Too much real life

Blog­ging is all about real life.’ Dis­cuss this state­ment point­lessly, mak­ing detailed ref­er­ences to your own drab exist­ence. Sharp imple­ments may not be used. Write in blunt crayon only, please.

My favour­ite people — those I call friends, some whom I call con­fid­ants — all pos­sess an uncanny skill of mak­ing a seem­ingly innoc­u­ous state­ment worm its way into a corner of my mind and take up res­id­ence there for days, maybe even weeks.

Why am I not blog­ging?” I wondered. “I have all this time on my hands, malinger­ing impa­tiently — if you’ll excuse the pun — on a hos­pital ward. Why can’t I blog? Why can’t I write about this major event that has happened to me?”

Take Cheer­ful One, for instance. She’s one of those people. One of those people I men­tioned. Very wise, she is; some­times too wise for me. And that’s why, at first, the fol­low­ing obser­va­tion — delivered in the middle of eat­ing a takeaway onion bhaji — seemed to fly straight over my head and dis­ap­pear into the nearest bush.

Some­times, you find that you’ve just got too much real life going on for blogging.”

It’s true, too. Yes, I may have spent far too many hours mind­lessly star­ing at whatever happened to be enga­ging my pea­nut brain at that moment whilst con­tem­plat­ing my own frus­tra­tion and bore­dom — time that I could have spent writ­ing down my thoughts and doc­u­ment­ing these new exper­i­ences — but that tor­por was an integ­ral part of the sud­den deluge of real life that had been showered upon me. Too much real life for blogging.

Blog­ging is all about real life.’ No, it isn’t. Really, it isn’t. Don’t go on kid­ding your­self. It’s only about the care­fully selec­ted bits and pieces of your daily grind that you want to show to the world. And I, for one, remain etern­ally grate­ful for that, because life veers far too reck­lessly between bor­ing and over­whelm­ing to be com­pletely con­tained — let alone under­stood — on a mere web page.

I hope you approve of my arti­fice, then.

Comments: 10

    Blog­ging is all about edit­ing real life, in my case.

    Hg | 09.14.06, 22:05

    How wise she is.

    andre | 09.15.06, 08:14

    You see, I feel as though I ought to say some­thing intel­li­gent at this point, but really all I want to do is run around the room wav­ing my arms and shout­ing ‘I’m fam­ous, I’m famous!’

    Which of course isn’t real life at all.

    (He quoted me! I’m fam­ous!!’)

    Cheerful One | 09.15.06, 08:21

    Very true.

    Magpie | 09.16.06, 10:42

    Everything is real. There aren’t non-real corners or defin­i­tions or ver­sions of things.
    Real is not a very good adjective.

    But events can only be exper­i­enced at cer­tain speeds, and it takes a bout of slow­ness — of events, not neces­sar­ily of time — to digest.
    If you like your blog­stor­ies to be filtered, mit­ig­ated, pleas­ingly unre­li­able, then they won’t flow at times like these.

    Sarsparilla | 09.17.06, 17:19

    So, tak­ing my own mea­gre offer­ings as examples, you can track just how much (how intense) is going on in a blog­gers life by how far away they steer from men­tion­ing it.

    Per­haps.

    But no, blog­ging isn’t life. Life isn’t in blog­ging and it’s all just what you choose. Yes indeedydo.

    Gordon | 09.19.06, 14:24

    Blog­ging, for me, is about mak­ing sense of *ele­ments* of real life by writ­ing around and about them.

    It’s also about flex­ing the writ­ing muscles I didn’t real­ise I had.

    It does mir­ror some aspects of my life, though. Lack of suc­cess, mediocrity, etc. When I feel that too acutely, I have to stop for a while.

    anxious | 09.28.06, 10:42

    Blog­ging is shar­ing — some­thing sadly lack­ing in many peoples lives. Thanks for shar­ing with us, it takes courage.

    Alan | 10.06.06, 17:49

    Like the smack of a magi­cians wand, the arti­fice begins the minute you press . I’m catch­ing up.

    Blatherskite | 12.28.06, 21:33

    bit of a code cock-up there, let me just say that again:

    Like the smack of a magi­cians wand, the arti­fice begins the minute you press POST.

    Blatherskite | 12.28.06, 21:36

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