Thinking about blogging

I was looking at the Urban Dictionary last night at blogging. Or the word "blog." You can see the entry here. It's not very flattering. I suppose that it's difficult to work your way into the elite group - some of the definers are willing to admit that some blogs are good and many are not - but it's tough to break through such a sea of voices. Sometimes people - like me - assume that no one will read, and that the writing is more a public record than a public performance. In other words, it's like something that is filed away in some public library somewhere that no one ever looks at. Like old mortgage documents. It takes a really obscure scholarly or legal researcher to dig up many things - and there is a vast body of information out there that will never be tapped. I wonder how many blogs are written every day without ever being read. How many blogs start and fizzle? How many have I started, myself, only to fall away from it for one reason or another? It's difficult to keep this going without some kind of intervention. I suppose it would help to get a comment now and then. I don't want to post on MySpace because that is rapidly becoming both a corporate site and a porn site. It's way too public, and I get sick of comments about mortgages and so on. And random chicks wanting to be my friend so that they can be more popular. It's not that I want to be left alone completely - otherwise why write this in a public place? - it's that I want the wrong people to leave me alone. There are too many of the wrong people on MySpace. People for whom the Internet is just another way to get off. Or who don't really care about words and language, they write only because they can't speak into the computer and be recorded on a blog. Or they can - but they don't know how.

Maybe I'm unusual in the sense that I prefer writing over speaking. By a lot. I mean, I think I have a nice voice and stuff - who doesn't like the sound of their own voice, and who hasn't wondered about their potential voice career as a signer or newscaster? - but I feel much more important and powerful when I'm writing. Like I have a hold of something that slips through other people's fingers. The ability to find the right word. Maybe that's it. I have the ability to capture difficult or slippery things. Or maybe it's because words and language are just natural to me. I'm not Mozart, but sometimes I have enough caffeine-induced euphoria to think that I'm an older, shabbier echo of the genius.

Today I have accomplished little. I've been thinking about my classroom a lot, and trying to design procedures to help recover my lost control. I thought I had control of the classroom once, but that has disappeared. I want to impose a lot of structure and a lot of procedures on the class to rein in that behavior issue. I want more rewards and punishments, and I want them to feel caged by learning and positive expectations.

Okay, back to work.