i’m embarking on a quest to put more raw content on my blog, though not all of it will make the main feed.
here’s a long story about the chain of events that led me to take the plunge (i’ve been taking baby steps for a while), so if you have some time and are looking for a diversion, get yourself a cup of tea and stay a while. :)

a couplefew days ago a friend of mine said something spiteful and petty to me under her breath while we were sitting at a large table of people, where i couldn’t really do much about it without being a complete ass. unfortunately, almost Everything that she has said to me for the past couple of years has been spiteful, petty, under her breath, and in the company of many people (and by Everything i mean about 10 things, maybe, because most of the time her strategy is simply to not acknowledge my presence), and so i am somewhat accustomed to this experience. i persist in calling her a friend nevertheless, because i prefer to take a larger, optimistic view of things – a view in which “friend” is a term that spans the rocky periods which sometimes result from the way that life requires us to make ourselves vulnerable to one another in order to truly know and be known, and because i understand that she was deeply hurt by turns of events related to matters of the heart, and i was involved in those turns of events in some way, and that is unfortunate.

what it was, exactly, that upset her so much, has never been made known to anyone to whom i have spoken about the matter (i’ve already mentioned that she won’t talk to me directly, right?) and the whole situation baffles anyone who has ever sat and tried to puzzle it out (including me), but in some ways this has made the experience easier. her outbursts in my direction are So intense, So angry, and So amazingly timed to only occur in situations where, were i to call her out, she could just feign innocence and look at me like i was a madwoman, that it’s like a little bell goes off in my head every time that says: “this is Clearly an expression of issues that are Far deeper than you can comprehend, much less feel responsible for. back away.” and all i can do is stare amazedly into space for a second, give my head a little jiggle, and keep going about my business. it’s true that i sometimes rehearse a clever and snappy retort while i’m brushing my teeth that night, and it’s also true that i go through periods where i am very tempted to just bite the bullet and make a scene because otherwise there is no indication that the impasse will ever be resolved, but i always end up deciding that i just don’t want to walk into the trap she’s constructing to prove to herself and the world that i’m a bitch; i’d rather just keep calling her bluff the best i can by playing the “i’m being friendly here, what the hell are you doing?” card, and hope that at some point she gets it out of her system long enough for us to talk in more evenhanded circumstances.
sometimes i think this approach is working.
and sometimes not.
sigh.

anyway, that’s a long bit of backstory, sorry.
the shorter frontstory is that a couple of days ago, out with a group of friends and acquaintances, the topic turns to future plans and someone asks me what i’m going to be up to after graduation. i say i don’t really know yet (which is true), and this friend mutters something i don’t fully catch that i hear as “don’t [mumble] boyfriend, so [rolling of eyes]…”
i latch onto the keyword “boyfriend,” because i had Just been wondering if she even Knew that i had broken up with the person around whom the painful matters of the heart originally arose, and i therefore jump a bit at the chance to set the record straight by saying “i don’t Have a boyfriend right now, so i don’t know.” at which point she looks me square in the eye and says, “exActly.”
and smirks.
my brain catches up in the speech processing department, and i realize that the original statement was something like “you don’t have a boyfriend, so you don’t know how to decide.” i stare right back at her, with a look of what i believe was sheer, unfettered incredulity. the retort i thought of later, while brushing my teeth, was something like “i Wish that you had enough information about what i’ve been doing for the past few years to be able to make a statement like that about my personal life, because if you did i would feel justified in arguing with you. as it is, i don’t see how it would be fair to even try. if you want to pretend that i don’t exist, you do not retain the right to lecture me on matters of personal character.”
instead i retain eye contact for a second to convince myself that i didn’t make it up, shake my head slowly to indicate confusion and sadness, and rejoin the conversation that had again taken off around us.

in the days since, i have been introduced to a new level of bafflement about the issue – where the Hell did that statement come from?! i was totally unprepared for an attack from that direction. does that really have something to do with what she’s angry about?! or was she just aiming blindly somewhere below the belt, hoping to hit a nerve? what could she be thinking?!
i have done my best to rein in such speculation, but the bits of it that have escaped my control have led to the conclusion that she probably Does think that she’s hitting something, but it’s not worth any of my energy to try and puzzle out. after all, she’s had two and a half years to cook up whatever story she wants, with incredibly limited and biased input from the world of actual events, so there’s no way of knowing what path she has taken, and i am not going to go looking for breadcrumbs in the spite that she tosses my way.

