Tag: about this blog

personal versus blog!personal

// Tuesday, March 4, 2014

As much as I’ve been on the internet for forever, relatively speaking, in the past I haven’t been the most successful at actually maintaining a Public Persona Writing Blog, which is kind of how I think of it. The tone is different, and it’s not about publishing every single thought that comes into my head; it’s about thinking and planning and typing and editing, until there’s a final product that’s worth posting. I like the idea of being able to use that part of my brain on a regular basis, because it’s a type of writing that I miss (which is something I’ve touched on enough thus far that I won’t repeat myself). I am still figuring out the overall direction this blog is going to take, and I’m realizing that it is something I won’t know for sure until I post more, until I see what it is that I want to post more. I am, however, accumulating a number of drafts, of potential posts that I know I need to flesh out more before they’re something.

What I am currently struggling with – and I realize this is not unique to me – is where the line is between personal and blogme!personal: for example, I’ve had an instagram account since March 2012, and I’ve been fairly active there. There is a lot of overlap between the type of content I’ll be posting here (read: pictures of political books; of traveling; of  many, many cups of coffee), but there are also things that are separate from that, things that are still perfectly acceptable but outside of the realm of this blog. Do I link it? Do I create a separate instagram and re-post some of the pictures, acknowledging that they are reposts? Do I have a post, here, where I detail some of the places in said pictures and use said pictures, but start the new instagram from now, from pictures only taken after January 1, 2014? Am I overthinking this? (Hint: yes, yes I am.)

What it comes down to, really, is that throughout most of college, I had this phrase that I kept coming back to that related to being a lover of blurred lines (no relation to the Robin Thicke song, I assure you), referring to a number of things, but for example, how sometimes relationships aren’t always delineated the way one would expect, a sort of ‘modern romance’ problem, as it were. But as I’ve grown up and accumulated more life experiences, I don’t think that’s the best way to live, at least not in the broad sense. There are many, many areas of life where grey is good and acceptable and necessary, but so too are there many areas where  dividing things into at least reasonably rigid categories is the better option (Facebook is not for coworkers, per se; etc. etc. etc.). So given that, where does this blog fall? How much of my online identity is inherently tied to my private personal identity, versus my more standard public identity, or even my public professional identity? Where is that line, and to what extent does it matter?

I haven’t quite figured that out yet, but I’m working on it. If anyone has thoughts, feel free to share. I’ve been ruminating on this for quite a while and haven’t gotten any closer to figuring it out.

an introduction of sorts.

// Wednesday, January 1, 2014

This blog has been something floating in the back of my mind for quite some time. It’s been too long since I’ve written anything particularly suited for public consumption. My goal is for this blog to be a (public!) outlet for my thoughts on a whole variety of topics, though the most frequent posts will likely have to do with (a) my search for good coffee and/or travel adventures, (b) my love of writing(/writing in literature/writing in television), and/or (c) my interest in politics/the relationship between media and politics.

My creation of a coffee-inspired blog where I document not only coffee shops and traveling but also writing and news and my views on said news stems from the realization that most of the sites I currently follow are either one world or the other: they are the virtual homes of English majors and lovers of literature, or they are those of political junkies and holders of Strong Opinions. I want to carve out my own little corner of the internet, where I can document not only general life events, but also both of these broad but important aspects of my personality. A good cup of coffee and a good book are just as important to me as a good academic discussion on the nuances of political communication.

My love of both English and politics started in high school and continued to develop throughout my college years.  My sophomore year of high school marked the beginning of my first serious foray into creative writing, inspired by a English class journal project on The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, which has become one of my favorite books. The project assigned had various components, not all of which I remember, but the main one was to create a journal from the perspective of a eighteen-year-old just drafted into the Vietnam War. Would  he flee to Cannda? Go to war? It was the first time I’d ever written creatively where the writing explicitly was meant to be read by someone else. I’d written stories in my head for as long as I could remember, but anything written down was written for me, not others. The assignment made me realize just how much I wanted and needed to write, and how the constraints I’d imposed on what I wrote didn’t need to exist. In college, I explored the other end of the fiction/politics relationship spectrum, examining fiction in politics versus politics in fiction, exploring how misinformation and sometimes outright fiction – intentional or not – often has real world consequences and significant public policy implications. The more I read and know of the world, the more it seems the fictional worlds of literature (defined in the broad sense, to include not only written but film/television) and the ‘real’ world of news and events and politics are intricately linked.

Now a year and a half out of college, I want to get back into writing, into examining the world as I live it and the world as others live it – hence the blog. I fell in love with modernism and post-modernism in college English classes, and in some ways, this blog is a delayed product of that fact: where’s the line between living regular life, having coffee in a coffee shop, and living a life projected to an audience, where everyone directly and indirectly influences each other? I think that line doesn’t exist in the way that it used to exist, and I no longer want to pretend that it does.

This is a New Year’s resolution to which I plan to adhere.