I am not my blog

Think, Pia, think about the rest of your life. Think about all the books and magazines piling up in your bedroom; all the DVR’d TV Shows. Force yourself to admit that sometimes writing in your blog and reading other blogs is more exciting than real life; how sometimes you would rather tell things to your blog and blog friends than your real life friends.

Sometimes you find yourself blogging instead of doing real life things; you are late to appointments. You’re not the late type. Something has to happen.

Breathe in deeply as you tell yourself ten times “I am not my blog, I am not my blog….”

The exercise isn’t working; you can’t let go of the need to talk into your blog. But it’s so obvious; you don’t tell your blog everything. How can you breathe out the wall that is somehow keeping you tethered to your blog?

There is only one thing that you can do. You can’t walk away cold turkey; you just can’t. For the next week you are going to limit your blogging time. You will be on line for only four hours a day, and that includes blog related emails, and comments which you now want to badly answer.

But if I’m not my blog how come more people know my blog than know me? If I’m not my blog, how do I manage to become thoroughly entangled in blogland?

Think Pia, about how Rosa Parks helped changed our country by doing something. She refused to sit in the back of the bus. That took real nerve not virtual nerve.

Are you afraid that you’re losing your real life nerve, and substituting virtual nerve?

You have had real life nerve when it comes to politics and any cause since high school. You were the only person in your Long Island high school who was socially acceptable and against the war in Viet Nam. Within the next two years everybody would be; but you were the only one who could put up announcements about rallies and events without fear of them being tampered with.

You didn’t want to be socially acceptable; even then you knew the horrible junior high years were going to be the ones you were going to play off in college and in life. Even then you knew how to frame a story; and you knew that being an outcast would make you sound better in the future. So you really tried to be the class outcast.

You weren’t willing to gain back the weight you had gained when you first moved to your suburb. You weren’t willing to become ugly to be the outcast that you felt you should have been. Nor were you willing to stop being cause centered.

You think about how sad it was that you had been paralyzed in junior high, and words wouldn’t spill from your mouth; how you carried that paralysis over to high school. You never gave most of your classmates a chance. You thought that they were still the same kids that they had been in junior high. You had changed yet you never allowed yourself to realize that other people had also changed.

You weren’t lonely. The class artist/intellectual was your best friend. That alone gave you status; you saw that but refused to accept that other people might also want to be your friend. No, you really didn’t see that. You were too tied into the negative energy that junior high school had embeded in you.

What does this have to do with your blog? Writing your truth so intensely this past year has forced you to rexamine your life. You see how you cast yourself into roles that resided solely in your head. When you speak to other people who knew you then they more than reaffirm that.

You are not blog; but your blog has helped you examine life and stereotypes. You were good when you told somebody that you wouldn’t defend yourself, the answers were contained in your blog; that he should look in the categories. You are no longer angry about that.

You will move on. You think that you are owed a big apology. Hah, that will come when the moon and the sun converge. There will always be people who don’t understand you; there will always be people who will call you moon bat a term you don’t really understand but are proud of being called.

Put it in its place; let it show how other people can be stupid. The next time somebody asks you why you hate America so much, pretend that you are looking into their faces; and ask them why they hate America so much? Because your America is the America of Rosa Parks; it is the America of limitless posiblities, and of good things that take hard work to attain, and you’re not talking about your personal resources, but the resources that built this country and are trying to make it great again.

When they ask you why you hate Bush so much don’t even try to explain that it isn’t Bush as much as the people he surrounds himself with; the people who he speaks to before making a Supreme Court appointment. As a New Yorker you had limited exposure to the people on the radical right. You only knew them through newspapers, magazines and TV shows; sometimes you think that it was better that way.

But it wasn’t. You have faced the enemy; you have seen their rampagant stupidity face to face or blog to blog.

It is good to know first hand or almost first hand what and why you are fighting.

Most bloggers are good people. So many good blogs; so little time. You can’t limit yourself to four hours a day; you must if you want your personal writing to become better. Blogging has helped it; now you need to refine it. You’re not sure that you can do that on your blog.

One rule that you will strictly adhere to; one day a week will be blogless. That is non-negotiable. Repeat:
“I am not my blog….” No you are not; but your blog is part of you.

The political part of this is not up for debate. I have no wish to argue today.

Really wish I had been at The Cream concert last night; I saw them when I was in high school and have never forgotten that concert. Hope that the DVD is good.