ninaherenorthere.com

I recently discovered that my mother found my blog. The exchange went like this:

Mom: I can’t keep a secret. I saw your blog. What, did you think I wouldn’t find it?

Me: It only took you a year.

I always knew it was only a matter of time before my mom, an IT professional, Googled me, clicked, and followed two links. Right before we hung up the phone, she said something like, “Don’t let my reading your blog affect your writing.”

As much as I’d like to blame my mother for all my shortcomings, failures, and blocks, and although I haven’t been able to open my blog without seeing her little mommy face, which I can’t in good conscience describe now that I know she is reading, I will not blame my inability to post for awhile on my mother.

I’ve also been completely slammed with trying to finish a book proposal. I contemplating blogging about that process, but then I came across the following question and answer in Poets & Writers magazine.

Q: What is the dumbest mistake that a writer can make in dealing with their editor or agent?

A: Be very careful about what you blog…If I am submitting your book to publishers and an editor wants to buy it, they’re probably going to Google you before they even call me. And if they find things out there that are curious or disturbing?

So now, sitting on my shoulder next to my mother was my agent, whose face I can in good conscience describe because it is always smiling and positive. Next to my agent are the potential editors that she is trying to woo. My shoulders hurt a bit from all of the weight on them. But please prospective editors, understand that I’m not calling you fat, but rather referring to the burden, metaphorically speaking, of your potential readership, or skimmership. And just so everyone knows, this is not of those things that can be helped by picturing the audience naked.

But really, what is curious or disturbing? Is using a cliche? Maybe. Is bad grammar or spelling errors? Perhaps. Is admitting you read Poets & Writers magazine? Definitely. And what if you and the premise of your book are both curious and disturbing? What if that is the whole point?

I tried not to let my fears about the publishing industry contribute to my block, and instead focused on my fears about my boss. I tend to think it’s safe to blog about work as long as I don’t explain why I use the day time stamp rather than the hour one to indicate when my posts are published. It’s also safer now that I moved from contractor to employee because it’s much harder to fire someone than to not hire someone for having a blog, especially one that never mentions the company name.

The only reason I’d want to blog about work is that it’s been taking up a large percentage of my time and energy for the past month or two, and I need an outlet to whine or mock it. Like today, I am dreading my fourth full-day training session, during which I will grow increasingly agitated about a methodology built upon bad metaphors (scrum, stories, and sprints to name just a few). I will remember what it was like to sit in a Wharton classroom surrounding by future Arthur Anderson consultants while caring about nothing other than my “P” for pass and dreams of a career I could love. When I realize a decade has passed since then, I will go to the catered food table and have another donut.

Work, my book, and my mother were only a few of the reasons I kept hitting “Save as draft” rather than the “Publish” button. There were also the typical writer fears, or at least mine, the self-questioning flagellations: How come you’re not funny anymore, say something funny, goddamnit; do you really think people care about your life because they don’t; you’ve waited long enough, this better be good—earth, moon, and sun-shattering good; trans this and trans that and trans shut up already. From experience, I know that the best way to get over blogger’s block is to say something, say anything. Then hit post.

I really am kind of embarrassed to be writing New Years Resolutions in February, but I’m going to do it anyway.

• Learn to cook five new vegetables.
• When I hear a voice in my head that says, “No, stop, don’t, bad idea, you don’t want that, you really really don’t want it, no, stop, no” make sure I don’t hear my actual voice say, “Sure!”
• Stop ignoring, avoiding, half-assing the abs portion of every workout.
• Participate in a 1-2 day yoga retreat.
• Finish my book.
• Bring a plate, bowl, spoon, and fork to work so I stop wasting disposable utensils. (This resolution is for next week, I swear, not for the whole year.)
• Experiment with a creative endeavor that isn’t solely writing based.
• Floss my teeth regularly.
• Start thinking of my resolutions for next year in December.
• Use lists for blog posts when I lack time and energy.

This morning I woke up without a shirt on. I looked down and noticed that I was boobless. I showered, remembering to wash my boobless chest, then dressed, drank some coffee, ate some cereal, and sat down at my computer. The sun wasn’t even up yet, and I wondered if it was too early in the morning to be awake and boobless. I wrote at my computer for a couple hours. I was working on a scene about putting on a binder for the first time. I was trying to capture the difficulty of wrestling that damn thing over my upper body, nearly dislocating my shoulder in the process, and the discomfort of pancaking seven pounds (to be exact) of flesh. I contemplated putting on a binder to joggle my memory. But I couldn’t, on account of the boobless thing.

