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Apparently, people love lists. That’s what my internet search “how to create a successful blog” revealed. It doesn’t matter what your blog is about, if you serve it up in list form, it is more likely people will click on it. 
(I also read you should include links and pictures, so I’ve added this completely unrelated photo of me chewing on a newspaper, circa 1965)
I plead guilty. I have clicked on some really dumbass lists–lists of things I didn’t even care about, like “15 celebrities who have aged badly” or “10 things you should never refrigerate” or “12 spectacular photographs that will make you wish you lived in Gary, Indiana.” Okay, I made that last one up. But you know the lists I’m talking about. You’re on the internet doing something useful, like checking your bank balance or reading an article about fly-tying, and you see a list and think, “that’s ridiculous. I don’t care about that.” And then you click on it. And you read it. No matter that it is a poorly researched compilation of photos hastily pulled from other people’s flickr accounts, or a rehashing of tired stereotypes (the 10 types of guys you should never date!). Your brain gets a very brief reward for absorbing some pre-chewed knowledge, and then there is an immediate feeling of micro-regret. I say “micro-regret” because you only wasted a few minutes of your time, and there was nothing overtly harmful about the information, but it doesn’t fill the hole–the hole that wants to know, understand, that hopes a list will whip chaos into order and show you how to live a better life.
As the title of this post notes, I rarely update my blog. And as I’ve discussed in my (few) previous posts, part of the reason is that I am not sure that there is anything necessary that I must impart to the world, despite the fact that I ruminate deeply on a variety of subjects and often write about them, but rarely post them. But you’re only reading this because you wanted to see a list. You might not know me or even care about my blog, but you still want to know 10 reasons some stranger isn’t updating her blog. So here goes:
1) Lists. Lists are popular, and I love to read them. But I’m not good at lists. Lists are about organizing thoughts or tasks into manageable chunks. My thoughts do not conform to lists. My thoughts dance in the margins and ramble onto the back of cocktail napkins and spill over to the palms of my hands and make everything messy, inky. My thoughts like freedom, they do not like to stand in line.
2) Everything I think I have to say was written in someone’s else’s blog in 2009. A while ago, I was reading “The Lorax” to my son and I got the great idea that the thneed, the new-fangled garment the Oncler manufactures that causes the eco-system to collapse, is basically the same thing as a “snuggie“. I did a quick google search and discovered that I’m not as creative as I thought. The blogosphere had duly noted the similarities between a thneed and a snuggie, and there was no point in trying to squeeze any fresh thoughts out of that idea.
3) I grew up in a time and place where self-indulgence was discouraged. I remember standing in front of a mirror when I was 8 years old, admiring the fresh new curls in my hair after a trip to the beauty parlor the day I was a Jr. Bridesmaid in my aunt’s wedding. I was wearing black patent leather shoes and a floorlength Florence Eiseman dress and I thought I looked pretty smashing. 
My grandmother tsked-tsked me sharply and admonished, “you look very nice. Now let it be. Vanity does not become a little girl.” After updating my blog, I rarely share it with anyone. Self-promoting my blog feels like looking in the mirror a little too long, and I don’t want to be caught admiring my own thoughts too much, lest the clicking tongue of the interwebs come down and shame me.
4) I am busy. Oh so very busy.
5) I am a fickle wanton hussy who cannot stay in love with my own ideas long enough to see them through to maturity. My dalliances and one night stands with fleeting thoughts are hardly worthy of being immortalized forever on the internet. So I have a lot of half-written posts in my drafts folder.
6) I have 2 other blogs. One I also post to infrequently. The other is merely a name and a page wasting free space on wordpress until I take it down. Those blogs need my attention too. So when I think to myself, “I really should update one of my blogs” I tend to spend most of my energy debating which post to devote my time to, and then it’s time to watch the the Colbert Report and go to bed.
7) Did I mention I am busy?
8) I am still trying to figure out if I need to focus on a particular topic or if I can riff on a bunch of different ideas. Here are some subjects I write about (for myself, not for public consumption). Open adoption, kidney transplant, marriage, friendship, lack diversity of roles for women in film, death, consciousness–is it merely a byproduct of a biological process or does it come from somewhere (that one takes up a lot of my brain space lately)–you get the idea.
9) I hate the name of my blog. When I started it, I thought the name would be my screen name–my nom de plume–but I realized I’d actually named my Blog “chimeragirl2010,” maybe the worst name ever for a blog, which gives me another idea for a list! “10 Worst Blog Names EVER”
10) Are you still reading? Good. I really hope you don’t have that empty feeling. And although I REALLY want to leave this in the draft folder, I’m going to ignore the tsk tsking of my inner-grandmother and hope that I can get away with staring at myself for a just a moment longer.
