Here goes

So, after several months of "lurking"--a word that has begun to describe how I feel, silently sneaking about the blogosphere--I have decided that I too will blog. It's either blog or get off the blog-reading pot, because I no longer want to be just a wallflower. And yet, as my blog name suggests, I still identify as an outsider, an observer taking notes in the margins. This living-in-the-margins makes me, at times, a good reader of the world around me; but it also allows me to avoid confrontation, entanglements, self-exposure, to remain unrepresented in the central plot. Blogging pseudonymously seems like good way for someone like me to begin be a participant as well as an observer.

I cannot say exactly what this blog will become. I will probably be quite self-centered, focusing on the things I am most often thinking about: my ongoing career ambivalence as a humanities professor, the joys and challenges of parenting a toddler, my struggles to remain optimistic in these disturbing times. I do want to keep my attention on the larger contexts that, at least in part, shape my personal world. Like my favorite bloggers (Phantom Scribbler and Bitch PhD come most immediately to mind) , I see no reason to identify myself as this or that kind of blogger, or to promote the idea that thinking about one's personal life should or even can be separated from thinking about larger social, economic, political problems.

But mostly I just feel the urge to write without the usual constraints or expectations and with the knowledge that someone besides myself might actually read what I've written. Writing with the intention of getting published has always been extremely uncomfortable, nay painful, for me. While I have always been told I write well, and have had success publishing what little I actually submit to journals, I remain crippled by self-doubt and what I can only describe as extreme lethargy in the process of getting anything written. Perhaps this pseudonymous blog will free up my writing voice, and help me work through just what it is that's been blocking it for so long.

(One reason it took me so long to start my own blog, I must confess, was my inability to come up with a name for it, which I suppose is a form of writer's block. I like this name, though would not have spelled it with a "y" if the correct spelling had not already been nabbed.)