all shall be well

frankly, i'm pretty surprised that in nearly five years of blogging, i have never mentioned julian of norwich, whose revelation of divine love was the only book i actually vaguely enjoying on my middle english course.

julian (not her real name) was an anchorite at the church of st julian in norwich, she was born in around 1342. during a bad illness, she had visions of God, and wrote them down in her 'revelation'.

actually, that's not what i remember, i've got all of that from wikipedia just now. what i remember is one line: "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well".

regardless of whether you believe what julian did (that she had received this revelation from god), a fantastic optimism just radiates from the statement.

and it makes such a fantastic motto that i have been using it in stressful situations ever since. although julian, perhaps, might have had a different revelation had she too been on a fixed term contract.

twitterpated

like every blogger in the world (or so it seems), i've been thinking about twitter lately.

twitter was founded by evan williams, who was a co-founder of blogger. it is "a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging [and] the Twitter website" (from the wikipedia entry. Those updates can also be sent to 'friends' (in that great web 2.0 sense) as text messages, and you can recieve the updates of the people you 'friend'.

i've had a twitter stream (log? page?) since january, but i'm yet to really see a point to it. honestly, it mostly seems like a pretty good way to stalk someone. and with stuff like twittervision (which is strangely mesmerising), it feels like just another way to see into the minutiae of strangers' lives (much like Blogger).

nonetheless, i suspect that if more of my (real-life) friends were using twitter, i might be more interested in it. certainly, one of the most appealing features of facebook is seeing people's updated statuses. if facebook made it possible to update your status by text - that would be great, and a twitter/facebook mashup (where your status updates were archived on a particular page) would be pretty fantastic.

metametameta

the worst thing about not posting, is that the longer it goes on, the harder it gets to post. i can't imagine any of you thought that i was in some way 'striking' in honour of alan johnston (who still hasn't been released/found), but i definitely wasn't, that would have required an ego the size of a large country.

so i read a quote from this article on banksy from the new yorker, on kottke.org of all places:
"The graffitist's impulse is akin to a blogger's: write some stuff, quickly, which people may or may not read." and it really hit home that my blogger's impulse has been definitely mis-aligned recently - i'm so concerned about writing something amazing or somehow insightful that people will enjoy that actually i'm not posting at all.

actually blogs are (and should be) by their nature ephemeral - nothing i write here will every be worthy of elevation to the pantheon of literature, and i should be celebrating that by posting about anything that comes into my head, rather than worrying about how what i write will be perceived.

in future: shorter, more frequent postage, less angsting.