Self-Editing

It’s only natural that at some point while maintaining a website, you get the creeping feeling you should be posting more frequently. I’ve been feeling this lately. That maybe I should follow the lead of some eponymous domain names and everyday — twice a day! — take a few moments, straighten my hair, moisten my lips, engage in self-portraiture with my camera phone, and post the photos online. Maybe add a few accompanying thoughts. (”On the way to work. Without makeup!”) Post transcripts of voicemail messages exchanged with ex-boyfriends.

Then I snap out of it and remember this is narcissistic lunacy talking. I don’t understand how this raging mania for exposure has come to be seen as normal, even normative. Whenever I stumble upon one of these websites now — or go gaze at them out of slack-jawed morbid curiosity — I have to remind myself: Melanie Griffith. She’s the fairy godmother of all these efforts, and the current state of her career is the logical endpoint for the kind of thinking that maintains them. I’ve made the New Year’s resolution that every time I visit such a site, I must punish myself by contributing a comment, and the comment will be a reading “suggestion” for a Joan Didion essay, or a new novel. Or, perhaps, a plug for Idiocracy. Which is to say: Whoa now, champ. Take it easy. [i.e., The time you allocate to preening in public might be better spent. Let's all learn to say please, thank you, and edit ourselves. Peace on earth probably more likely, blah, blah, blah.] Of course, I’d never send in such a comment, so the point is basically to prevent myself from going there.

PS. Many of Joan Didion’s essays first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. The Saturday Evening Post! I think I need a tissue.

PPS. By the way, posting pictures of yourself with a caption that specifies no makeup does not count as self-deprecation. No, just no. Thank you for playing, please try again. [Oh, and -- here's a plug -- you can read more about this tactical phenomenon in Ch. 8 of my book.]