Light and Momentary

Blogging like it's 2004

OK! It is the first of November! Which means-- it's NaBloPoMo time! Thirty days, thirty posts, coming right up. Topic requests are most welcome.

I am committing here on November 1 to a month of avoiding Twitter and Facebook. I am mulling over some other November habits as well, but that one seems especially important. There are a bunch of NaBloPoMo bloggers signed up, so it should be easy to find internet diversions that are more wholesome and less infuriating.

See you tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that!

20

Twenty years ago today I posted on my very own blog for the first time. 

That is a long time to be sending thoughts out into the world. Some of you have been reading my posts since 2004. Twenty years! That's a lot of years!

Thanks to all of you for reading. Here's to the next decade!

Party like it's 2004

It's November 1! It's the start of NaBloPoMo: thirty days, thirty posts. I was pleased to learn last year that there is a little NaBloPoMo community, if you too want to party like it's 2004.

November 30

That's a wrap, my friends! Thirty days, 31 posts (I threw in that extra one about saggy socks.)

Thanks for reading!

Typepad appears to be less broken

Typepad has been a MESS for a couple of weeks now. They had trouble with theit transition to new servers, they got hit with a DDoS attack, and then they spent, like, a week saying, "We are working very hard!" while nobody's blog would load. Or maybe parts of it would load in a sad and cockeyed way, but also maybe they wouldn't. People for whom blogs are a revenue source are big mad -- they've been losing advertisers, freaking out. Typepad just kept posting the same useless stuff on Twitter. Working hard! Getting better!

Now I have no idea what is involved here, and I can imagine that a subscription blogging service does not have a lot of money to spend on customer service reps here in the year of Our Lord 2022, but that seems like a terrible way to do business. However! Tonight, for the first time in a while, my blog will load. I am happy to see its pale-yellow 2004-era face again. If you have things to say but have been deterred by the endlessly loading comment interface, I'd love to hear from you. NaBloPoMo topic suggestions are welcome.

Spooky

Typepad has been linking to my posts more often recently -- maybe three times in as many months. This suggests to me that they are short on people to feature, as if all the people with Typepad blogs have let them go dormant. "Who's writing something? anything?" says the intern in charge of new links on the Twitter feed. "Oh, Jamie's talking about lentils again. Lentils it is. That lady sure does love lentils." They tweeted out that post I wrote about killed lettuce salad, only they called it Killer Lettuce Salad. "Which one would you rather eat?" the tweet chirped. "Killer Lettuce Salad or Murder Mystery Salad?"

You can tell that intern is not from Kentucky.

One wonders how long a subscription blogging service can stay afloat in this post-blog era. I guess it's not so much that blogs are dead as that everyone migrated to Wordpress and Squarespace and switched to podcasts and vlogs. I use a Squarespace interface for my church blog and I hate it. Give me my nice 2004-era three-column format, thank you very much. 

I miss the days when my feed reader filled up every day with chatty posts from women all around the country. I don't really know of many bloggers out there who are still doing the old-school blocks-of-text here's-what's-on-my-mind-today kind of blogging. Sunday is the first day of what used to be NaBloPoMo, but if there are any hardcore dinosaur NaBloPoMo-ers out there, they are not in my feed reader.

I am still thinking about doing 30 posts in 30 days for November, but I promise I will not write about Killer Lettuce Salad. Because I might give a recipe the improbable name of Murder Mystery Salad, but Killer Lettuce Salad is just plain spooky.

Dust in the Dovecote

Once upon a time, in the halcyon days of 2004 and 2005, the first of November was a Big Day. Bloggers started their engines! They scribbled lists of potential post topics to sustain them across the coming 30 days! November 1 meant the start of NaBloPoMo.

I am a bit like a passenger pigeon fancier, I suppose, who keeps looking up at the sky and remembering the teeming clouds of birds she used to see overhead. I am still sending text-heavy 1000-word posts out to roost on this blog with its oh-so-ten-years-ago design, and I still love the challenge of starting my engines and scribbling my lists. So! This is post #1 of 30 this month, or at least that's the plan.

