i am a butterfly…

Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

In honor of my recently passed 8th blogging anniversary, I thought it might be fun to totally slack off on posting even more by reposting old garbage repost some of the early posts. A lot of you who read here now weren’t around back then, so this old crap will seem like new to you it might be neat to share some of my early posts without you having to dive through the archives to find it.

Stay tuned!

Today marks the 8th anniversary of my very first blog post. Looking back at my old posts from the first few years of blogging, I’m struck by two things:

1. Holy crap I had a lot to say.
2. Holy crap I was so passionate about all those things I had to say.

I’m going to go with “passionate” in that second point, rather than “opinionated,” “overbearing,” or “cocky.” Let’s stick with “passionate.”

It hardly needs pointing out that I don’t post here nearly as much as I used to do. Part of that is that I’ve mellowed, and I’m not nearly as… ahem… passionate about a lot of things as I used to be. Part of it is that I got tired of being so, you know, passionate. Part of it is that Twitter has taken the place of the multiple short little blog posts I used to make. And part of it is that my audience has changed. Where pretty much everyone who read my blog eight years ago was either a blogger herself, an otherwise online-only acquaintance, or my mother, now the people who read this site are mostly people I know in meatspace.

That, Dear Reader, is daunting.

I don’t feel like I can be nearly as free about what I post now, which sometimes makes me sad, and oftentimes makes for a lack of posting. Some things have been verbotten since the very beginning. Things like the inner workings of my relationship with Scott, for example. That’s always been and always will be off limits for such a public venue, but now I’m also less likely to talk about all those girl troubles the way I used to do. I’m also more likely to keep my more passionate political opinions to myself, for fear of offending friends I know are equally passionate about opposing opinions.

As a result, I have a lot less to talk about here, because let’s face it, without cervical mucus and abortion, what do I really have?

But I keep this place around anyway, even if all I really use it for these days is talking about knitting now and then and posting cat photos. Every once in a while, I do have something of more substance that I want to talk about, and I plan to continue doing that. Who knows? Whole new chapters may be opening up soon. In the meantime, we’ll just keep on chugging along on cat photos.

Scott and I were in the car on Saturday and the topic of our blogs came up. He noted how my blog has changed quite a bit over the last two years, and that can’t be denied.

One of the big things, of course, is that I don’t post here nearly as often as I used to. Twitter has been a huge factor in that, but my posting rate was dropping off long before I signed up for Twitter. I recently decided to try to remedy the Twitter problem, though, by vowing that anything that would take more than two tweets to say should be posted on the blog, instead. That’s why I posted the “Conversations with the Old Man” post the other day. I used to post funny little snippets of the day* like that all the time. I’d like to try to do that again, and those things are too long for Twitter.

By far, though, the biggest change in the blog that I see is in the types of things I post. When I started blogging seven years ago, I decided to do it because I felt like I had a little something to say on the subject of this whole infertility thing and that maybe people just might want to hear it. At the very least, I felt like I needed a place to rant and rave and vent and get it all out, because if I didn’t, I was going to explode. And blogging was great for that. Not only did I get a place to dump all the crap out of my head and my heart and my soul, but I found a lot of women who were going through the same thing**, and it was nice to not feel so alone.

As a result of starting off talking about infertility, I was pretty open about body stuff. It was easy then, because the people who read the blog were only my friends inside the computer and I didn’t have to look them in the eye they day after they read all about my cervical mucus. Back then, I would have written for days about how I actually got my period while I was laying a a hospital bed after this last surgery, and gone into gory detail about the nightmare of trying to deal with that during a hospital stay and the humiliation of having to beg a nurse for supplies and how modern hospitals still seem to think it’s 1955 when it comes to girly supplies. But now, a lot of the people who read my blog are people I know in meatspace. If I write about that hospital incident***, the next time I see one of them I won’t be able to look them in the eye because I’ll feel like they’re just thinking about that post.

So that’s the main thing I’ve been struggling with lately when it comes to choosing what to write about. Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love that the people I know find me interesting enough to come back here to read what I have to say. I’m deeply flattered even if I can’t really figured out why they’d bother. When I see people in person and they say that something I wrote about struck them or made them think about something or strangers come up to me at shows and tell me I have pretty cats, it makes me happy to hear. It’s just that I don’t necessarily want them coming up to me and telling me that they read about my period. You know?

I decided that I’m going to try to balance it. Maybe stick mostly with the nice, fluffy things I’ve been talking about lately like food and knitting and cats and sort of ease people into the old school style of this blog by now and again tossing out a phrase like “egg white cervical mucus.” Just to see what happens.

* Whatever, dude. I  always thought they were funny. Maybe no one else did or does, but I did and do.

** And just about all of them are mothers now, either through adoption or ART, and here I am still stuck in neutral. But that’s a rant for another day.

