A Cautionary Tale

One sign that a sitcom has gone terribly wrong is the turn toward the meta-, that obnoxiously self-referential "we've run out of subjects, so our new subject is ourselves" trope. I've got two divergent examples. The first is Growing Pains, late in the series after Leo's departure, when the camera literally goes backstage to find a room of producers who spin a wheel with all of the characters' names a piece of its circular pie to decide who the next episode will focus on. That was the whole episode: we have no ideas.

The other example is Seinfeld, which was usually great--meta- or not--and the episode I'm thinking of is the one in which George and Jerry pitch a series to NBC (lo and behold! the same network that aired Seinfeld!) that's called Jerry, and the premise is it's a show about nothing.

Okay, so not all meta- sitcoms go terribly wrong. That show about nothing stuff was pretty funny.

Point is I'm about to get super-meta about this blog and say that after just a week of this writing an entry per day promise to myself, I'm pretty sick of it. The whole idea behind the blog was that I would write about ideas I have in life, most of which I can use in my book, a sort of online diary which my friends could read if they wanted and in a forum that made me feel I really couldn't screw things up (other people can read this, Brooke!).

But not very surprisingly the blog is something entirely different and not so productive: it's avoidance behavior. I am supposed to be first and foremost a writer, and if the goal of writing is publication, even if I'm writing every day I'm not a writer. (This is completely counter to everything I tell my freshman comp students, but hopefully my hypocrisy is safe with you--I suspect they will not be reading this blog.)

A sad truth: I have not submitted one piece for publication for four years now. And the last time I submitted it was because my teacher made me do it, and it was a local publication, and I was published by default (my teacher made them publish me). So this blog is just my way of having a safe audience of a handful who necessarily love me and not my writing, and even though they may like my writing a lot cannot untangle my words and sentences from their feelings about me. What happens when one comments? What happens when one doesn't? It's impossible to deny the ego-tripping involved here, and I suspect the main reason I started the blog was just to be actually read for the first time in years.

Now that I've been read, I want more. I want to be published.

So I wonder if I'm accomplishing anything at all by this? I'm going to continue to write the blog through November and see how I feel, but the thing I need to be doing more than anything else is working on my book. These pages may be filled with interesting notes, and disparate thoughts that may find more profundity later, but a book these screens are not.

I'm the cautionary tale of the cow (girl) not being bought (not being loved) because it gives away the milk (sex) for free (to whoever'll take her). My mother never told me that tale, as she doesn't speak in parable, and doesn't really see a big deal in people giving away milk unless it leads to pregnancy.

Of course I'm hungover and nobody reads my blog ever or loves me, so this might also be a reason for my current unbugginess. I could really use some ice cream and a cheeseburger while soaking in my hot tub. Yeah, that oughtta do it.