|
|
Thursday, February 16th, 2006
|
7:54p - Escalate
OH NOES IT'S DRAMA
Folks? This is my journal. Not yours. I don't know how clear I can make this before y'all GET IT. This is my primary means of communication with most of you, even those I know IRL. And, most importantly, this is how I vent about my pet peeves, form essays and story ideas that may be used for something real in the future, and in general comment about stuff I see and hear about.
There are, at last count since the defriending exodus that was last week, about 300 of you who have friended me. There are, according to my sitemeter when I last had it up, and the tiny rss feeds I either don't know about or have allowed to continue operating, at least that many who read but don't have Livejournals. I also - and this may come as a shock - know people IRL who don't read my blog, or have no inkling of its existence.
When people you know IRL read your blog, it's always tricky to balance someone else's experience with your experience. None of what we do or say is wholly ours; the actions we take affect people, and when a blogger or journaller is affected, the result can be a post, a rant, an essay, a one-liner. Because bloggers tend to have more of their experiences and emotions laid raw for their viewers, their journals often exist as exaggerated versions of their true selves. We deal with caricatures online, because our real personalities would be as boring to read about as they are fun to hang out with.
A large part of journaling involves prompts. These can be one-word or one-line ideas intended to get you writing, but most prompts exist as small real-life incidents. They throw a switch in your brain that says "hey, I've been meaning to post something on this." Someone runs a red light right in front of you, so you write about how the drivers in your town are worse than in any other town on the face of the earth. Someone disrupts a class you're in, so you write about that time someone even weirder disrupted your ninth grade science class. More often than not, the subjects we write about are turned into amalgams, their collective bad habits accumulating in our minds and compressed into a rant. And you get it all out to avoid stabbing the guy at lunch who sits next to you at the counter even when there are FIFTY DECENT SEATS at LEAST elsewhere in the diner and on top of it he SLURPS his SPAGHETTI and a little droplet of marinara gets on your bag, like, GOD, we all know these people should be murdered in their sleep, but somehow the courts allow them to LIVE. That guy? He may not even be mentioned in your journal, but the next time you write about table manners, you can bet your ass he'll be there in spirit, still dripping marinara ALL OVER your BRAND-NEW BAG even though originally it was just a tiny drop, right there on the corner, and the bag was really that old thing you picked up at Goodwill, but still, it's the principle of the thing.
I've had a journal since 1997, in some form or another. I learned from the mistakes of others that you don't out the bad habits and sins of others - by name. You don't make it clear who you're talking about. It's the responsibility of the blogger to realize that, while their experiences with others are theirs, identity is sacrosanct. Only extreme circumstances warrant "outing" someone - faking a death like ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif) limeybean, lying about a cat's horrific injury to get money like... um... that one girl, or making money off of fake fanart like Crystal Gamgee. We can all name cases in which someone either committed felony fraud or toyed horribly with the emotions and good will of other people, and the consensus seems to be that it's better knowing, in these extreme cases, who these people are - because chances are they'll do it again, or they need serious help. But, aside from those extreme cases, bloggers strike a careful balance between preserving the emotional truth of their experiences with the need to not "out" others as the sources of their minor woes.
It is egotistical to read a post and assume that you are the target. You may, indeed, be the impetus - but "impetus" and "target" are very different things. It is egotistical to assume, also, that your interactions with a particular blogger are so unique that you are the only person who could possibly have ever sparked certain associations, thoughts, or feelings in the blogger's mind. If I rant about marriage, for example: It is true that hpsf_phoenix is the only person thus far that I have married. But if I rant about marriage here, I may be more informed by representations of marriage in the media, the gay marriage debate, and people who hold weddings for housepets than our own personal dynamics. Any creative impulse is subject to the same vagaries, and this can occur without our knowledge - I wrote a short story, and my workshop partners noticed that my protagonist had an abusive relationship with her mother. What my workshop partners did NOT do was assume that it was a reflection of my personal experiences. The genesis of that particular dynamic was more than likely (and I'm betraying my intellectual exterior here) the first scene between Kim Cattrall and Britney Spears in Crossroads. Uh-huh. Yup. You only get one mother, and Britters lost out on that one, as did my character, even though my character was more mentally with-it than Britney Spears, and she was faking MPD at the time.