If you contacted me about the new parish blog, please do not worry that my silence means I am ignoring your request. I find that I am writing slowly and cautiously there, as if I might be able to win over the Catholics-for-Trump contingent with sufficiently fluid prose. I asked my 16yo to read a post I wrote about three of the saints who were canonized last month, including Ss. Paul VI and Oscar Romero. "You sound like you're writing very carefully," he said astutely, and I am hoping to get a little more comfortable with the task as I enter my second month of blogging there. I will send the link out soon.

Things have been quiet around here over the past few months, and I've missed the conversations. Let's get back to talking! My scribbled list of potential topics is still on the short side, so if you have post requests I am happy to add them to my list of possibilities. In contrast to the passenger pigeon, the 2005-era blog is only mostly dead.

208

This is the last night on which I will ever be 47 years old, and with this post I am hitting my goal of blogging 4x/week (averaged across the year). Thanks for reading, friends!

In the drafts folder

Today is the midpoint in my self-imposed March blogging challenge: 15 posts written before today, 15 more to go after this one. I was doing a bit of digging in the drafts folder to see if I could unearth any inspiration. It's like an archeological dig in there, man.

Top layer: things that need more research or that strike me as potentially pretentious

Middle layer: maybe I should take this down in case the extended family member described herein remembers that I have a blog

Further still: rubbly pile of question marks and mystery

One post is called "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Or, you know, not." I saw that one and thought, "Oh, Tennyson! I love that poem! Wonder what I was writing about that day?" Nothing, apparently-- I didn't save any text at all, just the title. What would I have been thinking about drinking life to the lees? I suppose I'll never know. There's one called "grapes" in which I was trying to preserve the anonymity of someone from my church while also describing an extremely annoying habit of hers. Probably a good call to keep that one in drafts, past self. There's also "Chicken Little, Evangelist" and "Time Does Fly," the accuracy of which observation is confirmed by the fact that the draft is now four years old. 

The posts I am most likely to abandon or take down are the ones in which I worry about exposing somebody else's underbelly. There's a post about a 2013 rough patch in our marriage, for instance. It will never appear on the blog, but here is a bit of painfully acquired wisdom from the end of it:

I've been thinking that maybe marriage helps you prepare for heaven in two ways. The first is that you see your own flaws more clearly through the eyes of your spouse. You see the damage those flaws can do, etched on the face of the person you love most. And this is the second: you see up close the crazy miraculous heartbreaking impossible truth, that you are loved anyway.

March 1

"When are you going to blog again?" asked my 12yo.

"Tonight," I told him. Also tomorrow, and the next day and the next. It's about time for a 31 days/31 posts kind of thing around here, don't you think?

Holding pattern

Around Christmas the youngest kids were fighting a virus that left them feverish, lethargic, and coughing. "My eyes hurt," said poor Stella on Christmas night. She was sick enough that she and I didn't make the trip to the grandparents' house the next day. Last night after we got home from our trip to the other grandparents' house I found myself weirdly achy and chilled. Was it just the 7-hour car trip and the return to our chilly house? I hopped in the shower to try to warm up, and found myself crying over a possibility too preposterous to record. (Do you do that too-- imagine improbable worst-case scenarios when you're sick? It's like getting sick incapacitates the part of my brain that would normally keep the nonsense in check.)

Today I am also feverish, lethargic, and coughing. "My eyes hurt," I said this morning. I am optimistic that another quiet day will bring me most of the way back to normal, but I've been pretty subdued today.

I was going to start another round of the Whole 30 on New Year's Day, but we stopped at the Waffle House and I said, "Hmm, I'll start tomorrow." Today, it turns out, was a comfort-eating kind of day. We'll see about tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure there are no Whole-30-compliant cough drops in existence.

This might be a good year for Epiphany resolutions.

**

'Tis the season for predictable blogging angst. I started this blog with the specific goal of maintaining a site I could share in a Christmas letter-- not too personal, not too navel-gaze-y, just a happy record of family life and funny kid sayings. It turns out, however, that I am put together as a navel-gaze-y kind of person. Give me a channel in which to broadcast a summary of observations from my navel, and I will do so. So every year since 2007 I've gone through the same sequence of thoughts:

1. Should I put the blog in the Christmas letter? It's so navel-gaze-y.
2. Yes, I will put the blog in the Christmas letter. People don't have to read it if they don't like it.
3. I should write some cheerful soccer mom posts, to disguise the true navel-gaze-y nature of the blog.
4. Except it's December, and I am never cheerful in December and also it's not soccer season so am I even a soccer mom?
5. OH AND ALSO it's December and we're visiting extended family, and I am having SO MANY THOUGHTS about the complexities of extended family relationships.
6. I cannot really post about those relationships in a soccer-mom Christmas-letter kind of blog. AND YET how can I process them if I don't blog about them?
7. Maybe I shouldn't put the blog in the Christmas letter next year.

