Blogs

Every time I sit down to write down this meta-blog about blogging, I can’t do it. (After this summer, don’t you just want to slap the prefix “meta-” on every possible word it would make sense with, pretend it’s the word of the day a la Pee Wee Herman, and go crazy every time you hear it?) And that is the problem with the assigned blog – like many well-intentioned guided assignments, mandatory necessitates not fun. It’s kind of like reading a book for a literature class; I’ve read and studied The Old Man and the Sea numerous times now on my own, for example, but I’ll be damned if I ever got through it once in high school.

I cannot complain too much, though. Blogging is by and large just the accidental gem Ben claims it to be, and structure is necessary. I was hesitant at first, because I know the relative insignificance of most random day-to-day thought, especially when put into un-deliberate phrasing, and for as much as we love our pet teaching stories, they’re likewise a dime a dozen and relatively uninteresting. I’ve come to realize, however, that the blogs are more about me than anything else, like a professional diary, and if someone else chooses to be interested, then so be it. Not to be too trite here, but writing does relieve constipation of the mind, and even when the writing and thought is particularly sophomoric, it still aids in sharpening the focus of that thought. I don’t see the blog as something I have to do, I see it as something that crosses my mind I’d like to do once every so often. Even if it is a bit unfocused, it’s still the writing practice I get, and just like any other good habit, if you just force yourself to keep at it, eventually it will become second nature. Ultimately, my chunk of the blog-o-sphere rates pretty close to as insignificant as possible to the outside world, but for me it serves that dual purpose of practicing (relatively) active thought and emotional therapy. If Ben or whoever wants to read it, great, but if not, that’s also fine by me, because the need to produce grandiose stories and themes to be read by many or none at all within this medium is a terrible, terrible conceit. It serves its purpose, if you can understand what that purpose is.