Interview With A Blogger: Me!

Herein forthwith follows the interview that Whoorl dreamt up for me as part of Citizen of the Month's Interview challenge. Whoorl's questions are in purple, the choice of color being mine, for no reason whatsoever.

If you were forced to blog about one (and only one) subject, what would it be?
ME! I know what Whoorl's trying to do, get me to focus on that one thing that stands between me and success: my inability to focus on one topic. But I can't. Don't you think I want to? Nor can I, it seems, professionalize this blog. That was my intention, and I did, in pursuing it, pay lots of money to go to BlogHer. But whatever they were selling doesn't seem to have taken with me. Maybe I'm just not cool enough or young enough or or--maybe I just don't care enough. I dunno. I see people to-ing and fro-ing with their blogs and pitching for blog awards and doing all this stuff that seems so incredibly "high school" to me. I simply can't sustain it.

What is your beverage of choice?
It depends upon the time I am choosing. In the morning, I’m a coffee-drinkin’ girl. I like it strong, full-bodied and rich, tasting like coffee, dammit. Come afternoon, I switch to Diet Coke, out of the can. Come evening, I prefer l'eau de potato, Russian preferably, over rocks with a twist. Stoly...Grey Goose. Or a Gin Martini (is there any other kind?) straight up with 3 olives. What I don't like are frou frou drinks: all those Tinis they've created to give people something sweet and sickly to get them gassed. Sissies.

Tell me why Northern California is a lovely place to live.
Who said it was? Not me. I've lived all over--here, there, and everywhere--and what I've learned is that every place and no place is lovely to live in. I'm here because my SoonTBX wanted to move here. Okay, okay, I wasn't exactly tied up and shipped to Sacramento, but if it hadn't been for his gentle urging, which manifested as constant whining and complaining and a pervasively permanent bad mood, I would still be living in LA. And probably right now my roof would be leaking because they're having terrible rains down there and that's what my roof did when it rained. Instead I am up here, sealed in tight, warm and dry in this wasteland called Elk Grove. And my SoonTBX is living elsewhere. And his roof is leaking. Ha! Karma!

Who is your favorite author?
Doing the coursework for a PhD in English Lit sort of ruined reading novels for me. Once you learn how to deconstruct a text, there's no going back to just reading for pleasure. When I did my MA, I did it in Southern Lit, and then Faulkner was my favorite. When I started my PhD, I thought I'd be an "Austen scholar" (la-de-dah), but my professor was insane and that sadly tinged my doctoral work with intense nutsiness. I haven't read Austen since I didn't have to, and I'm certainly not watching Austen month on PBS. Jane would be appalled.

What would your friends say is your most charming quality? Most annoying?
Oh, jeeze, I haven't a clue what they'd say is my most charming quality. Truth be told, I don't think of myself as one who could ever be labeled charming. I don't crook my little finger when I drink tea and although my manners are passable, I don't think the Vanderbilt's will be inviting me to join the cotillion. I will say that when I saw the film Steel Magnolias, I recognized a quality in the Shirley McLaine character that made me say, "that's what I'm going to be like when I grow up." And I believe I am, for good or ill.

That I speaketh the truth, even when I probably shouldn't is probably my most annoying quality. And that I speak it as if my truth is The Truth can and does create some moments of angst for those around me. I'm working on that, though, because I really don't believe in an Essential Truth, so to sound as if I do is antithetical to...to...my truth.

In 2006, you mentioned wanting to "be more present in you life". Do you feel you have accomplished this goal?
I am more present in my life, but it's an ongoing goal which I don't believe one ever accomplishes. I'm just starting out with little baby steps and lots of backsliding and falling down and smashing my nose flat. But one of the ways in which I have gotten better relates to the first question. I'm somewhere in the middle of working my way through the bullshit of being A Blogger. I am trying to quell all urges to write to please an audience. I am trying to at the least be true to me in this thing I do.

