Am I a Blogger?
I am in the process of making my own personal website and as I am stapling posters to the walls and setting up furniture, I can’t help but think about how important the task at hand is. At the same time, I can’t help but think about equally unimportant it is. Clearly, I am a person who thinks a lot. Don’t confuse thinking a lot with being intelligent, proficient etc., most of the times, one clear line of reasoning is the winner. But I can’t help feeling two diverging narratives.
The first narrative is the cup half empty guy. When I think about the internet and doing anyhting on the internet, I think of the pareto distribution. Basically, I think that there are some sites that make up 85% of the traffic on the internet. For this group, think Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Instagram. Then, I think there are another 10% of sites that are intermittently trafficked, but feel a little like a ghost town. For this group think club penguin, you might go on it ironically to relive the old days, but you aren’t checking it everyday to see how your puffles are doing. Finally, I’d put personal websites, resturant websites, and myspace in the last group – no one goes there unless they’ve fallen down a click hole, or they are really hungry and it’s past 8pm. And in the case of myspace, no one goes there ever I think. So that’s where this post lands. The likely demographic to land here is probably my friends, potential hiring people, and co-wokers, but besides that the world will keep on spinning with or without my un-proofread posts.
Everything isn’t doom and gloom though, the reason I am here typing away is the second narrative. I started by putting portfolio stuff together on here, but now that I’ve painted some of the walls, I am sitting down and having a soda. In my moment of respite, I feel one significant reason to actually post thoughts that are in my head on this website. It’s simply that I wanted to remember how I felt about doing this. And not just posting this post, but I wanted to remember how it felt to do a lot of things. I wanted to remember how it felt to publish my first paper, how it felt to graduate during a pandemic, and also stuff I thought about books I’ve read. In general there are things I felt like writing about in order to share them with myself.
The truth is that I’ve consumed a lot of information in my life. But I am genuinely scared by how many things I’ve forgotten, how many times I’ve learned the same lessons over and over, and how little I actually know about myself. The great thing about writing is that you have to form an opinon. You have no choice, you either have no opinion or you have no writing. The inception for writing this stuff comes from all the times I’ve discussed a book I’ve read but completely forgotten the content or my opinion of it. Other inspiration for doing this comes from version controlling my code. I can never remember what I have and haven’t changed, but a repository where the history is tracked is really satisfying. I know that for every monkey patch I leave in my code, there’s a commit where I add the comment # TODO: Remove Monkey Patch.
Ok, so the lines of reason have converged and now you (I) know my thoughts on posting. However,one closing remark. Several times while writing this, I cringed at writing the word blog. I have always felt like a blogger was someone who just their two cents in on everything as if their opinion deserved a pedestal (sure, call me a hater). I know this isn’t true, bloggers help moderate culture, they help our uphold our cultural agreement on avant garde art, tasty food, good music, and quality little furniture, to name a few. But addmitedly, except for normally toting the populist opinion, I am too much of an overthinker to be a blogger. So it is decided by me, for an audience of < 50, that, no I’m not a blogger. Someday someone might call this a blog, and I’ll cringe again. But for now I’m leaping from thought to musing and then crawling towards a ponderance before running back to mute observation as the world remains too complex to draw the line a blogger draws. I am just hands on a keyboard.
I don’t actually expect to even type that many things on here, but starting is better than never starting.
club penguin picture, inception picture myspace little furniture blog