a wolf angel is not a good angel

Bloggers mention, occasionally, chatting or msning or regular emailing with other bloggers. I don’t. This is because I never do any of it, pretty much.

In part of course this is because I don’t ever email anyone. I’m really leery of reaching out to people: am I too forward? Do they not want to hear from me? Will I say the wrong thing? Blah blah blah. I don’t know how I’ve ever made friends at all.

It’s not that I’m unwilling to talk to people, or what have you, I just never seem able to make that step from acquaintance to friend. Obviously I have the same issue(s) online.

I have this sneaking suspicion that the rest of this is going to come off like a “please email me!”, if the beginning hasn’t already, and I’d like to note that this isn’t what I intend (so, though I don’t mind email, I’m also not wishing regularly for it), but I will also note that I’m not going to make any major efforts to have it sound non-desperate.

I always wonder: how do people start these friendships? What kind of thing brings you to first email someone? It almost doesn’t occur to me. Oh, I’ve warned people about last names appearing or comments not going through, but that’s clearly not the same sort of thing.

The other thing I wonder: why doesn’t anyone email me? I’ve had this comment before, actually, on usenet, that I always sound so self-sufficient (which is, I think, a codeword for standoffish), and — well — no. Is it because I can’t imagine how to email people, and this comes through? I can’t think of possible reasons why people *wouldn’t* email me, because I can’t think of possible reasons why they *would*.

I admit I have sometimes wondered if I am a sociopath.

When I was in pre-k, I brought my Strawberry Shortcake doll to school. She had a tricycle, and I pretended that she was biking around and that her tire got stuck in the sewer cover on the road (something which has never happened to me).

I didn’t like Strawberry Shortcake very much.

My little pony! I loved my little pony. I’m going to hold back from naming every single pony I had (be thankful), but wow.

One of my favourites was Firefly: of the 1983 group, I also had Lemon Drop and Peachy, as well as the show stable. (I think I might have had more. I had most of the 1982 ponies, too.

But I think the pony I always loved most was Heart Throb (yes, I loved pink, and no, I never much liked the unicorns. I had some My Little Sea Ponies, which were only good for baths).

Apparently the last ponies I got were in 1985. I think my sister got the newborn twin ponies in 1987, and I vaguely remember having the baby sea ponies; I don’t remember the llama and dino at all. Was that when the Care Bears got their new friends?

I am singing the stupid My Little Pony commercial song now. Blame blurt.

My library’s overdue fines are going from 5 cents a day to 25 cents. I guess I can pretend I’m donating money to make up for the cutbacks from the government.

What with people talking about students making unreasonable requests around exams, I will talk about one of mine.

A few years ago it was my cousin’s bar mitzvah, and I didn’t have a dress. (Oh yes, you know where this is going.) And my father was heading down to NYC for a day to do a trade show, and I could go with him and shop! And just hang around NYC for the day, which is always fun. The show was Fri/Sat/Sun, but he wanted to be there Friday (he was willing to switch to Saturday, but). And I had a midterm on that Friday.

So I went, somewhat abashed, and told the professor this, with the comment that of course I could take the exam on Friday, but if other people were already taking it at some other date, could I maybe write the exam then, with those other people?

I had a wonderful time (though I had a slight flu), found a dress and got a free makeover in Macy’s that Friday.

My mother’s cat, who normally hates me but is right now sitting right next to me and NOT running away. I am not touching her, of course, because Eva is one of those “friendly” and “cuddly” Ragdolls.

I bought my cat at the Bay.

I spy with my little eye two cats sleeping amid all the junk.

Ah, the joy of ramming your car into huge piles of snow somewhere that might vaguely be considered near the curb. There’s barely enough room between the cars to drive, and you’re sliding anyhow.

I take the bus.

The wind! The snow! Woman, what have you done to my backyard?

That party I went to last night? Sucked. I will be making my excuses to parties this person throws from now on. Love her, not so much her friends. Which obviously I can’t ever tell her, but I don’t really assume it will matter.