Oh, goodness, it has taken me longer than expected to squeeze this blog post out of my virus-addled brain. Time to slurp down the last of my tea with honey in hopes of keeping the coughing at bay overnight.

29

Today, my friends, I reviewed and ranked 30 grant applications. It's been a judgment-heavy week, actually, between the grading and the committee work. So tonight, instead of writing you a thoughtful blog post about a weighty topic, I am going to observe that is the 29th day of November and NaBloPoMo ends tomorrow.

53.333%

You guys, there's still 46.667% of NaBloPoMo to go and I'm low on ideas. It used to be that you could raid other people's blogs for ideas during November, but I am the last lonely NaBloPoMo-er I know. I have a couple of posts in my drafts folder-- one on volatility in bigger kids and one on the failures of 21st-century evangelization. What else do you want to hear about?

#BL05

It’s November, y’all. Thirty days, thirty posts. 

The crowded kindnesses

This is the 365th day on which I have been 46 years old, and this is the 312th post of the year. Target achieved: 6 posts per week for 52 weeks. Thanks, my friends, for reading what I had to say this year! Thank you for your insights and your encouragement and your occasional enabling! (I bought the sandals.)

Who would have thought, a year ago, that the world would look the way it does? Gosh, I would have gone down hard in a contest to predict what July 2017 would look like. Hey, who wants to play this year's version of that game? Answer the following questions, and next year I'll send a prize to the person who was most accurate.

1. Who will be president of the US on July 18, 2018?
2. What will be the most astonishing news development between now and then?
3. What about the most worrisome development internationally?
4. Open-ended: what's one more thing you think will happen between now and then? (Anything at all. You will have another baby. I will gain a thousand Twitter followers. (Don't wish that on me, actually. Twitter is a crazy place.) The Queen of England will die a peaceful death.)

I...am feeling a twinge of lingering guilt about the last time I ran a pool like this. It was December 2008 and I asked people to predict Stella's birthday, length, and weight. Then I never sent off the promised chocolate to the people who came closest. Belated apologies if you won that pool. I will probably be more successful with sending prizes when I am not adjusting to the arrival of a new baby while trying to write a dissertation.

But do you know, friends, I am not going to let worry or guilt be the note on which I end this year. I am going to take the advice of Alexander Maclaren, who said, "Seek, as a plain duty, to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life." Onward!

 

306

Last year on my birthday I resolved to post six times a week for a year. I had been thinking I was a little behind, and that I might have to do throw in some quick picture posts to hit the number target, but what do you know? I'm right on track. I will turn 47 a week from tomorrow, and if I post six more times between now and then, I will have written 312 posts, or 6 x 52, since I turned 46.

I don't expect to blog as frequently in my 48th year as I did in my 47th, but it's been a fun exercise.

Comment Bankruptcy

I love comments. I delight in comments. I am not very good about replying to comments, though. I have good intentions and a perpetual email backlog. 

Lately it's been a mess in my email comment notifications. If you have left me a comment I have read it appreciatively. I have probably thought to myself, "Oh, I should reply!" I may have thought to myself, "Hm, this comment has been sitting here for three weeks. Is it weird to reply at this point?"

I just archived all of those email notifications and resolved to start fresh. We'll see how it goes.

PS If you blog, what do you do about replying on site / responding via email / chatting over social media?

Argh

Oh, man, I was almost 600 words into a post about the good enough question when Typepad lost its stinking mind and ATE MY POST like an evil cyber-bunyip. I have been standing at the edge of the figurative billabong, hurling imprecations in its direction, but it has slunk back into its subterranean lair without surrendering my lost 600 words. The "restore content" feature is useless, Typepad. Totally useless. Harrumph.

