If you are currently an active member of the blogging community, please ignore the following advisory. This is meant exclusively for those who do not blog but plan to in the near or distant future.
So. ALL YOU FUTURE BLOGGERS. I offer you a series of warnings. Heed these carefully.
1. You will begin to see everything in the world through your blogging-eye, whether you are conscious of it or not (see Dup's post about this exact sensation.) You will compartmentalize most experiences into bite-sized verbal curios. Sometimes you may actually manufacture blogable situations for the sake of a good yarn. Which will make your life seem even more surreal than it already does. Which in some cases may bring about an aggravated case of solipsism… see earlier remarks.
NOTE: While Blogeye can be pretty distracting in everyday circumstances (on the subway, in a restaurant, during coitus), it is much worse if you find yourself in an unusual situation, say at a Coors factory in Golden Colorado or an abandoned insane asylum off the Appalachian trail; in such cases your Blogeye goes BONKERS, slopping crazily about all the blogable detritus like a rat in a sewer. (I shall now officially coin that term: “Blogeye.” My hopes are that it will eventually enter the modern lexicon, like such popular slang terms as “okay” and “kizash” and “dickweed” and “agro”. Feel free to use it often and be sure to credit the source.)
2. You will start to link to high profile bloggers (bloggers whose work you legitimately admire, mind you) with the small hope that they will see your site in their stats and link back to you, in which case your own hit-count will skyrocket.
Or you'll do it in a more covert way… you'll send them a cringe-worthy fan email that tries to sound nonchalant while subtly mimicking the tone of the blogger him/herself, and then casually drop in a link to your blog as an afterthought (click here for an actual specimen) (and for the record, he never wrote back), which of course he/she will read and determine immediately that you are a kindred soul-genius and will link the living fuck out of you, or at the very least blogroll you.
NOTE: EVERY BLOGGER WANTS TO BE BLOGROLLED. Don’t be fooled! If a blogger gives you a fruity cheesecake or a rare coin or a sequin from the lapel of your favorite country singer, DO NOT ACCEPT. It is a ruse to make you feel obliged to reply in kind with a link.
3. You will become obsessed with your stats. You will consult your stat page at least six times an hour, trying to recognize who your visitors are by where they work, which is often encoded into their server info (such as “hq.publictheater.org” or “a202d.bsd.uchicago.edu” or “Ogilvy & Mather”). You will find yourself saying things like, “Who do I know in Korea?”
And you will mentally separate those who found your blog intentionally versus those who happened upon it by using the search string “small+sheila+first+time+fuck” (at which point you will begin to wonder if you aren’t unwittingly attracting an unsavory element to your blog).
4. You will experience insane and uncontrollable blog envy. You'll stumble upon a blog writer whose voice is clear and effortless, whose observations are lucid and pithy and fun, who gets linked from other blogs twice as often as you (salt-on-wound courtesy of the technorati search), and whose comments are filled with folks going on and on about how hard his/her blog rocks.
Then you'll slip into a “blog coma”, where you do nothing for hours but read your own past entries over and over, attempting to approach them with new eyes each time, acting like you are a fresh newcomer who, my word!, has just found an ENCHANTING and UNIQUE new blog and can’t WAIT to tell all her friends.
5. You will feel slightly defeated when you see your friends socially and they don't comment on your recent posts. You will start to think they dislike your writing style, or find your life and your observations tedious and banal. You will suspect they are right.
6. Your blogging journal will EAT your regular journal.
7. You will suddenly have "no free time."
8. You will be tired.
9. Your partner will make fun of you.
10. You will write posts about the joys/pitfalls of blogging. Long, pointless, aggravating posts. Like this one.
Arrrghh. Phooey! I promised myself I would never write a post about blogging, and here you have it. So much for pretending that all of you are actually in my living room drinking tea and listening with wide eyes as I tell stories. Drat.
Small sheila first time fuck, I suppose. It happens.
