My blog’s one-year anniversary was yesterday. On this, the first day of my second year of blog authorship, I’m reflective of what my blog means to me, why I keep doing it, whether or not who reads it is important.

I used to store emails as a way to keep track of what had happened in my life. I could go back and read old messages from now-ex-boyfriends and laugh about how happy and deluded I was to think the relationship was ever going to work. I could read emails I’d sent to BFE or Glamm about disasterous dates and remember why I declared dating moratoria so frequently. I could open picture attachments of my nephew at three days old, or friends’ kids doing funny things. But when I started my current job eleven months ago, I lost those emails and found a new way to document my life. Namely, this blog.

But how accurate a record is it? How much of my life happens without documentation here, in a public forum, for the world to read? Probably most of it, since most of my life is less than worthy of ponderance, let alone publishing. And yet, the compulsion to create some remembrance is still there. But more than that, having a blog forces me to be more observant so that I have some remembrance to create. Every drive to work is fraught with larger meaning about American society’s acceptance, and, occasionally, outright denial, of common courtesy. Every funny exchange with GTB is potential blog fodder. Every overheard statement in a bar runs the risk of showing up the next day on some random Girl’s web page.

Of course, I don’t tell you about every drive to work, or every funny thing GTB says, or every overheard idiocy. Because even I can’t stand to be THAT mundane. But it’s the possibility that I could that makes life a little more interesting.

Regardless of what stories I choose to share, which ones I decide to commit to internet memory, they are still MY stories. And their debatable accuracy matters less than the feeling they elicit, for me and for my readers.

I have been reading Joan Didion lately. I’m a big fan of Joan. So much so that there are times I can’t bear to read her. After a glass of wine, for instance. Her writing is so smart and so succinct that the combination of those words and a small buzz feels enough to blow my mind. I have to put the book down, or I run the risk of crying profusely, drunk blogging, or making GTB listen as I read excerpts aloud to him. And possibly all three.

This happened to me one night when I came across her essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” In particular, this section:

“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself…Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

“So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best. What is this business about “shopping, typing piece, dinner with E, depressed”? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was this “E” depressed, or was I depressed? Who cares?”

Precisely.

When I moved to Portland, many friends told me they’d keep track of my goings-on via my blog. And it is a way to get the general gist of my happenings. But if you find that it’s ever less than factual, or full of embellishments, or leaning toward fanciful, now you know why.

I may be a blogger and not a keeper of notebooks. But I would argue that bloggers are a rare breed only slightly evolved from Didion’s notebook keepers of the 1960s.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 10:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.