The conundrum of a blog

I was recently expressing to a friend my hesitancy to recruit a readership for this blog from amongst my friends and family. I do want a readership, but I don't know that I want to know my readership, or have them truly know me, at the end of the day. It becomes a matter of how brutally honest I am comfortable in being with my blog. My friend fleshed it out for me as follows:

I think I understand your publishing reticence. It make sense if you are going to write a blog you invest legitimate time and thought into writing. After all traditionally in publishing, you have a vague sense of reaching an audience, but a knowledge that your friends and family constitute a minority in that audience. Blogs, the modern-day vanity press, launch from family and friends outward.

I think too, we invest a considerable amount of time portraying ourselves to our friends in person. The danger in a blog is sending a conflicting message. You can't realistically enter a writing alter-ego when you know that all your readers are saying to themselves, "ah, this is all well and good, but Dave is thusly." Or worse that people that know you think you are duplicitous when you might actually be complex enough to read one way in blogdom and another way in conversation.

Writing is stilted honesty, it is hard to be honest, especially to people that know you. It is hard to be honest when people don't know where the honesty is (tone, content, idiom, thought...) and jump to their own conclusions. If you don't know your audience personally, things go more easily.

All this is not to say that I intend to be mischievously dishonest in my blog, on the contrary, I look forward to the challenge that it will provide me with to be honest and kind in that which I write.

A challenge to be careful with my words.

In other news...spent the weekend relaxing and helping Matt unpack in his new place. About time he moved to Hoboken. Saturday I drove the roommate to the airport in the morning then lazed while waiting for the dishwasher repairman to show up and fix the stupid thing. I'm pretty sure I could have done it myself, in less time, too. Here's the funny part - we had a guy come out and look at it two weeks ago. He only needed a few minutes looking at it to be able to tell me, with absolute certainty, that we needed a new motor. Sears sends the motor, we call them when it arrives, they schedule the guy to come again to install it (the part I could have done myself). Well, its a new guy this time. He tinkers with the broken machine for a while, then gets on the phone. The following ensues:

"Yah Joseph, is Ron. Listen, I looking at dishwasher, you know, one in Hoboken, you say need new motor?"

"..." (and I'm wondering if Joseph, on the other end of the line, even remembers our dishwasher)

"Yeah...well...I wondering...why you think needs new motor?"

I didn't bother listening to the rest of the phone call. Point is the roommate got a deal - you pay a flat $190 and they guarantee to repair the problem and cover it for a couple years or something like that. So it wasn't like the motor or extra labor cost us extra. Lucky for them. He put the new one in and left.

Helped Matt unpack that afternoon, Sunday I decided to take a morning off from the weekly trek to the East Side service, and furtively sought to not labor on the Sabbath. Helped Matt hang some pictures. Evening service. Home. Eat. Bed.

This weekend should be fun, Matt and I are headed to conquer the mighty summer rivers of Virginia via canoe. There will also be beer, and volleyball, and grilled flesh, and fireworks. I love this weekend.

We are syndicated

That just sounds freakin cool. At least I think we're syndicated. There's an atom site feed and an xml site feed near the bottom of the sidebar. Let me know if your poison of choice doesn't seem to work. Blogger only lets me do an actual site feed thru atom, but I found a site that should theoretically syndicate me in xml AND rss. I will now commence speaking only in acronymns.

UPDATE: Apparently there may be some "issues" viewing the feedburner feed thru at least one kind of RSS viewer. Be advised that my tech dept. is hard at work on the problem.

UPDATE UPDATE: If you use firefox as opposed to IE, and you use the RSS ViewPanel version 1.7, you're gonna have a problem viewing my blog or for that matter any other atom feed that reads like mine. Everyone else (ie. the majority of the free world, that does use IE, and any other kind of viewer) should be fine. Also, my tech department (read: Dick at feedburner.com) rules. I say this with much suspicion.

This is me. I have to post it to the blog here so I can link to it from my profile. If I figure out some other type of photo hosting, I'll post there and delete this post...hopefully soon.

Oswald Chambers

"Walking on the water is easy to impulsive pluck, but walking on dry land as a disciple of Jesus Christ is a different thing. Peter walked on the water to go to Jesus, but he followed Him afar off on the land. We do not need the grace of God to stand crises, human nature and pride are sufficient, we can face the strain magnificently; but it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours in every day as a saint, to go through drudgery as a disciple, to live an ordinary, unobserved, ignored existence as a disciple of Jesus. It is inbred in us that we have to do exceptional things for God; but we have not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things, be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is not learned in five minutes."

ok, so now, plans...

Well we're all contradictory little creatures at the end of the day, aren't we though? Here's the deal, I've gotten this thing up and running to a state that I think it may be presentable in, so I'm actually going to (shudder) start telling people about it now. So that they can (shudder) see it!

And since there will now be people seeing this thing, I suppose I should tell you what to watch for. I write this almost as a laundry list for myself...when I get home and find some time, perhaps Friday afternoon (God bless early Fridays in the summer time), that is. To come:

- Pictures! Yay. Hopefully even one of me, for ye olde profile.

- More Links to cool stuff. (Timecube will save us all. Stupid humans.)

- A "What I'm reading" / "What's on the stereo" section, also with links. (side note: most bloggers will link you to a book they are reading via Amazon. I try to use Cabobble whenever possible b/c it is a veteran-owned bookseller that uses proceeds to benefit homeless veterans - also they have a pretty cool mission) Hopefully I'll figure out how to make these into photo links! Oooooh.

- A new template. I'm tired of this one already. Kidding. Just need one a bit more unique. Minimalist motif, maybe.

- More posts. Yeeeesssss, my precious...

In the meantime, the weather here in the city is spandastic and I'm stuck inside. Oh, to be golfing. Also, the liquid stitches on my chin are working out nicely, so I'm healing up right fine. Perhaps I'll write more about the traumatic hubcap incident later. Nathan's motives: malicious or simple survival tactics?

first things first

Welcome to my blog. That sounds weird, just saying it (ok, typing it). My blog. Mine. I feel selfish already.

I am foraying here, and as such, feel no real need to supply you at the outset with a mission statement or vision or plan for my blog future. I have pretenses of being a writer someday and thought this might make a good start of it. Also thought it might be a way for a few of the people out there who are interested in my life to be able to check in on it from time to time without the painstaking commitment of a phone call. Let's face it, even the phone call is becoming mildly outdated in our day and age. Expect to see here: news, personal stuff, opinion, et cetera...we shall see.

So there you have it. My first post, to my first blog. Just think. You're one of the people who got in on the ground floor. Someday you'll be able to brag that you were reading my blog from day one.