Monday, November 07, 2005

Dilemma

There is a dilemma inherent in having a propensity to be self-indulgent in everything one writes, particularly on a public blog, and having a propensity to be self-conscious in everything one does, particularly on a public blog.

5 comments:

svoid said...

It sounds like this is in reference to:
1. The comment that I made on your post, "Blogging in My Head".
2. The Doestoevsky quote that I used in my post, "Memoirs of a Weekend in Milwaukee".
3. My mispelling of "Dilemma" as "Dilemna" in the afforementioned post (It has already been corrected). I don't know why I always want to an 'n' in there. Is there another word ending in "emma" that is spelled with an 'n' like that?

Am I correct on all three? I don't know that I particularly agree with the quote from Doestoevsky in general. I think that there is a lot of beauty and value in being literary for the sake of being literary. The dilemma that I was facing was the desire to be 'literary' (well, as literary as a Software Engineer is capable of being) when I knew that doing so would probably betray more information than I should responsibly share on a public blog.

B.G. Christensen said...

Though I enjoyed both your comment on my post and the quote on your post, Svoid, I wasn't consciously thinking of either when I wrote this. Nor did I notice (uncharacteristically) that you misspelled "dillemma." I was thinking of the fact that I often write about things that I know only I and maybe one or two of my close friends care about, and then I feel stupid for doing so.

Cricket said...

why feel stupid? It's your blog and you can write whatever you want. The Public at large is probably not who you were wishing to reach in the first place... or was it??

svoid said...

Oops, well at least you're not self-indulgent in everything that you read, like I apparently am. Those three things were on my mind as I was reading your post and I became convinced that you were subtley reacting to all three indirectly.

Having cleared that out of the way, I fail to see what the inherent dilemma is. I don't see any problem with being self-indulgent or self-conscious on a blog. In fact, I think that those two terms are best used to define blogging.

Tolkien Boy said...

This is why dating is such a danger. You never have any control over what the other person reveals about you.

Darn them. Darn them to heck.