Blogging Angst

So another subject I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is whether or not I actually enjoy this blogging thing. I’ve had this blog for about 8 months now, and I was just reading back on my first entry, and honestly I don’t know that my feelings about this have changed all that much in 8 months. My favorite part of blogging has always been reading other people’s blogs, I’m a voyeur at heart, I like peering into other people’s live, and generally I like doing it anonymously (I’m not much of a comment leaver, for some reason I feel like people are more natural when they aren’t as aware of their audience and the audience perception), I’m not though much of an exhibitionist, I don’t like people peering into my life at all. When the “what superpower would you most like” question gets asked (and it’s rather surprising how often that comes up, in casual conversation, must be in some book of “100 ice breaker questions to ask to get conversation started”) I will inevitably reply I would like to be invisible, to me that would be heaven. Not for any unethical reasons (although I can thing of some rather unethical things to do with that power, and I’m not too sure how good I would be at resisting them which is why it’s good I don’t have this particular super power) but so I could just move through life all the time casually observing others, but no actually having any attention drawn to me at all.

So after 8 months of blogging I have to admit I’m not much more comfortable with my blog than I was my very first post. After 8 months I’m still not sure the direction I want to go. Is the blog about “me” my thoughts, my feelings, how I interact with the world, or is it more of a journal, just a retelling of the day to day happenings in the life of my family through my eyes. I’m not sure which I want it to be, although I know the later is where I’ve pretty much landed. I think mostly because it’s where I’m comfortable, I can let myself out there a little bit by retelling the story of my family, without revealing too much, or making myself too vulnerable.

Yet I see, and read things all the time that I think “huh it would be kind of fun to just sit down and write my thoughts about that subject and post it in my blog”, or I read amazing entries where I think “man I wish I could just put myself out there that way”. I really like reading topic blogs, but I also like reading the other “stories about us” kind of blogs as well; so they both really draw me in. There is something really refreshing about both feeling comfortable enough to reveal yourself in all your neurotic glory for public consumption on this vast “internet”, and the idea that we all have stories that are interesting enough that our daily lives deserve a public chronicle.

I admire people that are able to put themselves “out there” in their blog in all their amazing human imperfection; but I also admire those people that are able to tell a story, and present a picture of how they want to be instead of alwys how they are, those folks able to prune day to day happenings into something meaningful instead of just “see how crazy we are”. I like the idea of a narrative of one’s life, but even at 40, I’m not yet sure what the narrative of my life is, and sometimes when I read back my own blog, I don’t sound like me, even to myself. Sometimes I think I sound like the detached narrator of some exotic National Geographic special called “Life of the Cranes”; and I’m not sure I like that, but I’m equally not sure how to be something else, without feeling like I’m putting too much out there, and instead of a picture of my life, I’m writing a peephole into it.

I wish I was one of those people that could be easily open and adorable without coming off as more than slightly unhinged, and neurotic. I’m afraid that I’m probably never going to be one of those people, thus the angst I suppose…

Which probably just means that maybe I shouldn’t be let out into the world wide web, alone and unsupervised.

As for the Cranes, let’s just say we had a pretty good week, but things will be looking much better when the female Crane chronicaler (pretty sure that isn’t a word) is over her whole PMS, and angsty thing in general (you all don’t even want to know how many times I’ve cried for no apparent reason this last week), as well as on her blog.