In my late night Net-browsing, I came across this obituary on Queerty, only it was about a blog, not a person. The Boi from Troy abruptly wished his readers farewell.
A year and some time ago, Scott-O-Rama took a sabbatical from blogging and planned a comeback. He even set up a spiffy blog template a few months ago to return in style. Ironically, his most significant post after makeover was one to say goodbye. He even took it a step further and got rid of much of his social networking accounts such as Twitter and Flickr.
Both blogs had large readerships and were heavily blogrolled. Both felt blogging became more of a chore than something they wanted to do after a while, so they called it quits at some point. They were big trees in their niche of the blogosphere forest and we heard them fall.
To celebrate Bu$h’s leaving, I’m going to put together a playlist with some music that gives the musical equivalent of hitting him with on the ass with the door on his way out. An appropriate choice to be included on the playlist is the Dixie Chicks, who took too much flack for saying that they were ashamed to be from the same state as the President. Let that be your high-heeled, Texan boot kick out the door, Mr. President.
A definitely appropriate selection would be “Mouth” by Bush, because “nothing hurts like yout mouth,” Mr. President. Hearing him clumsily handle the English language was quite painful. The question is, can the trauma from eight years of bad speech be undone?
I’m still trying to figure out what else to play that day, so I’m glad to get some suggestions.
As for President-ElectObama, I’m going to include that infamous song by Rick Astley because he pulled the ultimate Rickroll with his selection for who would do opening prayer.
I try to tell myself that this blog is for me, which isn’t completely true. I am transmitting my signal out there for readers to respond to. Over the course of the past couple of years, with a few social networking systems out there, some people did respond, and I in turn answered their signals as well.
This Prismacolor-like template has been very reliable ever since I migrated the blog to a hosted site using WordPress. It’s quirky, suggests an artistic temperament, and is easy to use. However, I don’t want to use this one forever, so I’ve tried a few templates on for size. I want to switch to a minimalist white background, black Helvetica text Wordpress template I can plunk a header image into.
Just a tagline I’ve recently adopted to describe my post-MFA life, but it fits. This blog is essentially my MFA creative writing afterlife. I do my stories and rants, and then reveal how I watch too much television. I get my writing community, this time stupidity free (most of the time). It’s part of my writing practice. As I’ve mentioned earlier, it’s my online magazine and my broadcast. It’s the best way I can spin my blog since it is about me and what I put up here.
For this year, I plan to keep on going with the blog. I’ve had my blog-ennui already. Plus, everyone (including yours truly) is hooked on Facebook, and I’m waiting for that moment where they get super-douchey and yank the carpet out from under the biggest Internet party ever. It may never happen, but one should always be prepared for the aftermath. For me, that’s keeping my lovely crayon-adorned channel (or whatever appearance I adopt) because my words are mine here.
I took this iPhone screenshot at 8:09pm for the visual pun.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, I want to stop procrastinating. It is my goal for this year, even if I might not cut out all of my bad habits. The idea is to start.
One manifestation of living on Procrastination Street is writer’s block. It is easy to put off writing because the rewards aren’t so immediate. Twittering my time away or posting witticisms on Facebook get more response, but those sentences are sent out on the quick and don’t take much process to make it into a story or a poem that expresses an idea.
It’s a new year, and hopefully a fresh start (of sorts). I’ve got my health, I’ve got work, but no telling how long either’s going to last with the economic downturn carried over from last year. However, that’s as much pessimism I’ll commit to text.
This year, I would like to deal with procrastination, which is the core of many new year’s resolutions. I could name all my goals, but it all boils down to this issue. I’ve always put things off, and it’s a miracle that I’ve even finished high school, especially in my senior year. When I was in college, activities such as cramming for exams and last-minute term papers were such time honored traditions that I kind of felt normal. In graduate school, I found that such behavior almost killed me.
When I was in my first year of the MFA program, I took an incomplete in a lit seminar on the condition I’d eventually turn in my paper. Of course, one has a year to fulfill the incomplete, so this essay I was supposed to write was a monkey on my back. I thought about it every day and I kept putting it off until I absolutely had to write it and turn it in, which was in the last few days it was due. Needless to say, I would not ever do it again.
But, I do stuff like that paper all the time in my life. I let clutter pile up until it’s unbearable, I put off grading papers or making lesson plans until the last possible hour, I intended to go to the gym and not gone, and I keep meaning to get myself into a writing routine. I then hate myself for not following through on these things.
So, I think you get an idea of what I want to get done. However, dealing with procrastination is the start of breaking a multitude of bad habits, even if they don’t all go away in 2009.
With that said, “Happy New Year’s.” I hope you find a fresh start this year as well.
This week in the San Diego Reader, I am quoted by Barbarella, the stylish blogger and columnist, in her latest entry of Diary of a Diva. She uses a snarky little tweet of mine to grab the reader’s attention in her discussion about online social networking where she compares it to the water cooler conversations at work, but with a little more control. You know, those conversations we all love to have on Facebook, Twitter, and even MySpace. Often, when people ask those of us who use social networking what they are about, we’re often hard pressed to explain, especially when it comes to Twitter, and Barbarella does take some time to explore that issue.
Barbarella, I enjoy your stories and your witty contributions to the online conversation. Thanks for the quote.
Last night, I went out with my friend Scott to ice skate at Horton Plaza. It’s an annual tradition in San Diego; however a lot of people here can’t skate. I just do the San Diego thing and deal with it - for a while.
Happy whatever festive occasion you choose to celebrate. Happy Holidays from ShindoTV.
Facebook-land is an interesting place. Most of the time, it is fairly inane, especially with the apps that are designed to distract people from their work. There’s tons of statuses and other kinds of feeds that go on all day. Most of the time, my timeline of statuses, links, and other news seems to go largely unnoticed. However, some of my items related to Rick Warren have provoked responses from some people on my network.
I joined a Facebook discussion group No Rick Warren at Obama Inauguration and I got a response was from a good friend of mine, an evangelical Christian, who wondered what my personal beef was with Rick Warren. To his credit, he and his wife took some flack from people they knew for voting for Obama and voting against Props 4 & 8. I sent him a response saying we can agree to disagree and these were my reasons:
I’m not at ease with Warren’s gentler rhetoric about GLBT issues. He certainly showed his loved towards “sinners, not the sin” with support for Prop 8.
If Obama was insistent on getting an evangelical pastor for this invocation, couldn’t he have gotten Brian McLaren?
Thankfully, a unifying opinion on Warren is not the basis for our friendship (which would be in trouble if it were). There is room to talk about him and the issues he represents.
Given that, I don’t have a soft opinion on Warren right now. I think it’s great that Melissa Etheridge is having a dialogue with Rick Warren. She is someone who has a lot at stake with this whole Prop 8 issue, so she’s a better person than I can be right now. I’m just not there.
I haven’t been a good gay blogger by editorializing on how Rick Warren is so innapropriate for Obama’s inauguration (which is my opinion). All I’ve been doing was doing things here and there on the Facebook feed such as joining that group and posting links to a Rachel Maddow commentary and an SF Gate editorial appropriately entitled The Purpose-driven Bigot. That, and I posted a tweet on Twitter. Given that people seem to pay more attention to my Facebook feed than my blog, I was asking for it.
