sleeping upstairs
See if this has happened to you in your own past. There is the auditory experience of being upstairs in your bedroom as a child, sleepy but not yet sleeping. Your parents have invited people over and they are likely drinking. There are lots of good comforting grownup sounds coming from downstairs. You put your face on the pillow this way then that, hearing how the sound of their voices change. There is an auditory warmth. Yet, you dare not go downstairs. You will get in trouble, you are not wearing the right thing, you are asking to be the butt of jokes you don't understand just by descending the stairs in that inevitably wide-eyed state that you are in at this age. It's just who you are. So you stay in your room, listen, and begin some restless dreaming that is all a part of growing up after all.
This is my current relationship with blogging. I am completely overextended and yet bored with that, no longer wanting to share every intricacy of what decision I succumbed to each day. I can hardly bear to read other blogs, their glittery brilliance of well adjusted people with fast ideas and faster execution, loads of trackback and spanky clean comments. I am in a state of alienation, slinking upstairs in my Sears nightgown that catches its polyester threadlets on my jagged fingernails. I want you all to know so much, not of me necessarily, but of what I have observed. Yet I cannot separate the two at the moment and I have enough monuments to my narcissistic defaults at the moment thankyouverymuch.
However while I am sleeping in the upstairs bedroom of the blogging world, waiting to grow up, I encourage you to write me as I would love to hear your own story, even if not fit to print, and through that you may indeed find out mine. Perhaps that is how many social phobias start, is people simply wanting to be discreet, and then next thing they know is they don't leave the house. However no matter how I look at it, much of what I might write is unprintable for the public.
Time does cure. I thought I would never write here about my trials having my first child, or remodeling the house, or going through dot-com or 9-11. I thought I would never write about my desire to be wanted by an industry that I picked out when I was 21, the 15 year quest that continues. But I have written about all of that and perhaps I will write about 2006 as well. Sometime.
But let's look at blogging from a grownup perspective, instead of a child's. I am one of the invited guests, yet here I am sitting in my car in the driveway tragically waiting for the inspiration to strike. Again Robert Scoble plays his role. Tapping on the window. "Hello? Beth? You know, people want to hear this stuff? If they don't like it they can start their own blog! If you cross the line then maybe it should have been crossed in the first place! Let the chips fall!" And convinces me to enter the party just as I was about to drive away. For he has played this role in the past for many and plays it again for me now. Setting an example.