When I think about the act of “blogging” I think about Tumblr (and Julie and Julia). More specifically, I consider the memories I have of my best friend, Grace, sitting me down on the mini (“work out”) trampoline next to her computer and proudly pulling up her personal Tumblr page. In the hour that follows these occasions, I invariably witness many things that I have never experienced before. A giraffe that has been photoshopped into obesity, a clip of Tom Felton (Warner Brother’s Draco Malfoy) attempting a Jersey accent during an appearance on Jay Leno and there’s always a demonic looking kitten with a caption such as “What you lookin’ at foo?”. As she scrolls through the endlessly long thread of reposts she has made in the past week—her focus spurred by the harmlessly intended question I had asked her earlier that day, “what’s the point of spending so many hours copying and pasting things other people have said or created onto 'your' page"— I think more about myself than the pathetically chunky giraffe. Do these things amuse me? Yeah, sure. So why don’t I get it. As she scrolls, I imagine millions of other tumblers scrolling through their own versions of this page, each site only slightly differentiated from each other. These pages are defined by the decision every tumbler makes to click on something he or she likes and choose it as part of his or her online identity—I like it, and now people will know “me” by it.
Like so many things that I fervently begin to write, believing that the instantaneous seed of inspiration has everything to do with my assignment, my personal experience with what I understand to be “blogging” (see convoluted contemplation above) has not really panned out as the introduction to me that I excitedly anticipated it to be. In fact, in all honesty, my initially fruitful little seed of thought stopped germinating about halfway through the above passage, and many of the things I claimed to recall in the past I only came up with minutes ago. What I intended to convey is that my relationship with the blogosphere is at once complicated and shallow. I have avoided the inception of my own blog for numerous reasons, all revolving around my defining capacity to over think everything that might come out of my mouth or, to an even greater extent, be written down by my hand. Because when I have control over exactly what people hear from me, or think of me or believe I am thinking, I’m going to pursue the opportunity to be as precise as possible. You might understand at this point that the common app essay was the most stressful assignment of my life.
Now imagine a person like this attempting to make regular, informal declarations to the cyber world. I figure I'm giving you a pretty real sense of what that would look like.
My posts are often going to be unnecessarily long, and so might my sentences. More than likely there will be times that, in an attempt to be clear, I’m going to effectively isolate every person out there who can’t possibly understand exactly what I’m thinking. But, despite all of this, I’m excited to begin my uncommon(place) blog because of what I didn’t understand about blogging and what I still hope to learn from the process. While I might never fully appreciate the specific genre of blogging that is Tumblr, it turns out that I have more experience as a blogger of sorts than I previously had imagined. For years I have written down things that I found beautifully worded or unequivocally true or simply defining of life. These quotations and words appear on post-it notes stuck to my walls and bed frame, in the digital notes section of my iPhone and even on the desktop of my computer, written on virtual post-its of all sizes and colors. T.S. Eliot, Gandalf, Ayn Rand, Julian Assange as well as characters from TV shows as diverse as Firefly, Criminal Minds, and (of course) Doctor Who, all have places on the commonplace book that I’ve been keeping for a significant portion of my life without even recognizing it. Looking forward at the semester of blogging activity ahead I really don’t know what to expect of myself, you’ll just have to bear with me and we’ll figure it out. But what I most hope as I attempt to share the things that make me happy and excited about learning in our class and on this earth is that this blog becomes something that is anything but common.
