Quite Quaintly So
i have a huge final paper due in exactly 24 hours, but i felt like i needed to talk about something, so here i am, feeling rampantly candid at this unfortunate time.
when i first moved my private blog to quaintly.net, i was a 17 year old girl who simply had a lot of things to say, and was very lucky to have a space to say it. as i was going on 18, i began to gain traction as a “blogger” and quickly learned what was appropriate and not appropriate in this strange, new world that was thinly populated but widely supervised by some of the most outspoken of society. there was a time when i frantically would say, no no i am not a ‘blogger’, but that quickly became counter-social. so by the time i was 19, i’d found myself quite by accident in a cozy spot of the world wide web, in which people would come to find me and read what meager things i have to say about my life and the world around it. i liked the camaraderie, the growing strength of my fledgling written word, the partaking of alien insights, and other tidbits that i would fortuitously find under this slightly larger canopy of my existence. this was also when i started to make a lot of money from blogging. by 20, i was getting advice on how to manage my blog and turn it into a business opportunity. this silly, pink thing which wasnt even a .com! remember, blog more about certain topics, less about the politics, less of the emo, more of the pictures, you all know the drill.
the truth is, i’d stumbled quite accidentally into this. i was growing up and learning how to find my own voice, yet i had to quickly learn how to accommodate as many people as possible in order to have the most effective voice of all. i know, i know — write for yourself and not for others. but listen to me. that’s not always the case. every now and then you have to write what other people want to read. sometimes writing what other people want to read is also writing for yourself. it’s the blogger’s theoretical win-win situation at its very best example.
my problem was that it wasn’t so easy for me. i knew the formula for becoming a popular female blogger — or even the most popular female blogger — and it’s not a difficult one, but it just wasn’t a place that someone as neurotic as i am could occupy. i worry about everything– what if too many photos of myself made people think i was ditzy? what if an excess of sentimental text bored people? what if i hung out with ‘top bloggers’ and they felt like i was only hanging out with them to get traffic? what if i linked a certain celebrity blogger and he thought i was only doing it to elicit a link back? how do i adhere to the formula without trading too much of my own voice? how does one know what the optimal balance is? why don’t other bloggers have this problem?
i know of very few bloggers who share the same problem as i do, mostly because everyone else takes a firm stand on which side of the fence they belong on, and we don’t. we try very hard to reside in both areas, thinking that a compromise is better than giving up one side, but we — or i — end up being nowhere. we want to maintain some sense of groundedness, but the competition of being a mainstream blogger is one that is so highly engaging. and so very, very sticky. i think most of the top bloggers can attest to how easy it is to get sucked into the contest, and how easy it is to feel like they need to start masquerading in a mainstream performance to gain more traffic or advertorials when their “competitor” or a blogger they “don’t like” starts doing better in those terms.
i’ve always had the philosophy that it is a beautiful thing when people are comfortable in their uniqueness, celebrate their little deviations, and resist conforming to the norm. which is why i am oftentimes sad and very disappointed when i look at what i’ve done with my blog so far. i stumbled into this, found a cozy number of readers in my hands, and had absolutely no fucking clue what to do with them. so for the longest time, i tried to juggle by playing two different tunes to two very different crowds. it was only very recently that i decided to exit the race, and just do what the lazy me likes to do, whatever that may be at the given point in time. putting serious effort into blogging and working hard to maintain an audience is for the pros, really. they are very, very good at what they do, and i can only watch and admire as someone who is not in their league and cannot pretend to be.
