“These are the contents of my head”
- Eurhythmics, Don’t Ask Me Why, 1989
“If all our days are numbered
Then why do I keep counting?”
- The Killers, 2006
“Why does my soul feel so bad?”
- Moby, 1999
Sin City, day 22 minus 2
Overcast, 21 degrees, humidity 81%
What a week. Newcastle, then a headcold. The glamour of acting in a flash job in a foreign metropolis – hah.
When you grow up you realise that some of the simple things we did as kids were actually pretty good. Why did we put these childish things behind us?
I haven’t played tag (we used to call it ‘chasie’) since about Grade 4. Everyone else got taller, putting me at a distinct physical disadvantage, and then it became passe in schoolground fashion.
As part of my ‘geek revolution’ (ie. Post-Sydney-Bloggers-Meetup) I have discovered a grown-up-geek version of tag, blog-tagging, by the most direct manner – I was tagged by John at The Interchange Desk. The tag-task was to explain Why I Blog.
Why do we do anything? Good question.
Here are five essentially random reasons why I started, and why I plug away at it with enthusiasm if not great artistry or regularity:
• I moved to Tasnarnia to start a new job in a new state and city with no friends and few contacts. I very much wanted to keep in touch with old friends. At the time the BM suggested starting a blog to post updates which any friend could access, and gave me a DIY link, and that’s how The Hobart Chronicles got started;
• I had forgotten the discipline of writing; my current line of work does not focus on writing so much as speaking. Blogging reminds me not just to write (stream-of-consciousness stuff is frowned upon as wankery by some of my old mates – funny, that) but to take the kernel of an idea and craft little stories around it. So I blog for practice;
• To write, I have to observe. Sometimes, even participate. In life, that is. Believe it or not, blogging is an incentive to dabble in real life occasionally so as to actually have something to blog about;
• One day I may like to start a more serious blog, on a serious subject, as a serious professional branching-out. Ahem. Better get into practice now;
• And finally I do it because I have an ego. Don’t we all? A person needs an ego to get out of bed every morning, to maintain friendships and relationships, to apply for jobs, to buy new clothes – and to blog. Ego, in moderation, is a healthy part of our psyche. Having relinquished my former ego-feeder, front-line broadcasting, I now blog to keep feeding that ego.
There. In the spirit of tagging, I tag Red Sultana. I don’t know too many other bloggers yet, but she knows heaps and hopefully will bung this tag onto a few more folk.
Tag/chasie got me thinking about other things I’ve rediscovered. If that sounds like a trip straight to second childhood, well – let’s just leave that thought hanging. Here’s a few things:
• Der-fred. That expression surfaced from my festering grey matter and popped straight out of my mouth at meeting this morning. One of my colleagues got really excited about it (“I haven’t heard that for aaaaages!”).
• Foo. Someone at work recently did a Foo over a partition, and now everyone seems to be doing, or drawing, Foo.
• Mud pies. Late last year I signed up for an adult ed course in ceramics (Old Ladyhood, heeeeere I come!) and realised that when you stop beating around the bush ceramics is less about making mugs and more about playing mud pies.
There’s lots more that have slipped my atrophied mind just now – will add them when they resurface.
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