No, this is how it works

In about a month, this here blog will turn 10. While I switched hosting sites a few years ago, I've been running "The Vale" -- named in reference to a circa-1980s fantasy-novel series I read as a teenager -- since December 2003. (Anyone who has actually followed this blog since its inception, by the way, simultaneously earns my appreciation, sympathy, and mild suspicion.)

I'm occasionally reminded of the fact that, in keeping and maintaining a blog, I'm participating in a humorously outdated activity. When I started this blog, it was during the heyday of personal blogging, in ye olde early-aughts, when people were still IMing and using Kazaa, before Facebook made it easier to be attention-seeking with less writing or forethought. I was in high school, and everyone I knew had an uncomfortably confessional LiveJournal or Xanga. These days, for the most part, blogs have gone professional. You have food blogs and fashion blogs and wedding blogs and car blogs and blogs dedicated to people doing everyday activities incorrectly. While I'm sure there are still teenagers out there using personal blogs to share emo poetry, there aren't many people my age who continue to see blogging as worth their time. 

Those of us who have stuck with personal blogging, predictably, tend to be the people who would identify as casual writers. (Not to be confused with the capital-w Writers who seek legitimacy and talk about "craft" and, I assume, wear fedoras.) Personal bloggers, in my experience, are the non-aspirational, little-w writers who simply find the act of writing enjoyable, even if we don't have anything in particular to say or anyone in particular we need to say it to. It's a dabbler's hobby. Historically, such material got recorded and promptly forgotten in obscure private diaries. The Internet provides a forum for making casual writing public, but most personal bloggers still don't have any real investment in the readership or publicity of our blogs. What's appealing about the "public" aspect of a blog is that it acts as a spur -- the mostly imaginary "obligation" we have to our "readers" -- which keeps us writing and laziness at bay. In the end, maintaining a personal blog, like doing yoga or cultivating a flower garden or other yuppie pursuits, functions primarily as a self-enriching activity.

Unlike yoga, though, blogging is a self-enrichment activity that gives back. I love reading other peoples' personal blogs and sincerely miss the days when more of my friends maintained them -- not because I'm nosy (although I totally am), but because blogs offer a very particular kind of window into another person's mind. Reading a personal blog isn't like reading a diary -- the writer quite obviously has no expectation of privacy and instead invites readership -- but the content is still personal and unrepentantly self-centered to a degree that is shunned in pretty much all professional writing. In a blog, you're allowed to be confusing, uninteresting, self-indulgent, mundane -- qualities that are typically excised out of even the most personal professional writing, like memoir.

Most uniquely, what you see in a personal blog is a weird mix of honest disclosure and crafted self-representation: everyone expects a blog to maintain a certain level of truth and sincerity, but at the same time it allows the writer to put forth his or her desired self. Blogs inevitably scream, "This is what I want you to think I'm like!" Reading a personal blog grants you privileged access into the writer's freaky little mind-world, (you often learn things in blogs that you're not likely to learn anywhere else), but your access is sanctioned and controlled by the writer. It offers the experience of trespassing without trespassing. From this standpoint, blogging is a social rather than selfish gesture, since writers are capitalizing on quasi-private/quasi-public conventions to open themselves to other people in a different way.

Well, anyway. Happy decade-versary, blog. Apparently I have not yet tired of you.

Bonus list: Other things that were invented/introduced in 2003:

  - The Iraq War

  - The DaVinci Code (the book)

  - MythBusters and NCIS

  - Camera phones

  - Love Actually

  - SARS

These days before you speak to me you pause

As it happens, I own a lovely, durable pair of genuine leather boots. GR surprised me with these boots last year for Christmas, in what I can only assume was a blatant and successful attempt to win the "which one of us is better at giving gifts?" award within our relationship. They are, to this day and possibly forever, the nicest pair of shoes I own. They're sturdy yet stylish, with heels that make me look stealthily tall, in a tannish color that goes with literally everything.

I have only one complaint about my magic boots. The soles are made of a thick and mercilessly strong variety of rubber, and as a result, each boot makes a distinctive thu-thunk! noise when I take a step. It's a chunky, weighty sound (as if a gavel has been struck two to three feet below the surface of the earth), and it happens even when I'm walking on pavement. Because I live on the third floor of my new apartment building, this means that if I have the boots on at home, I find myself walking wincingly and on tiptoe, imagining how I might be disturbing the neighbors in the apartment below us. Outside, if I'm walking behind a woman on the sidewalk, I wonder if she hears my heavy footfalls and feels threatened, assuming that I'm a large man rather than a small, noodley-armed woman. I wind up self-consciously passing such women on the sidewalk to reassure them that I'm, seriously, so not a predator.

So basically, the only qualm that I have with my boots is not actually a qualm of mine -- it's a qualm that arises out of my desire to not draw notice to myself, to not irritate or annoy or disrupt the pleasantness of anyone else's day. It's a preference guided by a weird sort of Will to Unobtrusiveness.

Being unobtrusive/non-annoying is one of those things that can become habitual, and then almost addictive. I do my best to never keep people waiting. If I'm on public transit with several bags of groceries, I attempt to stack them all on top of my lap to ensure that I don't take up more than a single seat. I turn my headphones down in waiting rooms on the off chance the music overflows my earbuds and can be heard by the people around me. If a restaurant is busy, I do my best to not take up much of the server's time and not to linger after the meal. When paying in cash, I always hand coins to cashiers before the paper bills, and I never commit the cardinal sin of placing coins on the counter to be picked up. While I would like to take up playing the flute again, I always wind up leaving the instrument in its case because I assume that someone in my building would be disturbed by the noise. I cringe when I feel like I've done something that unnecessarily irritates someone (anyone!) in my immediate vicinity.

These little actions that facilitate unobtrusiveness are not arduous. They debatably fall under the category of basic politeness. We all have a flexible sense of what qualifies as standard, "I wasn't raised by wolves, guys" conscientiousness. Most of us agree, for example, that it's dickish to not hold the door for someone immediately behind us when entering a building. But sometimes I find myself wondering if I overstep "basic politeness" into the territory of, "Seriously? No one cares about that." What, for example, would happen if I didn't turn down the noise on my headphones, or if I stopped thinking about what my server or cashier thinks about me? If I let myself take up another half-seat on the subway? Are my neighbors even home during those hours when I'm so worried about bothering them with my clomping boots or out-of-tune flute? 

Perhaps I would immediately wind up unconsciously engaging in assholish behavior. Or perhaps no one would notice. Either way, I'm not likely to know, since "basic politeness" dictates that the people I annoy can do no more than, at worst, shoot me a dirty look. So the question, for me and for everyone prone to the Will to Unobtrusiveness, is whether we can stand the possibility of someone briefly, silently finding us annoying. For myself, I'm not sure.