(Disjointed blog content, posted as part of a daily posting streak I have openly committed to; standard disclaimers apply)
Blogging is weird. I’m still nervous when I post stuff because I’m concerned I’m wrong, and end up looking unprofessional or attracting a bunch of Cueballs or something.
Before I told people about this blog, during the time when 100% of its traffic came from its coincidental placement in search results, I didn’t have to worry about this. Now, I choose my words. Because some Important Person™ might show up. Maybe even misinterpret something I said and/or get furiously offended at a badly phrased joke.
I also fear that I’ll update my beliefs quickly; maybe I’ll change my mind or discover a much better argument for the other side really soon. But the blog post would still be there, displaying my old belief, giving the reader an inaccurate or misleading impression of myself. People might even chat with me to argue about it, and then I have to admit I’m wrong oh no! It feels a lot better admitting I’m wrong on my own turf, in my own time.
This passage from Lord of the Flies comes to mind (I had hurriedly reread the book as ammunition for the AP Literature test and noticed that my past self had marked it):
Jack broke out of his gyration and stood facing Ralph. His words came in a shout.
“All right, all right!”
He looked at Piggy, at the hunters, at Ralph.
“I’m sorry. About the fire, I mean. There. I—”
He drew himself up.
“—I apologize.”
The buzz from the hunters was one of admiration at this handsome behavior. Clearly they were of the opinion that Jack had done the decent thing, had put himself in the right by his generous apology and Ralph, obscurely, in the wrong. They waited for an appropriately decent answer.
I welcome feedback on whether or not I am correct to assume that most of my readers have read Lord of the Flies.
Anyway.
Sometimes I even get worried that something I wrote might go viral in a bad way and lead to people stalking me in real life and leaving threatening mail, or my schools or companies publicly disowning me, or something. I will get really concerned about something like this as I sleep and hurriedly check the computer when I wake up to discover that absolutely nothing happened. I am a silly vulnerable biased human being.
Relatedly, looking back on my past, sometimes I perceive an “uncanny valley” of my own posts, or anything I write, really, but especially the argumentative ones; it occurs when I wrote something too recently to deny that I’m the same person who thought that, but too far away to agree whole-heartedly. I can laugh at something I wrote three years ago because I know I matured a lot since then, and I can look agreeably upon something I wrote yesterday and maybe even feel kind of proud, but it’s so weird to read something I wrote one to three months ago and observe the post’s naïveté or egotism or shortsightedness and think, “Ha. Ha. Some human being wrote this? Oh wait, I did. My fingers typed it up. Wow. This is embarrassing. I guess I’ll quit the internet now.”
Admittedly my expository posts about my life have generally far outnumbered my argumentative posts all throughout the history of this blog, and exposition is just what it is, with the writing style and voice being an integral part of what is being documented. I don’t feel embarrassed about that. Although it’s also true that once in a while I wonder how to faithfully record my life without coming off as wantonly arrogant.
The advantage is, though, that my reluctance to post many of the things I’m considering posting is caused by me thinking my justification and evidence are flimsy. But if my justification and evidence are really flimsy, I’m better off either finding more evidence or dropping the belief the post was concerned with in the first place. Rationalism 101. And I haven’t lost the ability to write an introspective unfiltered brain dump. It just goes into a different text file that I’ll never show anybody.
Yeah. That’s all. Also, coming up with blog post titles is hard.
Sometimes figuring out how to properly capitalize them is even harder. But yeah, “up” is part of the phrasal verb “come up” in this case instead of a preposition, and it appears the Internet does have a consensus that it should be capitalized, even if tools like http://titlecapitalization.com/ disagree. Whether or not one capitalizes “with” seems to be a stylistic choice that goes both ways.
Even harder than both of these is concluding a blog post well!