Blogito Ergo Sum

I take this as my honi soit, to be hoisted on the masts and engraved on the crest. Or at least heat-stamped on a T-shirt. I had planned a rather humorous, lighthearted disquisition on this topic, but some serious thoughts keep pushing their heavy-handed way in. So bear with me, and maybe we'll get to the yucks later. Or maybe not.

I've always been a smart chick (too smart for your own good, missy, some would say) and a mouthy one as well. I have a showy kind of intelligence, the sort that ranges wide but doesn't settle particularly well. As my dissertation director once said to me, "You are good at synthesizing a broad amount of information; you are not good at digging into one particular point to follow it to it's end." Basically, what she was saying was: you're terrific in a class where you see the connections among the works; you're lousy at writing a dissertation. And she was right. As, obviously, my continued status as an ABD (All But Dissertation completed for the Ph.D) will attest.

Having given up on academia, however, I am left somewhat bereft. There is no place to settle the huge respository of [useless] information that one acquires while doing a lit PhD. No one gets my allusions. There are times, it might even be said, when no one knows what I'm talking about. The other night, for example, I sat at my Wednesday night knitting group at Knitique Yarn Shop, and noticed a hand-lettered sign that had a missing hyphen. I felt compelled to inform all and sundry about the missing hyphen and exactly how it altered the meaning of the sign. Around the table were the faces of my friends, looking at me, with that expectant look that signals someone hopes you'll start making sense soon, but for now you're speaking gibberish. Which is fine, and appropriate for that setting, yet it make me long for the times when three or four grad students would have gotten their teeth into that hyphen and argued it until it's head whipped off. I miss that. It's a part of me that is almost never tapped these days.

This morning while brushing my teeth and reading O Magazine (there are few places in which I don't read), I was reading the list of Zoe Heller's favorite books and Amy Bloom's article on poetry, and I felt quite keenly the absence in my life of people with whom I could talk about such things (and if you don't think I'm an unrepetent grad student, check all those prepositions that come rolling off my tongue in exactly their proper place). It's not that my friends don't read. Some of them do (and some don't, it must be said, which to me is unimaginable but I love them anyway). It's that no one reads a book like a literature grad student, with the full play of the critical conversation, past and present, weighing in. I miss that. I miss the intellectual wrangling that is the academic arena.

I have tried to fill these gaps with what would seem to be similar activities. In LA, I was a member of a bookclub. We met monthly to eat, drink, schmooze, and talk about the book. I think at first they liked having me there, because I more or less taught whatever book we were reading. But then I think that they got tired of me pushing far deeper into the work than they wanted to go, and I got tired of them thinking that "I liked it...It sucks...This would never happen in real life....I hated the main character" sufficed as literary criticism.

In LA I was a grad student again, this time in psychology. That wasn't such a far stretch from my lit studies, as one of the areas of criticism with which I dealt was psychoanalytic literary theory. However, psychoanalytic literary theory and psychoanalytic theory are different beasts, it would seem. Lacan never figured in our class lectures or discussion. The French Feminists? Do they have to do with fashion?

So there I am, with this rich inner life, that gets very short shrift in the outside world. Except here. On By Jane. Here I am free to expound and explicate and elucidate at will. Here, I am free to be me, all of me, not just the comprehensible bits. Thus, for Descartes, it was cogito ergo sum. But for me, it is blogito ergo sum--I blog, therefore I am.

The Internet Is A Dangerous Place...

...for me. I can get lost in it.

When I was about five, we lived in a rural area in Western Pennsylvania, and there was no kindergarten. So my mother took me every day to Walking School. This was her invention, just the two of us, going for a walk and talking about whatever we happened across. Walking School came about because one day I had said to her, "Mommy, you're so mean to me. There's so much to learn in the world and there's no way for me to learn it."

When I surface after a session on the 'net, I thinking about Walking School. There is still so much to learn in the world, and now there is a way for me to learn it. I just want to inhale it all.

But no one is paying me to surf, so it's all gratuitious fun. Isn't that kinda like porn? And thus, the internet is a dangerous place to someone like me whose curiousity is endless.