coffee on Sunday. She knows very little about computers and I'd offered online help re blogging, etc. We met at the cafe on the corner, but it wasn't long before it was clear to me that it would be much easier if I just showed her what I was trying to explain. So we came back to my place and spent at least an hour going over stuff. I showed her a bit of my blogworld, and by the time she left, she was really excited to go home and just start digging around online. She knew her girls had set up Youth for Hope on MySpace, but had never seen the page. I managed to finally find it (not being a MySpace user, I didn't realize we had to search in "Groups.") You can see it here:
She was shocked that there were already 101 members of the group (Welcome to MySpace!) and wanted to see where some of them were from. But we couldn't look at all of the members because we weren't a member. Yes, you guessed it--she wanted me to become of a member of the group so we could look at the other members. Not because she was checking up on her kids--she's just fascinated by blogging in general and was astounded that there were kids on there from other parts of the country since Youth for Hope has done almost no promotion yet. So I set up an account and joined their group. Great--101 kids...and ME. (Blame your mother!) I tried to convince Jeffrey to join the group, too, but I see that he hasn't (at least not yet.) After all, he worked on the project, too. And I don't want to be the only adult in the group. (Why doesn't he just do whatever I tell him?!) ;)
So now I have a MySpace page. Just what I need...another blog. I have no idea if I'll even use it. It was kind of funny though to "ask" Jeffrey to be my friend (since he's recently started using it, too). He accepted me (of course!) and emailed back, "Cool! You set up a page. You must have really been bored tonight." Ha! Right now I have 4 friends: That Tom help guy who comes up first, Jeffrey, Genocide Intervention Network (I went and found that one), and this morning I had an email from J's brother David (the luthier) who wanted to be my friend. Awww. Anyone use MySpace? If so, let me know so I can add you. I'm here:
I exchanged emails with a guy in Portland who's also working on Darfur awareness. He's friends with Gabriel, the guy who was filing the video reports from the refugee camps in Chad over the holidays. And when I wrote that J was in Portland playing the MLK event and that his cousin Linda Hornbuckle would be on the bill (she's well known there), he emailed back that a friend of his used to be in Linda's band. Small world, eh? :) And it seems to get tinier by the minute.
And the only way I was able to get all of this done was because J was traveling. So I was grateful that he was gone, because when he's home, he's a computer hog. :)