#BL05

Lissa Wiley started a Facebook discussion about blogging that seems to have prompted several bloggers to resolve to write more frequently and comment more on each other's blogs. Do you remember the 2005-2006 blogiverse, when people would read thousand-word posts all the way through, and leave thoughtful comments along with 30 of their online pals, and discuss back and forth in the comboxes and then write their own blog posts about the topic? I'm not suggesting that we resurrect the trackback, but I miss those days. 

These days I am as guilty as anybody of reading the first sentence in a Facebook link and skimming the rest of the article. In those years blogging took up a little too much space in my head. There's no perfect solution, then or now, in the quest for online community, but if you have been looking for a nudge to write more frequently and connect more often with the bloggers whose posts you enjoy, maybe this is your nudge.

Say the word if you'd like to be added to the shiny new blogroll in my left margin -- the only requirement is a commitment to reasonably frequent posting and commenting. 

Comments are one of the things I've been thinking about. I don't often reply to comments on the blog, because I have the feeling that people rarely check back for replies these days. If someone requests clarification, or something along those lines, I'll comment here with the idea that it will be useful to anybody else who gets that far. Most often I reply to comments via email, because for me that's the best way to continue the conversation. But I don't know of anybody who says, "You know what I need in my life? More email." Maybe email isn't the best idea.

I'm interested in your perspective here: are you a blogger or a former blogger? If so, what is/was your motivation for blogging and how has it changed? How do you prefer to find out about new blog posts? Where are you most likely to comment -- FB, Twitter, on the blog post itself? What's your preferred channel for responses to comments?

Why blog?

Rachel-who-ought-to-blog asked me what I enjoy about blogging, a question I am eager to answer. The biggest thing I love about blogging is the record it creates. I am the memory-keeper at my house, and blogging is a way to capture the evanescent. The stories my kids tell about their younger selves are generally stories I have blogged. The things we laugh about together are most often things I have written down here-- not because they are the most intrinsically memorable, but because there's a record of them and the record itself makes us remember them. This year I have been thinking often about seeing as a form of love (which is a topic for another post), and I want my kids to know how much I have loved watching them grow. "I see you," my blog says to them, "and I love seeing you."

On a related but shallower note, I find it so useful to be able to look things up in my archives. Where was that awesome cabbage recipe? When did we last have the masonry guys out to work on the brick? How long ago did I spot my first gray hairs? There are other ways to get that information-- I can google the cabbage and dig through the file cabinet for masonry info. And there's not really an actual need to date the emergence of gray hair. But this blog is a one-stop repository for Things On My Mind: books read, thoughts thunk, goals established, projects completed, and, I suppose, vanity eroded.

Another thing I love about blogging is the way that it offers gentle accountability. No one here was holding my feet to the fire on the Crazy Shakespeare Project, and yet I doubt I would have completed it if I hadn't blogged about it. The blog is a place for me to announce new plans and problem-solve when they're not working (like last summer's half-marathon posts -- that really felt onerous at the time) and tell you when I'm over the hurdles. You guys would never have said "It's December 31, Jamie; how come you haven't finished Twelfth Night yet??" Instead you were happy for me when I finished on January the 7th.

I love the community aspect of blogging. It's different these days. Lilian and I often lament the loneliness of 2016 blogging, when almost all of our former blogging pals have thrown in the towel. I am totally a 2004 kind of blogger, with my dated blog design and my 1200-word text-only posts and the blurry pictures that adorn every fifth post. And yet some of you have been reading me for more than twelve years now -- laughing at my jokes and easing my angst and inviting me into your lives as well. Thank you, all of you! It's been so good to hear your perspectives! 

The thing that is alluring to me about blogging in particular, as opposed to Instagram or Snapchat or whatever, is that I love to write. I love the process of thinking up an analogy that says exactly what I mean for it to say (like the mantle paragraph in this post) or a ridiculous pun (desuetude!) or an implausible acronym (VACUOUS). There's a Flannery O'Connor quote from The Habit of Being, in which she says "I certainly am glad you like the stories because now I feel it's not bad that I like them so much. The truth is I like them better than anybody and I read them over and over and laugh and laugh, then get embarrassed when I remember I was the one wrote them." It is a little embarrassing to admit how much I love to troll through my archives. That's the heart of why I blog: it brings me joy in the moment, and joy in the recollection. Thanks for reading, everybody!