two reasons for blogging: creating and sharing
I remember telling my wife that I’d started a blog and her immediate reaction was, “Blogs are self-indulgent.”
This was followed shortly by, “I don’t understand blogs.”
While the first one stung a little, I can understand where people are coming from when they say this, especially if they also think the second statement.
Blogs are a funny thing. You have your topic-specific blogs, your funny blogs, your fictional character blog, your personal blog, your communal blog, and your throw-everything-and-see-what-sticks blog. Blogs, on the whole, are amorphous and hard to pin down. They are also, for a whole swath of us, talking to a pretty empty theatre. So why do it?
I think it has to do with two very specific desires: the desire to create and the desire to share.
My initial training is as an actor and I spent seven (mostly unpaid) years as an actor in the theatre in Toronto. I eventually stopped for a number of reasons (”dear sweet Jeebus I need money”) but the one thing that really knocked me out was the fact that while I loved the actual artistic work of acting and creating a play, I HATED the business life of an actor. The constant sending out of packages, auditions, the “networking” that I had to do even though I was so horrible at it that it made me hate myself, all of it felt like it was sucking my soul dry. I kept at it for a while, then I sort of coasted for another period where I didn’t admit I wasn’t acting but I really wasn’t, had a brief resurgence in my career, and then stopped completely.
And I don’t miss being a professional actor. God no. I have a regular job now and have time to do other work and go to school. I actually feel that I have a life and the time to enjoy it.
But I do really miss “creating” something.
So, this blog.
Just getting to craft the perfect run-on sentence that doesn’t end even though the reader has lost the train of what I was trying to say eighteen syllables ago but still I feel the urge to forge ahead blindly into the unknown future of where the sentence is going a future that looks dark but then in the distance you see a spark that just maybe could be the end of the sentence, is a creative act. And it feels good.
“But,” you say, “Most of your posts are links to other sites! You ain’t creating nuthin! You damn dirty leech!”
And it’s true, a lot of what I put on my site are links to other people’s creations or comments, with the occasional “witty” comment thrown in by me. How do I justify it?
Because I also want to share.
I love the Internet and the vast array of genius and crap available out there. The facts, the opinions, the little doodads and widgets. And the really really weird. (When I first discovered CATPRIN - Tailor for Cats, I felt like shouting it from the rooftops.) And me being the chatty fellow that I am, I want to share these marvelous discoveries with the world.
So, this blog.
Why do I blog? Because I want to create something. I want express my thoughts. I want to write. I want to make people laugh.
And sometimes, I just want to say, “COSTUMES! COSTUMES FOR CATS! LOOK, EVERYBODY, LOOOOOOOK!”
