Sometime this afternoon, I got my 50,000th hit on this blog. From my stats page, it looks like the visitor came to me via 11d. Thanks!
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No energy for a real post tonight. Sorry. After a lovely cool spring, it’s suddenly summer in DC — hot and humid. It feels like someone put lead in my shoes.
Today’s book is I’m Not The New Me, by Wendy McClure. It’s the story of her popular weightloss blog (although she doesn’t call it that) Pound and how it affected her life. (The link is valid — but McClure is mostly blogging about the book now. She also writes for Television Without Pity.) I have to admit that I had never heard of Pound before I picked up the book, but I had seen the infamous 1974 Weight Watchers Recipe Cards that she found and scanned. (If you haven’t seen them, check them out. They’re scary.)
The book is partially about body image and weight loss, partially about the weirdness of interacting with people who think they know you because they read your site. As the title suggests, McClure didn’t really feel like the success story her readers were looking for, and worried that she was letting them down when she plateaued short of her goal. The book is a quick read, interesting without being profound, amusing without ever being hysterically funny.
It made me think a bit about the different genres of blogging. Some of them — weight loss blogs, race training blogs, infertility blogs, and some illness blogs come to mind — are organized around a specific goal and therefore have, if you will, a narrative arc that draws the reader in. Whereas other blogs — political blogs, most parenting blogs, most craft blogs — meander around a theme or themes. You read them because you enjoy the writing, are interested in the topic, or care about the person, but there’s not the "what happens next" hook to keep you coming back.
There’s been a lot of talk about blogrolls on several of the blogs I read lately, with some folks worrying about exclusivity/cliquishness, while others argue that they feed into hierarchies in unhelpful ways. (A blogroll is the list of other blogs that’s off on the side of many blogs.)
I’m a fan of blogrolls. Looking at someone’s blogroll is a bit like looking at the books on their shelves, something that I do whenever I’m invited into someone’s house. Sometimes I find something new that I haven’t heard of. Sometimes I’ll find something that I’ve also read, and it will give me a subject of conversation. And almost always I’ll get a better sense of who the person is and what his or her interests are — or were at some point. (I know I’m not the only person who still has books from undergraduate courses in my house.)
So I thought I’d mention some new additions to my blogroll.
One is War on Error, which I found via her comments on Jody’s thoughtful post about class. Looking at the recent posts, I see she writes about choices, housing prices, work, health, food, class.
I’ve added Chocolate and Peanut Butter, a new joint blog by Anne of Barely Attentive Mother and Marjorie of Unclimber. They’ve written an interesting pair of posts in response to my discussion of Unequal Childhoods.
I’ve also added Anne’s new popular economics blog, Economom. I was especially interested in her review of Freakonomics, for which I have a hold request at the library.
Home from New York. We had a good time — ate some wonderful matzoh ball soup, caught up with some old friends, ran along the great new riverfront path on the West Side, visited the dinosaurs, and attended the Blog Sheroes meetup.
Nichelle liveblogged the event, including links to all of the attendees’ blogs. I see that Lindsay (Majikthise), Elayne (Pen-Elayne), and Carolyn (Instructions to the Double) have already posted about it as well. I was a little intimidated walking into the place, but soon felt very welcome. (And the place wasn’t as terminally hip as I had feared.) Topics of conversation included how we got into blogging, shoes, how many of us were high school or college debaters, animation, mutilated Barbies, our freaking cute kids, academia, and birth stories.
…at the Blog Sheroes meetup in New York. It’s about 2 blocks from my parents’ apartment, where I’ll be celebrating Passover, so I really don’t have any excuse not to attend. And I’ll get to meet Bitch, PhD.
Jody has two interesting posts up about why she doesn’t blog much about politics. I write about politics when something is really making me crazy, or when an issue that I care about is being overlooked, or when I feel like I have something to say that’s different from what everyone else is saying about the same thing. I generally don’t write about things like Social Security that I feel have been talked to death. I think Jody’s right in saying that political blogs are no more "valorous and valuable," no less self-indulgent, than mommy blogs or sports blogs or dating blog.
Jody said that she doesn’t believe "that political discussions on blogs have much spill-over effect." Most political blogs do seem to act primarily as echo chambers, reinforcing the participants’ confidence that they are the keepers of the truth, but not affecting anyone in the outside world very much. They may have done in Dan Rather, but I’m not sure they changed anyone’s opinion of George Bush’s service in the National Guard.
Ironically, I think that mommy blogs may be more effective politically than political blogs. Mommy blogs reach an audience that isn’t all choir no congregation, and they also personalize issues in ways that move people. I could post until my fingers fell off about poverty policy and not get as many hits as I did for my series of posts about following the thrifty food plan for one month. Maura’s story about HB1677 on Democracy for Virginia didn’t really take off until Grrrl picked it up at Chez Miscarriage and all heck broke loose.
