Pretentiousness

I had a family member ask why I’ve been posting so much, so I thought I’d explain. It’s National Blog Posting Month, aka NaBloPoMo, and I’m participating. You write a post a day for November.

BTW, I did this walking page on my site the other day since I’ve started walking to work and other places. I am upping my activity level in general with a goal of walking 20 miles a week. I was interested to see how far I would have gotten if I were walking in one direction rather than just around the neighborhood, so I started tracking it. I’ll update it every week or so.

So. Pretentiousness.

A few people told me recently they were impressed the way I’d really cut down on my “carbon footprint” by being vegetarian, living in a small house and not commuting by vehicle. I suppose. Look at me! I’m an environmental hero! Ha.

Although I’ve learned a lot from my brother (who has a degree in environmental management), my response to comments like that is to chuckle uncomfortably. I have no actual intentions toward my carbon footprint. I’m terrible about recycling, I don’t save scraps of unused fabric, I use acrylic yarn, I wear leather shoes, and don’t turn off the water when I’m brushing my teeth.

I don’t care whether anyone else makes the particular choices I’ve made. People ought to make their own choices. Many more people than I expected believe my choices indicate I’m rather militant about certain things or expect me to launch into a tirade or guilt trip about something.  It’s odd, but the first thing 90% of people say to me when they learn I’m vegetarian is, “Don’t expect me to be, I LOOOVE meat” or they deliver some other sort of justification for not being so themselves. I was unprepared for this apparent widespread guilt complex. All I can say is well, that’s nice, but I don’t care.

I don’t eat meat because I think it’s gross in the same way I scream and run out of the room when there’s a giant cockroach. It’s slimy and has tendons and veins. Entrails. Shrimp looks like bugs. Ewwww! Vegetables simply don’t gross me out.

I walk because I like to walk and hate driving. Driving makes me yell and swear. Plus, my job is sedentary so any exercise to counter my love of food is good. Besides, the thought of sacrificing an hour or more of my life every day to commuting makes me angry – I have too much to do!

I live in a small house for practical reasons and expect no one to justify their large homes to me. I am used to small because I’ve lived in lots of small places. In those situations, you either shut up and learn to like it or you end up miserable. Plus it’s nice not to have to clean a lot of stuff.

My point is that I don’t mind being friendly to the planet I live on, but I dislike being stereotyped. Even more than that, I dislike people being put off by me or feeling defensive because they assume I fall into a stereotype. There’s so much weird unnecessary guilt about it!! It’s been a weird position to be in. I like my choices, but I keep saying, “No, that’s not the reason” or facing defensiveness.

In the end I’ll just do whatever I do for my own reasons, like always, but it’s a good lesson to me to never assume I know why people live their lives the way they do.

Meta CbN 3: Rise of the Machines

{Editor’s note: My occasional dyslexia strikes again. My title originally said CnB. Crafter Night By. Nice.}

As I wind this to a close, I have to thank all of you for your patience with my weird aside. In my life, I think it’s important to step back sometimes and consider what I’m doing. Why do I have this blog? What am I doing with it? Is it worth the time and energy? (Can you tell I’m an introvert? All this self-reflection nonsense.)

Part of why I reflect is self-preservation. I do internet work in a world that can feel hostile to technology, and here I am blogging and being a webmaster. Fact is, the most common comment people have said to me, in my years of techie/computer work, is that they dislike computers. The equivalent of going up to a teacher and telling them I dislike education because I’m not comfortable with it. I’m often frustrated by responses to work I do that are tinged with doubt, suspicion, and cynicism. It’s disheartening. I try to understand, but my long tenure, early start and love of learning new things means I know I don’t really get it. So I check myself sometimes – my motivations, my work, my responses – and see if I’m doing something I believe in. The truth is that what I really believe in is people, and communicating with them, and enabling them to do the best work they can do, and have fun too. A computer is nothing more than a tool that, when used right, can be amazing. Like a pencil, but more buttons.

So I’m finishing Merlin’s good blog ideas with the thought that what makes a blog good is that it’s human. It’s unique and expressive, it’s inconsistent, it has weird bumps, it’s obsessive and thoughtful, playful and complicated. Somebody really lives in that virtual house, and participates (give and take) in a community. With that,

• Good blogs are weird.

Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s. If this isn’t happening every few weeks, the blogger is either bored, half-assing, or taking new medication. — Merlin Mann

So, I guess this is about the time I’m vexing readers with my diverging obsessions? Mmm hmmm. Yeah. Guilty. And there’s the crafting for charity posts, and the index I ran out of time to update. And yes, my blog does make *ahem* fart noises that make me cringe (perhaps not so publicly as Stephen Fry, but still). To wit: the weird cat thing, the pet costumes, all the mistakes I’ve fessed up to, the occasionally grumpy post, the 7 months of one quilt. But at least we’ve established I’m not bored, half-assing or on new meds, right?

