Dear Diary - To blog, or not to blog?
Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 2:40PM 
Dear Diary,
My online friend, Snooty Primadona, asked herself - and all of us - why we blog.
And, as they say, she got me to thinkin'.
Why do I blog?
I think it's because, deep down, I'm a creative person, and that creativity has always expressed itself through writing.
Languages, and the way people express themselves using them, has been an endless source of fascination for me. When I was a kid at school, English was my favorite subject, closely followed by French and Afrikaans.
The fact that people chose to assign gender to nouns interests me. La table is feminine, whereas le chien (dog) is not.
The fact that you have to say no twice in Afrikaans interests me too. They use a double negative. Ek het dit nie gese nie (I didn't say it).
How people expressed themselves through words - the art of prose - was something I grew to love. Dickens' humor, Shakespeare's prose-poetry and Judy Blume somehow getting into my head and helping me work through the difficult parts of being a teenager.
The more I read, the more I realized that writing can be as much about working through things for yourself as about telling stories. I never had a diary as a kid - I'd start one and then not take the time to keep doing entries - but I wrote a book when I was about 12. It's somewhere in my stored stuff. I seem to remember it has something to do with a boy and my transformation when my braces came off.
After High School, when studying English at University became about analyzing the writing of others, I never wrote creatively for years. I guess I didn't need to. I was having fun growing up, getting out into the world, travelling.
But then I got into the corporate machine.
I was working in a large company, dealing head on with a matrixed hierarchy, 15 hour days, business travel, working on weekends, useless meetings, yearly goal-setting and reviews and a curve on which my team-mates and I were graded for bonuses so we were effectively in competition with each other to get our projects noticed by our managers. Bureaucracy and office politics seemed to stifle any creative or artistic thought.
Even emotions had to be regulated - one had to appear enthusiastic and be PC at all times, no matter what you were feeling or what was going on in your life. This was particularly difficult for me after I had major surgery and went back to the office too early. Consequently, I was labelled "a bad fit" and my work life became even more restricted.
It was all looking a bit bleak, dear Diary, until my therapist suggested I find a way to write again.
I'm not the kind of person who can set up a story outline, develop characters and have the self-discipline to produce a novel. I admire the people who do. My creativity comes to me in little bursts: observations, jokes and the need to vent.
And so, the blog.
And that, dear Diary, answers the question.
Ittybittycrazy
You might find this article interesting.
The article is from the UK newspaper, the Sunday Times. You can find it here:
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6896061.ece
Extract:
Women's blogging: the new home front
November 1, 2009
By India Knight
From the trivial to the titillating, the hilarious to the heart-rending, women are spilling their most intimate secrets on the internet — and revolutionising their lives
We know about Facebook and Twitter, about downloading free music, and that the current crafts explosion started online. We know about forums and celebrity gossip; about sinister blokes “grooming” pre-teens in chat rooms; about funny clips on YouTube, online gaming and techy nerdery. But it’s a mysteriously under-reported fact that the internet has also dramatically changed the landscape for “ordinary” women. Many people still view technology as off-puttingly masculine and the joys of the online world as geekily blokeish — either that or a tiny bit sad. That’s certainly true at one level (there’s the overwhelming preponderance of porn, aside from anything else), but it ignores the seismic — and I don’t use the word lightly — difference the online world has made to women’s lives, by holding a mirror up to them and celebrating the minutiae of their existence as if it mattered.
Reader Comments (7)
I blog for myself and the fun of writing and remembering.
