blogging

i had the opportunity to meet arianna yesterday (and i very embarrassingly did NOT have a card to give her when she asked me for one! note to self, get this DONE). she was keynote speaker at a conference for media buyers.

note about the beginning of this talk: just before arianna took the stage, yahoo played a very entertaining video about the internet that featured several children, one of whom said she want to be a “mermaid fairy” when she grew up. arianna incorporated several mermaid fairy references into her talk.

she pulled no punches, speaking about everything from sarah palin to 9/11 to arthur schlesinger (who, she says, with his accent “made incomprehensibility acceptable” — she’s very funny, and her accent is not THAT bad).

i love what she says about accountability in journalism. if something is said that isn’t true, we are obligated to mention that when writing about it. if two people are debating, for example, whether or not the earth is flat, it is incumbent on the writer to note that the earth is not, in fact, flat. she incorporates this thinking into debates over such things as creationism and global warming.

the talk is about thirty minutes long; i posted it in four separate videos on youtube. you can find them individually on my channel if you prefer. if you’d like to listen to the talk straight through, you can watch the playlist below.

would love to hear what all of you think about this talk. as for me, i liked and respected arianna quite a bit before — i think i’m in love with her now!

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walking home from a medical appointment this evening, i thought “everything is against the law now,” after reading about two states (NY and IL) trying to criminalize the act of text messaging while walking. (while WALKING, mind you, not while driving or flying an aircraft. walking. for fear you might bump your little head on a telephone pole.) (oh wait, there aren’t any telephone poles any more.) (there aren’t? when did they go away?) (around the same time cassette walkmen vanished.) (in any event the walking texters are bumping their distracted bodies into some fucking thing or other.)

and then i thought myself to be exaggerating, as i am sometimes known to do, and said no, even though we live in a country where it is illegal to cause someone pain while you are executing them it doesn’t therefore follow that absolutely everything is against the law.

after all, if everything was against the law then so would overloading my to-do list be against the law, and i would not be allowed to handle it as poorly as i have this last week (weeks? months!) and it would not have been eight days since this blog was updated, would it? no, when i get to working on my list i write it up as if i were rich and unemployed, adding every possible task i’d like to do for every one of my many ongoing projects. these lists make me happy! they have no conference calls or 1:1 meetings or spreadsheets or powerpoint presentations on them, no way! they are filled with twittering and songwriting and recording and blogbuilding and emceeing and performing and generating new creative writing. but then i have to go to the office. one of these should be illegal: either the thrilling making of lists that contain only things that inspire me, or otherwise the showing up at a job that’s filled with tasks that don’t inspire me — one of them has simply got to go, and anyone can see i’m far too undisciplined to make that happen on my own.

there should be a law! there’s a law for every other undisciplined thing — a fricking law about text messaging on the sidewalk for god’s sake — why not a law to save me from my own ambitions? (i almost wrote bottomless ambitions, but my ambitions are not the bottom of what i do, they are the top, the creative top — so are they then topless ambitions? not at my age.) anyway.

it is really nice out today, an august afternoon that feels like the best of september. walking home reminded me that it’s summertime for some people — kids are off school, the park is full of hanger-outers, toddlers and tweens and matriarchs all not jogging, not seeming to follow any agenda, not in a hurry about anything. i slowed down, taking all this in, forgetting about my lists. “ah,” i told me, “you’re just too pessimistic. everything isn’t against the law. this is america, land of the free!”

then i got home and learned that it is now illegal to scan your granny at walmart.

sigh.

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it’s harder to format the damn blogs than it is to write them. you’d think there’d be some default setting to choose in terms of fonts and so forth but no-ooo (as you can see from my pathetically and widely variously randomly spaced and fonted posts to date). one i wrote mostly on my blackberry in a cab and in a psychiatrist’s waiting room, then finished at work (don’t tell the boss) and silly me for thinking all that was just plain text words, postable, compliant, ready to roll over and format for me. optimistic girl, thinking this part might be easy after my hands atrophied from frantically thumbing microkeys as the taxi slalomed down fifth avenue.

just spent an entertaining half hour trying and failing to get my postings to date to match one another using the available settings, and it seems there is no combination of choices that equals the default result that you get when you type in the annoyingly small box provided on myspace’s post page, which is what i’m doing at the moment. (5:30 am, no music playing, and of course i’m not reading a book, how the hell can you be writing a blog and reading books or watching DVDs at the same time, they may as well have included masturbation as one of the “what i’m doing now” choices.) (though perhaps that could be done…)

and, in other news from the sucks-to-be-me-sometimes department, YES this stuff matters, matters terribly to a person born with five planets in virgo. the fucking blogs must match, the way one’s pubes must more or less match whatever’s sprouting from one’s head (mine don’t, and it keeps me up nights).

i need some advice from the rest of the blogging myspace world about how to get this right.

and while i’m asking for advice, i may as well put this useless fear out there — what about posting poems? not something i’ve ever done, i still waste my time stuffing the fuckers into envelopes and mailing them out to disinterested editors, in order to appear in journals that no one reads. (admit it, poets, you don’t read them either, when your work finally makes it into Agni you just check your own poem to make sure wasn’t poisoned with typos, don’t you?) posting them here eliminates that other frustrating activity as a choice, and … i just might be answering my own question here… look for new blogpoems soon!

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