In an odd sort of continuity leap, I am starting a new entry before I finish my last one. All I remember about the last one was something about the "entry-a-month" trend that I haven't kept up. I am so crappy at writing blog entries, but I'm quite good at status updates. Does my state represent the current human condition? Is microblogging really the ideal form of useless but occasionally funny, usually boringly personal broadcasting online? Have we really become so shallow and uncreative that a summary of our lives is best expressed in 140 characters or less? Has the population evolved and adapted into such a state of ADDness that we have no time or motivation to focus on writing or reading a full blog entry? Is Twitter the natural expression of our hyper global consciousness? Do I sound repetitively pretentious or merely curious? I'm not trying to sound like some broken record of a cynic; I really do wonder. Maybe it's just me that can't manage to complete one thing at a time unless it is a single witty sentence or two. I actually was too lazy to even keep up my twitter, and have started half-heartedly mirroring my Facebook statuses and tweets so as not to abandon one or the other.
Maybe I'm not unique in my online laziness/ADDness. But in any case, I feel like I'm betraying myself. It's not like I have a readership I've been neglecting on this here blog; I did claim from the start that it was for my own benefit. And yet I can't even serve my own selfish agenda. I had a dream I met myself on the street. I was disgusted with myself. I have really betrayed what made me me: my supposed avoidance of social constructions, my attempts to live outside the herd of sheeple. I revert to faux thoughtful musings on Facebook posted mostly for comments or "likes" and not for real thoughtful discussion for which I used to long ("How do blind people dream?" (A cleverly provocative status message that inspires such comments as "Hmm." and "Wow that's a weird thought.") Though it in itself is a very interesting thought. It must depend on whether the blindness was from birth, or after the brain of the person in question learned how to see. Or are our brains programmed to visualize things, even if our eyes have always been uncooperative? Would they see the psychedelic bursts and swirls of color and light that we sometimes see when we close our eyes tightly? Surely they must have some sort of subconscious thoughts; would they manifest in sounds? I know I have had scented dreams, and ones with well defined sensations, but I am never sure if I could really hear in dreams, unless it is an external sound coming in (an alarm clock, the radio, thunder, etc) through the passive gates of the unconscious. Could you teach your brain to associate shapes felt, with visuals? It reminds me of a certain trippy part of Ratatouille (possible spelling fail; I don't much care though.) in which tastes are represented aurally and visually as swirls and blots of color, if my memory serves me well. Could blind people have similar mental experiences? Are we restrained mentally to imagining the familiar, only permitted to dream altered parts of real life? If so, that is sad, and I lose some faith in the amazingness of our minds. But it seems that it would not be so, because brains learn skills through time, such as language and speech (although, of course, there are schools of thought holding that the brain is preprogrammed for language) and there are stories of sixth senses. Why not a fifth sense that is surely hardwired somehow into the brain's main cortex even for those who only eternally experience four senses? It seems plausible. So what would visual dreams of the blind look like? It is surely unimaginable for we sighted folks. It is overwhelming enough to consider that our world is based on perceptions and that even others who are capable of vision as well as we are may have different sights. Who is to say that the green I see is the green everyone else sees? So then the blind may not be that different from us after all. They may just have a difference in perception only a degree away from that which each of us experiences. Oh I've gone all philosophical. Apparently I haven't lost my rambling abilities, even if I have lost other things. I'll stop now.), and lose the really thoughtful ones on here, if they can even be called that. Doubtless I am following the path of thousands of other quasi-existential unread teenage blogs. Perhaps millions. On that note (millions, that is) it's kind of scary how many facebook users there are. Over 300 million! As I noted in a recent status message, that is nearly the population of the United States! If facebook were a country, it would the fourth most populous in the world today. Now that is dumbfounding.