It felt sort of like the worst parts of high school. The people I knew there: the hostess. I’d met a few of the other people before, but only at large party-things like this. I’ve been to a lot of parties where I know no one, or one person. I have never had so terrible a time (usually, despite complaining about not wanting to go, I have a good time). Because *normally* people are actually interested in talking to people they don’t know, as opposed to walking away (literally) from a conversation with me. I don’t need to deal with that, thanks. And especially not several times in a few hours. Plus, it was far too much drink-to-get-drunk, something I dislike. But I could have dealt with that, but just watching a group of jerks get drunk? No.

So I left as early as I could, walked up past some poor guy who’d been blocked in by the cars in front and behind him (about a half inch clearance on either side) who was really angry, had a brief conversation with him, walked to get yummy fresh bagels (Fairmount 24h bagel place, I love you), where there was no line, then suddenly a very long line, watched someone buy a thing of lox and stand in the corner of the store, eating it all, and slid my way home on the snowy icy roads.

Now I feel the need to either post something as topical or whatever as my last post or post lots of really stupid posts to move that one off the front page. I’m not sure. But hey, almost 30 comments. That’s pretty impressive.

I don’t mind the discussion, it just surprises me somewhat. I would have loved to have heard from female professors, though. And I’m not likely to change my posting style because I’m already pseudonymous (though, as I have said, I take my pseudonym seriously — I also don’t mind telling people my real name, I just want google not to find me that way) and because after 10 years of different sort of net.interactions, I am not surprised at the distinction between who I am and who I present to be, and who I am and who people think I am. I was a teenage girl! You can’t possibly be a teenage girl near a bunch of other teenage girls and NOT realise this, at some level.

What ended up happening was that I slept all last afternoon — so good! I highly suggest sleeping a lot. Then I saw the play my father put on, which was actually quite good, though the audience was smallish because of all the snow. Now there’s even more snow so the cats are making little trails in the backyard and not walking off of them. But the trails are mostly just little holes for their legs. It’s really cute but I have no photos. Yet. I have until March to take photos, though now the snow is all white and clean because the blue collars are pissy about the binding arbitration (36 hour workweeks now) that they don’t bother to do things like clean or salt the streets. (I’m much more pro-union in the summer.)

Oh, and I slept ELEVEN HOURS last night. Eleven! I feel so good.

I’m practicing knitting, and I can now fix my mistakes, which are no longer every other stitch. Next it’s increases and decreases. (I’ve been busy.) I have my grandmother’s old knitting book, which should be fun, because it shows how to knit with ribbons. (A good friend of mine works in a lace & ribbon importing company, which her family owns. Supplies at cost!) This means that I will buy stuff to knit on the long drive to Florida and maybe be less bored. I’ll also probably try to get some ribbon from this friend, because it just looks cool to do.

Did I mention how good I feel for having slept?

Tonight I have a party I really don’t want to go to. Tomorrow I have TWO parties I don’t want to go to, but one is the family Chanukah party at our house, so at least I get gifts, and the other is a baking party, so I get good food (followed by more food at the Chanukah party). Me = misanthropic.

I’ve decided to expand on some of the themes in my earlier posts, and particularly some of my really LONG comment.

One person decided to leave, was instalanched, and then her post about leaving was blogged about on Cliopatria. (Unfairly and somewhat cruelly, I think.) And because she had a silly, non-academic blog, this is apparently lack of love of history.

I really got this reading from the posts — but not the comments — there. And it brings up that interesting thing people talk about regularly: how does blogging intersect with everything else in your life? But it’s more than that: how honest are we supposed to be in blogs, how honest can we be *expected* to be? If I turn out not to have studied linguistics but cognitive science, but said linguistics to be a bit less traceable, how offended would be people be, and how much right do they have to feel that? What if it turned out I was lying about being in Montreal? What if the cats I post photos of are not actually my cats at all, and in fact I am allergic to cats? I could go on. I claim all these things are true, and you trust me (or don’t), but what would happen if I came out and admitted I was writing fiction or semi-fiction?

I would feel betrayed if I found this out about the blogs I read. I expect some amount of editing of reality and rewriting of conversations. But I also expect that the gists are true, at least to the author, or that the fictionalised parts are marked as such. Is this fair? I’m not sure. I don’t think I’d stop reading, but it depends.

There are some people who post fiction-as-if-autobiography (I am a long time fan of Oblivio). But for most people, we assume blogs are true.