that said, i think that the assertion that one requires a male romantic influence in one’s life to make important decisions would ruffle the feathers of Any young, independently minded woman at least a Little bit, so i have also been giving even more thought to that question than i usually do.
and that’s a lot of thought, lemme tell ya.
see, the timing was especially harsh because i am right now at a point where i am making decisions explicitly for the purposes of figuring out who i am on my own, and not just who i want to be with or how i want to be in a relationship. i am getting a master’s degree that excites my mind and inspires me to change the world in ways that i have only just begun to envision, and sometimes i have to argue for those ways because i see them differently than a lot of people. i am beginning to make plans to travel the country, or perhaps the world, in the time after graduation and before i find whatever it is that i’m doing next. i am working on blogging more and feeling more confident in my sharing my thoughts and ideas, even at early stages. i feel like i have a lot to do, but it feels good, and it’s going well. at the same time, i have come to acknowledge over the years that i Do have a tendency to set some of my perspectives aside when i get into a relationship, especially when i’m really excited about it. one of my favorite things about relationships is getting to see another person’s way of looking at the world, and i’ve learned that i can get kind of caught up in that, and set aside the work of trying to understand my own thoughts because i’m caught up in trying to understand his. i put too much pressure on myself to make things right, to solve problems, to be insightful, so i tend to spend a lot of time figuring out the dynamics of what people are wanting and thinking in a situation (not just romantic ones, either), and can forget to include my own wants and thoughts, if i’m not careful, because it’s easy to convince myself that the thing that i want most is harmony.
so that’s a long way of saying that i guess i felt a little defensive.

but actually, it’s more complicated, because in thinking through all of that stuff so much, i have also decided that, as much as i think that we have a responsibility to keep our own heads on our shoulders and call things as we see them, i also think that it’s wrong that people, and especially women, learn to feel so defensive about the fact that they are likely to make different choices from within a relationship. one day i was giving myself a little lecture and i did a thought experiment about what i would do if i was entirely on my own, with no obligations to anyone else. i thought about it for a second or two and i started laughing out loud. i didn’t think of things like “i would climb mt. everest,” “i would write the great american novel,” or “i would plant a garden full of peonies.” i just thought of myself, sitting there, on a grassy little hill, twiddling my thumbs, and suddenly the idea of trying to figure out who we would be without other people struck me as absolutely ridiculous. “i would die of boredom, perhaps?” i said. “drive myself crazy from a sense of purposelessness?” because seriously, what does it matter what choices i would make if i lived without the constraints of other people?! i can’t live without other people and, more importantly, i don’t Want to. i want to live tangled up and twisted into knots with people. i want to stay up late talking with them when i should be sleeping, i want to change plans at the last minute because they have inexplicable cravings for tater tots or golden grahams, i want someone to wake me up in the middle of the night when he has a nightmare and just needs to be held, and i want to be able to catch that same someone’s eye from across a crowded room and feel a whole book pass between us with a smile. yes, i want to make my own decisions and be the best i can be, but i also want to be a part of bigger decisions and surround myself with people who reflect that best back to me so that i can keep going even when i’m tired.
the Real challenge that i’m seeing, therefore, is not to know what i will do on my own, it’s to teach myself how to maintain a sense of my own purpose while i’m living and loving in the thick and dirty trenches of life.

so the whole thing: the meanness of the statement, my defensive reaction to it, my defensive rereaction to my defensive reaction to it, my sense of how much bigger life was than words could carry and how little she seemed to glimpse even as she tried to make some kind of incisive commentary… it all just made me feel a bit muddled and cranky for a few days.

errr…. ok.
but what’s this about trying something new, kynthia?
you weren’t joking about this being a long way of saying it…

yeah, i know.
thanks for your patience.
do you need a cookie or another cup of tea?
we’re in the home stretch.

so the Actual Thing that led me to post all of this stuff was the reaction i had to a post that i started about something completely unrelated.
it was about the news that google bought writely, a web-based word processor, and some of my thoughts on things related to google, and also to the web-based life that they (and others) seem to be championing for us.
clearly critical to my self-actualization, right?!
well maybe, because i Do care about those things, but anyway, what happened was, in the beginning of the post, i quoted some of a chat that erik and i had the other day where i had mentioned that i thought that google was acquiring lots of small companies but i couldn’t remember what any of them were. it seemed relevant, and it was fun to make use of the chat logging that gmail is doing on my behalf. blogging about chatting with erik, however, impelled me to mention an idea that i had about thread management in IM, and an idea that he had about using our dangling chat threads as blog prompts (which we still may well do, after break). those were fun ideas.
and then, since web-based word-processing was one of the other topics of the post, i also felt impelled to link to some blog entries that he had written last fall about the idea, right after the rumors were first whipping around about google releasing a full web-based office suite.
that seemed relevant, too, but what happened as i tried to pull all of these things together was that i started to feel like i didn’t really know what the post was about. half of it was these scattered references to conversations with erik, and half of it was a rather skeletal and shallow introduction to larger thoughts on google and the web. it had all made sense as i was clacking along, going from one point to the next, but now i felt like it was all shine and no substance, and it made me upset. i wondered if i should spend more time fleshing out my thoughts on the web stuff, even though i didn’t really want to. i had just been meaning to write a short announcement-style post, and now i had all these other threads of stuff that excited me, and i didn’t know what to do. i thought that maybe i should split the post up or cut stuff out, but that sounded like work and i was tired and it seemed like i was putting Way too much energy into trying to craft my freaking blog post. it didn’t Have to make sense or cover all sides; it was a Blog Post. i want to write more of them. shorter ones. unstressfully. jesus.