I got on muni, still boobless, of course, and arrived at work. I went to meetings in a shirt that was tighter than the one I wore the previous day, begging someone to notice that I was boobless and prove my roommate wrong for saying, “straight people are clueless.” I did a little work at my desk, hoping as I hope everyday that being boobless will make me like my job more. It didn’t.

At lunch, I went to the gym. I changed my shirt as quickly as possible in the corner of the women’s locker room, a truly horrible place to be when you’re boobless. I went for a run along the embarcadero on this summery January day, and about twenty minutes in, I noticed sweat spots on my T-shirt, right in the center of my chest and nowhere else. My sports bra used to absorb that sweat, but now that I’m boobless it went straight through to my T-shirt.

In the afternoon, I came back to my office and ate lunch at my desk. I acted like I was going to do more work, but boobless or not, it just wasn’t happening. I knew I needed to write a blog post. Unfortunately, I’m braindead, and overwhelmed, and exhausted, and I got nothing, other than being boobless.

It’s official. I’ve maintained this blog for one year. I’ve written 76 posts. Woa. And received 99 comments. Thank You! I’m pretty damn pleased. In honor of this anniversary, I thought I’d point out some of my favorite posts. The choices are inspired by your input. But feel free to comment on your favorite post of the year, or just review some of the links.

An Interview with the Blogger – About Me

A Day in the Life of an Unemployed Writer - December 7, 2007

Lying for a Job - January 23, 2008

The Denial of Death – June 24, 2008

My Name – October 12, 2008

My Big Day: December 3, 2008 – December 2, 2008

They say it’s easy to start a blog. Pick a template, name your site, and you’re up in 5 minutes. It took me at least a month to get my blog up. First, I had to teach myself basic HTML so I could customize the layout. (This resulted in complicating my index page and making it hard to alter the template of my blog without relearning HTML). Then, I had to organize a titling committee and wait for a spark of creativity. (Thank you, EverydayCaitlin.) Of course, I also had to stress about what I was going to write about. So, I glued my forehead to a baseball bat and spun myself in circles until I was too dizzy to care about writing in a straight line.

I wrote about my passions–writing, books, sports, queer, and transgender issues. And I watched the subjects of my posts change as my life changed and I got a job, went through a break-up, pursued top surgery. I discovered I love blogging–the power of self-publishing, the immediacy of communicating my emotional state and getting a response from my readers, a connection to friends, near and far, as well as strangers, some of whom I’ve written about and others who stumbled upon this blog through links and acquaintances. The quickest way into my heart is to tell me that you read my blog. I will blush, smile, say thank you, and never forget that you take time out of your life to read my words. It is something I return to again and again when I doubt my ability to write, when I forget one of my main reasons for writing–sharing my experiences with others makes me feel a little less lonely.

I also discovered that blogging is hard. That some days, I just have to throw something up there to fill the space and keep the momentum. But other days, I don’t know how I’d survive without a blog, days when *something* triggers me, and my mind is moving so fast to structure a story that I’m sweating puddles, and I’m so pre-occupied writing and re-writing descriptions or sentences or something humorous in my head that I nearly get nailed by a taxi while jaywalking across the street.

Happy anniversary to www.ninaherenorthere.com…

There was a picture of a hot girl with tattoos on the cover of the NY Times magazine yesterday, and it messed with my whole morning. It’s a good rule of thumb never to start the paper by reading the magazine, especially the cover story. The Sunday magazine is best kept until the week, for public transportation or the gym, the only part of the paper that can be saved and not hang over your head like homework. But read the magazine first, and already a half an hour of precious Sunday morning time has passed, and you’re still stuck there with a stack of unread newspaper.

But with the girl and headline, “Blog-Post Confidential: What I gained–and lost–by revealing my intimate life on the web,” I dug right in. I was hoping to find answers to why people, including me, blog about personal issues, and maybe to find the line that separates sharing from oversharing. Also, I was curious about a first person essay as the cover story. I still can’t believe so much space is given to a topic that seems more fitting to the Style section and a Modern Love column.

