Adjusted Reality

If the band Cracker was in it’s heyday in 2008 instead of the early nineties, the lyrics would probably be something like.. “what the world needs now is another BLOGGER like I need a whole in my head”. Opinions are like assholes – everyone has them, and some reek of… well, you know. Each blog is like our own personal toilet, a portal for all of those… opinions to flow freely and intermingle and synergize and become much more than they could on their own, via the sewage system of the internet, once we hit “publish”. The internet has brought together groups of people that we thought just didn’t exist before, and not in that enlightening way.

Case in point, furries. This guy to the left is probably not a furry, but a little too close for comfort. No link, because I don’t want to be responsible for bringing down your Friday. If you don’t know what I’m talking about and you’re feeling particularly brave, set your google safe search filter off, and prepare the bleach for your eyes (and soul). Now, I’m sure there were furries before the internet, but they dressed up in the comfort of their own home, and had the good sense not to tell anyone about it. Maybe there were underground furry clubs or something where they could do their thing, but the rest of the world went on blissfully ignorant about it.

Enter the internet, connecting everyone in the world with a modem. All it took was a few oddballs to be public about their fetish to realize that they weren’t alone, and now the world is exposed to madness of all sorts. Of course, this is but one example, but I’m sure you can relate. Who hasn’t clicked through a few too many links and ended up seeing something you can never unsee, and a little bit of your innocence died that day? Even without the dramatics, who isn’t sick of “SENG PEOPLE UES ABBOMINASHUNS OF DA INGLISH LANGUAEG WO APALOGY???!!!!!! WTF!!!”.

Even through all this, I have come to love everything about blogs. First of all, I need something to get through my day. Let’s face it – my job is to be ready to deal with anything that comes up at a moment’s notice. However, there is not always something to deal with. Some people read the news during that downtime. I like reading blogs, and if I have a significant chunk of time (or enough small chunks of time), I like writing blog entries.

So, since I like lists, here we go.

Why I like reading blogs:

1. I’m a psychology major, and though I promptly rejected doing anything with my field after graduation, I do still have a huge interest in the human condition and what makes people tick.

2. Along with that, I’m nosy, but polite to a fault about letting people share with me what they wish to divulge. People seem to be braver on blogs than in person. I know I am.

3. It’s allowed me to connect with people that I either have never met in real life or haven’t been close to in person, and that’s kinda fun. There are people that I’ve never met IRL that I’ve known online for 5 years, and we were invited to their wedding. There are a few people I knew previously that were on the opposite side of a shared social circle that I didn’t really get to know until I read their blogs. I used to think that only losers had internet friends, but then I started playing MMOs and chatting on message boards and you’re only a loser if you ONLY have internet friends or take it as serious as this guy. 🙂

4. Those people can talk about anything that their little heart desires, and I can read if I want to, or skip it if it bores me. If they were sitting right in front of me, I would have to feign interest, or be rude. Since I’m not a big fan of being a jerk-face to people that can reach out and slap me, it’s the best of both worlds.

Why I love blogging:

1. I love to write. I have since I was little. I’ve always written stories and poems and kept a journal on and off again. I can’t really think of a time that I didn’t have a notebook within arms reach most of the time.

2. I’m not a terribly private person. I like people to know things about me. Things I don’t feel comfortable sharing, I don’t talk about, but I’m just pretty honest with the world about who I am.

3. I like fame, small chunks of it at least. While at the time I needed to run away and hide for a while, after a few months after leaving SOE and EQOA and no longer being Sapphyra, I terribly missed my fanbois and fangirls and even my haters. I always had this feeling that I wanted to be famous. At the very least, I like putting what I want to say out there and seeing if it bounces or sticks.

4. I figure things out well in text. Sometimes I’ll be pondering a decision, I’ll meander back and forth on it in a blog, and by the time I read the finished version, I’ll have realized I’ve already made it.

5. I think I have an interesting viewpoint and have had some unique experiences in my life. I like telling stories, but I just don’t have the knack for it vocally. I’ll start talking about my experiences working a renaissance faire when I was 10 and then all of a sudden I’ll see something shiny and I’m off track. I just don’t have that comedic timing either, which is a shame, because I really think I could be funny. I could totally rock the stage doing standup. See, I’ve already wandered!

6. I’m sure this doesn’t help with the storytelling, but I have a goldfish brain (really bad memory), and if I don’t write it down, I’ll forget what I’m thinking. I’ve had to reference when things happened by entries in my blog more than a handful of times.

That being said, I’d like to put more thought into my writing, and I feel more accountable for that by blogging on my own site, attached to my own name. I found a lot of my entries to be just rambles about my day, what I ate, what I weighed that day and how happy/sad it made me, how pissed I was that I was working too many hours, what I was doing this weekend, and that’s fine for livejournal, but I want to try and do more here. It may take some practice, so forgive me if I slip into a post of “daily life blah blah” every once in a while, and tell me to bugger off if I make a habit of it. But… that’s why I’m here.