but it was too late, and for whatever reason, part of my brain was pissed.
“why can’t you decide what you think about something?! why do you spend so much time talking about the fact that you think about things and so little time actually putting ideas out there?! why do you always set up safety nets for yourself?! what are you afraid of?! and why are you putting all these references to erik in there to flesh out your points?! are you trying to legitimate yourself by your connections to other people?! it just looks silly!!”
whoa, there, sayeth the rest of my brain. that was Uncalled for. i talk about what i think. look! that’s my idea about the IM stuff! this is my blog! and i’m saying things about google and webstuff. i just… don’t really know what all to say yet.
“justify it however you like,” the pissed part shot back. “but you aren’t Pushing yourself to know what you think. you’re waiting to hear what other people say and then reacting. you’re afraid to put yourself on the line. this is your blog but you don’t post even a tenth of what you think about posting. maybe [friend from the long backstory section] was right, and you Can’t make decisions on your own. you’re not even Dating erik and you are still using him to prompt your thinking. and you do it with other people, too. just look around.”
at this point i said fuck it, and sent the pissed off part of my brain to go take a cold shower.
i did Not want to go down that road, much less post whatever gobbledygook would result from trying to make sense of it.
i knew the argument was mostly nonsense – responding to people is a part of life. posting references to conversations that engage me does not make me a coward. in fact, it was a great way to give my thoughts shape. erik is becoming one of my closest friends, and he’s smart as a whip. i’m not going to apologize to anyone, not even myself, for enjoying the chance to rehash some of our conversations.
but it still shook me up, and the shitty comment from my friend was still hurting my feelings.
i saved the draft, logged off my computer, and started walking home.

walking home and making dinner i realized that a lot of the argument would be resolved if i could just get over myself and figure out what i need to do to put Everything (or as close to Everything as is possible) somewhere on this site.
i want to post more short things, but i also want to post more long things. i want to stop starting a bunch of things and then hitting that wall where i realize that it will take me a long time to get it right, so i just abandon/postpone. i want to post half-finished things, leads for later, dangling sentences that may or may not ;)
i come up with ideas about new ways of organizing the site, or new ways of tagging posts, all the time. new this, new that, new! improved! easier!
but seriously, i won’t do half those things, and i won’t do Any of them until i have more to work with, so what am i waiting for?
if i get stopped up because i make things that i don’t feel like there’s a place for, then why don’t i just make new places, and work from there?

so i asked myself one question: what’s stopping you?
my answers were all variations on: i don’t want to overwhelm the main feed.
some of the variations were charitable (i don’t want messages of this length to bog down planet info, for instance), some practical (it will be kind of confusing if half-finished sentences are scattered in the midst of more fully fleshed out thoughts), some self-conscious (i don’t think it’s wrong to want rawer, more personal things to be at least a Bit harder to find).
all of them, however, were addressable, in at least a rough fashion, right now.
i have already figured out how to exclude specific categories from the main feed, which is how my reading list and notes work, if you noticed them before. i have been thinking of moving the ideas category into this group, which would remove whatever obstacles keep me from posting really random and crazy stuff there.
so i did that, and i also created a drafts category, which leads to my first real behavior change:
henceforward, when i start a post but don’t finish it, or get an idea for a post that i don’t have time to actually write, i’m going to post it on the drafts page instead of saving it where it can’t be seen. i am also going to go back and post old drafts, as an incentive to flesh them out or let them die.

if i do that, post more ideas, and keep on myself about transcribing more notes and writing book reviews, it will go a long way towards getting a lot of my thoughts online, even if a lot of times they will only be in really rough forms.
rough is fine.
it might even be the point.

so explore as ye will, and we’ll see how it goes.
the menubar at the top of the page can help you find the other sections.
i know it looks a little funny in firefox as of the time of this post, but i’ll keep working on it.
it’s a css/browser feud that i dislike, and i Still contend that i’m going to change the whole look of the site sometime real soon, so…
but the moral was do this Now, remember?

finally, i got off my ass and found a way to make the “more…” links (like the one at the beginning of this post that you had to follow to read the whole thing) work on the rss feed, which was an annoying hurdle that sometimes kept me from writing long stuff, because lots of people read my blog via planet informatics, and i don’t like taking up screens and screens and screens of it, but i still like to give everyone the chance to come see what i’m talking about, if they’re interested.
so that is resolved now.
and it also led to comment counts becoming a part of my feed, which is awesome.
but i’m going to post about that separately, so that people who didn’t read this novel will still know about it.
:)

so that’s the news, from back to front.
i hope your tea was lovely, and i wish you a grand spring day.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 12th, 2006 at 12:59 pm and is filed under introspection, on blogging, ranting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.