The blog in the world or blogs as curatorial practice

It used to be that I worried desperately about everything being told. In my later teens and the darker days of Portland winters, I regularly cried over knowing how the details would disappear--how there would be no record of the rotating pots of rotting mung beans that stocked the stoves of drafty punk houses lived in by depressed queer girls with gluten sensitivities and good layering schemes that made nine months of rain and underemployment look okay. I experienced a panicked mourning at the feeling of time passing underneath me, seeming to worry about everything not getting told but moreso being terrified of not remembering, not being able to hold it all at once.

In a half attempt to catalog all of the knowing and not knowing I made, compiled, cross-referenced, and later consolidated list after list: Lists of things to be told. Lists of things to be written. Lists of things to be done. Lists of things already done. Lists of things to want from the world. Lists of lists to be made.

I don't remember when I decided to give up the campaign. At some point, I started to know that too much had come to pass for everything to even possibly be told. That the world was too full of of this untolded-ness. That instead we are all just arriving, delivering ourselves to each other. We are building the mystery and we can try to do some telling, but really the best we can do is just keep paying attention.

And we are all paying attention. To really different things. These days I am less concerned with obsessively and comprehensively cataloging everything awaiting to be told. Instead, I am much more interested in how we offer our respective bodies of specialized knowledge--whatever it is we are paying a lot of attention to-- to each other and the world. I want to know how it shows up in the now and in the sharing. And that process--of working from your mass to decide what is worth the telling--really, that's your blog.

In this way, I've come to understand blogs as something of a curatorial practice. And not just blogs that are blogs. but blogs in the world--all the paying attention. All the noticing. All the curating. All the offering.

In reflecting on what our blog in the world might be, Mira and I realized that the bizarre and neurotic brilliances of women in the world and the information they are working with is where a lot of our noticing lies: The logicslashmagic when you organized your tea collection or chose your socks. We may miss a beat, but not many.

So this is the weird girl blog. There's too much weird girl in the water--too much being known and too much knowing about how not to know--to ever really be told. But consider this as our offering. A blog for the world about blogs, bodies of information, in the world.