Confessions of a blog junkie
My name is Dani, and I am a blog junkie.
Phew, it feels soooo good to finally admit it. But, the only problem is I don’t want to recover. I love blog and all things bloggy – my blog, other people’s blogs, articles online and in the print media about blogging, talking to my friends about what they’ve read in blogs. Blog is good. Blog is life.
Unfortunately, some key people in my life feel a little differently about blog. My employer, for one. Don’t worry, I’m not about to go all Dooce on you and get my ass fired. But, I suspect the IT support guys are on to me. I can only imagine the reports I must trigger with even the most mundane blog content. The smut filters must rev into overdrive on all those references to poop, nipples, sperm, breasts and vaginas, to mention just a few less than innocuous terms I trip over daily on the Mommy Blog circuit.
“No really, I read this stuff for work. I’m compiling a study on, on, (thinking fast, wheels spinning) on the use of blogs to reach a wider audience on the Internet.” Nope, they won’t buy that. How about, “I’ve been analyzing language use in online users, to make sure we are wording our outreach products in terms to which the users can relate.” Hmm, gonna have to work on that one… Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?
The only way I can get any amount of work done at all is to set little performance goals for myself throughout the course of the day. “If I respond to these three urgent e-mails from last week, I can look at one blog.” And, “Since I posted today’s blog entry from home last night, I can follow someone’s blogroll list to TWO new blogs today. Only two. And I’m only allowed to read the most recent post on each. Absolutely NO ARCHIVES. Okay, maybe archives on one. But only if they’re really good blogs. Or mostly good. Or showing a lot of potential, that I will probably find in the archives.”
Well, you’re probably thinking, why don’t you just do all your blogging at home? Ah, but it were that easy. Even if I suppress my bloggy urges until the kidlets are in bed, there is still Beloved, my blog widower. I don’t think I’m fooling him anymore. I think he realizes that it doesn’t take me 20 minutes to “check the laundry” (did I mention the computer is in the basement beside the laundry room?) or an hour to “pop on to the Internet to see if that cheque cleared”. (Nancy mentioned the same pathetic attempts at subterfuge in her comment last week.) We are sad indeed.
Beloved has so capitulated to the fact that blog is simply an irresistible force in our lives that he is in the process of mounting a campaign for us to acquire a laptop. He dangles tantalizing tidbits like “wireless network” and “you can blog from anywhere in the house” – he is almost as insidiously evil as the bus people. The idea of spending a couple of grand on a laptop simply to feed my blog habit is wrong. It is very wrong. It is oh so wrong. It is unimaginably wrong. And no, that is not a Best Buy flyer open on my desk. (But we could probably do without groceries at least one week a month, right?)
Phew, it feels soooo good to finally admit it. But, the only problem is I don’t want to recover. I love blog and all things bloggy – my blog, other people’s blogs, articles online and in the print media about blogging, talking to my friends about what they’ve read in blogs. Blog is good. Blog is life.
Unfortunately, some key people in my life feel a little differently about blog. My employer, for one. Don’t worry, I’m not about to go all Dooce on you and get my ass fired. But, I suspect the IT support guys are on to me. I can only imagine the reports I must trigger with even the most mundane blog content. The smut filters must rev into overdrive on all those references to poop, nipples, sperm, breasts and vaginas, to mention just a few less than innocuous terms I trip over daily on the Mommy Blog circuit.
“No really, I read this stuff for work. I’m compiling a study on, on, (thinking fast, wheels spinning) on the use of blogs to reach a wider audience on the Internet.” Nope, they won’t buy that. How about, “I’ve been analyzing language use in online users, to make sure we are wording our outreach products in terms to which the users can relate.” Hmm, gonna have to work on that one… Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?
The only way I can get any amount of work done at all is to set little performance goals for myself throughout the course of the day. “If I respond to these three urgent e-mails from last week, I can look at one blog.” And, “Since I posted today’s blog entry from home last night, I can follow someone’s blogroll list to TWO new blogs today. Only two. And I’m only allowed to read the most recent post on each. Absolutely NO ARCHIVES. Okay, maybe archives on one. But only if they’re really good blogs. Or mostly good. Or showing a lot of potential, that I will probably find in the archives.”
Well, you’re probably thinking, why don’t you just do all your blogging at home? Ah, but it were that easy. Even if I suppress my bloggy urges until the kidlets are in bed, there is still Beloved, my blog widower. I don’t think I’m fooling him anymore. I think he realizes that it doesn’t take me 20 minutes to “check the laundry” (did I mention the computer is in the basement beside the laundry room?) or an hour to “pop on to the Internet to see if that cheque cleared”. (Nancy mentioned the same pathetic attempts at subterfuge in her comment last week.) We are sad indeed.
Beloved has so capitulated to the fact that blog is simply an irresistible force in our lives that he is in the process of mounting a campaign for us to acquire a laptop. He dangles tantalizing tidbits like “wireless network” and “you can blog from anywhere in the house” – he is almost as insidiously evil as the bus people. The idea of spending a couple of grand on a laptop simply to feed my blog habit is wrong. It is very wrong. It is oh so wrong. It is unimaginably wrong. And no, that is not a Best Buy flyer open on my desk. (But we could probably do without groceries at least one week a month, right?)
Said DaniGirl at 7:24 a.m. #
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