When Bob Dylan busted onto the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1960’s he told people that he hopped a freight train and rode the rails from Minnesota to New York City. It didn’t matter that he actually drove there in a Chevy Impala, or that he wasn’t really broke, or that his last name wasn’t Dylan. What mattered was that he created a fiction for himself, and for his eventual fans—it was this fiction that allowed him to be Bob Dylan, folksinger, instead of Bobby Zimmerman, the middle-class kid from Hibbing.
There’s a difference between a myth and a lie, even if you make it up yourself. You tell a lie about yourself to pull one over on somebody, to avoid responsibility. But a myth is an aspiration, and you make a myth of your life story so you can achieve something superhuman.
When I was younger, there were lots of opportunities for mythmaking—especially when traveling. On a Greyhound bus from Ohio to Boston, I told a convict that I was 20 (I was really 19) and that my name was Jordan Lister (it’s not—I found that name on a nametag of a English schoolgirl’s coat I thrifted in London) and that I grew up in England (nope, suburban Chicago). My myth made me feel powerful. It made me feel as though I were mature enough to handle the situation, which was that I kissed a 32 year old convict on prison-furlough and now he was trying to convince me to have sex with him on the back of a bus. The real me wouldn’t have known what to do, but Jordan Lister kissed the convict with willful abandon, and then confidently declared a “cease and desist” when he tried to take it too far.
I kissed that convict in 1984. It was easy to pretend I was somebody else back then. I didn’t have a cellphone or a credit card. The convict didn’t ask to friend me on Facebook. My parents didn’t even know I was going to Boston on a Greyhound bus, because I didn’t tell them—and I didn’t have to either, because I was in college and being in college meant you were free, more or less. It meant I called home once a week from the payphone in the dorm lobby, dropping extra quarters into the slot if the call went over 3 minutes, which it hardly ever did because what did I have to say anyway that I didn’t already say in my letter? It meant that if I had a few days off from classes and some money in my pocket I could go somewhere and not tell anybody—and nobody would ever even have to know, anyway. Nobody texted me to make sure I was safe, and there was no i-pod to distract from the baby crying across the aisle, or the wind that buffeted the bus along the frozen interstate, or from the convict with love on his mind.
If you are under 35 and reading this, I feel sad for you because you don’t know about making things up, making myths about your own life and believing they could be true, or even about plain lying about yourself, just because. You can’t do what my friend Diana did at her 10th high school reunion. She was feeling bad about grinding away as a writer and working as a receptionist at a law firm, so she concocted an elaborate fantasy wherein her best (gay) friend Matthew posed as her husband. Nevermind that in real life Matthew had been an adult firm actor and male-escort, at the reunion he was a filthy rich Wall Street investment banker. They lived in New York and Paris and had beautiful twin daughters named Chloe and Coco.
But you, dear 20-something of today, you can’t say you live in Paris or even make up a pretend town, or say that you grew up in a shack or a castle if you really didn’t because somebody will Google-earth a picture and call you a liar. You can’t make things up or disappear or know what it is to be untethered. You have been taught that the world is unsafe and unnavigable without a phone, but generations of people before you went on road trips and camp-outs and semesters in Europe and they all somehow found their way back home relatively unscathed. And the world was not safer then, no it was not. There just wasn’t enough time on the evening news, or in the local paper, to recount each tragedy that occurred daily, each brutal rape, each heartbreaking kidnapping, each terrible accident, each senseless murder–and thank God for that, really thank God.
My friend Sadie is only 24. She’s had a very adventurous life for someone her age, and she’s lived a lot of places in the last couple of years. I’m settled down for now, so I like keeping up with her travels through her facebook page. But about a year ago, she disappeared from Facebook with no warning. I called her cell phone, but the number wasn’t working. Eventually I got in touch with her through e-mail, and we arranged to talk when she could use a friend’s phone. “Why don’t you have a phone?” I asked. “I don’t even know where you’re living. I heard maybe Italy or somewhere in Asia. Nobody can find you!” It seemed absurd to me that in this day and age a person would travel hither and yon and the only way you could reach her was through an e-mail. It was barbaric!
“I didn’t want everybody to know about me, and what I was doing.” She sounded almost wistful. “I didn’t like that I would tell somebody about where I was and they’d say they already saw the pictures on Facebook. I didn’t like that anybody could reach me any time. I just wanted to be…” she trailed off for a moment and I tried to imagine where she’d been and what she had done. I pictured her trekking down the Mekong River, or riding a bicycle with a baguette in the basket on a Parisian street. “…I guess I just wanted to be free.”
The internet is good for fact checking a doctor’s credentials or to make sure your child’s preschool teacher isn’t a sex offender. But if someone blows a mean harmonica and tells you they hopped a freight train into town, resist the urge to google them. Try for a moment to just believe the myth.
the story gatherer 