March 13, 2007 2:10 pm

In My Absence

There are a myriad of reasons why I haven’t posted since last week, most of which are really lame excuses. I kept going to start a post, but I would write a couple sentences and realize my writing totally sucked, no one would be interested in what I had to say, and GAH what made me start writing posts in the first place? But I think I’m sort of over it. Sort of.

The most valid of the reasons for not posting is that I’m having a strange sort of experience in which my offline life and my online life are merging and it’s a little weird. Granted, I have always said that more people I know in real life read my blog than otherwise, but now the offline people that read are my co-workers and people from college instead of close friends I’ve known since high school or my boyfriend’s family. Because of this, I’ve been thinking a lot more about what I post here. It’s nothing big – I just don’t want to say something I’ll regret later. I will admit that I considered getting rid of a lot of my archives (well, I’d keep them, but not make them available) because some of the stuff there is wildly embarrassing to me, but I suppose it was my life at the time so they’ll stay.

My Flickr photos have suffered too. (Obviously.) I have a ton of self-portraits to put up, but now I’m oddly self-conscious about them. Also, hi! I don’t go out with friends so all of my pictures are of my embroidery projects because I’m an 80-year-old lady! I don’t know. I guess it’s that I’m still trying to fit in at work and I feel like my website and my flickr photos aren’t helping things. I’m getting over it, but that’s part of the reason why I can’t bring myself to post anything. I don’t even know why I’m that concerned.

In my absence, however, I was not totally useless. I present to you a list of things I could have talked about but didn’t, for whatever reason. Without further ado…

Topics on which I have started, but not finished, a post:

  • Frustrating clients and projects at work
  • My outrage about the girls who got suspended for saying “vagina” during a performance while the kid who said “fuck” got no such reprimanding. IT IS A PART OF THE BODY. It is just as normal a word as “leg” or “appendix.” Can you imagine someone being suspended for mentioning a part of the body? ARGH. The rationale for the suspension is that young children could have been present and school staff felt the word to be inappropriate, so they asked the girls not to say it and they did anyway. Inappropriate? Should we declare “appendix” inappropriate next? Or not, because it isn’t “dirty” and saying “vagina” somehow is? And how is saying that harmful to children anyway? Ignorance is rarely an intelligent choice.
  • How I don’t understand how to work my health insurance to get what I need, and how I need to remember to call them and ask them to explain it to me.
  • The website Wishlistr, which, despite having a stupid name, is actually cool because you aren’t limited to one store’s registry. You can add items from anywhere on the internet. The only feature I wish it had but doesn’t is the option to add a photo of the product.
  • How Daniel’s birthday present came in the mail a few hours after I posted worrying about it not showing up, and the box was ridiculously large for the size of the present. The present was a record player and Daniel totally loved it. The one we had was conjoined with this old dual-deck tape player that didn’t work well or much at all, and the motor on the record player was dying and made everything sound a tiny bit flat. Being music-oriented, neither of us could handle it. It was all off-key and bad. This new one works wonderfully and doesn’t have a cumbersome tape player on the bottom.
  • My hatred for WYSIWYG editors. I don’t care how good one is, you still have to know basic HTML to do anything properly or fix something you messed up. The Internet is not Microsoft Word. It just isn’t.
  • How instead of making more progress on my scarf for Daniel, I started a cotton dishcloth and have made it nearly halfway through. You knit it diagonally and increase some on each row until the halfway point and then you start decreasing. It’s pretty mindless, which is why I can make more progress on it than the scarf. The scarf takes attention. I have to devote time and energy to it, time and energy I do not have.
  • The fact that I signed up for Twitter and have not yet figured out anything useful to do with it besides adding it to my sidebar and then forgetting to update it.

I’m sure there’s more that I’m forgetting. It has been a week, after all. :) There’s no big news or anything. I could tell you how I cleaned the bathtub the other day but that’s not very exciting. Oh! I’ll end by recommending Launchy. You press alt+spacebar and a little box comes up where you can start typing the first few letters of an application (or music file, you can tell it what to look for) and it will launch the program for you. It’s kind of nice if you like keyboard shortcuts, because you don’t have to pick your hand up to grab the mouse if you want to find something in the Start > Programs menu.

P.S. The new Type O Negative CD is coming out today! Must get it after work!

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8 Comments

  • AJ says:

    Meggan, as a coworker and not your highschool pal, I hope you don’t mind me reading this. If you do, too bad. Hahahah.
    Seriously, though, I enjoy your posts. All the ones you ‘started’ would have worked as is, by the way. Yes, your blog is a little window into who you are, but that’s a good thing I think. I get to learn about you without asking those lame getting-to-know-you questions. Also, I wouldn’t worry about what people think of you. I mean, look at me. I say and do some pretty stupid things. If people don’t like it, forget ’em. I am who I am. (That’s not to say you do stupid things.) And finally, yes, I’m long winded, you fit right in here at work, knitting and all.

  • Melissa says:

    I had a similar problem when my online and offline “lives” began to merge. At first it was difficult and I censored a lot of stuff that I would have normally said had none of the offliners known about my site. But then I got to thinking: This is who I am. If people cannot accept that and are going to stop talking to me because of what I might write in my blog, then so be it – they aren’t worth my time. So after about a half year of opening my site up to anyone who wanted to visit it, things got a lot easier. I don’t really censor anything (although I do leave out the really personal stuff) and I’ve grown to like that because people can find out who I really am, what really goes on in my head or simply what I’ve been up to the past few days.

  • lkvy says:

    I censor myself a lot more now than I did a few years ago. I’m also relieved that my archives aren’t online anymore because my family is bound to find my site anyday now and I don’t need them to read the mean stuff I said about them when I was 16.

    Launchy? Twitter? Wishlistr? They are all hilariously lame names.

    Vagina.

  • Tracey says:

    I’m not too sure how I feel about my offline and online lives merging. One thing’s for sure, I would never let my family members read my blog nor would I want anyone at school that I’m not familiar with to read it either. I see my blog as ammo to particularly vindictive people to fire back at me sometimes which probably isn’t the best way to think about it. I think that, if you’re not comfortable with other people seeing something, you should restrict access to it, but if you’re getting over it then it shouldn’t worry you.

  • Adastra says:

    I listened to the new Type O Negative – I think it’s boring. It’s like the earlier, faster albums, and I don’t really like those a lot. I really prefer the “cuddle” songs they made, because that’s what they’re good at…

    However I understand how you feel about blogging – I’ve been feeling similar lately. But I’m actually that far again that I’ve re-opened my own blog to the public… ^^ And I even have self-protraits on flickr which might raise weird looks, but I don’t really care anymore.

  • Adastra says:

    Oooh I forgot to mention that you’re not the only 80-year old lady around ;) I recently started knitting again – doing my second sock, and I really hope that this time it fits! If it does I’ll have to make a second one of that though – that’s kinda the annoying part of knitting socks… ^^

  • George Huff says:

    Want to hear my horror story?

    My boss made me post my eleven3 sxsw posts on his blog. *A piece of the soul falls away.* I know *insert employer name* sent me and all, but fuckkk…

  • Elea says:

    I know what you mean about the online and offline lives merging — that’s been a huge problem for me as well, and I’m STILL trying to figure out how to deal. Add that with a busy schedule, and you’ve got me missing in action from the site for (GAH!) almost a month now…

    Also, add me to the club of WSYIWYG haters. They annoy me to no end, and I have it disabled in WordPress…

    Oh and I haven’t visited in some time evidently, but I really like the new layout. It’s clean and minimalistic, but at the same time also has a personal feel to it.