Nightline totally missed this in their story about blogging, even though they devoted a lot of time to the HB1677 story. They’re too worried about whether bloggers are "real journalists," which just doesn’t strike me as that important a question.
Ogged seems to have gotten it right in his post about mommy blogs:
"The mothers are profane, and horny, and pissed, and funny, and, still, devoted, and protective, and nurturing. What’s more, they write intelligently and in detail about how a particular bill, or urban plan, or school board, affects their lives. The real speech of mothers, and their commentary as mothers on what we’re used to thinking of as "the political" is, suddenly, itself part of political speech."
Lauren at Feministe wrote this week that she expected people who knew her in real life who read her blog to let her know. She explained:
"It is important that as a friend, relative, co-worker or whatever you may be to me, your presence at my weblog does not impede my ability to express myself…. If I did not personally provide you with my URL, this is probably because I may not want you to read certain things I might write about you or others you care about, in order to spare your feelings, avoid drama, or maintain their privacy."
I’m coming from a different position. While this blog doesn’t have my full name on it, anyone who knows my name can find it pretty easily. In the past couple of weeks, two long-lost friends have contacted me through the comments. And I’ve given the URL to my family and friends. Yes, it means that there are some topics I’m somewhat inhibited about writing on. But I’m not really the type to talk about my sex life on the internet. And it’s nice to get emails and calls of concern when I post that my kids are sick or I had a really lousy day.
So why don’t I publish this under my name? If you disagree with my writing, I want you to respond by telling me where I went wrong, not dragging my life into it. And I don’t want any nutcase who I might piss off showing up at my doorstep, or at my kid’s school. I’ve provided enought detail that someone who was sufficiently obsessed could probably figure it out, but I don’t need to make it easy for them.
Lauren goes on to say:
"If I make my opinions public, I am held accountable for them. I have to own my words, be willing to take responsibility for what I have said, admit flaws and quibbles in my rhetoric. I have to pay attention the particulars of language, how punctuation and word choice can shift an entire argument."
I think that’s an important lesson. Earlier this year, one post I wrote got a lot of attention, mostly hostile. I thought that I had been misunderstood, and considered deleting the post. But I decided that would be intellectually dishonest. I can take the heat.
That said, I don’t typically edit what I blog. If I did, I’d post a lot less often. I’m often figuring out what I think about an issue in the process of writing. This is a first draft, not a polished product. (Maybe that’s why Lauren gets several times more hits per day than I’ve gotten in my lifetime of blogging.)
Via MUBAR and Postcards from the Mothership, I learned that I was included in a roundup of mommy blogs in the Ottawa Citizen. They picked one post from a different blog for each day in February. They picked my entry for February 23. It’s sort of cool to be included with a bunch of "big name" bloggers, even if they decided my name was "DC Mom."
I’m tired tonight. I blew off the fundraising auction at D’s preschool tonight and am going to take a bath and get to bed early.
So instead of writing anything of my own, I’m just going to share a few absolutely lovely posts about the promises parents make to their children:
Thanks to Ann Douglas for the very nice mention of this blog. She’s the author of several books on pregnancy and parenting, and her blog focuses on these issues. And welcome to anyone stopping by as a result of her mention. I’m afraid the place isn’t quite as up-to-date and "neat" as I’d have liked with company coming over, but I’ve been somewhat distracted from writing about parenting by… actual parenting. So, don’t pay any attention to those dustbunnies, put the stack of books on the floor so you can sit down, and make yourself comfortable.
That’s usually the way I respond to in-person unexpected guests as well. We’re not total slobs, and we generally stay on top of the dirty dishes and the laundry, but vacuuming is generally pretty low on our list of priorities. I think the problem is that it doesn’t really get any harder if you postpone it a day or a week. If you don’t do the laundry for two weeks, you have a huge mountain of dirty clothes to face when you run out of underwear. But if you don’t vacuum for two weeks, it’s not really any more work than if you had been doing it all along. And there’s always kids to be read to, and blogs to be written, and little things like sleep. So the vacuuming tends to slide…
That said, my husband and I have actually spent much of today taking turns vacuuming and dusting. We don’t know what triggered the asthma attack, but the level of dust and cat hair in the house is something that’s within our control. They’re probably not the major cause — if D. were really allergic to them, he wouldn’t have made it to age 4 without showing symptoms, not the way we keep house — but my understanding is that triggers are additive, and so it’s worth doing what we can.
Jen commented in a thread on excema over at finslippy that her doctor "seemed floored that I was not willing to run home and scour our house from top to bottom every 3-4 days in order to keep a few bumpy spots from coming up on my kid’s arms and legs." I’m totally on her side — but not being able to breathe is another story. If vacuuming the heck out of the house keeps us out of the pediatric ward, somehow we’ll manage to do it.
