Cyn, cynical--cyn, cynical--cynical is me....(sing like Dick Van Dyke)

(This is a picture of Astrid peeking into the kitchen. My sewing machine and one of Elliot's old handdrawn maps are behind her. I put this picture in because I feel very childish tonight....read on, if you dare.)

I'm in the final stages of drafting my Bad Craft Blogs paper for the Popular Culture Conference in Boston--my husband and I are reading our papers on April 4. I've been aiming for nine pages, and I have about six right now--with one more day of spring break in which to finish the draft. I feel pretty confident that I can do it (unless I don't sleep tonight and feel bad in the morning), and I think it's going to be a pretty good paper. But. I'm sick to death of thinking about blogs. I've been looking at other people's blogs much more than I actually want to (I just found out, for instance, that there are 1048 blogs in the Knitting Blog ring), and I'm feeling like I did before I ever started my own blog---that they're good mostly for navel gazing egomaniacs with time on their hands.

And yet....this navel gazing egomaniac with no time on her hands has *really* enjoyed writing a blog, and I feel like a twelve-year-old wallflower when I google Seis Manos and can't find it, or when I go to Blogflux (where I tried to list myself) and I can't find it. I figure I'm doing something (or lots of somethings) wrong, but there's part of me that feels like I'm being left out by the popular kids. I've been feeling high on my tech savvy (not easy to do in a house where my husband can basically build a computer from scratch, and knows more acronyms than actual words)....

To top things off, I just about fainted tonight when I found that someone from U Washington had published a refereed article about knitting blogs in an online rhetoric journal. I was ready to call up the Popular Culture Association and let them know that I wouldn't have a paper to read, because someone had already written and published what I was going to say. Then I had the presence of mind (ha ha) to read the paper and I saw that it wasn't at all what I was trying to do.

This entry is way more "academic" than "creative," though a main reason for starting Seis Manos in the first place was to explore how artificial the divide between those two kinds of thinking is. I've been thinking how competition goes underground in women's craft blogs---women seem afraid to openly show how competitive they probably feel---and my immersion in writing this paper (and, I hope, a journal article built on it) has made the academic machisma I'm so used to feeling bleed way, way into an area that I've tried to keep it out of. Oh well. No one's reading this anyway! (Maybe if I start making lists of people I hate and envy--and who have no connection to sewing or crafting--this blog will suddenly become very popular and influential.)