No they cannot touch me now

It's been an introspective week for bloggers, it seems. As all things in my blog world, it started off with Bears Will Attack pondering over whether blogging and self-obsession are synonyms. From there, things went a little haywire, though in an extremely entertaining way. I'd love to tell you more, but the areseven.com privacy policy keeps me from naming names and throwing out damning stories and potential insults. And even after this insanity, there was the common-but-no-less-interesting blog phenomenon of finding out a friends true feelings over their blog, which is odd and somewhat uncomfortable, but kind of nice in a way.

And this was just on Monday.

This morning, I got a link to the blog of a former coworker of mine who has apparently set out to write the most boring blog of all time, and he's succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Any given sample is coma-inducing, including this one from his trip to exotic Philadelphia:

We did go to the new Constituition Museum, which was really well done, and the Rodin Museum. We also saw the Lewis and Clark exhibition at the Natural History Museum - which is a really fascinating story. We had wanted to see the Dali exhibit at the Museum of Art, unfortunately it was sold out for all of the days we were there.

You're probably thinking the same thing I'm thinking: "What would you know about fascinating stories?!" The answer, of course, is nothing, as judged from the fact that the only title he could come up with for the blog was "News & Views". This whole thing has inspired me to take a week and try to write the most boring blog ever. It's a challenge that I look forward to.

But I've gotten way off course here. I was going to make some points about how I think that the daily writing has been really great for me. It forces me to take a life like mine and not only squeeze out something reasonably interesting, but to try and craft the words so that it at least makes sense to other people. I don't think it's any more self-obsessive than an editorial ("What makes you think anyone wants to hear your opinion?!") or going to see a therapist ("You love talking about yourself SO much you'll PAY someone to listen to you!") or talking to a friend about what you did over the weekend ("Can't you talk about anyone besides yourself?!"). There's any number of ways you can make almost anything sound as though it's an exercise in over-indulgent introspection, but there's really nothing wrong with any of it.

A blog, like any of those other examples above, is as good as the person. A boring person writes a boring blog and tells boring stories about their weekend. A self-obsessed person writes a self-obsessed blog and becomes addicted to therapy because they can't stop thinking about themselves. But the boring person shouldn't ruin story-telling for everyone and the self-obsessed person doesn't clearly show that mental therapy is a stupid, pointless thing.

Also this morning, another one of the blogs in my blog universe went on hiatus, citing "needing a break". I know the feeling. It all seems very exciting for a while, but it takes a lot of mental energy. It's exercise like anything else, something that's hard to actually bring yourself to do, but something I'm always glad I did at the end of it.

Of course, I also consider this page something of a public service to those people who are desperately bored at work enough to read this.