For some time now, I have been wanting to start a blog.
I had a blog once before, back a long time ago. I think I was around 14 or 15 at the time. I don’t remember what I said on it, but it sure would be interesting to find and pull up. Maybe I’ll go and do that once I’m done writing this. It may be interesting to go and look back on what 14 or 15 year old Michael was thinking and catch up with him a bit. Then again, it may also be really embarrassing, given that 14 or 15 year old Michael was known less for his social graces or wisdom of his words, and more for being a terribly awkward homeschooled kid who was just beginning to learn about the world outside of the Christian-homeschool-family bubble by working in the backroom of the local computer store. Aahh, good memories, good memories…
ANyway! More recently (four-ish years ago?) I stumbled upon an interesting discovery, quite by accident: I kinda like writing. I had known this growing up in high school in the back of my head, but at the time I was much more fascinated with writing words to make computers do my bidding than I was interested in writing words to convey any thoughts or ideas to other people. Other people, I thought, were mostly very strange. I did not understand them, and they seemed to not understand me either, especially with my speech impediment that I had during high school. Of course I did not think that anybody in my Christian-homeschool-family bubble was strange. These people all seemed fairly magnificent, and while it was a shame that everybody wasn’t more like them and like myself. At the time I didn’t think too much about this or question the underlying assumptions I was making in deciding which people were strange and which were okay. This is not a bunny trail, I promise!
Okay maybe this is a bunny trail, but let me tie it back in with my interesting discovery I made about four-ish (five-ish?) years ago about how I kinda like writing. About four-ish years ago or so, the first endeavor a girl and I had made at what we thought we were supposed to do when you discover the other person feels the same way about you as you do about them ended about as terribly and uglily as this awful run-on sentence is turning out to be which I spent a good seven or eight minutes of my life writing that I’ll never get back. Anyway! Shortly after that, I realized that my social development stunted by a speech impediment and sheltered lifestyle during critically formative years had not really gifted much in the ways of close friends of the opposite gender. As I was a little older and more experienced than I had been back in high school, I realized that this was going to make it difficult to find ladies to have more phone calls and do things on Friday nights with. However, I was single, nearing the end of my education at Harrisburg Area Community College, and I had a bit of extra time on my hands. I realized that this could be an excellent time to work on improving myself in various areas of my life, and ultimately becoming a better person.
So I joined the online dating website OkCupid.
Now let me tell you about what happens when you join OkCupid. What happens when you join OkCupid is that the website asks everybody questions such as ‘Which sounds more romantic, kissing in a tent on a camping trip or kissing under the Eiffel Tower?’, ‘Do you believe in God?’, and ‘Would you squeal like a dolphin during sex if your partner asked?’, and, based off this information, determines if you and other emotionally desperate people could be a good match for each other. And let me tell you, there were a lot of questions you could answer about yourself on that website. Cloaked in relatively thin anonymity, I ended up answering several hundred such questions during my time on OkCupid.
But that was not my favorite part of OkCupid. My favorite part of the site was reading about what other people had written about themselves. In addition to answering questions about yourself, you can also write a short bio of the kind of person you are, filling in sections under prompts for what you’re doing with your life, what your favorite movies or books are, and what kinds of things you’re looking for in another person. Reading what other people had written was fascinating! 14-year-old Michael might have been right in thinking that other people were indeed mostly very strange, but this was wonderfully more interesting than high-school me had ever realized! Some people would put very little time or effort into their profiles, and I would usually leave these people alone. I quickly reached the point where I wouldn’t even check pictures that a girl had uploaded until I had read through her profile and made an assessment about whether this was somebody worth spending time with. It was great!
It was also immensely enjoyable to write up my own bio as well. I made an effort into making my bio interesting to read, and would periodically revise parts of it that I realized weren’t written very well. Messages I sent on the site took on a similar skew; most of the first messages I would ever send a girl would end up at least several sentences long, and I ended up having some great conversations with people that I likely never would have met or had conversations with in real life. Eventually I ended up meeting the wonderful lady I’m dating right now, and also re-discovering something I had forgot about: I really, really like writing.
Obviously these days I am not on OkCupid anymore. For the past year, the main outlet I’ve had for actual writing has come from Facebook, where I’ve enjoyed writing posts about things that purposefully have more to do with how I’m doing and less about whatever-the-trending-thing-to-complain-about-is. However, it seems that social media is a poor platform for really sharing deep thoughts and ideas; its format encourages short posts of a few sentences or less, and obviously harbors all sorts of negativity and complaints about whatever-the-trending-thing-to-complain-about-is. Blogging seems much better suited for detailed explanations, deeper thoughts and long-winded rants than the social media construct does. It also seems like a much better tool to use for honest, real writing, even if it’s really crappy writing that goes off on tangents about girls, internet dating websites and squealing like dolphins. Don’t get me wrong, social media sites like Facebook have their place. But I’ve been looking to branch out for some time, and now that I’m graduated from college and don’t have to worry about homework on the weekends, I’m going to take the opportunity to do something more than playing through several centuries of Civilization 6 on the weekends until my eyes fall out of my head.
I can’t give any promises about what all I’m going to write about on here, how often I’ll write it, or whether the writing will be any good. But dangit I want to write, even if nobody ever reads this and this whole website fades into the sands of time as all things inadvertently do.
The future will belong to the people who are writing things today. A picture may very well be worth a thousand words, but writing is often the most efficient and one of the most effective ways to make a point or get an idea across.
I’m curious to hear what you guys think about all this. Part of why I’m gonna be writing a blog is to get the chance to hear what you think about some of my deeper thoughts and ideas that can’t be expressed adequately on social media.