Is the name of a Barenaked Ladies album. That aside, I was laughing at Red Queen/The Other Joan's comment below. I think I say something profound everyday (o_o") I just don't say something profound about the same things everyday. Mirror keeps his blog pretty focused on Theater and Theater in Boston with only tiny personal sidelines. Red Queen finds her "Art of the Day." David's is clearly a much more focused blog designed to discuss his work (and his hireability) within the fields which interest him. It's personal, but tied to the professional. I don't have a focus to this blog. I like to review films and books (although my reviews have been less formal than I am capable of). I did NOT want to become maudlin or self-absorbed. I've started real-world journals for that and found that it wasn't productive. What I wanted was to find the more universal meaning based in my personal experience and to practice writing essays which I've always enjoyed. I was talking to my husband about this today. Tomorrow's blog will be my 40th since I restarted this in February (there's a lone January post of a poem connected to Cogitate that throws the number off). I've missed a few days, but I've posted doubles some days . Some are pretty meaningless--more enforcing the discipline than the writing. Some I'm pretty proud of. I read somewhere that if you do something 20 times it's a habit. If you do it 40 times it will stick with you for life. I don't know if that's true, but I do miss this now when I don't do it. When I started it last year I worried a lot about whether anyone was reading (I don't have any kind of tracker attached--I have a feeling I'd look at it obsessively for a few days). Now I find I'm writing more to be writing--which is good, and was one of the things I was hoping for. At the same time, it's different than a real-world journal because it is somewhat accountable. There are people dropping in to read it, probably not every day, but enough. I feel obligated to write in case one of my friends is reading. Writing everyday gave me the confidence to post it places and put it in my signature to encourage my friends to drop in and read (and remind them it's there). I do not edit and re-edit. I write as I have always written--as I would say it, with only moderate altering of order for strength. If I were really publishing these somewhere I would do more extensive revisions. Better paragraph structure, etc. The film reviews would take the film point by point, layer by layer. There might be more quotes and I would certainly bother with the links which I am sloppy about now.
What I do know is that not all of my readers are interested in the same things. Poor JT admitted to barely recognizing the names of movies (he has a small child and thereby no time). Others seem primarily interested in (or at least only comment on) the film reviews. This has always been a weakness of mine. I presume that everyone is interested in everything. I seldom stop to explain in conversation (no links) and I had a friend once tell me that she just smiled and nodded a lot of the time--she was interested in hearing my interest, but had no idea what I was talking about. Musing and I discussed why Cogitate seemed to start strong and fizzle a bit and agreed that it was because there were too many disparate interests--coming from the different sides of her life, all interesting, just not all interesting to each other. I won an essay contest in high school with an essay based on Pablo Neruda's We Are Many (woo-hoo, a link!) where I wrote of the many different people I am to the many different kinds of friends I have. It makes it difficult to have a party work (like Cogitate), but it makes life better. (As a side note it won me that scholarship at Scripps that I turned down and I used it for some college apps--I'll have to see if I can find it and see if it's still any good, or if it was only good because I was 16).
As a PS to yesterday's post about my husband and my taste and sort of tied to this, who knows what things I would be interested in had I met someone else, that is I might have lost some things but gained others (and vice-versa for him). I might be more interested in music of the 90's. I might know more about motorcycles. I doubt very much that anyone would have interested me in sports, but I could be wrong. Red Queen has had to face my worst fear--the lost of one's best friend/husband by death--so I know why yesterday's post resonated with her in a way that writing on The Children of Men would not.
What I do know is that not all of my readers are interested in the same things. Poor JT admitted to barely recognizing the names of movies (he has a small child and thereby no time). Others seem primarily interested in (or at least only comment on) the film reviews. This has always been a weakness of mine. I presume that everyone is interested in everything. I seldom stop to explain in conversation (no links) and I had a friend once tell me that she just smiled and nodded a lot of the time--she was interested in hearing my interest, but had no idea what I was talking about. Musing and I discussed why Cogitate seemed to start strong and fizzle a bit and agreed that it was because there were too many disparate interests--coming from the different sides of her life, all interesting, just not all interesting to each other. I won an essay contest in high school with an essay based on Pablo Neruda's We Are Many (woo-hoo, a link!) where I wrote of the many different people I am to the many different kinds of friends I have. It makes it difficult to have a party work (like Cogitate), but it makes life better. (As a side note it won me that scholarship at Scripps that I turned down and I used it for some college apps--I'll have to see if I can find it and see if it's still any good, or if it was only good because I was 16).
As a PS to yesterday's post about my husband and my taste and sort of tied to this, who knows what things I would be interested in had I met someone else, that is I might have lost some things but gained others (and vice-versa for him). I might be more interested in music of the 90's. I might know more about motorcycles. I doubt very much that anyone would have interested me in sports, but I could be wrong. Red Queen has had to face my worst fear--the lost of one's best friend/husband by death--so I know why yesterday's post resonated with her in a way that writing on The Children of Men would not.
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