It’s only a matter of time, right? Am I the first to write a blog about this place, and the process of blogging here at families.com? Well, in any event, I have many thoughts about this issue of my audience, and while people have left me comments and I am getting read fairly well, I am wondering about my blog and the function it serves here.
A casual look at most of the other blogs will show you that the writers here want to inform the audience and be a resource for one another. There’s a lot of “how to” type of posts at this site. People are writing from their experiences – personal and/or professional – or they are doing some research and offering information based on what they have found. Lots of advice abounds here, and I am very interested in learning what I can, where I think I can use the information. Some of it’s quite important, some of it should be important to me but still is not, and some of it remains a bit of a mystery. That’s fine.
I don’t have a lot of posts like that. I have given out some advice, and I do share my experiences. Mostly what I do, I think, is write editorials (I also occasionally sneak into the pop culture blog and toss a few moderately witty review-grenades like my recent one about, speaking of grenades, The A-Team, with permission of the chief bloggers there). I’ve never really written such pieces for publication, though I have always held opinions and offered them to whomever wanted them and of course to my students, who had little choice but to listen, since I held the grade book. I do give small insights into my life, my family, my beliefs and values, but that’s not the same as giving advice. I don’t know if this makes me a great resource or not. I do offer some ideas and advice in the forums – thank you Lisa for gently reminding me — but again it’s largely about my experiences, which may or may not be useful to others. Of course, maybe that’s typical of guys – questionably useful!
I could write posts that give advice, but I don’t see the point – why write a daily advice-to-dads blog when most of the audience are not dads? I might give some pointers here and there, but for me, it’s more about sharing my thoughts, my ideas, and hoping they resonate for you, give you a new way of seeing things, especially since most of you are not fathers.
I’m not as funny as Dave Barry, though I wish I were (my last post about feeling like “Bobo the Sperm Guy” was meant to be funny). I don’t think I take as much time to write columns as those Op-Ed writers for the Times do (though some days I wonder). I don’t always follow my own advice to my students – I often improvise like a jazz musician, writing one idea, then suddenly shifting to another idea. (I am so lucky I live in the Age of Computers, which allow me to have several “sheets” of idea “paper” all at my fingertips!) So that’s why we end up with pointless, rambling self-conscious posts like this one. I guess I have to ask the pathetic, incredibly self-conscious, and not-quite-rhetorical question: what function does a blog like this one, more about perspective than advice, serve in a site like this?
Stay tuned for more self-conscious ramblings…