Keep Your Eyes On Your Own Work

It is the 14th of January, which means that it has been 20 days since I wrote a regular blog entry here (by which I mean one that is in paragraphs and is non-Schmoetry/Phoneography/Five Star Friday/Canadian Weblog Awards). I think this may be the longest I have gone in the nine years, four months, and 20 days that I've been at this blogging gig.



Something in me froze up at Christmas. I'm searching. I don't know where to put my feet next.

You see, this year I plan on revamping my whole online deal, because it's grown over all this time, and it's developed appendages, and it's starting to feel a little like the hair on Medusa's head. My house has grown cluttered and makeshift.



So, while I let plans percolate in the back of my mind, I decided to take on publishing one poem every day during 2013, and this has started pulling some pretty deep chords within me already, 13 poems in. It has made me take a second look at how I tell my stories and why I tell them, and it has made me listen to the changing tenor of my voice as my writing and online real estate grow into something else again. It's also making me look at how all of you tell your stories and why you tell them, and it has made me listen to your changing tenor as we all move in this medium together.

It's very distracting, and so outside my specific time-sensitive projects, I have been quiet here. I'm a bit of a publishing maniac, so you may not have noticed my lack of paragraph writing, but I really have been quieter.



While I've been quieter, I've been thinking about:

• blogging and the deep sexism that often runs behind confessional writing, and
• how marketers still struggle to define women by their relationship to children even when those women don't have them (I'm looking at you, PANK), which just shows again how people still don't know how to value women as individuals with their own merit the way they do men, and
• how so many people decry the state of blogging as having gone down the marketing toilet, destroying authenticity and the power in not selling stuff, but how that is a myopic and cherry-picked opinion not based on the thousands of examples of bloggers who aren't selling stuff or who are but who aren't spam-sleazy about it, and
• how some online blogging critics more often than not conflate criticism with conjecture and insult, and, while criticism within the medium is important, it is equally important that that criticism move beyond sophomoric snark, and
• how I need to find my way through all the arguments I have up in my head so I can find constructive pursuits guided by love to put out there with my hands.

One of my guiding statements this year is this:

Keep your eyes on your own work.

Constantly altering measurement of the joy in my own pursuit with perceptions of how others are doing it better or less well than me means that I also alter my perception of my own work based on either how I am failing measured against someone whose work is not what I do or against how others are failing based on what I think they should be doing.

How about we all do something that makes more sense? Like make stuff we believe in? Yes?



NUMBER ONE RULE FOR HOW TO KNOW YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG:

If you are more obsessed with how other people are failing or judging you for failure than you are with improving your own work, you need to recalibrate your priorities.



So, this entry has been a rather meandering and disjointed journey, but it means this: I'm figuring my stories out, I'm working to understand what words should go where and why, and I'm learning how to centre it through the force of love.

And it feels damn good to write even a disjointed mess after 20 days without paragraphs. Goddamn.

The Best of Schmutzie.com Weblog 2012

What follows is a list of the 12 best posts from each month of Schmutzie.com in 2012 (and you have to indulge me, because it's my birthday!).


the Palinode letting his freak flag fly

January:

We Are All Children Until We Die:
The truth is that we grow and change and learn and shift all of our lives. It's the great gift that no one tells us about, this beautiful truth that nothing is ever as it seems and nothing stays the same.

February:

We Can Become Known:
If I see a real and meaty you, I am better able to recognize the real and meaty me, and then someone else sees that in me and so in turn in themselves, and on it goes. We don't have to devote our lives to appeals for the most minimal levels of social power and acceptance. We can become real and inconvenient and complicated and sometimes ugly and memorable and loveable and honest and bright. We can become known.

March:

What My Cat Taught Me: Perceived Aggression and the Power of a Gentle Touch:
A gentler hand makes room for both us to be who we are beyond the volume of our reactions to each other.

April:

It's Not About the Past. It's About Taking Our Joy Back.:
I had an epiphany in the bath today, though, that made sense of why working toward a balanced perspective of the past continues to be important, even if you think you can continue to handle its negative fallout just the way you are: Putting the past into perspective isn't about the past; it is about claiming our natural ability to experience and create joy in the present.

May:

Plagiarism On the Internet and What You Can Do When It Happens to You:
The word plagiarism has been around since the 1620s, and plagiary since the late 1500s, so this is not some newfangled idea people made up to make life difficult. It has been considered a bad thing to claim the works of others as one's own for hundreds of years — be the works written, visual, or conceptual — but people seem more confused than ever now about what plagiarism is and why it is a bad thing to do.

June:

TEDx Talks: Elan Morgan's "Self-Doubt and the Power of Personal Narrative" at TEDxRegina:
Working toward this TEDxRegina talk required me to call upon a level of personal fortitude I honestly wasn't sure I had, but it turns out now that I do, and it is this medium and so many of you over the last almost nine years that brought me here to this point where I can accomplish things I once had no faith I could accomplish.

July:

Five Is the Magic Number:
I have always seen time as this cruel boundary that defines our eventual deaths — I've been gifted with such a sunny disposition, don't you know — but I just realized that it is also time which defines the boundaries around who we are and how we exist and what our relationships are to one another and the rest of the universe. Time makes whatever gifts we have here possible.

August:

Sweeping Up the Endless Mess Like a Volunteer Janitor:
I wonder what we're ever really ready for, anyway. You're told you're having a girl, and then the baby comes out with a penis attached. You go to university with a supposed passion for art and then find out that Biology gets you hot in a way that Life Drawing never does. You thought you'd go to seminary to become a minister but couldn't get past the discovery of your inner atheist enough to pay your tuition.

September:

There Would Always Be a Becky and Some Damned Kite:
I spent hours in that field during my 13th spring reeling out string and squinting against the sun, waiting to appreciate what I had taken and worrying that this was how things would be, that I would always want and then regret wanting. The field only punctuated my thoughts, stretching out flat and dusty and unforgiving until it abutted the peeling fences of suburban yards.

October:

Growing What You Love As a Daily Practice Grows Your Courage:
Growing yourself beyond the daily pattern changes you. It doesn't just grow your skills; it grows your courage. It grows your ability to say I can or I will be able to.

November:

The Fantastic Trick of Being Alive:
I had lazily equated loving my life with being happy, when what's true about love is not happiness but love itself. What's true about love is that it exists quite aside from happiness. Love is indivisible.

December:

3 Oddly Touching Conversations with Strange Men:
"We'll see each other again if we are supposed to connect," he said. "The world takes care of things like that." I tried to memorize the logo embroidered on his coat so I could look him up later, but all I remember now is that the logo was red on black and his face was broad and brown and kind.

Do you have a favourite post of yours from the past year that you'd like to share? Show it off in the comments!

12 Photos of My Day In Honour of 12/12/12

I woke up after my first refreshing sleep in about two weeks:



I had a hot shower:



I ate lunch at Tangerine, and it was damn good:



I bought groceries, but totally forgot about getting anything for supper:



I worked:



I helped warm up cats when our boiler cut out:



I was cold when our boiler cut out:



I had tea and a Clif bar for supper:



I stood on a dead cow, considered vacuuming, and then didn't:



I made Aidan laugh when I told him I was going to make it look like he had gigantism of the legs:



I double-checked that outside was still stupid, and it was:



And I got my new "vulnerability is sexy" t-shirt in the mail!