Today a friend emailed and said, "We're good, tho. busy... and somehow I have to (want to) figure out how to fit blogging into all this madness! (Advice?!?)"
It seems to me that I'm the worst possible person to give advice about blogging, seeing as how, counting this post, I've blogged a total of three times in the month of September. Blogging is a terrible idea for a busy academic, for so many reasons. It can't help me professionally, but it could certainly do damage if I inadvertently wrote the wrong thing here on this very public forum. It takes time that I seem not to have, and that I should probably be spending either on professional endeavors or on my family. It's self-indulgent. If it doesn't do damage to my career, it could easily make me seem ridiculously obsessed with baby pictures and bean pie.
And yet, I do really love having a blog. I love the fact that it's a nonprofessional public forum where I can say what I want to say. Part of the reason I went into academia, of course, is because I have things to say and I like getting to say them, and the blog provides a different venue for that. I enjoy being self-indulgent. I love the continual gratification and feedback that the comments provide--it was such fun to see what you all had to say about the idea of a class about anti-feminism. I like getting to practice non-academic writing.
So, despite the potential drawbacks, I not only continue to blog here at Baxter Sez, but I've agreed to be a blogger at Girl with Pen. Once a month--on the third Tuesday of the month, in fact--I'll be coming up with something intelligent to say about women's bodies: reproductive rights, representations of women in the media, violence against women, or the demands of motherhood and career. I think this is going to be a fun challenge, and I'll be joining a great group of bloggers. I'll be sure to post links here. And I promise there will be no mentions of bean pie.
10 years ago
2 comments:
Girl w/Pen is thrilled to have you, Alison! And thrilled that you have kept on blogging! You are an inspiration to so many of us :)
as long as posts about bean pie and baby pictures (and baby pictures of maybelle eating bean pie)still show up here. I like the multi-layered approach baxter sez takes to the issues of life -- the big and the small -- if I knew something smart about geology I woul have a smart metaphor about those layers of earth and rock that tell us things about what was around millions of years ago -- baxter sez can be the {cool geological term here} of the 22nd century.
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