I cannot believe I am doing this right now.
I cannot believe I am going to do this. Right now.
I am blogging, and this is the first time I have written a blog without the "red line of misspelling" appearing under any form of the word "blog."
I just read through my old blog entries. In case you don't remember (who the eff am I writing to?), I started this blog for an experimental writing course I was taking--during the spring semester at UMass Amherst, the English department offers experimental writing courses that graduate students design and teach. The courses are worth 3 credits and can only be taken Pass/Fail, but as an undergraduate I never realized how awesome the idea of these experimental courses were. Graduate students were designing and teaching them. Why the new perspective? Well, because I am a graduate student now. And I teach college-level writing. And while I won't be teaching anything experimental in my English department, this blogging class is very relevant to my life now as a teacher and a writer. Who knew?
As a teacher, I've been playing around with going more multimodal. As a writer, I am looking back at what I wrote about my Costa Rica experiences during my application time (I should have written more about that, but I was all "ew I don't want to write about my feelings for a public audience"). ((haha my blog persona is still kind of the same, huh?))
I am losing steam with this blog post at the moment, but, to be honest, I just wanted to start writing here as a sort of "warm up" to some more "academic" writing (I'm actually starting with some vignettes about my experience in Costa Rica, so I guess we can consider it creative nonfiction--is that academic or something else?). Hemingway was an avid letter writer, and his letter writing served as "warm ups" (and "cool downs") for his fiction. I wonder if blogs could serve the same purpose: get all the "real life" crap out of your head by writing it down, and then you're more free as a writer to write the crap you actually need to be writing. It's weird because, as I am writing this, I am having all these "meta" moments of what blogging is doing for me right now/what it has done for me in the past. Since my entries from years ago are fresh in my memory, I could easily allude to them and say something more poignant about the writer I was then. Or I could easily write about what has happened since then. Oh boy, now I am rambling, but I don't believe in deleting these thoughts. What I was trying to say is that I am having these "meta" moments, and, while I don't think I have an actual "audience" that will click on this to read it, I have an audience in my head--a very specific audience, which happens to be the same audience I am going to write for after I finish this. That's strange, right? That I have an audience in mind as I write, but it's a public blog, and this person is part of my "private"/school life, and I have no intention of showing this writing to him...
I don't know. One last note before I go back to my writing self that I was honing as an undergrad at UMass (the travel writing/memoir Kristi): Hemingway actually became a big part of my Master's degree life. But I had forgotten about this post that is now one of my favorites... I just noticed that someone from outside of our blogging class had commented on it (who wasn't a spammer!). In my current "Geopolitics and the Globalization of Writing" course, we've spent some time thinking about technology and English and the idea of "linking." It's interesting to me that someone engaged with that blog post (4 months after it was posted in 2007) because they were brought to my blog via a Google-image search (if you look at the last comment, you'll see that the blogger gives me "directions" to how he found me--yay not a stalker). He engages both "personally" and "academically" (it is downright stupid for me to split those phrases like that, especially in this case), and offers me "links" to him, to Hemingway, and to his personal space (not by posting his link but because his name is a hyperlink that leads me to a profile that leads me to a MySpace account). This dude still checks MySpace (whoa, no "red line of misspelling"came up under the title "MySpace"). People who use the Internet are weird.
