Taking Aim at the Fatosphere. WHICH IS TOTALLY EASY BECAUSE IT CAN'T RUN FAST.

The New York Times has this giant article on how fatty bloggers are all, I dunno, blogging. Which is great. For them, I mean. It is slowly dawning on me (because I am very, very stupid) that there are blogs to satisfy almost any sort of predilection a person can have. Whether you fancy cats or like anorexia or are fond of music or whatever, there is someone out there pontificating endlessly about it.

This does not mean I have to approve of what is being said. I do not take the fatty bloggers seriously, any more than I take the anorexia bloggers seriously. Partially because my recent BMI measurements placed me around the upper end of "Normal Weight". WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN, INTERNET? But also because it illustrates the one thing that I hate most in life: people who are satisfied with who they are and what they are doing. Blogs are supposed to be tawdry or witty or riddled with neurosis (self-referential pause inserted here), not life-affirming details of what some sassy overweight teen is eating and how she doesn't care who knows it.

That's great. I get it that when you are in certain states of life, you want to commune with other people. But this cannot be healthy. I mean, not just that it's reaffirming (what I interpret to be!) an unhealthy lifestyle (that is, the lifestyle where you are happy and you communicate with others - WE HATEFUL TROLLS DEMAND THAT YOU SUFFER), but that you're doing it and expecting praise. How brave of you to accept yourself! Aren't you novel, aren't you grand! I totally wish I could drown myself in the crushing mundanity of my own life in front of an audience! GRR.

There's no sense of self-reliance in so much of the online community. The self-acceptance that's so often preached online is nothing more than dependency wrapped up in the comfort of anonymity, that having attention paid to you is good, so long as people are stuck watching. It's worse, in my opinion, than a rich/poor division, because the watched/watcher division is invariably skewed towards the lowest common denominator. Television studios don't make shows that are too highbrow because then people would form dreadful individual opinions about things - including the possible opinion that the watchers of the show aren't smart enough to understand it. Wal Mart has pulled magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and the New Yorker and others. Do you know what this leaves behind? The magazine rack at the most popular store in America is pretty much just Nascar magazines now. The notion of challenging a reader has gone out the window, along with flowery prose and the effing Dodo Bird. As Kurt Vonnegut (speaking of things that are extinct) said, eloquence is just a matter of waste nowadays.

The notion of self-satisfaction (was going to say "satis-fat-tion" but realized that is an incredibly stupid thing to say - but I just said it! Yay me!) coupled with a desire for approval does not, to me, display any shade of good thinking. If anything, it reveals a crippling inability to achieve the kind of satis-fat-tion that makes an interesting individual, substituting trifles for actual content. This profligate blogging is no real solution, but a placebo to achieving a healthy balance between the personal and the private. It's no forward progress, but rather, simply justifying the old idiom that misery loves company. We may be perplexed by a single problem in life, but hey, at least we're all stalled at the same point.

Which is partially the purpose of my participation (what is it with all these multisyllabic P-words? My professors would've demanded my head on a platter by now) in the blog-o-rama. I do it because I am a neurotic, self-hating individual, but also because I've been told that I do my best writing when I feel strongly about an issue, and also because I can only hope to get a chuckle or two out of the reader. Hey, I'm a third child - getting attention is something that I'm good at. It may be that I think I can help the world (snrk) by blogging about blogs, in some kind of snake-biting-its-own-tail sort of way. It may be (read: is) the real fuel for my bilious temper is just simple jealousy, that there are people out there who I feel are undeserving of the attention paid to them (the hidden truth: SIMMERING ALCOHOLISM).

But at least I'm self-aware enough to admit it. I may not practice what I preach ( and who does these days? ) but I at least have the good sense to present myself as a trifling hypocrite, and not as someone who should be taken seriously.