This Is This

This Is This is two.

Last week an article about blogs went up on the MSN UK homepage and this was listed at number five in the top thirty “must reads”. I don’t even know how MSN heard about this site. On Wednesday it got a very kind review on ITalk2Much.

I can’t explain how much I thinks this rocks. I honestly can’t, and I’m supposed to be the guy with the good speaking, and writing them - um… with, you know, the words. Without them, I’m kind of jingling my change.

It does make me think about the whole blogging thing and why I’ve been doing this at all or why I’ve kept it going for two years. I guess I had some stuff to think about, and at times even things to say.

I think there are a lot of bloggers who write because there’s an audience, and I’m not the best judge of whether I’m one of them. There have been occasions when people have asked if me if I wanted them to link to me from their site, and I couldn’t say for sure if I wanted them to (the answer, I guess, is: “up to you”)

What I do know is that in general, if you’re going to do it - this whole blogging thing - you’ve got to love it.

You’ve got to love it so much that you can’t stand not doing it.

You’re probably not going to make a ton of money. You’re probably going to get accused of trying to be something you’re not. People who think they know you will say, “Hey, that’s not you.”

Well, actually, yes it is. Hello.

I just don’t say all these things out loud, because who am I, right?

People can be mislead by how you present yourself in writing, and while I have little to hide, there are aspects of my personality which anyone who knows me may not recognise because they are only one thing.

They may be a colleague, a friend, a family member - we may have even had a thing once.

One of the reminders that life is too short is that we have these complex relationships with people on different levels and often we only see one side of that person. That’s a shame, which is why I try and be as honest as possible when i write, and forthcoming even though it’s not always in my nature.

I’m not outgoing. When I was a kid I would eat ice-cream with a fork in a restaurant because I didn’t want to ask for a spoon.

Buying sweets in a newsagent once, I pretended to be German when a shopkeeper spoke straight at me. And I don’t speak German. I speak French, but to speak French would have been to actually communicate. So I went for German. ”Nein, Deutschland,” I said. He fucking replied in near-perfect German. I walked out and cried, sweetless and defeated.

I sometimes misread the simplest social situations, even facial expressions and my own emotions get misinterpreted fairly regularly, which I’m pretty sure is my fault. Also, most of the time I have very little idea what the people I know think about me, so even saying what I want to say, which is:

Thank you guys so fucking much. Seriously, I mean it, thank you. 

 …makes me think you might think “Is he serious?”

So given this self doubt (which I hope this tempers the badass of other posts) it comes as some surprise that I am still writing here and it’s cool that anyone is reading it. I enjoy writing it, although there are still days when I think: “This fucking blog, I swear to god.”

You probably do as well, but I’ll keep writing if you keep reading, and let’s see what we can’t cook up.

Tell them what they’ve won, Ed.

Also on This Is This
Seriously though, for years I thought “Kim Jong II” was a sequel.
Read this post...

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 1:10 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.