First Inaugural Address

The first thing I notice on this page is the example labels for each post. The first one is "scooters." Really? Scooters? Are the labels based off the kind of web traffic they get? Top search scooters, next highest turtlenecks, and so on. I suppose there could be a lot of people writing about scooters. I mean, they're great, don't get me wrong. Good mileage, the exhilaration of seeing the road flying past below you, breakneck speeds of 40 mph. I have a moped, and it has treated me well. My point is, I can't imagine anybody thinking they need to go and consult a blog or two because they want to know of others' opinions on scooters. It is, of course, entirely possible that I am wrong about the whole thing. Maybe it's a marketing ploy. Yeah, that's probably it. It's all about advertising on these sites. Needless to say, I will be tagging this post with "scooters."

As far as blogs go, I'm not sure what this one is going to turn out as. It mostly just started as an impulse, as something to do on the internet when every other site seems old or stagnant. Plus it is admittedly nice to be able to write in a casual, vernacular format like this. At the same time, I'm not sure what I hope to accomplish by doing it. I could just as easily keep a private diary in some ragged notebook, but the stigma that carries isn't something I want to have, even if it is a ridiculous distinction between private, internal contemplation of your thoughts and putting them down on paper. Personally, writing something down and reading it back seems more concrete, more distinct than just staring at the ceiling and thinking about it. Written communication must have some sort of allure, because this blog scene has absolutely exploded since its first appearance. It seems that people have a craving for self expression of any kind, which is actually comforting in a way.

I suppose the best way to start this damn thing is with a personal statement of some kind. So what I'm gonna lay out is my explanation of how damn sweet my life actually is, when I think about it. Here's what life consists of for me, right now:

1. School, with a manageable amount of homework and even more manageable amount of studying, most of which concerns topics I am fully interested in.
   
2. Madhatters, one of the most fun groups I have ever been a part of, where me and a bunch of my friends get together and sing for pretty girls, and occasionally become inebriated.
3. Frisbee, often of the glow-in-the-dark variety
4. Video Games, more often than not Bedtime Smash
5. Watching, discussing, speculating about, and attempting to win money off of sports
   

Everything else is just mixed in when I can find the time. So really, what can I complain about? I have a German paper due Monday, which I haven't started yet. So what? No matter what, I will end up writing the whole thing in 3-4 hours on Sunday, and most of the actual writing will take place in some small time frame when the sentences start flowing well and I key in on the specifics I want to actually talk about. That's the hardest part of writing in another language. It becomes so fractured because of all the gaps in my vocabulary. It's funny, I can imagine it's like being a little kid again. I know just what I want to say, but I just can't seem to say it.

So what else? I have never even really read one of these things before, so I'm not sure what common practice is. Of course, then I'd just being using the thoughts and expressions of someone else as a template. This might have its merits, since we're all presumably looking for the same thing in writings these things. I suppose I can't expect the mere fact that I started some web-based public diary to start my mind off in some profound direction previously unexplored. I can hope, I suppose, that just writing this stuff down will spark something along these lines, and some great life truth will be revealed to me in my own words. I think that was supposed to be the point of those assignments I had in high school, when we were instructed to just write without stopping for 10 or 15 minutes. I'm betting I wasn't the only one who found that to be difficult. But then, I think that's to be expected. The mind is so disjointed, so non-linear, that continuous writing about some arbitrary topic would be constantly interrupted by wandering lines of thought. In fact, I would occasionally try to follow the instructions without compromise by literally writing straight through for the entire time. There would invariably be certain words just repeated over and over for a line or two when I blanked, but it was undeniably amusing to look back later and be stumped by the complete lack of logical connections between topics on the page. Sometimes one would last for a half a page, sometimes they would just be single sentences, exclamations of some idea that popped into my head because linear thought was proving too exclusive, too narrow for a person who experiences pressures and influences from hundreds of different avenues every day. Like just now, I find myself thinking that I'm definitely getting away from the day-by-day structure I expected to find myself constructing.

It's 1:04 am, and my sleep schedule has been messed up enough already this week. Not to mention that this first post has surely gone far beyond the accepted length restriction for an independent personal blog. So I think a fitting conclusion would be: too long, didn't read.