25 Random Things: elenabella

I've been blogging now since late September (with 2 screensaver gaps in late December and February) and thinking about what a blog is or could be. For me it has been a daily dialogue/bio-log, a place for random or meditative reflections and connections with others, sometimes invisible (ideal/ized) readers. It's a practice. The question becomes: how to manage the time it takes to produce the posts? Where is it going? Where does it come from? And (of course) who cares? I read somewhere that "no one cares about a blog except the writer and, possibly, their mother" – my mother is a reader, and that's good enough for me. (But I so appreciate all of you other readers, too: thanks for visiting, and come around often – or better yet, subscribe!)

I won't go on too long in this vein, except to indicate that these are questions you begin to ask if you start throwing words or images or ideas or videos around on the web. The crafting of a webspot turns out to be a somewhat random thing: one kind of aesthetic practice among many possibilities. Any practice involves the full spectrum of emotional engagement: it is a joy, a life-saver, a pleasure, a burden, a conundrum, a gift – an experiment with memory, observation, revelation, and the great unknown. It begins with one reckless and quasi-calculated act of risk-taking, and then becomes a question of trying to do something interesting every day.

It does seem like a strange sort of miracle that we can now create on-line journals, complete with video, sound bites and photos, and immediately disseminate them around the globe. Sometimes I click on that button at the top of my screen that simply says "next blog" and then travel wherever it goes.