Blogging can be a rewarding and/or frustrating source of happiness/malaise. Forests require trees, fortune seems pale, fury seems petty and sometimes you just don’t feel like a good enough writer to compete with other talented bloggers using their accounts to the fullest. For example, let’s say that person A and person B both have blogs. They became a fan of each other in their personal lives and the two of them started dating. But then person B decided to move on with her life and all that person A now has to remember her by are her charming thoughts stamped out like mental photographs upon the album of her blog. Sometimes when person A goes self-destructively onto person B’s blog, he’s severely impressed by the humor and skill that person B demonstrates in her careful prose. Further, person A is amazed at person B’s mastery of literary structure and vocabulary, knowing that such mastry is the result of a superior intake of knowledge over the years. While person B was learning from books, school and family over a well-spent lifetime, person A recollects upon his own life and considers that while he was busy trying to not get in trouble with his parents, trying not to get beaten up at school, trying to fit in and be cool, trying to get a girl to like him at college, worrying about various distractions like pre-med and politics, and trying to be accepted as “cool” by peers who were probably going to make up their own mind no matter what he did, person B was learning proper usage of who vs. whom and how to avoid run-on sentences. I know person A is just jealous of and misses person B and this reminds person A of strange things he’s been told over the years such as, “Did you know that Beethoven was very jealous of Bach during his lifetime?” But this Lost-style flashback is useless advice for person A because he’s no Beethoven, and Beethoven was so talented that he had nothing to be worried about, even if he didn’t know it. Person A knows that the point is that competition breeds excellence, but that doesn’t make the brass ring any easier to acquire. Maybe person A didn’t want to compete with person B preferring to instead satiate the mental wanderlust with long talks. But that was then and this blog is now person A’s makeshift sailboat on the spherical ocean of discourse.
So here they are years later, person A and person B, after their dissimilar lives of turmoil and shelteredness resulting in two very different approaches to writing and everything else. They both still have blogs because they still like to write. Sometimes they both have the same problem where they can’t think of anything to write about that’s publishable. That’s cute like buying each other the same birthday present. Person A thinks that the worst posts person B writes (in her opinion) are some of her best and funniest and most revealing, while person A’s worst posts end up alienating readers and need to be removed because person A still worries about being cool and being accepted by his readers and other actors in his life’s play. Person B, he imagines, is just opening up and letting the world flow through her words like water through the rocks of a stream.
