Oh, hey! Look, it's me again! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I'm back online, ready to bore you all with the predictably pallid details of my unbelievably dull existence. Here, have some of my inane thoughts and aimless reflections, all for free!
Okay, I'll cut the ironical crap. But it's still something worth considering, at least from my point of view. Why should I bother with this? Why do I plant myself in front of a computer every couple of days, grit my teeth, and force myself to empty the erstwhile contents of my brain onto a webpage that no one (apart from my girlfriend) appears to read? And even if someone were to read one of my posts, why should they come back for more of my paralyzingly dull prose? What's the point in trying to write about the most random, silly, stupid, boring bits of drivel that I know of--namely, my life?
I'm no Orwell or Hemingway or even a Sedaris; I've never hunted an elephant, or smoked with travelers in a Parisian cafe, or created artwork out of human hair and cardboard while snorting cocaine. I've hardly done anything noteworthy or been anywhere exotic. I can't even offer readers the dubious fascination of hearing about life as a schizophrenic, manic-depressive, or obsessive-compulsive (not yet, at least). Who would want to listen to what I have to say, and what exactly is there for me to say?
But maybe that's just it. Maybe some people don't want to read about other people doing things that they, the readers, would never actually dream of doing. Sure, we all like to fantasize to some extent, we all need to, sometimes--but we also don't like being made to feel as if we're not really living, like we're not doing it right, like we're just not having as much fun or excitement as others get to have. Maybe what we want, some of us, sometimes, is to hear about someone like us--someone just as confused, as petty, as envious, as ordinary and uncertain as we are. Think of it as an ice cream Popsicle on a stick--there's only so much ice cream to go around for the Hemingways and Orwells of the worlds, but once that sugary sweetness is all gone, it's gone. Only the stick, a flat, bland, stubbornly splintery bit of ordinary wood, remains to tell the tale. Only some people get to have adventures--but human life in all its gloriously splintery blandness remains, foibles and baubles and all.
Or maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm just trying to project onto all of you, the seven billion plus people out there, all of my awkward peevishness and fragile philosophizing. Maybe it's just me who fondly wishes that the world wants to hear a college student ramble on about the value of family, life, and archaic words. Maybe the only personal essays that anyone wants to read are the ones filled with wild foreign adventures, random sexual encounters, and reckless substance abuse.
But if not, and there is a demand for the ordinary, for the day-to-day headaches and epiphanies, even if it's from only one person in the whole chaotic shuffle of humankind--then I'll be here, watching my caffeine intake with a wary eye, dreaming of a professorship with tenure, and continuing to jot down astonishing revelations and absurd redundancies concerning life on my end of the Great Popsicle Stick of Ordinariness.
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