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Conclusions
Sep. 23rd, 2009 09:52 pmI'm flying abroad on Saturday, and as a result I'm putting this journal on partial hiatus until January.
I expect I'll post occasional photos (and I have a couple of fics in the pipeline; and there's Yuletide; and I do plan to keep commenting on other people's posts), but I don't want to feel any obligation to my computer while I'm abroad.
The other is that I plan to keep a paper journal while I'm abroad, and LJ will conflict with that. A private journal doesn't need to be succinct, reasonable, or fair; LJ, at least the way I do it, needs to be all those things because it's performance art, and meant to entertain.
I think that having an audience, even such an amorphous and implied one as on LJ, changes my behavior. In some ways this is a good thing - it means I have to make my life big enough to entertain the audience - but it does have the warping effect, where I do a thing, and part of me is thinking about the thing, and another part is standing back and going "I could make a great post about this." It's like carrying around a camera: it forces me to really look, but it also forces me to pick an interesting angle instead of just absorbing.
It enforces distance, and the appropriate time for distance is after the trip - when I've seen and felt everything within my limited ability, and can begin to put it succinctly and reasonably. Attempting to create distance during rather than after just invites premature conclusions, when I think, ideally, that when one goes abroad one needs a sense of humility. One should absorb instead of locking into a single interesting angle.
So I hope everyone has a lovely autumn.
I expect I'll post occasional photos (and I have a couple of fics in the pipeline; and there's Yuletide; and I do plan to keep commenting on other people's posts), but I don't want to feel any obligation to my computer while I'm abroad.
The other is that I plan to keep a paper journal while I'm abroad, and LJ will conflict with that. A private journal doesn't need to be succinct, reasonable, or fair; LJ, at least the way I do it, needs to be all those things because it's performance art, and meant to entertain.
I think that having an audience, even such an amorphous and implied one as on LJ, changes my behavior. In some ways this is a good thing - it means I have to make my life big enough to entertain the audience - but it does have the warping effect, where I do a thing, and part of me is thinking about the thing, and another part is standing back and going "I could make a great post about this." It's like carrying around a camera: it forces me to really look, but it also forces me to pick an interesting angle instead of just absorbing.
It enforces distance, and the appropriate time for distance is after the trip - when I've seen and felt everything within my limited ability, and can begin to put it succinctly and reasonably. Attempting to create distance during rather than after just invites premature conclusions, when I think, ideally, that when one goes abroad one needs a sense of humility. One should absorb instead of locking into a single interesting angle.
So I hope everyone has a lovely autumn.
