I Am Very Tall

After thinking a bit about why it is that my blog has not hit any sort of stride, I've landed upon the following: I write a lot like the last thing that I read. Unfortunately, I read a lot of different sources with varying aims, contents, and styles. If I've just gone through Fred Wilson's blog, I'll probably try to write something that's simple, straight to the point, and yet relatively informative (these posts never get posted, because I can't do them). Phonelesscord inspires me to write witty rebukes to political assholishness (I might have written one of these once, I can't remember). The New York Times nudges me towards some sort of educated response to something, whatever it may be (these also go in the trash heap).

After having spent a good while reading Tim Urban's stuff, I will undoubtedly start writing a bunch of Seinfeldian opinions about nothing. I will try and stay away from uttering timeless truths, like:

"If peeing in the shower is wrong, then I don't want to be right."

That being said, I can't help but be influenced. Already, you can see the self-referentiality seeping into my prose, the endless parentheses, the references to parentheses, and so on.

All things being equal, this is probably the easiest style to write in. You don't have to know anything beyond yourself and what you think, meaning that you don't have to sit around and look for a link to the informative tidbit that you think the world should see via your post. Since your post will be about nothing, there's no real reason to find a pithy image to fit with it. You're not trying to convince anyone about the validity of some point or other, so you don't have to cover your ass and think about an issue from a bunch of angles. And since the post is ultimately about you and what you're currently thinking, it's totally fine to just end at some arbitrary point, because that says just as much about the subject matter as anything else (i.e. I don't care enough to finish thinking this through).

Really, this is blogging at its laziest/most convenient. That other stuff, in one way or another, just feels like work. And to be perfectly honest, if I'm writing on this blog while I'm at work, it's because I'd rather not be working.