Sometimes I think I’m really queer. Then I see a video like this and realize that I would be so much queerer, if only I were a musician and a performer. I’m not normally a reposter, but I don’t have much to say. I saw this on Diana Cage’s blog, which really is worth bookmarking.
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.
If you find the June issue of Town and Country magazine in your local bookstore and open it, you will find many diamond and perfume advertisements. You will also find, on p. 134, what isn’t quite an article, but an item, written by me. It’s a brief, concise, succinct piece on an organization that leads bicycling and walking tours (luxury vacation style). The participants also raise money for AIDS and breast cancer charities. Check out the link, and see what it looks like when an editor edits my writing. Or better yet, buy the magazine. I did.
For awhile there, I couldn’t focus very well. I couldn’t focus enough to write a blog post, or a story, or an article, or anything that I couldn’t send on instant messenger. I couldn’t read for awhile either. There is a two-week span during which I missed any and all news content. If the earthquake in China or cyclone in Myanmar occurred a few days earlier, while I took my sabbatical from the world, I would have no idea about these natural disasters. For a few weeks, I had become that person. The one who skims metaphysics and Buddhist philosophy books on public transportation, covering titles like “When Things Fall Apart,” to avoid the befitting connotation of self-help manual. I was only one step away, a cousin to that person who powers her way through the pain on a stationary cross-country skiing machine while watching daytime soap operas.
I haven’t made leaps and bounds here, but I thought I could try to present some of my recent thoughts, small as they may be. And that I could awaken my sense of humor, shake out the pins and needles tingling in that dormant part of my brain.
1. Gay marriage – woohoo! holla! This is exciting, also a little scary. Lots of friends have asked me jokingly if I’m going to get married. Seriously, is this something I’m actually going to have to consider. I’ve recently started to have one of those sitcom flashforwards: a woman, whom I’m presumably dating, begins complaining about her ticking biological clock, asking when the hell I’m going to marry her, and then there she is, in a white wedding dress, sitting on the floor, leaning against the island in our kitchen, surrounded by boxes of picture frames and appliances and a million other presents from our registry that I don’t want or need.
I am fundamentally disinterested in marriage, but as far as progress, equality, and rights for me and my fellow homos, I couldn’t be more elated. The real battle will be in the next several months leading up to the November election and the amendment that will be tough to defeat. But I look forward to that day, eventually, when gays are marrying everywhere, and I still get to be the big, queer outcast who thinks they’re all nuts.
There was an interesting article in the NY Times magazine a couple weeks ago about the impact that the Massachusetts gay marriage law has had on young men, naive romantics, tying the knot. I also particularly like Diana Cage’s blog post (I’m a huge fan of all her posts) on the subject of the Supreme Court decision.
While the tradition or institution of marriage does not appeal to me, I’m always floored by the images of those in long term relationships that end up in the press surrounding gay marriage activism. When I read about couples who have been together for 15, 25, 30, 50 years, like long-time activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, I’m inspired and amazed, because I barely meet any couples, gay or straight, who have been together for more than 10 years or even 5. I just don’t see very many long-term relationships at the bars and clubs, and it’s nice to know that if you open your world beyond the Lexington Club, commitment is out there.
2. I’m already exhausted from all that mental thought. So, I’ll end with this picture. It’s the crisper from my refrigerator at work. It’s been full like that for about a month. I don’t know why it has affected me so deeply. But don’t you think that’s a lot of half and half? How many do you think are in there?
The other day I was tutoring my “adult learner,” a man I meet with once a week to work on literacy skills. After several attempts to force out the proper sounds and pronounce the individual syllables of the word, he successfully strung everything together and announced it. Then, he tipped his desk chair onto its back legs and said, “I have no idea how you got me to do that, but you did. You got me to do that.”
I don’t remember the word and I don’t remember what I did. I was probably thinking that I should be using something from my tutor training, maybe phonics exercise #23 from the Literacy Start workbook or the one where the learner closes his eyes and tries to visualize the word written in the upper right corner of the blackboard. Or maybe I was wondering when I’d discover if he was a kinesthetic or auditory learner, and if the fact that he’s an active person who often goes to the gym means we should do more spelling activities with our hands. Those are the kinds of things I think about during our tutoring sessions, things that I could be doing better. But rather than stop and consider what I actually did to help him with the word, I smiled and thought to myself, I did it, that’s it, that’s being a teacher.
I’ve been thinking about teachers a lot lately, which is a bit odd because I recently finished graduate school and it’s not those teachers on my mind. My instructors in school taught me how to read sentences closely for tone, style and rhythm. They taught me how to reshape the structure of my own essays and stories, to notice my pacing, characterization and tension. I praised them as insightful educators, published artists, compassionate disciplinarians and therapeutic hand-holders. But lately I’m stuck on the people, mostly yoga and spin class instructors who are able to get me to do activities that I don’t believe I can do.
This could be part of a current transition in my life from the cerebral to the physical, and a dependence I’m developing for endorphins and sweat and the quiet of my mind. It is impossible for me to imagine doing a yoga tape alone at my house, and we all know what happens when I don’t take an organized class at the gym—I sit on the recline bike, listen to music, read a magazine, contemplate dinner, all the while creating friction between my back and the backrest in the hope of producing sweat. Now that I’m taking classes, I walk out of the communal workout room drenched and tired, having completed an activity I’m surprised I even attempted.
There are some teachers who are not so great. Some yoga instructors seem to sermonize on the principles of being present and open heartedness. Their words emerge forced, as directives. They speak about acceptance and understanding, but their voices are heavy with desperation and need. Some spin instructors try to hard to be boot camp leaders. I had this one teacher who spoke English with a foreign accent and reminded me too much of Hanz and Franz, “I’m going to Pump You Up,” from Saturday Night Live. He wasn’t the regular instructor for this class, and he demanded things of us before establishing a relationship. He kept yelling we’d have to carry his gym bag to his car if he we didn’t turn up the pedaling resistance, which really just made me want to laugh.
The good teachers have a natural ease about themselves. Their comfort and security fills up the room, blown about by the fan that never quite cools me down. I get the sense that some teachers really want to be there. They don’t appear to be teaching, but rather working out on a raised platform, talking into a microphone. A good teacher can bring the room together into Michael Jackson sing-alongs (if it’s spin class), or into collective tension relieving laughter (if it’s yoga class).
While I’m noticing my improved ability to tell the difference between good and bad teachers, I’m also noticing my intense need to find teachers, to surround myself with people who trick me into action, make me believe the unbelievable. I’m desperate for a crutch or cane, something to help me along while letting me think I’m walking on my own.
I was talking about my new openness to people offering wisdom and support with a friend of mine recently, and he said, “I know, man. Now that I’m looking for it, I see gurus everywhere.” I’m not quite sure if it’s gurus I’m looking for and finding, although I have been mumbling along to chants about them in my yoga class. What I’ve really been looking for are the people who make me say, “I have no idea how you got me to do that, but you did. You got me to do that.”