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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