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shadowkatPondering this livejournal habit. Been considering discontinuing. Breaking it off after a while...letting the postings dwindle away slowly, bit by bit.
Why? Well it feels less rewarding then it did before somehow, less connecting.
Like, as my pal Wales would state, there's a wall of ice separating us. Or we are mostly communicating behind a wall of masks. In some ways, I miss the more personal email - that I exchanged when I had the time with a few long distant friends. Hard to keep that up as well. An email only relationship.
It might be different, I suppose, if the people I saw in my daily life, face to face, kept journals, but outside of cjlasky, none do. As time wears on, the long distance relationships falter - as they often do without real face to face contact.
So the question becomes I guess - why am I posting these entries? Why not just stop cold? Would anyone really miss me if I did? Oh maybe for the first three or four months, the people who friended me might. Then again maybe not.
Is it to play with writing? Is it to get validation? Can't be that - get few if any responses to my posts nowadays, but was certainly a factor a year ago.
Is it the safety? Safe? Online Posting? I must be nuts. But I think there is a safety to it. You get the odd thrill of someone seeing what your writing, some stranger, and the protection of the mask. Sort of like going to a masquerade party where one can talk for hours, make a complete fool of oneself even, be someone else, but no risks - since you don't know who they *really* are.
You can't see their face. Except at a party you do see their eyes. Here?
No.
Is the connection real? Yes and no. I think we can connect through art and words, yet, yet...it is an unsatisfactory one. I want more. I want more than the possibility of an email response. I feel at times as if I'm reading a story that is great, yet, doesn't quite deliver what I want - I'm left with that odd yearning. That empty gap. Like a dancer reaching for a partner who has found another better one. OR perhaps the child who sees the rainbow and races to find it's end. I did that once upon a time, raced to find the end of a rainbow. We dashed across yards and fences and swimming pools hunting it. But whenever we got close, it was always just ever so slightly out of reach.
Inaccessible.
Reading "the three wish tv genie meme" on my flist, you know the one where you state what you wish was different in your favorite tv show, reminds of the same yearning. The yearning I have when I start reading a fanfic, story, book or watch a movie - that starts wonderfully, is so filled with promise and ends exactly as the writer wished it to, yet leaves me feeling that gap. That wall of ice. That sense of disconnect. Wait. Wait. I want to say. Why did you not go that a way instead? But I don't need an answer, I know it well - it's because they are satisfying the desire in their heads and perhaps in those around them. Me? I am unseen, outside.
Never been much of a groupie I'm afraid. Not much into following the flow. Going to group meets? Makes me break out metaphorically in hives. Ack. Ack. I think. Too many people. Too many conversations. Plus, well, there's always that jarring sensation when one realizes that one's interests and views don't quite jive with the group's. As a child - I remember my best friend at the time informing me that we needed to change our style, our interests, our tastes, in order to "fit" in. I remember backing away, slowly. I've joined many groups in my life time, stayed with none of them, a dilettant, dabbling.
But each one without exception unnerved me after a certain point in time.
There was the inevitable clash of personality, the pressure to conform.
I see it here as well in the internet world with its music swapping, file sharing, icons building, etc. And I feel the disconnect. The inevitable wall of ice. The sense...that somehow, I can't quite conform to the group dynamic.
Something in me, prevents it - does not want it.
It's a feeling that is hard to describe in words, this weird feeling of loneliness in a world filled with people. This weird disconnect...
And yet, even with the disconnect, the wall of ice, I still post entries, like an alcoholic who says this will be their last drink or the cigarette smoker who is always about to quit. A friend told me recently that the internet became my drug [or more to the point the discussion boards then later live journal] in 2002. I believe they are right. The question is...can I or should I go off of it, stop, quit?
I think these things while investigating taking Salsa classes.
Why? Well it feels less rewarding then it did before somehow, less connecting.
Like, as my pal Wales would state, there's a wall of ice separating us. Or we are mostly communicating behind a wall of masks. In some ways, I miss the more personal email - that I exchanged when I had the time with a few long distant friends. Hard to keep that up as well. An email only relationship.
It might be different, I suppose, if the people I saw in my daily life, face to face, kept journals, but outside of cjlasky, none do. As time wears on, the long distance relationships falter - as they often do without real face to face contact.
So the question becomes I guess - why am I posting these entries? Why not just stop cold? Would anyone really miss me if I did? Oh maybe for the first three or four months, the people who friended me might. Then again maybe not.
Is it to play with writing? Is it to get validation? Can't be that - get few if any responses to my posts nowadays, but was certainly a factor a year ago.
Is it the safety? Safe? Online Posting? I must be nuts. But I think there is a safety to it. You get the odd thrill of someone seeing what your writing, some stranger, and the protection of the mask. Sort of like going to a masquerade party where one can talk for hours, make a complete fool of oneself even, be someone else, but no risks - since you don't know who they *really* are.
You can't see their face. Except at a party you do see their eyes. Here?
No.
Is the connection real? Yes and no. I think we can connect through art and words, yet, yet...it is an unsatisfactory one. I want more. I want more than the possibility of an email response. I feel at times as if I'm reading a story that is great, yet, doesn't quite deliver what I want - I'm left with that odd yearning. That empty gap. Like a dancer reaching for a partner who has found another better one. OR perhaps the child who sees the rainbow and races to find it's end. I did that once upon a time, raced to find the end of a rainbow. We dashed across yards and fences and swimming pools hunting it. But whenever we got close, it was always just ever so slightly out of reach.