The fact is that I figure some people will roll their eyes at my Star Trek obsession, or think I’m silly for talking about controversy, or not care so much about charity, but if none of it were here, well, I guess I wouldn’t be able to do my first point (Good Blogs Have A Voice) very well, right?

• Good blogs make you want to start your own blog.

I don’t know that my blog will inspire anyone else, but I was inspired to start a really good blog by reading other blogs. I’ve read Wil Wheaton’s blog for years. I learned HTML in 1998 and had my own lame “blog” in the pre-blogging platform days. My husband also “blogged” pre-Blogger but was more consistent and had prettier websites. A friend of mine from high school had the first craft blog I ever saw (she created the Alien Illusion Scarf in the Stitch ‘n Bitch book). Then I found myself consistently reading the blog of a friend of my husband, and that made me think about consistently blogging. And then when I was in graduate school and sundered from my crafting, that I realized crafting was something more than a hobby and less than a career. So a year after quitting school, I threw up a WordPress blog and wrote about my dad and I making beer. So it began.

Last but not least.

• Good blogs know when to break their own rules.

My rule is that I only post about crafting. So.

Meta CbN Part 2: Good Blogs Care

Continuing bravely on here with this obsession, but I should add an aside. In the past 2-3 years I’ve learned about a part of website development called content strategy. I love it, and I’ve done some CS work, but I’ve learned the most about what’s important in content strategy (quality content) while writing this blog. It ties into the next three of Merlin’s thoughts:

• Good blog posts are made of paragraphs.
• Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation.
• Good blogs try.

Quality deserves three of Merlin’s bullet points because a blog that doesn’t try to do a good job or want to provide something of value to its readers is a blog whose existence is suspect. I certainly don’t want to read it. Good bloggers create original content and cost the writer time and effort. Good blogs are the product of an actual person’s thoughts and ideas and are that person’s original concept. The content type is immaterial–words, videos, pictures or something else–as long as it’s real stuff someone came up with for that blog. A good blog is a creative product and process all on its own.

Why do I care? Because I’m participating in the Internet, and in blogging, and by reading this so are you, and I care about both of us, and I care that you and I are sometimes poorly served by some of the Internet’s content.

I’m fascinated by the possibilities of this gigantic collaborative communications forum called the Internet. I think future historians will go nuts over the implications and consequences of this thing. I think having millions of voices contributing billions of largely censorship free and interest-driven links, tidbits, journals and conversations to one giant, collective, easily-accessible repository is powerful. It’s a forum as yet mostly un-mediated by any authority and largely independent of the boundaries of any political entity. People can opine, express and persuade one another directly, without a journalistic filter. We inspire, amaze, are radical, traditional. We share and adapt and create collectively. The internet is the biggest, most gossipy, fickle and judgmental, most human expression of collective humanity I’ve ever seen. It’s awesome.

It’s also hungry for good content. By “good” I don’t mean that grammar/spelling gurus, religious/political authorities, or your 3rd grade teacher approved it. I don’t mean it has to be serious or even very coherent. I mean that it is original, interest-driven content that provides value to someone else. Even if that value is someone listening to you and taking the time to disagree with you about your opinion on level 3 warlocks in a sub-forum of a gaming community. Heck, the lolcat meme is silly fun, but I go back to it when I have a bad day, and it makes thousands of people laugh. That’s value.

Many people throw junk at the internet. They hope it gets them money, followers, or both, but they don’t want to give anything of value back to their audience. PR hacks think blogs are the 21st century tool to keep themselves in business and keep selling you stuff, even if it’s bad for you. Affiliate marketers con you into thinking you’re reading a real review when it’s a paid person with 10 logins spamming Amazon. Some newspapers think regurgitating already-published material into a blog saves their bacon with the young people. Business owners start ghost-written blogs neatly packaged by the Corporate Communications department. People “game” membership sites to get more followers they care nothing about. Website owners don’t understand their unrelated, obnoxious advertising is part of their content too. I could go on.

The internet = content, and a lot of it is junk. I write these articles, and this blog in general, because it’s my thing, part of my contribution, to something I care about. And if you think about it, what I care about isn’t the internet itself, it’s the people on the internet. I care that bloggers, and other people, are putting good content into this collective thing and yet reaping junk from people who don’t respect them or understand what all this internet stuff is about. A blog isn’t a business bandwagon to jump on, it’s a platform for unique, creative content.

So. Write well. Write often. Care. Even if what you write isn’t a masterpiece, the effort really does matter.