Absolutely nothing you write, as a "serious" writer or as a blogger, ever exists in a vaccuum. You draw on what other people have said and written, filtered through your eyes, processed by your brain, filtered out again through your mouth or your keyboard. The reader filters it through her experience, and this begins the process again. Reading anything is just one massive game of Telephone. To presume to know specific inspirations of a writer when you're not in her head is a tricky, tricky business, particularly when your own personal issues and quirks probably inform your perceptions more than the issues and quirks of the writer in question.
Bloggers face these presumptions and assumptions every time they write. If I choose to write about something that happened while snapple and I were hanging out, my write-up will be different from hers, and she'll read my write-up and interpret it differently than how I wrote it. That's another good reason to strip other identities from your posts and rants, and make them into amalgams. If I'm going to write about something that happened, to me, and I'm well aware that the impetus may be seen as someone else, I will amalgamize the incident in question. If I do mention specifics, I will pick-and-choose specifics from a variety of different people. Notice I've done so very deliberately in this post. If one person annoys you about one thing, it's not really worth posting anyway, unless it's HUGE. But if you see one small quirk as a general pandemic, you've got yourself a post - and one that isn't about a person. It's about a behavior. If you post about Republicans, and all the crazy stuff they do to ensure the poor orphans starve to death while working in sweatshops, you don't mean that yndy, personally, kicks those orphans every single day. If she posts that Democrats are intent on screwing the rich and taking all their money to line the pockets of apathetic government bureaucrats in Social Services, she's not envisioning me personally gripping two bloody wads of cash and turning a crank that creates ever more complicated levels of bureaucracy. These are types, used to convey emotional truths: one, that Republican policies often screw the poor; and two, that Democrats often create needless levels of government and desire a progressive income tax. The more offended I get, the more likely it is that I actually beat up a Dupont heir and took his money. The more offended she gets, the more likely it is that she owns the orphan sweatshop.
The question is not if someone gets personally offended at something I write, it's when. My journaling style is carefully constructed over nearly ten years of public writing. I don't take it lightly. I will not see my personal experiences made public or private by anyone but me, and damn anyone whose personal chips decide that I'm not allowed to say something in public when I make it perfectly clear that it's about me. When your name is used, you get to put your chips in; ultimately, it's my filter. Getting offended over what's put in a blogging post really reveals more about the person being offended than it reveals about the person who wrote it. The response reveals more of our own insecurities than what actually caused the offense - just look at Janet Jackson's Nipplegate and the hysterical response of a Puritanical America. They were blurring the chests of infant girls for God's sake. There are legitimate avenues through which we can be offended, and it seems to me that there are so many of those in present society that going out and looking for new reasons to bring out the flamethrower is a bit silly. And if there's something you do, a habit you're trying to stop, a wrong you haven't amended, and it happens to jump out at you from another post free of context, it's specious to blame the person who wrote it for causing you the offense. It means you're picking a small point out of an alamgam, making yourself the representative, and owning an awful lot of responsibility. If I post about the moron downstairs who lets his car's bass go for hours on end, causing me headaches (NOTE: YOU CANNOT BE GHETTO IN $800/MONTH APARTMENTS. STOP.), and I mention something about white people who dress in head-to-toe FUBU like they're down with the homies, and someone vociferously and huffily defends their personal use of baggy pants? There's an underlying issue there that has NOTHING to do with what I wrote. I'm not going to apologize for dissing the co-opting of FUBU, or for finding it absurd. Chances are, I'm not going to try to smooth over or explain what I wrote any further, because the offendee has to deal with his own issues on his own time. If he feels personally offended by the mention of posers, chances are it's because he hasn't reconciled his own status as a poser, or because he isn't a poser and his self-esteem is threatened by people who are. Either way, he's looked in a portrait, believed it to be a mirror, and didn't like what he saw.
If you're a Jungian, you believe that people exist as "types." If you're not a Jungian, you've still noticed that people lump each other together into categories. These can be based on physical characteristics, context, or tiny personal tics. "People I met while I was wearing my favorite slutty dress" get a different interaction than "people I met while I was horribly scarred from the time my dog accidentally set me on fire." It's natural for us to split ourselves into different people, depending on who we are when we're with different groups of friends. Watch me run a LAN game sometime. I'm horribly insecure. Watch me in class. I'm horribly self-assured. Watch me play music. I'm horribly drunk. But I'm always myself, as different as "myself" might be. I'm the only one who can own it, and I distill myself into a type as much as I do anybody else. It all depends on context.
(comment on this)
|
|
|
|