Bon Blogiversaire a Moi

I started this blog a year ago today. While I was swimming yesterday--or maybe it was the day before--I thought of some things that I could say about that: mainly concerning how this blog isn't quite what I envisioned it to be, but has become a much more sort of frivolous and largely silly blog with the occasional desperate cry for job-related reassurance. I'm perfectly okay with that. I think it suits me.

But I don't remember exactly what I was going to write, and I'm starving and also need to head back to campus in just over an hour to show a movie to my students, so I won't try to reconstruct my thoughts. Instead, and true to the above-stated theme, I will only say that today is the EARLIEST POSSIBLE day that I could POSSIBLY even DREAM to IMAGINE hearing about either of the jobs for which I have had campus interviews, and I am, accordingly, a wreck. (Never mind that this state could last weeks and weeks--I know the process--I will proceed to fret in an undetermined fashion, fraught with self-loathing and despair, until everything is settled and/or I've resigned myself to my fate.)

On Voice

The strangest thing about this whole endeavor is the matter of voice. Of persona. I can say with some confidence that yesterday's post was written in a style that I don't normally use. I mean, obviously it's not my academic voice (thank God), but neither is it my epistolary voice, my fiction-writing voice, or even the voice I use in journals and the like. It is, instead, some kind of odd sarcastic hybrid that I really quite enjoy. Experimenting with it is giving me a greater sense of the appeal of blogging: the opportunity to be someone else, in print; to flesh out a manner, a tone, a style of speech that you enjoy but can't (or won't, for whatever reason) normally make public.

Clearly, anonymity is the key. Bitch Ph.D. has an interesting paper on anonymity and personas, and that plus yesterday's post have got me thinking about the weird freedom of writing under a non-name. I can be as facetious as I want, for example, and no one will care. Of course--and I hate to point out the obvious here, but it ought to be mentioned--there is the fact that no one is reading this. Because only two people actually know about the existence of this blog, and I think that they both get enough of me in real life that they don't need to go through these ramblings, too. However, at some point, someone might read this, but in the authorial present/near-future, it's unlikely, and pursuing this theme will get me into all kinds of tedious pronomial and temporal confusion, so I'd best change the subject.

--To lunch. I had one too many beers last night; some food is well in order. Accursed bartender! (Actually, one of the bartenders did buy the last round, so my vitriol is not entirely ill-placed.) Leftovers await. Followed by a four-hour bus ride.

Off I go, then--