And your blog has caused me to remember that I too wrote a novel when I was 12... or rather I was very impressed by Agatha Christie at that stage and decided I would write a murder thriller in her style. I invented a village for the murder to take place in; drew a map of the houses including their gardens; I included a manor house and a duck pond on the village green. All very Miss Marple. I remember a plot completely stolen from one of Agatha's books, whereby only one of the seven murders planned was the real murder... all the other ones were window dressing to throw my Austrian detective off the plot. My detective was basically Hercule Poirot, but Austrian rather than Belgian, which gave him plenty of chances to throw in little German phrases which I was learning at school. I recall the barmaid (who was the local PC Plod's fiancee) met a particularly grisly end with one of her own stockings. I got no further than Chapter Two and the first murder when I remember being sidetracked by the volume of Agatha's work. If I was to be a successful murder author on a par with the Dame, I obvioulsy had to write as many books as she had done. Agatha wrote 78 murder novels, so I recall writing the numbers 1-79 down over several sides of A4 and decided that I would only start writing book 1 when I had decided on the titles and plots of all 79 books! What an OCD little nightmare! I think I got as far as 12 book titles, and got particularly excited about a Murder on an Ocean Cruise Liner. I know I got some brochures and used the schematics of the ships therein to place different people into different cabins on different decks. I vaguely remember someone was going to have their head cut off and it would later be found in a washing machine as a warning to the laundry maid not to reveal what she had seen.
Perhaps their is mileage in some of these ideas yet :)
Holy crapsticks!
You weren't kidding around!
I was a little more unrealistic as a kid. I remember playing "let's design a house" with a good childhood friend of mine who later went on to study architecture.
Her house was normal, one you could actually build.
My house was built on a steep hill, had three levels (the first had six garages for all the cars) all set back from each other, and an elevator at the back of each level which took you up to the front of the next.
I think it also had one of those open fireplaces in the middle of the lounge.
Clearly I intended to be a lottery winner!
I think you could take your crime writing and combine it with your travel and have some kind of international sleuth!
You know, I spent so many years speaking nothing but baby talk all day that I'd nearly forgotten everything I ever knew. Once the kids began speaking and learning more, I suppose I kind of grew with them... all over again. It was a while after they were finally gone from home that I began to rediscover myself. Thank Gawd I didn't have a blog back then. They would probably have grown up as street urchins with dirty fingernails and tangled, dirty hair.
I wrote a book when I was young too, but I was more like 14 I think. I wrote about having a wonderful perfect life, which was foreign to me. I didn't have a perfect life so I thought it would be really good. As it turns out, had I written about the truths in my life I probably would have had a book deal by 15. Who knew?
However, I think what I really like about blogging is the fact that you are NOT constantly under the perusal of *the powers that be*. I am that power and lord knows I'm hard enough on myself. I do wish that I had never told anyone I know about my blog. I could be writing and saying things I really want to say without anyone's feelings getting hurt or making anyone mad. As it is, I opened my big mouth and now I have to be nice all the time, LOL! And, it's much more fun to be bad....
I am so glad you blog -- you write with such clarity and humour!! I love all the 'he said/she said" pieces -- and the puppy pieces, having a puppy myself.
My dearest Liz:
Thank you for your lovely comment. You understand now why I keep my real identity to myself. That way I can be as much of a bitch as I want. There are some good friends who know who I am, but they are used to my nuttiness.
There is nothing stopping you, Liz, from starting a second blog, and writing the truth that you feel. I know I WOULD read it! I know there is a time factor, but you could update one blog one week and the other the next.
And Angelica:
Thank you SO much for the encouragement. It's a strange contradiction that I write primarily for myself, yet want to be read!!! Is that vanity? Actually, what I REALLY like is people's responses and comments - more of a dialog. I think when you put yourself out there and express yourself, you want to know that you have been heard, even if people disagree or dont like it. I am sure few artists paint simply for themselves without dreaming of a gallery show.
Small world - I know Snooty Primadona too! You wouldn't think it's a very common name, but I know quite a few of them. All with different middle names, though, so as not to confuse me. ;-)
I haven't really given much thought to why I blog. I mean, I have given it a few thoughts, but it's never been something that I needed to understand. I just do. I do have a bit in common with you, though. I love language, and have tried my hand at writing a novel, but I just don't have the patience for it. My creativity also comes in spurts. Sometimes it's just a trickle, and sometimes it's a flood. I have periods of Sahara Desert, when I don't blog for weeks, and then it's monsoon season and I'm blogging every day.
Thank you Shelli for your comment!
I know exactly what you mean... I also times when I am mute, and times when I have verbal diarrhea.
I also have ideas which I can't be bothered to actually sit and write - there are two posts festering in the back of my mind right now.
And yes, blogging is a small world, almost a community... it's great!