It's time to bring this thing back, but only if I can do it without anyone knowing (NB: the Fat David Gilmour gif, which I created myself, did not count as a full resurrection, despite the immeasurable joy it brought to this world). I think the reason the internet is littered with dead blogs is because of their constrictive public nature--after a couple posts written in a charming, carefree style about charming, carefree things, afforded by the assumption that no one's paying attention anyway, the author becomes aware of an audience and increasingly feels confined by (probably imagined) expectations of charming, carefree styles and things. Maybe this performance anxiety also stems from the self-branding that results from blogging after a while. I am a young, female adult, so what are my options? Shall I tell stories of how I'm an adorable disaster in my love life? Inventory to an almost pathological degree my findings in the realm of fashion on the internet? Document undertaking a quirky hobby I'll abandon once I reach the inevitable crossroads of "give up" or "get serious"? Even if I don't want to do any of these things, it's sometimes hard to avoid becoming a caricature of oneself (like this rule of three rhetorical question-asking; is it Aristotle or Sex and the City I'm channeling?). This is an expectation at the heart of the available template photos for Blogger, which seem to have pre-ordained that my blog, like all others in my demographic, be about either My Life: One Cupcake At A Time <3 or a self-actualizing journey through Italy, India and Indonesia.
Themes contribute to this kind of oppressive branding, and as you may gather from above, over-analyzing the mundane, as a raison d'etre, suits me just fine. After all, the only other unifying thing that could really occupy numerous entries for me is a phenomenon my boyfriend and I have observed here in Seattle: cars driving around with no headlights on after dark. Yes, that is truly a fixation of mine--why does no one else notice?!!--and the only other possible filler for this blog, besides a Kafka-esque serial novel examining the dark heart of man and set at a store near my apartment called Cartridge World that I don't feel like getting into right now. Until I overcome the physical limitations of documenting the mystery of the former or get a job at Cartridge World to research the latter, I will recount other developments in my world in which I live in:
- A lot of important people in my life died over the past two years, including my dad, which was sudden and awful. It has been horrible, horrible--things like months of waking up from naps, having forgotten that the world is now one with no Dad in it, and then having to re-remember as my sleepy disorientation wears off. I hope that this partly explains why I have consistently been in a bad mood for the majority of the past year. You should have seen me as a barista last summer, holy hell. But finally things are starting to even out for me, I think. Another day, maybe, I will talk about how the grief process made me surprisingly uncommunicative, not only in blogland but with many of my friends, including some from a while back who still don't know what happened. Some uninspired journalist looking for an angle on the tired story of the decline of newspapers should write about the almost comical misfortune of having to verbally compose your father's obituary to friends and acquaintances instead of making the paper do the dirty work for you.
- In better news: I moved to Seattle! A good amount of people here are from the '90s, it really is true. In some ways, these vestiges of our shared common history--men with earnest long hair, women in clunky Mary Janes--is comforting, especially for someone to whom the pleasure of subjecting her 24 year-old boyfriend to the video for "Runaway Train'' is not unknown. On the other hand, your goatee is gross. On the third and final hand, though, I admire your determination to assume the costume and, by extension, the less downtrodden attitude of a pre-9/11 world. Perhaps as a result of this, I have found myself saying "hella" unironically from time to time.
- I started law school at picturesque University of Washington. Some of my classmates' ability to bullshit is so outstanding that knowing that they don't know what they're talking about makes me admire them all the more. As someone for whom life decisions are excruciating (see: lack of ability to decide on a blog theme, above), I have been pleasantly surprised at the outcome of this one, despite concerns that developed the first day of orientation when one of the alums on the introductory panel recommended, as if he were imparting a great truth, that the UW Law School Class of 2013 see "Dead Poets Society." Many of the hangers-on in the legal profession like to speak as though they are imparting great truths, and that's a great truth you can take to the bank.
That's all! No theme = no need for conclusions, hooray!
Car without headlights?!
