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.

Blogging at Home for the Painfully Alone

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have a life full of dignity and self respect. Wouldn't it get dull after a while? When would you talk to yourself under your breath, telling yourself how stupid or ugly you are? That you shouldn't do something because you'll only fail spectacularly at it (hello College, Social Life, and Elevennames!), like you've failed at everything else?

This would, in an ideal situation, be the point where I say "But then you go ahead and do it anyway and then you feel great about it because you aren't trying to prove anything to anyone." But I am not going to say this. Because it is a filthy bastard lie. I have done plenty of things that I knew I should not have done, and I did not feel good about doing them. That voice in your head that tells you about your limitations is there for a damn good reason. I don't doubt that sometimes it must be ignored, the times when you have to talk to the girl or write the paper or do something bold and brave and hooray inducing. Other times, individuals must be aware that no amount of blatant denial will hide their obvious, tragic failings. Which is part of what makes the internet such a miracle; we are forever observing people who participate in this culture of blatant denial. Sometimes we even reward them! The great yawning chasm of despair that mortal men call YouTube is seeded on a minutely basis with people who want the whole world to see their failings and arrogance. This is not to imply I'm naval-gazing over some kind of recent phenomenon, either; observe Danny Tanner and America's Funniest Home Videos, or even that Funt guy and his show. There is precedent here - I mean, what did people do at gladiatorial games, if not laugh at the funny looking or unlucky contestants? I mean, there wasn't a lot of replay value when they were eaten by tigers or whatever.

So instead of (can I begin a sentence not on a preposition, just once?) musing about the gradual erosion of dignity and the whole notion of Blogging Like An Adult (I just googled that!), I just figure that the whole thing is a social construct anyway, and I've got enough of those already, kthnx. I grew up with dungeons and dragons - I don't need another set of codified instructions about imaginary entities interfering with my daily life. Suffice it to say, the old crank in me hates everything, while the kid in me likes the two scoops of raisins. Or whatever. Effing Family Guy has ruined my entire generation. Or has it?

Anyway. My point (the irony is that I got distracted by the adult ADD website) is that, uh, the internets are an evolution of natural human patterns, and, uh (ha ha, check out that list of 151 strengths of adults with ADD! "The Positive's (sic) of ADD") that there's really nothing fancy or newfangled about it, that it's just more voices to contend with - that if they weren't supplied from the outside, they'd probably come from within. Human personalities seem to be consciously self regulating in a way that I (in my intense and scientific studies) have not noticed in animals. Which is to say, a trained dog will not look down it's nose (okay, so it will, hey, why don't you shut up?) at a dog which doesn't have any sort of normal socialization. And that hey, maybe that's the point of humanity's progress! Perhaps every social and scientific advancement has just been one great escalation of snobbery, a great sociological pyramid of gentrification, constantly seeking that one universal, Fonzy-like cool that will end the search. It certainly sounds bleak enough to be a cosmic truth, and fits nicely into the myths of lost civilizations.

Yeah, Atlantis? It was real cool until all these effing hipsters moved in, and the developers built all those new hotels and then the Gods killed the fuck out of everyone there.

But we, as mankind (perhaps man unkind? Oh ho!) will continue to build these giant enormous misguided attempts at setting ourselves apart from the crowd; our Williamsburgs or our Towers of Babel, and in the end, we're going to be left with a thousand languages and a million Brooklyn Vegans, leaving behind only disunity in their wake. We, as a species, will always look back to the studio 54's of our past, proclaiming that before us came a golden time, and that it is what we strive for, and that only disease and death await us in the future. Which is true!

In summation, we can have our metaverses and second lives and other kinds of annoyingly populist dreams about the future of technology, but we also have to acknowledge that, ultimately, they're going to jump the shark. As Yeats wrote, the center cannot hold. Or, as the alternapress can point out, Vice is going to be bought out by MTV. And that, in the end, is the mad rush and joy of being human - fast paced, tossing your all behind a hope or an ideal (we're all scenesters - don't deny it!), and then praying that we don't be too embarrassed by them in later on. Or that if we are, then at least we can be proud that we ignored that little voice inside our heads long enough to actually go for something, to risk being put in a compromising position so that we can know, for just a few moments, that for a short while we were the mad pulse of humanity, driving it onwards to it's next heartbeat.