Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Bowing
Photograph by Louis Faurer
French Vogue, 1973
Mom's Closet's last post leaves me
very, very distressed because I remember being so delighted when Kristyn -- my bestest friend and haggot -- became part of my blogging universe. I remember when the
Midnight Society first started communicating with each other electronically via e-groups (remember those?). It was great at first. But the epistolary medium proved shortlived (and tiring) for many of us in the
barkada because the mere thought of "letter-writing," even if done in the convenience of emailing, invited a sense of it being... well, a "chore." I remember I would not write back to group emails for days, even weeks. It was dreadful.
But blogging changed all that because this medium fancied itself a diary, a personal newsletter, a links engine, a bulletin board, a forum board -- all rolled into one. Plus you can post pictures! Plus you can tweak the design to make it fit the very personality you think you have! It was definitely more colorful than mere email... And it proved to be fun when members of the Midnight Society (a quick aside: you're right, Shi -- whoever you are -- it
is a beautiful, close-knit friendship peopled by smart, creative, driven, ambitious, questioning but open-minded, semi-ultra-liberal/sometimes-conservative, and often sexually-enlightened individuals...) would just hop all over each other's pages, taking note of each of our triumphs, defeats, birthdays, marriages, professional struggles and make-overs, trips, and trysts. If somebody was sick, we bring electronic chicken soup. If somebody has a birthday, we make tributes. And so on, and so forth. You can very well say this was something noble, if only for those of us who belonged to this group. For a while there, our blogging was a universe to itself.
And yet the very accessibility we had to each other -- initially a good thing since all of us are geographically diversely located (nobody occupies the same city, except for Clee and Aldwyn: we live, variously, in New York, San Fernando, Manila, Cebu, Dumaguete, Tokyo, Puerto Princesa, Sydney, Los Angeles, Dapitan, and Chicago) -- also proved to be our Achilles' heel. Being online is also being public. Since most of us live in Bloggerland, we do not have the same comments-gatekeeping system afforded for LJ folks (Nada O. Nil is the only LJ maniac among us). That meant our intimate lives were also public, and thus also subject to public scrutiny.
And subject to anonymous -- sometimes unwanted -- comments by strangers and/or hangers-on. (There's a word for these folks: "lurkers.")
Ryan, for instance. Ryan who has a choice of
not reading us if indeed we are the children of the Apocalypse, but
does!, inexplicably enough. Which is fine, really, but he abuses many of us with unwanted comments in our tagboards and haloscans. Comments that many of us take to heart even if we pretend we are strong individuals who can take sticks, stones, and hurtful words... or even bitches who "do not care" what other people say.
It would have been okay if he does his ranting about some of us in a private journal all his own (like somebody else in my blogsphere,
hehehe -- but he does it discreetly, which I appreciate and secretly love, even though I've been branded a literary canon-forger!
hehehe), but
noooo... Ryan leaves his mark in our circle of blogship, which was first offered up as a means of communication between friends who just liked the idea of personal online publishing in lieu of letters. I can permit Mom's Closet, or whoever else in M.S. a rant in MY tagboards -- they are part of my group after all. But some other people just should learn to keep away, if they can't say anything nice.
In honor of Mom's Closet's decision to close shop, The Secret Tango Dancer will also stop dancing -- at least for a week. It is my equivalent of a moment of silence. Plus, I do tend to talk too much. I will
not stop blogging, because I've done that before --
three times! -- but I always went back to it in the end. Plus, I believe blogging CAN
be beyond Ryan. He will have no power over me.
And I really need the time to finish my stories, anyway.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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