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Meta-Post: Performance Anxiety

I'm posting about my post, so I guess that makes this a meta-post. 🙂

The warm reception that my Bloggin' v 2.0 post received was a bit overwhelming. I realize that I am now experiencing a bit of performance anxiety.

That post actually started out as the body of the e-mail that I intended to send to friends and readers about the change in my blog address. It was Sunday morning, the coffee rocked, and I was riffing about blogging. I get a lot of feedback that my e-mails are "too long" and "too detailed". These days, I think anything written in paragraphs with proper punctuation is deemed "too long". One of my pet peeves is the deterioration of English as both a spoken and written language – but I also think there must have been a tutor in Shakespeare's time who was worried about the same thing. The language has changed and also survived in a continually mutating form.

Nonetheless, as I reviewed the length of this announcement to friends/readers, I realized that no one in their right mind would read the entire thing and that I'd better give them a choice about doing that. So the announcement got shortened to a few lines, the e-mail became that post, and the post wound up on the front page at Vox for 24 hours.

Wow. More than seven people are actually reading this. And thinking about it. And writing back to me. Enter performance anxiety.

My best thoughts about blog posts come to me when I am nowhere near a computer. Usually they arrive when I am driving up or down the Don Valley Parking Lot, wishing I could get out of second gear, and muttering under my breath about global warming.  I'll have an "A-HA!" moment as my engine idles and spews god-know-what into the atmosphere – a confluence of connecting ideas so powerful, moving and obvious that I simply MUST record it in my blog for posterity. Time will pass, classes will get taught, activities will be executed … and I will get home and remember the "a-ha!" but have no freaking clue what it was about. Yes, I should have a notepad handy, or I could remember that my cell phone has an audio memo feature specficially for this kind of thing.

I guess a "note to self" about taking notes would be a "meta-note"? 🙂

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3 comments to “Meta-Post: Performance Anxiety”

  1. pfft.. performance anxiety… you could talk about a grilled cheese sandwich and I would read it. 🙂

  2. <southern accent on>Why, Miss spilledmilk, I do declare … *fans self* … </accent off>I happen to have LOTS of stories about grilled cheese sandwiches. Note to self … write about melted cheese for spilledmilk.

  3. phtt! Note to Venus – cook grilled cheese sandwich for Lex & spilledmilk.

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