Saturday, July 25, 2009

World Premiere!

I've decided to blog again.

I used to have a LiveJournal but I concluded after three years that it was corrupting my soul. (This was before Facebook got its claws into my soul.)

Too many people were reading it, I was writing about things that were too private, I was writing things that I would never say out loud, and I was obsessing over what people thought of what I said. Just as having a digital camera caused me to see every beautiful thing in a two inch LCD screen, my life had swiftly become this xkcd comic. Since then, Facebook has picked up the slack on an even pettier scale. "This would make a great status update." Thank goodness I don't have Twitter.

So I'm very apprehensive about starting this blog, because I have been slowly regaining my independence from the internet and my ability to be present in the present. But I want to become a better writer, and I think a blog could help me. I can write a good essay about a book. I know that much. Or at least I have written one. As for letters, emails and my journal, though, I've found that since I wrote that one good essay I have been very unsatisfied with what comes from my pen and my mouth! My "lazy" writing isn't very good, and I think the only cure for that is to practice writing spontaneously, holding myself to a higher standard than I have been before. I would like to get to the point where I can write something "off the cuff" and it's good. If, as I grumpily shout every morning over the dreadful local paper, "I could write better than this with my hands tied behind my back!" I should practice writing no-hands.

We'll see if that plays out.

Another hope: If I discipline my faculty of speech on the static page, perhaps this rigor will move to my mouth. For knowing so little, I sure do talk a lot. I'm no voice crying in the wilderness, I'm more of a car horn adding to the din of the city.

It's hard to decide what parameters to set. I want to say "No complaining," but the world is messy and I'm 21 and there are things to be mourned. I want to say "No preaching about Orthodoxy," but it's new to me and I'm trying to figure it out.

We'll see. If I find myself lying awake at night composing blog entries, I'll stop. Ugh. Blogs can make you fat, too.

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