How hard can it be to write a blog entry a day? Pretty damn hard if you’re going to make them worth reading, of any substantial thinking or even amusement value. I’ve been thinking a lot the past couple of days about why I have a blog in the first place.
Was it because I’m a geek for both fun and profit and at the time they were the hot new toy? Not likely. At the time I was entirely too busy with work to have room for new toys (for the record: social networking is now the hot new toy; we’ll get to why I don’t care about that very shortly)
Was it because I needed some place to vent about the Type-A backstabbing insanity at my job (examples here, here, and here)? Perhaps. After all, until blogging became passe the biggest, most famous blogs were about work or politics.
It certainly wasn’t because I felt the need to join the “I am special” look-at-me aren’t I great pre-YouTube self-publishing revolution. I’m entirely too much of an introvert to put the total of what I’m thinking, feeling, and experiencing in a public forum for all the world to read and critique (I do enough self-critique, thanks. I don’t need to be told when I’m being inadequate.)
Was it because I wanted to raise the signal to noise ratio in my own world, to have a place to vent the things that I thought needed venting (can someone explain to me how we’ve recycled 1980s fashion so quickly?) and share the odd, quirky things that brought a smile to my day (See shoe, giant flying; extinct)
Maybe it was just because I wanted to write, and possibly be heard. I honestly don’t have an answer. What I do know is that blogging does several things: it exercises the writing muscles; it makes me focus on the world around me instead of on the world inside my head (after all, I am constrained by both the simple fact of the potential of readership and by propriety from disclosing all of the details of my private life); and it makes me think critically about things that, while they may or may not be Important, are at least amusing or food for thought. My personal signal to noise ratio has been a little low in recent months. With luck and fortitude that will change this month.
Since the title of this blog is Thoughts That Come Unbidden Department, and those thoughts are often questions, I’ll close with this one which has been bugging me since yesterday morning when I saw my first group of amazingly cute single-digiters in costume: Why is it that in America we devote an entire holiday to teaching children who are born not knowing how to dissemble to wear masks yet we spend most of our adult lives fighting to get off the masks we acquire starting in puberty so we can figure out who we really are and what it is that we really want?
Perhaps this is because I tend to do things my own way, but I always took Halloween as a symbol of the opposite construct. Namely that it was the one day a year where you got rewarded for being and acting like whoever you wanted to be, no matter how unsightly, gory or strange, rather than the self you were told you “should” be the other 364 days of the year.