Blogging Without Obligation
I get stuck in perfectionism procrastination - if I can’t get something right, whatever “right” looks like in my head, I freeze up and put it off until later, letting uh…. um… gah…. nevermind take over rather than letting whatever it is I’m murgling about be better late than never. Frex, I’ve had about a dozen blog entries swirling around in my head in the last month, and have realized that I put myself on a deadline to get them typed up and posted, and if I miss that deadline I don’t bother.
My rationalization for not bothering is that I’ve missed the window, the ship has sailed, there’s no point in even trying as eventually the earth will fall into the sun and my blog post ain’t gonna do shit to stop that. Which is essentially giving into existentialist despair. Over blogging. But not really over blogging. Blogging (properly / ontime / underbudget / brilliantly / insightfully / worldchangingly / pulitzerprizewinningly) or the lack thereof, is just one facet of the sparkling dark jewel of perfectionism I ceaselessly seek to polish (had to toss in a bit of goth emo phrasing, really I did). The phrase “polishing the knob” extends rather nicely from this - if in my case as a woman the use of “knob” could be a feministing sort of reclamation of a normatively male euphemism for penis, or a placeholder for the poetic jewel of wine-sodden 12th century poetry. To remain in the realm of the conceptual, polishing this particular jewel (no, not the one that broke that last vibrator) amounts to mental masturbation.
See? Grandma was right! If you do it too much you will grow such thick hair on the palms of your metaphorical hands that you will no longer be able to grasp the point of an argument! You will go intellectually blind and will no longer be able to see the semantic forest for the syllogistic trees!! God will kill conceptual lolkittens and strew their bodies along the left-hand path of your amygdala!!!
My point, and I do have one beyond asserting that my clitoris is a sparkly jewel of ancient wine-soaked poetry, is that ain’t nothing ever gonna be perfect, no matter how hard I grind my brain against it. The double-negative in that last sentence is the devil’s advocate picking its fingernails whilst muttering through a cloud of brimstone that it just might be possible to make something perfect if I obsess over it long enough. The devil’s advocate needs a manicure and to fuck off, so I’m gonna let stand as-is, imperfect grammar and all, and stick a graphic up here now:
