But it didn’t show up in Google Reader. So the question is, will THIS one?

If not, I suppose I’ll have to … fix it, somehow. I don’t know.

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About the archives:

This is what bothers me about the archives: I’ve spent the past few years trying to start from scratch, to figure out how to be a better person. If you’ve been around for any time at all, you know that I pretty much loathe complacency in that department. I hope I’m still trying to be a better person fifty years from now. (A psychologist would argue that there is nothing admirable in this, as I take a sick egomaniacal pleasure out of the whole thing, and that psychologist would be absolutely correct, so please don’t consider this paragraph any sort of bid for sainthood.) In trying to be a better person, I’ve made messes. I’ve made friends that were no good for me, I’ve made comments that were ignorant at best and rude at worst, and I’ve made mistakes. I’ve made a lot of really great changes, too, but that just makes the earlier archives all the more winceworthy. (Was I really once afraid of driving on the highway? Of eating sushi or other non-Midwestern foods? Good grief.)

I realize that maybe the ability to view my long-ass trail of destruction and renewal might be helpful or even inspirational to you, but I need to let it go and I don’t want it out there anymore. It’s really that simple. Not that I’m trying to hide the fact that I was once so cringingly unimaginative, but, you know … I’d rather not admit it in such, ah, vivid detail. There was this weird psychological drag effect going on, the same one you experience when you attend a Thanksgiving dinner at which every last participant over sixty still treats you as if you are twelve, and I feel much better having trashed all that.

But some of the archives didn’t have much to do with me as a person, and those had some pretty helpful stuff in them. I’ve gotten a few e-mails from people who are all, “BUT NOW I DON’T KNOW HOW TO MAKE EGG NOG, YOU JERK,” and you can just go ahead and count that among the factors that didn’t occur to me when I installed the WordPress Suicide plugin and let ‘er rip. I intend to put some of that stuff back, maybe on a recipes page or a recommended products page, but for now: how to chop an onion. You’re welcome.

About the state of the blogosphere in general:

It bothers me that we’re all so … separate, just because we want our own mastheads and sidebars and such. I’m jealous of photographers, who all get to romp around on Flickr and mesh and mingle and interweave. The blogosphere, if you ask me, is bass-ackwards in terms of efficiency. You have to come here just to talk to me, and I have to go over there just to talk to you, and it’s not that hard but it’s annoying nonetheless. If I had my way, Facebook and Vox would have hot sex and birth a baby and that baby would grow up to be the new blogosphere. Right now, the blogosphere is like the world’s least functional block party. Oh, you want to say hello and maybe try some of my sweet potato casserole? No problem! Just step on over here and stand on my lawn.

I’ve never been good at the political (for want of a better word) part of blogging. I don’t like small talk, and commenting somewhere just because someone commented here feels embarrassingly artificial. I have enough trouble complimenting someone after they’ve complimented me, even if I mean it (and I always do), because what if they think I’m JUST SAYING THAT? They’ve gone and complimented me first and taken all the meaning out of it, dammit. I personally would feel patronized if someone left a comment here SOLELY because I left a comment on their blog. I commented because it was a great post and I had something to say, not because I think they owe me something or because I’m trying to garner attention. I tend to freeze when I can tell someone is blatantly fishing anyway, because thanks to self-consciousness, nothing I say is going to sound sincere, even if it is.

I don’t think I’ve ever commented somewhere just because someone commented on my site. If that makes me a poor team player, so be it. I used to feel guilty about it, and then I realized that, hey, I write these posts, and I do put effort into them, and they’re free, and the only readers I want are the ones who get something out of them anyway. God knows the last thing I’m interested in is a pity listen. I’ve always liked the notion that what I say here sometimes helps people, and that is ultimately what I want. I mean, good grief, if these posts aren’t working for you, don’t put yourself out just because I commented on your site. Such a thing demeans us both, in my opinion, which is why I’m always surprised that it’s such an expectation.

I’d love to have a blogroll that revolved around the comments I’m leaving, that directed you to the posts that I’ve found compelling enough to respond to. I’ve looked for such a plugin but have yet to find it, but if you know of one, speak up. That type of function exists naturally on Facebook … which, let me repeat, needs to have babies with Vox, so that we have a blogosphere that interacts a little more organically, letting the interesting stuff rise to the top without a lot of socially obligatory-mutual-backscratching crap getting in the way. Because here is the sad thing: The people who say that the blogosphere is all politics and high-school bullshit, they are so very wrong. But because things work the way they do, they also are given plenty of evidence to back up their argument, and that’s really too bad.

I don’t think that people should exist in one spot, I guess. I’d rather see my identity function as a tag that follows me around from here to there, rather than as a URL. If my tag bumps into your tag and finds you to be delightful and I say so, I would like that to just BE, without having to make and maintain a big links page reflecting it. Revolutionary, I know, but it would be nice if you could invent such a system, known as “Facebook with mastheads.” Thanks.

