The Little Blog That Does

Here it is my, little tile in the mosaic of blogs. They’re all different, yet the same. I’m not really sure why I decided to join the blog community, no reason and every reason I suppose. Regardless of why, the blog exists, and that’s what counts. I even update. Whether I’ll continue to do so in the future is another question entirely.

I’ll start out by saying this: I don’t really like reading blogs; and unless you’re new to the blogging community you’ll probably know what I’m talking about. Let’s back this bus up a minute, back to a different era. When old school was new school. The date is January 2004, times were so much different back then. The final cartons of egg nog were all but gone from the houses of friends and family (though I had no part in this, but that’s another post for another day), I still wasn’t sick of hearing Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl and the people that I passed on my way to class whispered pleas into the wind-chilled air for a golden age known as spring.

It was at this time which I finally brought myself to visit my friend’s blog. He’d been asking me for weeks to go to his site. This immediately caused me to think of all those terrible and cheesy-looking Geocities and Angelfire homepages circa 1996. After a valiant month-long stand of ignoring his hyperlinked text messages on MSN, I decided to put an end to the little blue annoyances and see what the fuss was about.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t bad. The first thing which caught my eye was the wonderful layout of the site; it actually looked like it was professionally done (though only days ago I found out about templates for web sites, and that my friend's site was actually set up by a friend of ours who’s in comp sci). Also, the content wasn’t bad either. I read the most recent post and it was funny. I mean, I chuckled to myself. I started looking at blogs of other friends, and even people I didn’t know. Every few days that little blue link would suddenly appear in a dialog box, and I clicked on it eagerly awaiting his latest post, at least for the time being.

After a few weeks I noticed a disappointing trend in the blog of my friend. The blog was evolving gradually from funny instances, and situations into a mature, serious, depressing saga of his grievances with the working world. It eventually got to the point where my friend could no longer post because it was making him depressed and he stopped blogging. Reading of his descent was like a kid eating Fruit Loops, hopelessly staring eyes glazed at the slowly vanishing colours, praying in vain that there were more until all which was left was a cold, plain, homogenized puddle that I would have none of.

I also realized that this was happening to a lot of the blogs I had been to. Everywhere I read people were bitching and griping about “how much my life sucks” or “no one understands me” and all that other adolescent trite that’s so cliché, it’s cliché to call it cliché. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the cathartic release people get from venting their problems, I just don’t think the internet is the appropriate place for it. But I think what annoys me the most is not the actual griping, but the monotony of the griping. It’s always the same self-centred rambling about how much their parents bug them or how annoying their boy friend is. Maybe if they didn’t all write in the same fashion I wouldn’t have such a problem with it, but you play the cards you’re dealt.

Which brings us back to me and this little blog of mine. I’ve been meaning for a while to do more creative writing. It hasn’t been since high school that I’ve had the opportunity to write, with the exception of lab reports, which I do admit are creative in their own way, but honestly, who really wants to read for ten minutes about why I think a certain gene is found on chromosome 8 and not 18.

I guess this blog was created in protest. In protest to the throngs of blogs that focus on the ass of people’s lives. I’d like this to be a refuge, a place where people can read about the good things in life. You know jokes, insight, and all that other jazz. It’ll be the like the phoenix rising from the ashes of my friend’s failed blog (yeah, I know, cheesy metaphor, but like I said it’s been a year).

I can’t promise there won’t be griping or bitching, because it seems to be a very integral part of most blogs. But if I do bitch, I will try to do it in such a way that it won’t make everyone (including myself) sick.

After all, the world isn’t as bad as some blog would have you believe... well, not until you realize how futile life is.

Enjoy!

-Adam