Sunday, November 20, 2011

damn you, mr. darcy

Is it (the blog) too cute? It might be. But I kind of love it. And I think the cuteness will offset the occasional cursing rather nicely.

I wonder how many times I've written this post.

I have a love/hate relationship with Jane Austen and her men. Darcy, Bingley, Edward Ferrars, Colonel Brandon, Edmund, Mr. Knightley, Captain Wentworth, and, of course, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant, and Colin Firth. These men are not real. I know this, you know this, and we love them anyway.

I just checked, and the last time Mr. Darcy was referenced on my blog it was 2006. I'm not sure what happened there. Am I regressing? Maybe.

That last post (five years ago?!) was about how I tend to like imaginary men over real men. I have a new theory as of late: I approach all men as if they were imaginary. And by "all men," I mean "available men" or "unattached men" or something like that. The men who I should be considering or hoping that they consider me, they're not real. They're. . . they're Mr. Darcy.

There is a part of me that is insanely frustrated that this seems to be the eternal conversation on this blog. Or in my life. I spent Friday night (a) swooning over HHS's production of Aida, directed by my genius friend,  and (b) apologizing to my (other genius) friend that I was talking about a boy. A boy who is a man who is not Mr. Darcy.

I wonder if all this is my real frustration. Because I have a long list of them right now. Maybe not that long. I'm tired of being alone, but the aforementioned genius friends have alleviated that to some degree. I kind of love my genius friends. I want more of them. I should just clone them, keep them in my linen closet.

So more genius friends. The other frustration is the (lack of) writing and sending writing out since I graduated. I know that there is an easy solution there, but I just haven't been able to produce anything I'm happy with since I left Chicago. I miss that more than Mr. Darcy. I want to write and I want people to read my writing and I want to be a writer. I'm not sure I can say I am one right now.

Oh, the self-doubt. I want to shake it off, go to work tomorrow without anything holding me back. I don't think that's going to happen. But at least I have a cute blog.

Sunday, November 06, 2011

blogging and the beast

Hello world. I haven't blogged in over a month, but I've been thinking a lot about blogging.

I had a professor who would ask me why I blogged. S/he thought it would take my attention away from my academic and creative writing. I tried to explain that blogging was a different kind of writing, that it's a way of sorting through ideas, that it's fun. The prof didn't get it at first, but a few years ago, s/he started blogging.

I started blogging in 2004. Seven years ago this month. Go team. I started because Kristen started, and Kristen started because Jeremy started. Nothing like peer pressure. But really it was about a conversation. For a few years, I was part of two groups of writers who all blogged. It was another way for us to create our community. There weren't a lot of other types of blogs out there yet--the only blogs I knew were "writer" blogs.

Now I follow over a dozen blogs. There are still writer blogs, but there are also art blogs and home blogs and wedding blogs and the all-powerful mommy blogs. It's not the same activity. My own blog went from being part of this small, almost exclusive, community, to a travel blog when I was in London, to a way of letting my family and friends know that I was still alive in Chicago.

All this just leads me to this (overwhelming) question of what this blog is now. Do I stay here? Do I start a new blog? Do I blog at all? I've toyed over the years with starting separate blogs for my not-so-secret wedding/event obsession. More recently I thought about a writing blog modeled after an exercise we used at NU that was usually successful. Or even a blog to chronicle my thoughts on religion, scripture, etc.

I'm not the same editorgirl who started this blog seven years ago. This blog is a record of how I've become who I've become. And I love it for that. But I don't know if I belong here anymore.
 

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