About identity:

I think I would maybe just like to be me from here on out. I had an issue with someone online once that made me hesitant, someone who once loaded my page more than thirteen thousand times in a very short span of time, someone who was just creepy enough to turn things into an unpleasant news headline somewhere. But you know, if people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi can do their thing without an Internet handle, I’m thinking that my perceived need to use an alias just to recommend Croc mary janes and onion-chopping techniques is perhaps a tad overdramatic—and maybe even ludicrously archaic, in this day and age. So: I’m Jennifer Gilbert. Very nice to meet you. Continued “Schnozz” references will be accepted with affection, just like always.

There’s this idea that using your real name is bad, that someone could meet you and then go home and Google you and know everything about you, but … yeah, whatever. I don’t see extensive archives as part of this blog’s future anyway, and even if I did, I’ve never allowed myself to write much of anything I’d be ashamed to have my neighbors read. Except for the part where I got drunk with a bunch of hookers in Amsterdam and took some incriminating polaroids, but bestiality isn’t illegal there anyway. Wait, it IS illegal there? Oh.

I guess I’m at the point where, if I someday get divorced then I go on a date with you and you do not like what you see when you Google me, then I offer a shrug in your general direction, and this is one of many ways I seem to have gotten old all of a sudden. And I like it.

On SchnozzFest.com:

I just haven’t figured out how to make it all happen the way I want it to yet. But I’ve been thinking about it, and … well, not to steal someone else’s famous line, but I’ll be back. (Come with me if you want to live.) These are very busy days, but I’m working hard to get that desired job switch going, so I can work out a schedule that has a little more routine and leaves me a little more time to write, both here and elsewhere.

My book is stalled out right now, not because I don’t have a million ideas on how to finish it but because I am realizing that my every effort needs to go to studying, if I want to someday soon be in the position to channel all of my creative energy toward said book. Every week I spend in the publishing industry is severely crippling me in the novel-writing department, and maybe one of the most profound realizations I have ever made in my life is that work should be work and play should be play, and any effort on my part to sell my very best talents has proven itself to be a great way to chop my own legs off at the knees.

I’ve worked in the lowest floor-mopping jobs in the food industry and I’ve worked as a creative mastermind, and both were really just work, something to be endured. That seems like a tragedy, especially when I’m at a time in my life when I don’t really need that much money. I want what I love to just be what I love, not for sale until I’ve gotten what I wanted out of it and it’s no longer of use to me anyway. And I am enormously grateful that I am in a position to attain that ideal.

On stuff that isn’t so goddamn heavy:

Life is good. Really good. Some people have asked me if I’m going through something, and I absolutely am, but it is the best of somethings, where I shed some weight and climb just a little higher than I’ve been before. Because you deserve a medal if you made it this far in a very muse-y and self-indulgent post, I give you pictures of what my husband and I wore to our high-school reunion. And let me just say that I am so glad I’m with someone who supports me in my career changes, gives up a lot of our quality time so I can roll around with a bunch of girls in knee socks, and is the first person to turn to me and say, “Hey, you know what I should wear to the reunion? A REALLY AWFUL TUX.” And then looks at the horrible, horrible yellow dress I found for $25 on eBay and says, “It’s perfect.” And it was.

Also, thanks to the long hours I put in at my new desk, the bunnies are getting unprecedented amounts of playtime. This results in them sleeping as if they are dead. Because I knew you would want to see, I give you Maisie, looking dead. I think we all feel a little bit like that around here at the moment, but in the best possible way. In the summer-afternoon-nap sort of way, when waking up will mean a good dinner and an evening on the porch and that feeling that this life, it is made of good stuff.

I hope you all are well. I’ve missed you.

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I don’t like to write about something until I know how it ends,
because I like stories and it is not a story if it does not end,
and right now I am sort of between a beginning and an end;
so it is just the middle.
And it is not even a very exciting middle;
truthfully, the most exciting thing about it is a rug I bought;
it is from Crate and Barrel, if you were wondering.

I think it would be nice if we could just sit together;
I don’t know of any virtual way to do that, or maybe
there has always been a virtual way to do that, seeing as
the required bandwidth is pretty much nonexistent, but at any rate,
I assure you that you are missing nothing.
It is just the middle, the sole function of which
is merely to bridge that gap between
what has been before and what will be next.

[COMMENTS OFF]

My blog is working fine; I just deleted all of my posts, both here and at the old blog.

I think maybe I’ll do something a little different here now. This makes it sound like I have some sort of plan, but this is unfortunately not the case. So it might take me a while, but I’ll get back to you on it, okay?

Thank you, as always, for being here. I like you quite a lot.

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