Oh dear, it's another plotless blogism. I began by talking about blogging again. How to return to the world of RL (or real life, for those of you out there who actually have one)... anytime I think of writing about my real life, I feel buried in things to mention so much that I don't mention any of them. If I had a permanent status to describe and summarize my life, it would have to be "is writing an essay XP." Because it feels like that's all I've done in months! An essay a week for this AP/AICE English class is quite draining. As if I needed another reason to lack a social life. Since no one reads this, I can complain. I have felt unbearably lonely lately, and, contrary to popular belief, it is not based on teenage romantic angst. Entirely. That is always a factor in the equation, but it is only one. I feel like I don't have any real friends at this point in my life. I feel like I don't fit in with anyone. My "best friend" (note: quotation marks not for sarcasm or bitterness. I just feel that we are far from close right now from lack of contact) isn't in any of my classes and the extent of my interaction with her is very limited car conversation. My latest "best friend" of the last few months or so who had been filling in has just about abandoned our friendship for other relationships. My other friends are what would be called coworkers if I were in an office rather than a highschool band. At times I feel very close, enough to tell my only secrets. Then at other times I feel we are worlds apart, thinking on entirely different spheres, never to touch. I didn't realize how much I relied and leaned on a couple close friends until they were gone. Now I just feel like I have no one to talk to, no one to release exciting ideas and rants upon and share everything from gossip to deep feelings with. It's not for lack of trying. I continually try to join conversations even just as a small contributor, and I find that the original members of the conversation leave one by one, leaving me, once again, alone. I think people may be put off by my attempts to join; maybe I seem needy? So I try to look like I'm having fun; maybe if I laugh enough I'll really feel the resonations inside, pretending to be happy and ending up actually happy? Sometimes works, or rather, used to work. I feel like I've changed in some way; I've forgotten how to socialize. Maybe I committed a social crime and now people feel uncomfortable around me. I try to branch out instead of always going back to the same people, but I just can't seem to fit in. Hopefully it's a phase I'm going through. Hopefully it'll end soon.
Anyway. Complaining accomplishes little. {In other news, I have been writing this entry for a whole hour} I'll post my web exploits of the last few units of time.
- I have fallen prey to the addictiveness of TV Tropes at least once this week, loving how there is a title (and many examples) for every type of person, situation, etc.
- I started a list of music videos that feature marching band. It's actually quite cool.
- I read some MLIAs, copied the funniest to my Opera notes. (very convenient feature for a browser, but the way. Highlight text, and in the right click menu, under Copy is Copy to Notes, which saves the test and a hidden link to the source. Very simplistic but helpful. Then you can right click in a text boxy area and insert a note, like I am about to do here.) One of my favorites is this one - "Today in church the pastor asked the congregation what "amen" means. After a few moments of silence he proceeded to tell us that it translates into "true dat." I love church. MLIA" - due in part to my random adoption of this phrase (True dat) and use of it all the time. (It's a useful phrase, but I get weird looks. The same kind of weird looks as when I say "Fo shizzle my nizzle.")
- I tried out Wordle, another simple beauty. It makes typographical (text) art out of any piece of writing, blog url, or other stuff, with more mentioned words bigger (like a tag cloud). You can edit the font, orientation, colors, etc of the finished art. An image of a Wordle of my blog as of before this entry is somewhere in here.
- I've fallen in love with Neil Patrick Harris (of Dr Horrible fame) all over again with his awesome hosting of the Emmys. (See his opening number here and Dr Horrible's hijacking of the awards show here)
- I've watched some Castle, a totally cute show (with a totally cute main character, teehee. He actually reminds me of someone...)
- I've done some tweeting and changed my main picture on there to a bit of pop art self portrait I've been working on with the GIMP. This blog may see it at some point in time.
- I've read every xkcd ever and saved some to my hard drive. I already had my very favorites, but I added plenty more. 8 mb doesn't sound like that much, but when it's just tiny comic strip pngs, that's a lot. 139 at last count.
- I've watched The Guild, a funny webseries that comes out in 5 minuteish episodes. It inspired Dr Horrible and is based on the lives of serious MMORPG players with minimal RL social lives. It is quite hilarious.
- And loads more, of course. Even just glancing through my browsing history is ridiculously overwhelming (ha used that word twice so far), to see each and every page visited is simply staggering.
Anyway, I really should go to bed now. I'll post this because I won't ever do it if I leave it off for another time. Until next rant session! PS- This is posting at 11:59 pm yesterday, because that's when I started. It's 2:11 am now. I haven't been writing nonstop, but geez.