And when we assume they’re true, we also end up assuming they’re fairly comprehensive. I might not have mentioned that I changed elementary schools after grade 4 (ends in grade 6), but that’s not, it seems, a big deal. Of course it was, to me, it shaped my life in all sorts of ways I know about and probably many that I will never know about. But it’s not something I’ve been lying about, even in omission. And I don’t talk about my friends much, and when I do, I try to do so only in generalities, because they might not want to be online as such.

But this also isn’t a lie. I complain about my job instead of talk about the good parts. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I don’t talk about the vast majority of the books I read; I don’t talk about most of the music I listen to; I don’t talk about all sorts of things about my family.

A blog, even one where I’ve posted over 700 times to, cannot possibly do justice to who I am as a whole. It doesn’t make it fake: it makes it an honest portrait of part of me.

So to look at this blog and say that I mustn’t be X, because I don’t post about X, is not understanding what blogs are or how they are used.

You can judge me based on this, to some extent. You can dislike what I write, or how I write it. You can just not care about anything I write. Presumably then you don’t read my blog. Or maybe you read it because it provides a daily dose of irritation — I have blogs like that. But the reality of the disconnect needs to be considered when you judge someone based on what’s missing from their blog. (It’s much more sensible to judge someone based on what they say.)

The thing is: this is personal, downtime for most of us. It shouldn’t be judged as more than that, and people are never all of and only what they say on their blogs.

I should make an exception for purely academic blogs — Language Log, say — it may be downtime for them, but I don’t know. But I am sure that despite the fact that all of them have academic blogs, they all have non-academic lives also. This works both ways: I can’t judge someone’s non-academic life by an academic blog. The lack of posts about the LLers families doesn’t mean that they are all lonely and single or just about to divorce.

It’s not that I worry I’m boring: the people who find me boring just don’t read my blog, and we’re all happier for it. It’s more: did I sound like a whiny, stupid brat, not interested in ideas? If so, does that mean that it’s true? (I don’t know and no.) Our personal blogs say things about us — including about how we write — but they’re limited and biased (sometimes for, sometimes against ourselves). You know I’ve been to conferences because I say I have — but you don’t know anything else about the work I’ve done, or my abilities — and to expect that you can predict this based on a personal blog? No. (A professional one is different. But until all faculty members have professional blogs, we can’t tell grad students they are weak because they have personal but not professional blogs.)

This is the thing: it is not, at this point, considered obligatory for academics to have professional blogs. Many do — but we don’t think the others are bad academics. Equally, it’s not obligatory for them *not* to have personal blogs — and those who do aren’t bad academics. If you’re working on online media as a dissertation, probably you need to have a professional blog. Otherwise, you can’t say that so-and-so is clearly a more interested academic because they have a blog.

I’ve said what I wanted to say about leaving academia: I think that the prices we are made to pay aren’t always admitted to as prices. Not that you shouldn’t make that choice, but that you need to say yes, it’s a choice I’ve made, with prices I’ve paid. And some people will decide it was worthwhile and I respect that choice, but I couldn’t do it.

Life is about making these choices — which Becky didn’t seem to realise.

I’m not, in the end, sympathetic to Becky. I feel sorry that she’s had such mental health issues. I feel sorry that she wanted to be a mother and an academic, and that’s a hard combination to pull. But I think she wasn’t willing to say that yes, sometimes you give up something for something else, and that she played on victimhood too much. I don’t think she understood what life entails.

And Michelle said:

If the content of a blog seems at first glance to be frivolous, is that necessarily true? And is that a reflection of the blogger? Is a tendency to talk about personal details that matter to no one else evidence of a lack of interest in anythign else? I think that the answer is no in every instance but yet people do judge people in just that way.

This is exactly how I feel. I don’t think I judge people based on that, but it’s hard to see where the things you don’t say matter, and how much that should be taken into account. Letters of reference use this, as do all sorts of conversations. Still, this is different. When I kept a (written) diary, the things I didn’t talk about were (a) meaningless or (b) momentous. The balance has changed here, but the fact of things I don’t talk about still exists.

I talk about frivolous issues, and I think this is fine. It’s not better to talk about your new techtoys than your new boots — except that tech stuff is coded okay and appearance stuff not. And I think that bringing to the fore this coding of masculine = good, feminine = bad by being a clearly intelligent articulate woman who buys boots and knits and likes pink, you’re adding to the discourse.