Blogging

The following are my words: the words you see. But read them and assume they were destined for more than the lifeless screen. They were birthed with electric drumming in mind, so imagine a beat, and imagine me—
cool, hip, scantly cad if you must, speaking these words with emphasis to a beat mimicking the tapping of wind against housing, the hum of traffic in the city, pulse of blood pushing through veins.

Yet we aren’t in a warmly lit room, listening to the white noise of other conversations and speaking in rhyming, silly tones. My voice in type transmitted over the World Wide Web—that’s intimidating. The whole, wide world is a potential audience. Let us be real for a minute, you and me, unlike the fake we usually don. Maybe five people will read this blog posting in the next year, and after that I will lose in interesting in caring about this blog post and who reads it.

So with my audience of five, what’s so scary?

Actually having an audience I can count on one hand is sad. But let’s not dwell.
I go to all the trouble of typing out, reading over once before finally publishing my most random of thoughts for an audience consisting of five readers. Okay, I’m dwelling.

As I type in tempo to the beat in my head, I realize perhaps my five readers aren’t actually the same people I expect them to be. Go ahead, feel special undisclosed people—you know who you are.

What if my audience of five aren’t the well-meaning, overtired, too-busy-for-their-own good fellow English majors? What if they are a cohort-ish, click of judgemental, know-it-alls who found this blog post because I happened to random hid frequently used search engine keywords (sex, gay porn, hot Asians) in the white space?

One of my friends on Myspace recently posted a blog about how cumbersome she finds blogging because according to her a blog post should read like a five-paragraph essay. After all who has the time to write five paragraphs, besides me apparently? (Okay I confess. We aren’t friends in the classic sense; rather we know like to play Mafia Wars, and we both needed new mafia members.)

All in all, her post was very insightful. First of all, I haven’t used the five-paragraph essay format since my junior year of high school, so after a moment of high school retrospection, I realized the truth of my original point: Blogging has no requirements.

So to my audience of five, I say: Go forth. Be free. Post whatever you want without any restriction. Let the blogosphere be a forgiving hearth to hold our collective ramblings.