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Sunday, February 21, 2010

M is for Masquerade

(Cue overly ponderous music from Phantom of the Opera here....)

I got upset the other day and my first inclination was to go blog about it but, of course, I didn't, for multiple reasons: the incident involved the husband (and my hormones); it was personal; and, most importantly, it was a fleeting thing. And blogging about all that is not my blog style.

Why? Among other things, I've decided that blogging, perhaps even more so than other public media, is, at base, a public performance. We perform who we want to be on our blogs, even if we believe we are letting it all hang out and have no secrets from our reading public. I am under no such delusions about my blog persona. I mean, I know I sound like I complain a lot here, and I really do have very few filters while blogging, but when all is said and done, there are parts of my everyday world and thoughts that simply just don't make it into my posts. Ever.

Partially this is a question of audience. I know enough to know that there are readers out there I can't even imagine, and I would like to avoid angering these unknown people, as hard as that may be to do. More to the point, there are readers out there whom I know very well and, even with all my trying, I have still inadvertently offended or hurt some of them. So my audience, both known and unknown, is always on my mind.

But of course, literary (and more generally postmodern) theory would tell us that we are all always already performing (that's for you, mtg) our public selves. I guess blogging just makes that point more salient for me, when I sit down every day and decide who I am in each post. What you get is necessarily a construction...but one that's still made up of "real" elements, never fear!! (Just in case you were, you know, fearing. Which I really doubt you were. But whatever!)

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