There was a blog contest a little while ago that wanted to know what one looks for in a ‘good’ blog. My answer was, a combination of useful info and a true author’s voice (be it humourous or sarcastic or scatterbained, whatever); someone who shares. Well, I’ve been trying to share what I can about the processes of learning to spin on a limited cash/high determination budget, with the usual quota of WIPs and FOs found in your average knitblog. Yet I realize I don’t really share the personal stuff.
It was this ability of bloggers to share their true feelings and frustrations that got me reading blogs in the first place. A few years back I spent an entire day reading the archives of Dooce, and back last fall (was it really only a few months ago?) it was the openness of the Yarn Harlot and Crazy Aunt Purl and January One (this post in particular) that got me well-and-truly hooked on knitblogs. These people out there — these women out there — aren’t all that different form anyone else, save that they can reflect upon the ordinary and bizarre and funny and tragic things that they are living through at any given moment, and still have the presense of mind to write it down and then publish it for all the world to see. That takes guts.
I’m not sure I have that kind of confidence. I know that I’ m still developing my blog-writing style, that I don’t come across as clearly as the narrator in my mind. Beside this Narrator stands the Editor, and behind her is also a bookish girl who never had many friends during school. Even as I write this the Editor says, “you sound cliche, don’t write that” and the girl warns, “don’t tell too much”. But I want to share. I want to develop a blog-voice of my own. I don’t care if I ever get the kind of readership that the women mentioned above have, but I do want to be heard, and I guess before that can happen I need to speak up.
So here it goes.
I am 29 years old. I have a BA in Classics, an Honours BA in Enligsh, and a MA in English as well. Throughout getting these various degrees I have taken time off to work random jobs (from bookstore clerk to dataentry to working with an indie record lable). I’ve been out of school for the better part of a year now, and this week will see the end of a 7-month temp job, the only work I’ve been able to land. And I have no idea what to do next.
[Here is where the Editor cut out a four-paragraph rant about "experience" and the current job-climate.] I know that my temp agency will ensure that we don’t starve, but I want so very much more. I want someone to take a chance on me, to see that my education means I am dedicated and adaptable and worthwhile. I want to have a career, and to start a family after holding off so long, and maybe someday be able to afford a spinning wheel. I want to stop feeling like despite a sucessful marriage and letters behind my name and nice boots on my feet and the ability to turn fluff into socks, that I am a failure.
I don’t know how to affect these changes. I don’t know “what I want to be when I grow up”. I just know that I am smart (so what if it is mostly “book smart”?), and can be hard-working, and want more from my life than this tenuousness.
