Some of you may have noticed that I have yet to fill my links page. I can’t bring myself to do it, to be honest. I can’t bring myself to pick and choose, to decide who is worthy and who isn’t. It smacks of high school, frankly, like most things do in the blogosphere as of late. It’s frustrating. Maddening. Suffocating. It’s no longer about who you think writes well, whose turn of phrase leaves you swirling your bra over your head and raising your glass of Merlot. It’s about popularity, who knows whom, who spent a weekend devoted to another blogger at her apartment in Anytown, leaving with one of her Etsy bags and getting a link via her latest post. It’s Facebook extended. And there doesn’t seem to be room enough for all of us.
Plenty of folks will have no idea what I’m talking about, and I hope they enjoy that status. It’s the place to be, as far as I’m concerned. Because somehow, somewhere, our URLs became a little high schoolish, perhaps elementary, dear Watson, hankering back to an era when our training bras made us fold in half in the locker room, when we despised our reflections in the mirror. It’s small in the greatest sense of the word, and it’s more than what I wrote about in 2005. That was about divisions within a stable community, about folks who revered others and sought their own growth. This new reality is about Tweets that sabotage and Facebook comments that judge and more shit than I ever thought we’d engage in. I care not about that preposition.
There is so much junk floating around the community, so much crap, that at times I no longer want to be a part of it. There are women, now well known, who have handled themselves with great aplomb, great grace and unnecessary apologies, and there are others that need a reality check. You do know what it is that we do, don’t you? We write for the nameless, faceless masses, who perhaps offer up an avatar for our consumption? If we’re honest, we were all fucking nerds at the outset. Some of us more successful than others, some demonstrating more cheerleader pyramid than flute prowess. But really, do any of us have room to play social chair? To determine who lives and dies in the world of online writing? You know we don’t. You know you don’t. And if you’ve felt like you did in the past six months, chances are you’re one of the offenders.
I can’t help but enlist the assistance of a local boy, of course without the approval of his trademark/copyright/flagrant sponsorship attorneys, but I’ll risk it. Did you see what Garret Weber-Gale did when he won the Olympic gold? The one that established his place not in a world of 7 million blogs – half of them anime and Cialis ads, to boot? He didn’t pull the equivalent of what’s been happening lately in these parts. He didn’t throw his relay squad in the water, didn’t accuse them of not wanting the best. He thanked them for lifting him up, for doing their part. He embraced them and their 4 am practice support. Which is what every fucking one of us should be doing for the other. We are all the reason the others exist.
In my humble, nerdy opinion, the blogging Interwebs needs one huge shot of tequila, a group hug, and a reminder to read the memo that it needs to get over its damn self. Keep writing, keep humoring yourself, keep doing what you did in high school that made the kids close to you know they’d know you for a lifetime. Chances are this isn’t going to be your ticket to the big time, and even if it is, it certainly isn’t going to put you atop that cheerleading pyramid. So be fucking nice. Get back to why you did this in the first place. Besides, they put the smart, carpal tunnel girls at the bottom of the pyramid, anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment