Every once in a while, I get bitten by the envy bug about the hit statistics (and ad fees and public appearances and articles published) by some of the big-name bloggers. Gee, I think to myself, all I have to do, really, is what they do. Write emotionless, dry, sometimes-fact-based opinion pieces (while also toeing the conservative or liberal line, depending on whom you want to emulate). I have the talent. I have the discipline: I edited my college paper and have published a few magazine pieces.
But y’know, every time I think of trying to cut out the emotion and snark in my posts, I realize that I don’t want to cut out the emotion and snark. I know it costs me Instalinks. Glenn Reynolds likes to link to dry, emotionless analyses of topical issues. He particularly likes lawyers, which is not surprising, what with his being a lawyer who writes — you guessed it — dry, emotionless pieces about topical issues.
And on the flip side, I could change over to being wholly emotional and over the top, like some bloggers who I stopped reading long ago because, well, they bore me. You can only read so many rants before you get utterly tired of the person ranting. It’s predictable. It’s boring. It’s the reason that I don’t listen to talk radio except during the drive to and from work, and then, rarely. I mean, how much outrage can you take?
Of course, sometimes that happens to me right here, which is why we then get kitty pictures, Random Thoughts, and posts about dishwashers. When I can’t take reading yet another article about Jew-hatred, I make the subject go away for a while. I suppose it’s a way of recharging my batteries.
A friend of mine thinks that I’d make a great public school teacher, because I really like teaching Hebrew School, and I’m very good at it. The kids love me, they come out of my class knowing more than they did when they started (thankfully!), and the parents are pretty much fans of my work.
But I can’t be a public school teacher, and it’s for the same reason I can’t write dry, emotionless posts. Public school teachers have far less freedom than private school teachers. I have a curriculum to be followed, but it’s up to me to figure out how to teach it. There are very few restrictions on what I can and can’t do. In other words, I can be myself as a Hebrew School teacher, whereas I’d have to tone myself down a lot to teach public school.
So I guess I’m doomed to stay in the midlist bloggers, neither big nor small, but able to do what I want, how I want, pretty much when I want it.
I can’t complain. Ilyka Damen told me a couple of days ago that my readers are the best she has ever encountered:
If you get in a mood to pat your readers on the back sometime, Meryl, please do, and tell them I seconded it. Because though quiet, they READ things. They click the outgoing links, they explore, they stick around. And I would rather have that than some big site’s megatraffic of attention-deficit mouth-breathers ANY day.
I must be doing something right to attract a following like that.
Bows and applause all around, everyone.
You should be kind to “mouth breathers”. Just because someone has a sinus problem is no reason to assume that he is dumb. Sometimes nasal surgery to correct the problem is not feasable.
Then again, some commenters (on other blogs) would require brain surgery to correct the problem.
Well, with Fred Astaire and Cary Grant gone, Meryl, I realize it’s up to me to maintain that tradition of casual elegance they embodied. And if in my own particular idiom I have managed to lend class to your blog, I consider my time to have been well spent.
Please don’t change a thing about your blog. I, for one, enjoy your “dishwasher”-type posts just as much as your top-notch analyses of “Jew-hatred” articles and unmaskings of anti-Israel media bias.
I like that you’re emotional-but-not-exceedingly-so. It means that we really know how you feel about an issue, and that we know when you’re happy or sad. Reynolds, for example, hardly ever mentions his actual day-to-day life, which distances him from his readers. You share your experiences and that makes your regular readers feel like we know you. So we keep coming back. I don’t read very many top-of-the-ecosystem blogs because I like knowing about the person whose opinion I’m reading: what they’re like, their interests, their pets, even! It helps me judge their personalities, and get a better gauge on why they hold the opinions they do. Top-level bloggers can’t really share too many details about themselves.
FWIW, your accounts of your trials with the woodpecker were one of the funniest things I’ve ever read on a blog.
Yeah, people tend to laugh at me when I describe how I used to run outside in my pajamas and throw ice cubes at Woody. Go figure.
I’ve had The Woodpecker Wars on my list of posts to move to the new format. I’ll try to get to them this weekend.
I hope so, because I’m with Lizzie–they were great.
Sabba, sorry about “mouth-breathers.” It is that I run out of metaphors for people who aren’t very bright, and sometimes get a little too cute trying to find one I haven’t used a thousand times already.
Poor choice for allergy season, though.
We like what you do…we might not always buy your reasoning, but your enthusiasm (may we say “passion”) is a good thing. And the qat pix are a good break from the disheartening plethora of nitwits who were taught as children to be antisemites and have not developed the mental maturity to think otherwise.