Two months ago, someone on one of my online discussion boards suggested that certain people on the board really needed to get a blog so they would stop hogging all the bandwidth.  True to my character, I immediate opened up Word and wrote a sassy little essay entitled “Why I Don’t Blog.”  However, I got distracted a few sentences into it and never completed it.  But the gist was:

1. Blogging is narcissistic, while posting to discussion boards is a valiant display of community spirit.
2. As an untenured professor, I cannot actually afford to release anything remotely intelligent that I write into the public domain unless it is thoroughly copyrighted and published in a venue that will count in my tenure file.
3. Why write a blog no one will ever read, when I have a whole discussion board full of imaginary internet friends who refresh their new posts list every 10 minutes, 24/7, as well as a whole contacts list full of friends and family who feel obligated to reply to any ramble I choose to inflict on them?
4. I have some concerns about splattering my personal stuff all over the internet, lest it get linked back to my real identity where I try to fake like I’m super serious and totally not a nut job.  A cover that would undoubtedly be blown if anyone were to read what I really think about things.

So why am I here?

In the past few months my amount of posting, emailing, and journaling has kept ballooning, and because my worlds and identities seem to keep converging, I end up writing the same stuff to multiple people and have now gotten lazy enough to start forwarding my own emails to different recipients.  I also encountered a very fine blog post by and old and dear friend and rhetorical adversary of mine, entitled “Why Blog?”  which while completely uninteresting in its specific contents (just kidding, hon, it was actually very nice) made me realize, “Hey, I could write a way better blog than that!  And he’s already gotten over 3,400 hits!”  So, I have concluded the following:

1. Dominating discussion boards and flooding your friends with long rambling emails is also quite narcisstic.  So if I’m going to be a narcissist, I might as well be an honest and reasonably efficient one.  (I am a big fan of efficiency and have a whole deskful of never-used organization systems to prove it.  Somewhere over there, under that pile of receipts and magazines and overdue library books.)  And blogging really is the primary narcisstic genre of the 21st century.  Much as Romantic poetry was in the 19th (Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”) and Beat writing was in the 1950s (according to one critic, “an overflow as accidental as a bathtub running over”), blogging is the postmodern way to show everybody your navel while pretending you are telling them something important.  And occasionally doing so.
2. Although publication and copyright are important concerns for me, I have plenty to say that no one is ever going to publish, at least in its earliest and most unprocessed forms.  But getting my ideas down on the page, and getting feedback from others, is always what’s helped me cross the bridge from the rambling stream of consciousness in my head to figuring out what I’m really trying to say.  So the blog is only one point along the way, not the end of the writing process, as I struggle to publish rather than perish.
3. The people who really don’t want to read my stuff do a perfectly fine job of ignoring my emails and discussion board posts when they like, and the people who like it will probably be happy to wander over here once in a while to see what I’m up to.
4. I’ve been doing such a good job lately of rooting out my inhibitions and insecurities that I’m afraid I may have few personal boundaries left, so what the heck.  Anyway, I’m less concerned about anyone figuring out who Pollyanna really is, since most of the people who’ll read this probably know already, only with people who decide to google my real name instantly being taken to my navel.  So, to make it just a little more challenging for the nosy types, please don’t use my real name here or link to anything including either my IRL identity or my other major online alteregos.  Here I am Pollyanna Sunshine, internet philosopher, poet, and sage.  Anyone else I may be is incidental and probably irrelevant.