Well, for starters, I'd like to hold off on getting a Twitter account until everybody's moved on to DotPage, the social networking site where people express their innermost selves by forming collages of primary colored dots (but no more than 13 dots per collage!).
The main reason for me to start I blog, I suppose, is just that I told a bunch of people that I was thinking about doing so, even though I wasn't really, and then they all seemed to think it was a good idea. So here we are. That simple answer, alas, doesn't beg, but does raise, further questions.
What to blog about? That's the big one. What is it that I have to say that's worth my time to type up and publish, and worth your time to read, ponder over, and be forever changed by? I turned first to the blogs I myself love to read. Perhaps I could start by imitating my influences and find my way to my own thing. Unfortunately, most of the blogs I read are about politics, and my own political opinions tend to be alarming to the sort of buttoned-down, conventional wisdom worshiping, so-called "moderates" who aren't used to hearing constant calls for the assassination of political leaders' children. I'd like this blog to have broad appeal, even if it's only to a broad range of my acquaintances, so that's out.
Setting aside the political bloggery, I mainly read various feminist blogs, from general cultural critics to body-image activists. But, frankly, I just don't think the ossified field of Women's Studies is ready to deal with the straight, white, middle-class male take on patriarchal oppression.
Next, I looked at the blogs of some friends of mine, to see if I could just steal their ideas. Amanda's theatre blog, TWISI, is popular and influential. But it seems to have got that way through tireless hard work. So...
Glen Matthews also has an interesting blog based on something I certainly don't have: an interesting job. Oh, well...
My sista-from-another-mista Meghan has quite a prolific personal blog, and that seemed like a model worth imitating. However, Meghan has several advantages over me in the personal blog-realm. She's living the romantic life of a playwright in Toronto, so she has lots of interesting experiences going to see exciting shows and presentations and whatnot: just look at the name dropping in this one post! Meanwhile, I'm here in my apartment in Halifax, and a big night out for me is when I put some pants on and walk over to Video Difference to rent a
Not to mention that as both a playwright and a young woman, Meghan's filled with powerful emotions. Just look at the title of her blog: You'll Never See My Eyes. I haven't been that emo since I was in grade 10, and even then my sensitivity would have had to share space with my other fixations, resulting in a blog called My Heart is Like a Secret, Now May I Please Put My Hands On Your Great Big Ass?
So, stealing Meghan's personal blog idea may work, but I'd still need to figure out my own angle on it. So I started thinking about that. But then I started thinking about how if someone shot you with a ray gun that made one of your butt cheeks become incredibly hot, and the other at the same time become extremely cold, the worst part wouldn't be the singeing on one side, or the frostbite on the other, but the terrible steam burns right in the middle.
And right about there, I hit on an idea. You see, I have long suspected that I have ADD and was simply never diagnosed because as a child I was scared of getting in trouble and so expended great force of will to overcome the desire to act out. My mind wanders constantly from one idiot thought to the next. Often, I have to drop out of conversations in the middle because I've somehow made my way from following the topic at hand to crafting an intricate defence of the artistic merits of Commando or composing an oration on the legacy of Koji Kondo's legendary score for Super Mario Bros. It can leave me feeling very alienated (if you've ever been at a party with me and wondered why I wandered off in the middle to sit in a room by myself for an hour, it has something to do with that). But a blog can get around that. I can take these otherwise interesting-but-useless thoughts, which I keep to myself to avoid derailing conversations, and lay them out, with some semblance of order, for you, my friends, and maybe even eventually some strangers, to peruse. It could be a way for me to finally feel more connected to the world around me.
The theme of my blog could, maybe, just maybe, be it's themelessness. It could just be a melange of the various subjects that have been accumulating and ricocheting through my addled mind since I was five: video games, superheroes, politics, sex, comic books, superhero comic books, sex in politics, sex in video games, trashy genre films, serious art films, serious art films that rearrange and critique the tropes of trashy genre films, the sex scenes in all of those films, political themes in superhero comic books, which superheroes I'd most like to have sex with, and, of course, Victorian literature (not sure how that one got in there, but I am about to get a Master's degree). And people would love it for the same reason they love me: because they mistakenly believe that I'm independently wealthy, and they want into my will.
So I guess that's what we're going with. In keeping with the the ADD-theme, I picked a title (Grand Central Station of Thought), that will surely only seem more clever and less clunky every time you read it. When I can think of interesting things to say, I'll say them, and try to make some good jokes along the way. And when I can't, I'll say things that aren't interesting and fill them up with cheap jokes that try desperately to deflect attention from my own nagging sense of my intellectual vacuity. You'll probably never learn anything, but hopefully we'll both have a good time.
Shall we, then?
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