is this blog annoying?

It's amazing how the whole nature of experience can change so rapidly. Was it really last week that I was still worried about moving into the apartment? Our housewarming party finally happened last Saturday and it was a success. The culmination of over a month's worth of deliberating and fretting and shopping. We received uniform raves about the layout and the furnishing, the decorations, the hors d'ouerves. Whatever it was that I was trying to prove to everyone, I guess I did it.

I recognize that my obsession with this apartment has been equal parts a legitimate anxiety about putting roots down someplace and a competitive, self-promotional need to have everyone recognize the superiority of my setup in life. Things were in flux for me and I needed some kind of validation to verify that I'd made all the right choices.

Well, it's over and done with. So, hopefully, you all will never have to read another word about my sofa (which still has not been fully repaired, by the way!). What annoys me in retrospect about the blog entries I wrote last month is their pseudo-philosophical tone. It doesn't really matter to me that I was obsessed for a month with my furnishings (especially since I am so contented with the fruits of that obsession). What's disappointing is that instead of just saying, "Yeah, I'm being a little bit silly, a bit superficial, a bit materialistc -- who cares?" I went through an elaborate process of self-justification, written in self-righteous, all-knowing prose. I have a tendency to sermonize. One astute reader of this blog has described how when reading it her response is always, "Oh, look, Brian had another epiphany!" And that must get annoying after a while right? After all, how many epiphanies can one person have?

I have some ironic distance on all of this right now because of how hard I've been working myself for the past week. Life has been a relentless cycle of job-rehearsal-coming home-working on the script for the play. (I'm directing an original theater piece that's being created out of group improvistations; if I don't work on the script constantly, then there will be nothing to perform.) I was up to 3 am working at the computer for a few nights in a row. It's a good thing I got all of that furniture stuff out of my system when I did. Imagine if I was trying to do it now?

This blog is a bit like an online version of my journal. If anyone ever reads my journal (because it's published someday or because we get really close and you ask to look at it), you'll discover that it's not all that different from what you can read here. I subject my brain and my behavior to elaborate self-scrutiny, but always with the presupposition that my choices have been fundamentally right and that I just need to become comfortable with that, to see just how right they really are.

The times I write most in my blog or in my journal are when I'm sad or when I have nothing to do. When I have a lot to do, I'm almost never sad. Like now, for example. Work is heating up because the holidays are around the corner. I've got this play to create, which takes up all my time. If I weren't doing that I'd be working on some other scripts that have long been stewing in my brain. The free time, the time for anxiety, is completely occupied by other things. I don't really care in any deep sense, for example, that I haven't seen Sammy in person since the last time I wrote about him. (He's got me hooked on AOL Instant Messenger, though, so we "talk" a lot.) It's not as if I've been sitting around agonizing over him or anything. I haven't had the time. When you're active, you have less self-consciousness, which is why athletes are generally perceived to lead unexamined lives and why Plato insisted on the importance of leisure in his utopia to allow the philopher-kings time to do their contemplative work.

This blog is self-consciousness personified. It's not a rambling account of my daily activities, but a series of studied, worked over prose pieces that tread and re-tread over the same terriotry time and again. I'm always needing to teach myself the same lessons, convince myself that the same things are O.K.

I guess I write this blog for me, then, to get things off my mind. And doing it in a public forum has the added benefit of letting you into my mind. Total strangers, some of you. And that's as good as sex. Sharing the innerworkings of my brain, letting you inside of me. I like doing that, of course, but in blog format it's necessarily one-sided. I can be a slut and share my thoughts with all of you, but I don't really get penetrated. I expose only what I want to. And, in the comfort of my vaccuum, I can keep convincing myself of things that I know will continue to trouble me. The questions recur and recur, but in every blog entry, I pretend to have all the answers...