OCD on blogs
There is something about blogging that brings out the passive aggressive, manic depresive in me. It is an open format. There is no way of measuring progress outside of readership. No one to pat you on the back and say "nice work buddy", only to criticize meanial spelling errors and disagreement in assumptions. The only work that garners motivational feedback is my least favorite muse - misery. I am naturally predisposed to embrace sympathy and comfort when I am alone with my computer. Some of you are as well. This only leaves me to write entries far and few between of actual inspired quality, sacrificing to the whims of a merciless serendipity calling me to write of things. In by night, out by morning.
I am what fellow internet junkies call a comment whore. It ought to be a flattering term, as I crave feedback on my work, but it is not. Prompt feedback is difficult to deliver when sarcasm cannot be carefully denoted on such a medium. Such a brothel as the internet has spread a communicable disease - blogging. Every couple days I look at my blog to see what people thought.
I lie. I check my blog more than I check my e-mail, which adds up to several times a day on particularly lonely/boring days. It should make me feel important when I find new comments and such, yet I feel more alive when I am offline so to say. It is truly pathetic, especially at times of night when a normal person my age might be exploring their sexuality with a partner or making friends over coffee. So I compensate by writing a blog entry that will ganner me the comments I so crave.
Of course I am exagerating this problem, but certain parts of it remain true. I exagerate things for comic effect or to compell you, dear reader. It is only the times I am not exagerating when the truth is far worse than I am willing to put it. Ho, ho. Now you know why I don't talk about the military-petroleum-pharmacutical-industrial complex. What a pity, I know.
That problem is this - without comments, how I am to know whether to keep writing or quit. Bad feedback can be better than no feeedback, for sure, but how else then? I have no one to help guide my writing. No one to tell me what I'm really good at or what kinds of writing I commit hackery to. (no one to tell me when a sentance ends in a preposition for that matter). By myself I can't even justify using spell check, because it is usually wrong when I spell words it doesn't know.
Sometimes feedback can be a poor indicator too. It is often my most trivial of entries that garner the most comments, and the longer more important ones that ganner none. Those are the one's i need to hear back from people about, but how could they when they don't have the time to read it?
Ultimately I am stuck. There is no end to a living, breathing blog. I have given up hope months ago, just before my recent flurry of blog entries, as to making a blog capable of being published as a book. It really set in when I realized my hero, Dr. Thomson, wouldn't get published today if he wrote to the editor like he did so long ago.
More importantly, there is no metric to measure when this blog is finished being written. The change is continuous, and even the theme is oft forgotten. How do you know when to stop writing? How do you stop writing? Is there a blogger's patch, or methodone for cracktastic internet junkies? I'd like to know...
Oh, and Leave a comment
I am what fellow internet junkies call a comment whore. It ought to be a flattering term, as I crave feedback on my work, but it is not. Prompt feedback is difficult to deliver when sarcasm cannot be carefully denoted on such a medium. Such a brothel as the internet has spread a communicable disease - blogging. Every couple days I look at my blog to see what people thought.
I lie. I check my blog more than I check my e-mail, which adds up to several times a day on particularly lonely/boring days. It should make me feel important when I find new comments and such, yet I feel more alive when I am offline so to say. It is truly pathetic, especially at times of night when a normal person my age might be exploring their sexuality with a partner or making friends over coffee. So I compensate by writing a blog entry that will ganner me the comments I so crave.
Of course I am exagerating this problem, but certain parts of it remain true. I exagerate things for comic effect or to compell you, dear reader. It is only the times I am not exagerating when the truth is far worse than I am willing to put it. Ho, ho. Now you know why I don't talk about the military-petroleum-pharmacutical-industrial complex. What a pity, I know.
That problem is this - without comments, how I am to know whether to keep writing or quit. Bad feedback can be better than no feeedback, for sure, but how else then? I have no one to help guide my writing. No one to tell me what I'm really good at or what kinds of writing I commit hackery to. (no one to tell me when a sentance ends in a preposition for that matter). By myself I can't even justify using spell check, because it is usually wrong when I spell words it doesn't know.
Sometimes feedback can be a poor indicator too. It is often my most trivial of entries that garner the most comments, and the longer more important ones that ganner none. Those are the one's i need to hear back from people about, but how could they when they don't have the time to read it?
Ultimately I am stuck. There is no end to a living, breathing blog. I have given up hope months ago, just before my recent flurry of blog entries, as to making a blog capable of being published as a book. It really set in when I realized my hero, Dr. Thomson, wouldn't get published today if he wrote to the editor like he did so long ago.
More importantly, there is no metric to measure when this blog is finished being written. The change is continuous, and even the theme is oft forgotten. How do you know when to stop writing? How do you stop writing? Is there a blogger's patch, or methodone for cracktastic internet junkies? I'd like to know...
Oh, and Leave a comment