*** Yeah, yeah. I realized that I basically just DID write about that hospital incident, but in nowhere near the detail I would have gone into it a couple of years ago. People, I can write pages and pages about my period if I get going. This? This is nothing.

I’m upgrading WordPress. Last time, that didn’t go so well. Hoping for a better result this time.

Update: That went exceptionally well. How nice to have an upgrade work properly and not have to use the backup.

Today marks the turning of Project Spectrum from North to East. East is represented by the element of Air, the season of Spring, the material wood, and the color yellow.

Yellow is a really hard color to work with in a Web site design. It’s either pallid and babyish, or eye-numbingly bright. I hope I’ve been able to balance that a little, but please let me know if that yellow is blinding on your monitor.

I feel like this blog design is way over the top for me and, to be honest, it makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because yellow just screams LOOK AT ME and I tend to feel more comfortable fading into the background. Yellow isn’t a color I normally wear, my mother’s efforts notwithstanding, and it isn’t a color I’m particularly fond of, for the most part. (The one exception would be with daffodils, which are my favorite flower. I love them yellow and bright and eschew the white ones in favor of the sunny faces of the yellow ones.) But Project Spectrum is about exploring your relationship with the various colors and elements, and about pushing boundaries to some degree, so I’m stepping outside my normal comfort zone with this bright and over the top blog design.

It’s fitting that today is the beginning of the next phase of Project Spectrum, for today is also Beltaine. (Though you wouldn’t know it looking out my window.)  I have a love/hate relationship with Beltaine. To see the world bursting with life and color and promise makes my heart sing, but the associations with fertility make me cringe. It’s holidays like Beltaine that make me feel like a failure as a Pagan.  It sounds silly to say something like that, but so much of Paganism is about fertility. I try to not take that so literally and make up for my lack of fecundity in body by nurturing my creative fertility, but it’s not always easy.

I haven’t decided yet what my focus, other than the blog design, will be for this phase of Project Spectrum. I’m considering finally starting on Flicca, because I have a mountain of yellow yarn waiting to be knitted into that sweater. There will certainly be photos, and tree bark is one of my favorite things to photograph, so I’m looking forward to that. We’ll see where this goes.

As of today, yes, I do have 7 years behind me.

It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this blogging thing for so long. And hard to believe how much things have changed, and how much others have stayed the same. Looking back through the old archives, I know that 7-year-ago me would never have thought that she’d be facing 40 and still not have a child. She certainly never would have believed that she’d have to face the cancer thing and go through so many surgeries.

7 years is a long time, and I feel so much older now. Not so much wiser, but older. In some ways, though, I actually feel younger. 7-year-ago me was a lot more boring. She didn’t go out much, she didn’t drink much, she didn’t have any hobbies. I think that, back then, I was still recovering from my wild early 20’s. I know I was trying to fit into a mold of a person I wasn’t, but when I started the blog, I was starting to come out of that. Over the past 7 years, I’ve discovered a lot about who I really am and don’t try to fight it anymore. For the most part, I like me now a lot better than I liked me then.

I know I don’t post anywhere near as much as I used to, but it’s because I don’t have the same intensity in me that I used to. 7-year-ago me was full of passion and drama and ranting. It’s not that I’ve lost my passion for things, but I’ve mellowed. I’m less likely to invite conflct than I used to be, but more likely to d0 something about the things I’m passionate about. Quietly, instead of yelling about it and fooling myself into thinking I’m accomplishing something.

So happy blogiversary to me. Do I have another 7 years in me? Who knows. But for now, I’m happy to keep going, albeit without any regularity.

So I don’t know if this will work, but I’m testing out Twitter Tools to see about the daily digest of tweets thing. We’ll see tonight if it actually works. If it does, I can get rid of the Twitter thing on the sidebar after all, because there will be a daily blog post of everything I’ve tweeted that day.

Fingers crossed.

It was my intention to do a new theme for each phase of Project Spectrum. So here I am, only a month late into North!

I’ll keep the Twitter feed public and leave it in the sidebar. What convinced me even more was the fact that I’ve gone nearly two weeks without posting, so at least having the Twitter feed there makes it look like the blog isn’t stagnating.

My concern was that clients would be smart enough to try to get to twitter.com\kendiala – since I use kendiala for email and some clients know that – and that would allow them to find the blog if I was posting links to here from Twitter. I’ve gone to some pains to make sure that I never use my full name here so that Googling my name won’t lead to here. I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter, though. I don’t really bitch about work here much, so there’s not much for them to see if they sleuth me out like that.

So the Twitter feed stays.

Does anyone really care about the Twitter feed on the sidebar? Do you just follow me on Twitter if you’re interested in the Twitter feed?

The reason I ask is that I’m thinking about making my Twitter updates private, but if I do that the feed on the sidebar won’t work.  I was thinking the feed was good because when I go a week without posting, like I just did, at least people can see I’m alive and active, even if I’m not posting here.

So, what do you think?