having been read

I walked into work yesterday afternoon, and my boss said, "So, I read your blog..." Eek. My initial reaction was somewhere between embarrassment and mortification. (His response was that it was "nice.") This afternoon I kept wondering why I inwardly panicked at the prospect of having been read. That's the whole point, isn't it? The point of blogging, the point of being a writer, the point of writing. This is not my journal, there's nothing even superficially private about it, and there's not supposed to be. I have the url listed as my website on facebook, I've told people I have a blog, it's not a secret, not anonymous. So why the conflict?

I could write something like, 'I just don't think I have anything interesting to say or worth reading,' or similar, but that's clearly not true if I'm sitting here typing words onto the screen and planning to click the publish button. It's not true if I intend, as I do, to continue writing, not just today, but every day possible until the day I no longer have the mental capacity for it.

Is it fear of criticism? Probably a little. I don't want to be thought of as cute ("oh, that's cute, you have a blog."), but I don't want to be thought of as taking myself too seriously either. That's not meant to be as self-deprecatory as it sounds to me having just written it. I have been in the restaurant business for a long time, and I plan on staying in it for a long time, getting even more involved, in fact, but I know I don't have the necessary expertise to write a real review. What I can do, what I am good at, is analyzing someone else's review, of comparing several pieces of evidence at once, which is what I was attempting (casually) with my last post.

I'm tempted to mention the restaurant by name just so it shows up on my boss's google alerts again, but I think I'll refrain.

My point about the review in Time Out was primarily that it was wishy-washy. He writes that Alex has "tightened her focus," and that the food is "among the most solid Iberian fare in New York," but that the restaurant is "far less inspiring than the sleepers from which it sprang." Perhaps I am unclear about what he means by "sleepers." If her prior two restaurants were/are unexpected successes, saying that the new one is far less inspiring seems nonsensical to me in this context. I understand if one thing is less inspiring than a prior thing, and I understand the prior thing being an unexpected success, but how can something new be less inspiring than something unexpectedly successful? Does the word choice here highlight that the new thing has the potential to be successful but we may not immediately expect it to be so? Is he giving the restaurant the equivalent of crossed fingers? I am questioning his critique on the basis that it is not direct enough.

Anyway, enough about that. I have the urge to write down every word that comes into my head, but this is not the outlet for that. This is the outlet for making (non)sense. Clearly.