So anyways, the author Emily made her entrance into the online world with a personal blog called Emily Magazine. She still writes on it, and it is apparent that her Times piece drove traffic and two hundred plus comments to her recent post, “Room-elephant acknowledged.” Her personal blog appears no different from other personal blogs, like mine, except that she seems to have more friends than me, counting about 200 visitors. I have so few visitors, I know them all by name and don’t bother with numbers.

Emily writes that she always desired to broadcast herself, tell others the ongoing story of her life. She says blogging is like a drug, but then excuses her use of the universal metaphor by saying it’s so exact, “maybe it’s not a metaphor at all.” She creates a larger context for the culture of personal blogging by tying it to a time when reality TV rules the airwaves.

The essay is a good read for the voyeuristic, but only an okay read in terms of her insights. To stick with her drug metaphor that is too true to be a metaphor, she should probably just go to blogging rehab, share in group therapy that “The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion.”

Basically, Emily had a personal blog, then a job at Gawker, blogging about “Manhattan media gossip.” She becomes somewhat of a virtual celebrity, equally praised and pissed upon, in the same way that Sex and the City’s Carrie would be, had she blogged for a major New York website. The commenting, not to mention the high-stress life of a blogger (see recent Times article, In the Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop), as well as the working from home leads to depression.

The question of how personal to be on her Gawker blog (the more personal, the greater the readership it seems) resulted in more personal posts. Then there was a break-up, sex with a co-worker, pseudonyms, a new personal anonymous blog “Heartbreak Soup” that didn’t stay anonymous, password protections, a pay-back, an embarrassing experience with Jimmy Kimmel on TV, and what Emily seems to understand now, as a whole lot of oversharing. She is left with the realization that the only way to eliminate it all is to “destroy the entire Internet.”

But she can’t, so she keeps all her posts up, “as a sort of memorial to a time in my life when I thought my discoveries about myself and what I loved were special enough to merit sharing with the world immediately.” In the end, by writing the Times piece, she is revealing even more about what happened. And to that, she responds, “Well, I’m an oversharer.”

I’m still not positive what I walked away learning, or thinking more about after reading this story of a blogger’s life unraveling. (I particularly like the one sentence she slipped in about the major changes leading to the upswing in her life, including, “I quit smoking pot cold turkey.” Clearly, nobody told her that pot leads to oversharing on a grand scale.)

Yes, the Interwebs is a dangerous place, but I already knew this. We all have it in us to be Google-stalkers. Recently, I’ve heard quite a few confessions regarding the post-breakup online stalking, which basically ranges from checking MySpace and Facebook pages of exes to communities where they post messages to searching Craigslist personals for terms that will lead to the ex’s ad. This is self-torture, but it is surprisingly common.

As someone with the genetics, or maybe it’s the compulsion to share the ongoing story of my life, I relate very much to those who cannot help but start blogs and continue to unburden themselves while lying in unmade beds. To all the of the people who feel a twinge of nervousness as the mouse arrow rests on the “Publish” button, to all of us out there with the blogging disease, I say, Let us overshare. Let us overshare with restraint.

Writers like to talk about the blank page. It’s white, the cursor blinks, and there is nothing more intimidating to a person whose self-worth depends on producing words. Except the blank blog.

The archive is what troubles me. Traditionally, archives are places for historical documents. They are kept in governmental buildings, in rooms with high arched ceilings and shelves that buckle underneath dusty tomes. In an archive, one might keep a letter from Benjamin Franklin to John Adams, scrawled with quill pen onto parchment and describing a forbidden sex act with a woman of colonial Virginia. Or one might keep Charles Darwin’s sketches of mating finches. The aged papers and faded drawings of Important People go into these historic vaults, not the Eureka! moments of my morning bathroom experience.

Maybe other bloggers are unconcerned about the Who Cares factor. They don’t seem to have this debilitating archivophobia. The right column pushes down on the page so that the user needs to scroll to reach April 2003. Or the blogger proudly declares, “blogging since 2000,” as if to show he or she watched the legs of the Internet spread and birth the blogosphere.

Well, I’ve been blogging since last week. I just didn’t tell anyone. I was hoping to pad my archives with worthwhile reading material before announcing the site. But it turns out that as a result of some unintended viral marketing, people are reading already. So… here goes.