however, the effect of playing two tunes with one instrument has its lasting effects and these are sometimes irreversible, especially when it matters. even when it doesn’t matter, they can be irreversible too. i occasionally talk to my friends about a particular category of readers, which i don’t quite have a name for, but describe more or less in terms of- “when i first met her, she pretended that she didn’t know about my blog, but come on“. at the risk of sounding vainglorious, this does actually happen, and quite often too, because it is a necessary effect of the two tune, one instrument thing. i’ve met many, many people who pretended to not have ever heard of me or “oh i probably read your blog once a year or something”, but then i’d later find out from their friends or some other serendipitous source that she or he has been reading my blog for a long time, or reads my blog often enough to know about some things s/he alleged to not know. these things are easily proven, of course, and just as easy to fish out of an unsuspecting pretender who’s unaware that other people can pretend too. i am often asked if i get creeped out by people who approach me saying that they are fans of my blog, but i can firmly say that i love the honesty and friendliness of such people. i am so touched by their warmth. the people i do get creeped out most by, actually, are the aforementioned ones who prefer pretending to my face that they don’t read my blog.
i know the few reasons why it happens. sometimes they’re shy and it’s a personal choice to not want to appear like they’re taking an interest in a complete stranger’s life. this i take no issue with, and fully respect the decision of. but sometimes — and these are the creepy ones — there are those who simply don’t want to acknowledge to me, others, or their selves that they spend any time reading this insipid, self-centered blog of a 21 year old girl’s life, whether daily, weekly, once a year, or having accidentally clicked on my link once. sometimes i think it’s funny (”waiiiiit, oh my godddd, you mean youuuuuu are pinkpau?”), but most of the time, the dishonesty and the two-facedness sincerely scares me when i do find out about it. i start wondering if i really want to be friends with someone who reads about my life and my opinions, but asks me questions and engages in conversations with me as if they didn’t already know my thoughts and answers on these issues. or worse, if they’d also been going around proclaiming things like how a pink blog of a 21 year old is just too shallow! for their refined tastes!
a big reason of why this blog is still pink is because i’ve simply been too lazy to change the layout, but a tantamount reason is because i’m not particularly bothered to sustain the interests of people who hurriedly remove themselves from a blog just because it is a shade of color that they associate with things that are ‘beneath’ them. of course, not all the creepy ones have a pink aversion, but a significant portion do. it’s sad, but there’s not much i want to do about it. i’m sure there are many black and white blogs out there to read. in fact, i had an ex boyfriend who complained to his best friend that he thought my blog was … what were the words … moronic, pink, stupid. when i found out, he had a million excuses about how it was all simply an exhibition of male pride, but seriously, fuck that. if he couldn’t deal with a little color flush and some emotional writing, then that’s fine, don’t — but why hound me for the rest of the relationship over how i never blog about him?
likewise, random people who pretend that they’ve never heard my blog, and moreover, enjoy so much the crumbly judgment they find themselves so capable of passing about people they barely know — it’s fine if you don’t find my blog suited to your eggbox constraints of what a blog should be. but please, save me the big smiles and the faux friendliness. what, really, do you know about me? and what is this attempted interaction really about? you must need a favour. it shames me too that you once upon a time accidentally clicked on my unsuspecting link.
this has veered off into a somewhat angry direction. apologies- i’ve digressed. what was my point? that we live in a strange world where people lift so many assumptions over their heads. i was talking to a friend earlier about how easy it is to misconstrue a person’s entire constitution, especially with this very human habit of trusting in self-constructed truths. a tip: dream a little, live a little– not everything or everyone can be so neatly defined and understood, especially with faculties as imperfect and incomplete as ours.
and a tip to myself: dream a little, live a little– not everything or everyone can be so neatly defined and understood, especially with faculties as imperfect and incomplete as yours.
to the folks who have been reading for however long, people who have so graciously taken the time to write me comments and emails, and have come up to say hi even if it was in the middle of a meal or in the midst of a large education forum, and people who have been so kind to tell me they read my blog every now and then, i thank you muchly. an equally huge thank you to the people who hate the colour pink, but still find the tenacity to keep reading! (especially you men reading from the office, who write in so politely to request a color change– your emails make me giggle so! color change hopefully soon, when i become less lazy).
each time i log onto my quaintly dashboard, i am excited to write because there are people who think that the simple things i have to say about life and the world are worth the crucial currency of their time and interest. time and interest taken in something is such an honour for that something, so i thank you. how do i properly thank you? :)
112 comments December 13th, 2009
