how I learned to stop worrying and love the blog

Wednesday, sep. 27, 2006   |   0 comments

I have fallen in love with a book. It’s called No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog, and the author is my great friend, Margaret Mason (yes, that Margaret Mason).

First of all, I am so impressed by the wealth of fine Ideas that she managed to pack into this book. And the titles she crafted for each Idea, they’re all so smart, each one neatly side-stepping the urge to dip into base punniness. And the writing itself! Maggie’s wording is so winning and elegant and strong and funny, so very yar.

For instance, take this passage from Idea 16 (“Mine Consumer Culture”):

All of us are picky about something. Say you’ve become a little obsessed in your quest for the perfect oven mitt, or you lie awake at night wondering whether it’s even possible for lip gloss to be shiny enough without feeling sticky. Once in awhile we stumble on something that’s just right, and we want to tell everyone we know.”

What an excellent suggestion. In fact, have you heard about this new book called No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog? (You see how I did that?)

What I most love about this book — aside from the writing, and the breadth and creativity of the suggestions — is that it’s also a tender love letter to blogs themselves. Many of the Ideas featured in this book offer examples from actual bloggers, well-known cewebrities to people I have never clicked on before. And these bloggers that Maggie has currated together, they’re doing such wonderful things. Their writing, photos, films, drawings, childhood mementos … it’s all so inspired and inventively assembled.

I have been known to think bad thoughts about blogs in the past. Just the word “blog,” it’s so depressing. Bloooooggg. It’s like the sound you make when you want the nurse to come change your bed linens because something important just exploded. Then there’s the part how “blog” is not just a noun, but a verb. And a shirt. (I’m still waiting for the “Stick it in your blog hole” tee. Tee HEE.) Working on the web for as long as I have (ten years now), and “blogging” for as long as I have (eleven years…with many, many hiatuses of course, but still … eleven years!), I can sometimes slip into a jaded kind of grumpiness about this world. Have you ever been in a room where everyone unapologetically introduces themselves as an URL? Then maybe you know this grumpiness. It’s just that…okay, no, here’s what I mean: there are people out there whose identities are far too invested in their blogs, people who look at everything — auto accidents, friendships, love, chocolate — through a calculating “but how would this play in my blog?” filter. I know because I do it too: I see a war protester in a panda suit, and the first thing I think is “I need a photo of this for my blog!” So this peeve probably stems from some hidden self-hatred, Jungian-shadow style. But at least I feel sheepish when I catch myself mining key moments for blog fodder! At least when I say, “this would be perfect for my blog,” I have the decency to put sarcastic quotes around it!

So that’s my beef? Bloggers who aren’t sufficiently modest about their blogs. Huh, somehow that lacks the manifesto-inspiring vim I was hoping for here. And suddenly it occurs to me, rather unpleasantly, that on the scale of one to cool, I’ve always thought that people who are passionate about what they do (excluding, of course, Burning Man) are 8,000 times cooler than the crabby people who scoff them. And in this situation, I’m totally the scoffer! And I don’t want to be the scoffer. I am officially an elderly internetster ranting inarticulately about blogs. Oh blogosphere, look what you’ve gone and made me do.

But this book, it reminds me of the things that attracted me to the internet back in the beginning. People can share their small ideas and odd hobbies and unexpected discoveries with the entire world? And it hardly costs a thing? Hurray for the tripple-dub! Three cheers for the wackity-wack-wack! Just like in Ice Castles, or The Cutting Edge, where the competitive ice skater (goes blind)/(falls for a hockey player) and learns to love the ice once more, Maggie has has found a way to get me back on the blog.

It really is such a lovely, comforting thing, this book. It makes me want to bite Maggie’s cheeks off! And then hug her tightly. And then buy the whole bar a round of drinks. And then go home and write and write.