Inaccessible.
Reading "the three wish tv genie meme" on my flist, you know the one where you state what you wish was different in your favorite tv show, reminds of the same yearning. The yearning I have when I start reading a fanfic, story, book or watch a movie - that starts wonderfully, is so filled with promise and ends exactly as the writer wished it to, yet leaves me feeling that gap. That wall of ice. That sense of disconnect. Wait. Wait. I want to say. Why did you not go that a way instead? But I don't need an answer, I know it well - it's because they are satisfying the desire in their heads and perhaps in those around them. Me? I am unseen, outside.
Never been much of a groupie I'm afraid. Not much into following the flow. Going to group meets? Makes me break out metaphorically in hives. Ack. Ack. I think. Too many people. Too many conversations. Plus, well, there's always that jarring sensation when one realizes that one's interests and views don't quite jive with the group's. As a child - I remember my best friend at the time informing me that we needed to change our style, our interests, our tastes, in order to "fit" in. I remember backing away, slowly. I've joined many groups in my life time, stayed with none of them, a dilettant, dabbling.
But each one without exception unnerved me after a certain point in time.
There was the inevitable clash of personality, the pressure to conform.
I see it here as well in the internet world with its music swapping, file sharing, icons building, etc. And I feel the disconnect. The inevitable wall of ice. The sense...that somehow, I can't quite conform to the group dynamic.
Something in me, prevents it - does not want it.
It's a feeling that is hard to describe in words, this weird feeling of loneliness in a world filled with people. This weird disconnect...
And yet, even with the disconnect, the wall of ice, I still post entries, like an alcoholic who says this will be their last drink or the cigarette smoker who is always about to quit. A friend told me recently that the internet became my drug [or more to the point the discussion boards then later live journal] in 2002. I believe they are right. The question is...can I or should I go off of it, stop, quit?
I think these things while investigating taking Salsa classes.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 04:09 pm (UTC)Well, I'm glad someone does. I got the feeling people were getting a bit tired of it, I know I was. That said, I may wrap it up eventually.
I wouldn't call it an addiction, in any case; you are, after all, producing something by posting (as well as creating at least the possibility of interaction--not only between yourself and others, but between others who come across your work.
That is a valid point and one I've often argued with myself. The thing of it is - how much validity does what you produce on the net have? I guess more than just writing things that never leave the comfort of your harddrive or notebook. I struggle with the concept of fanfic - because it cannot exist (due to that pesky thing called trademark and copyright law) outside of fan interaction. Nor for that matter is anyone outside of fans of the particular show you are writing about, going to read it. I honestly wonder if any none BTVS fans read that drabble I wrote. Or for that matter if any non Spike/Buffy fans did. Yet - the same thing is true about any work of art, I suppose, if the subject matter does not appeal, you will not partake.
How do we define being productive? Creating art? When it gets published?
When it airs on TV? If so what about all those wonderful pilots that never aired (there's a theater in LA that shows some of them, I've been told).What about those films that get made but never find a distributor? Or the books that never find a publisher? I suppose in a way producing fanfic on the net - is more productive than that - at least someone outside of dear friends and family gets to read it. Yet, is writing a story using someone else's universe, someone else's rules, someone else's character's - art? Perhaps more so than the novels okayed by the studio reps. Since in fanfic at least, we can break the rules, change the characters - creativity is at play. More to the point is it productive?
How do we define productive? Money at the end of the day? Or changing someone's world outlook? I don't know. Been debating the whole thing with myself for a while now.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 04:44 pm (UTC)Surely all of it's valid. It's there, people can read it, might or might not reflect on it. Is that really much different from something on a library shelf--say, maybe it's in a section you aren't interested in but happen to be walking through, and the last time someone actually took it out was in 1963, but it just happens to catch your eye or something.
I'm not sure that matters; most dialogues--and fanfiction is nothing if not a dialogue, just as art as a whole is--take place among specialized audiences, or are intially intended "just for us" in that sense, whoever a given "us" happens to be. That doesn't lessen their value, I don't think.
(Also, you never know: I've never been that much of an UNCLE fan, but I still have fond memories of a Man from UNCLE fan novel I happened to read back in the eighties [The Nowhere Man Affair by Pauli Gilmore, I think?].)
I tend to think that making it is the productive act. I used to be a slushpile reader at a publishing house, a couple of careers ago; while most of what I read in that capacity was indeed amazingly awful, there are four or five manuscripts out there I've read that, while so far as I know were turned down and will never be published, I feel privileged to have been exposed to--at some level, they've affected my inner experience. That's art. Something can be discovered years after the death of its author--or never discovered at all-but I don't think that makes it retroactively not-art.
Yes. Unequivocably. You can get more money (and if you're lucky, exposure) if you concentrate on your own creations instead, but whoever created the elements, the person creating that particular act of storytelling is committing art, I think.
My guess (and that's all it is): Making stuff. That's all. Money you need, affecting someone's outlook you hope for, but I don't know that "being productive" necessarily requires either.