To Blog or not to Blog?

That is the question.

I was having a discussion with one of my weird housemates last night about the nature of blogging. The implications which he made about the ‘arrogance’ of bloggers startled me somewhat. That blogging was a pasttime which served to reinforce a bigoted opinion of oneself served to make me consider my own approach to blogging. Why do I do it? What do I hope to achieve, and why should anyone care what I think about issue x or y?

Honestly, I do not buy into the whole idea that bloggers are arrogant. I maintain that, in a society which champions free speech, blogging is but another tool in which this should be allowed. If the medium is there for me to talk about things, then why should I not use it? This does not make me arrogant, it makes me opinionated. Obviously there is a difference.

Moving on then to the issue of why I blog. Honestly, I do not care who reads what I write, I would love there to be some form of discussion about the topics I blog about, but being only small fry at the moment, this is obviously limited. I blog because I want to. I express myself far better ( in my opinion) in written word than I do in spoken word. Blogging gives me a way of expressing my own opinion fluently, and in a careful and considered manner. It is rather like a public diary, my thoughts, and opinions on the crazy world in which we live.

So to my weird housemate (in the knowledge that he will read this at some point), let us into your realm. Why and where do you blog? Let us in and engage with us about the random stuff that happens in your blog.

Confrontation aids digestion…

Trying to fathom a 4-2 defeat over my fourth curry in little over a week, whilst arguing about student housing with my mum was probably not the best time to insist my sisters friends were weird. So ran the conversation over dinner with my family. It did have the result though of making me consider two things.

Firstly, how lucky I was to find a group of mates with whom I want to keep living, safe in the knowledge that any house we live in cannot possibly look worse than some of the ones we have witnessed this week. Whilst arguments are an increasingly common symptom of living with the same people for two years, they only serve to make you realise what you have got. For me, that is like minded (mostly) people who enjoy the same things as me and are concerned about the same sorts of issues, although, in the case of politics, my privately educated backside disagrees on some issues with one certain housemate who is a firm advocate of Labourite principles, and can convincingly argue her way into and out of a paper bag. Armed with a huge array of statistics, her ‘facts’ only serve to show to me how little I actually know about a lot.

Secondly, I became aware, as I nibbled on yet another naan bread, that weirdness is something entirely subjective. My definition of weird differs greatly from my sisters definition for example. I unconvincingly tried to maintain that to be weird was to be outside of societies norms, but I was painfully aware that such an argument held little or no credibility. Consequently, the rather ill-considered slur on my sisters friends aside, I became aware of my own peculiarities. And those of others. Specifically my housemates. All of them are ‘weird’ in some way or other, if judged by the poorly considered definition outlined above. And that’s great. It is great news that nobody is normal. It is a marvellous thing that every human being is unique, and it prevents the view which I had expressed to me recently which suggested that everyone is the same, going through the same basic patterns of life until the day they die. If, by this logic, we are all the same, I could, in theory, create work of similar quality to Van Gogh, or Tchaikovsky. Instead, reality seems that no-one is the same. There is a basic framework to the human being (eat, sleep, breath, breed) but outside of that, life is one big mystery, ready to be lived and enjoyed. For me this happens when I am with the people I care about the most. This is no longer just my family (despite the frustrations), but my friends too. I will probably stop here before I begin to sound too much like a lost cause.

The nett result of dinner was that I suddenly really appreciated all the ‘weird’ people I know. I still couldn’t work out how my team had lost 4-2 though.