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March 12, 2004
unplugged
I loved Halley's picture of where she blogs...it looks like my Platonic ideal of a blogging space. Unfortunately, my blogging space looks more like this:
The thing is, I don't really have a place where I blog. I have to squeeze the blogging into the (increasingly small) spaces between family and travel and work and friends and students and research and...well, you get the idea.
The laptop I carry around with me is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it allows me the flexibility to work from home, or the road. Because it gives me an ongoing connection to my family (thank you, iChat AV!), and to my friends near and far. A curse because...well, because it lets me work from home or the road. There's no real time off when your work can follow you wherever you go--online, everywhere, all the time is a reality for me, and not always a utopian reality.
This is a reality for a lot of women, the endless juggling of work and family, the feeling that you're always forgetting something (or someone) important, that no matter how much you've done in the day there's always a little more that you didn't get done.
On the one hand, I hate that I've not spent more time tending to this blog, or my personal site, or Many-to-Many. On the other, it's amazing to me that I get anything written at all, given everything else on my plate. So hats off to all of us, we women who pull off these amazing acrobatic feats and still have time to post to our blogs!
And now I'm off to pack, again. My flight for Austin leaves at 6:15am. If you'll be at SXSW/Interactive, come find me and say hi...
Posted by Liz Lawley at 08:16 PM in General | Permalink
Comments
Liz = You're so right, how the HELL do we pull it all off? Hats off to all of us who wear too many hats.
As for loving my desk -- I come clean today over at Halley's Comment about the fact that it happens to be my dining room table, NOT my real desk which is a big papery mess, soon to be cleaned up. Lately I've wanted to be more in the middle of my house, not hidden away in the office as I blog, and I let Jackson take over my office and desk to do his homework OUT of the middle of the house and commotion and temptation of TV and videogames.
Posted by: Halley Suitt at Mar 13, 2004 7:12:25 AM
Has this blog, so promising at the beginning, become something completely irrelevant? What's next, pictures of kittens? I think the bloggers should go to the archives, and have a look at what was going on here when it got started and what's going on now. And no, I don't buy it's all Julius's fault. And if it were a few trolls's fault, it would be so sad and still your fault for giving up in front of them.
Of course, you can do whatever you want with your blog, but I think it's a waste of wonderful potential, of all the things it promised at the beginning.
Posted by: Ion at Mar 15, 2004 8:28:28 AM
Ion, you've linked back to a group blog with no obvious clues to your own identity. But I suspect that you're not a woman who's had to deal with the juggling of family and career and technology, or you'd be unlikely to call this post "irrelevant."
Have we started to deal with less controversial and personal topics? Probably. For me, it's not "because of a few trolls," but because the intrinsic reward of writing here was outweighed by the frustration and unpleasantness. If you'd like to characterize that as being "our fault"...well, c'est la vie.
I am interested in knowing which of the posts in the archive you feel are most indicative of what you saw as the promise of the site.
Posted by: Liz Lawley at Mar 15, 2004 9:52:01 AM
Liz, for instance:
http://www.misbehaving.net/2003/09/when_you_assume.html
I'd like to apologize a bit, I'm afraid I sounded too harsh. And I understand the frustration and how unfair to say it was "your fault". Still, I miss the first months of misbehaving.net.
Posted by: Ion at Mar 15, 2004 7:30:15 PM
Ion,
I like that post too. But I think it would be difficult to sustain a group blog that deals exclusively with "this makes me angry, pow!" themes. I myself am hoping the misbehaving.net authors can explore the range of women+technology issues, and some of that is day to day stuff, some of it is passion. I'm hopeful that it can, but the usual "not my blog, after all" disclaimer applies.
Posted by: Mary at Mar 18, 2004 6:05:07 AM
"Has this blog, so promising at the beginning, become something completely irrelevant?"
In a word: No.
What Liz very aptly characterizes as
"the endless juggling of work and family, the feeling that you're always forgetting something (or someone) important, that no matter how much you've done in the day there's always a little more that you didn't get done"
is certainly relevant to me, and, I suspect, to many other readers too.
Posted by: Invisible Adjunct at Mar 19, 2004 9:31:35 PM
