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This is the first time in four and a half years of blogging that I woke up this morning without a post drafted, ready to publish. I post something every three days or so, and in all this time, often I have had two or three topics ready to fly. So, what of this presentation of emptiness? I dunno.
Give me a couple of minutes, I’ll come up with something. Either a topic to write about, or a reason I am without a topic.
Wait for it.
You could very legitimately ask, If I have nothing to say, why post anything?
OK there is something I’ve been wondering about lately.
Many of my favorite bloggers have enabled comment moderation. I wonder why? There was a short time I was getting spammed like crazy, so I added the word verification feature. That seemed to take care of it. No more spam.
When I publish a comment at a friend’s blog who has enabled comment moderation, off my words fly like a butterfly, never to be caught again. Sometimes when I really like something I wrote, I copy and paste it into a Word document first so I can look at it again while I wait for my friend to publish the comment to their blog. This is a good safety net, since I have written a long comment many times, only to have it gobbled by Internet interference. I might have spent fifteen minutes writing that comment, and pfft! Waiting for my comment to get published after blog author approval can take an hour, a few hours, a day, and sometimes a couple of days, depending on the blogger. I tell you one thing, it’s a way to get me to go back to that post, something I don’t always have time to do after posting a comment. A lot of the people who have this feature enabled also respond to comments, so that is a nice reward for the waiting and checking on my part.
Maybe requiring blog author approval of comments is one last ditch effort to have control over something. There isn’t much left in that category.
So enough maundering. Isn’t that a great word? That’s my new favorite word. It means to talk in a random, foolish, or meaningless way. I have a friend who taught me that word who is anything but random, foolish or meaningless.
All this gets me thinking about authorship, and authority.
In my English department there is an awful lot of plagiarism by students. Would you be surprised to hear that some reports show that up to 70% of college students admitted to plagiarizing at some point in their college career? And did you know that it’s considered plagiarism even if a student does it unknowingly?
OK, here’s my last wandering, lumbering, untethered donkey thought on this open-the-gate-and-let-the-animals-graze-freely blog post kind of day.
What is authority? After growing up in a home where parents ruled and kids weren’t consulted much, I am happy to report that at age 54, after much tugging and tucking, I am the author, and the authority, of my life.
It’s dark outside. A truck just drove by, I heard the sigh. It’s the 9th of November, 12:25AM. In a few hours I’ll get up and drink coffee, eat oatmeal, and get ready for work. I can’t stop the clock ticking, but I can decide what to wear, maybe a skirt and tights before it gets cold outside. The sun will rise, no matter what I do. I can’t find the picture I really want to load with this post. I must sort and file my photos. They’re out of control.
I'm not used to this free donkey wandering, but this felt kind of good. Now I'll wander over to the comment box and see if anything wild, random or unruly happens. Eee-haw!
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