In Which Blogs and Overanalysis are contemplated in some kind of Meta-Post

The thing is that blogs are doomed to failure. Not that the institution of blogging is dying out over all, you understand (although it certainly seems that its halcyon days are past, in this era of twitter and sporadic updating), but that each and every blog is, in and of itself, condemned by its own genre. (Blogs are much like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories in this respect. That genre is also infuriatingly incomplete-feeling, and leaves one feeling that in order to fully comprehend one’s reading matter, one would need to reread all the pages in different orders, as well as being something which sounds like a really good idea until you think about it even fleetingly.)

The problem is that blogs are pointless. This is broadly the point of a blog; one “logs” one’s thoughts or whatever, like a ship’s captain or similar. And this would be fine, except that most entries in ship’s logs were/are probably along the lines of “Still at sea, heading North by North West at whatever latitude and longitude. Tired of ship’s biscuit, strangely attracted to Cabin Boy, still not king [or ‘there yet’ or whatever it is that sailors want to be. ‘Free of syphilis’, maybe?].” Even when exciting things happen, they wouldn’t be written down excitingly. “Met the French in battle, engaged at 11:30am, no loss of life” is probably the way thrilling battles get logged, and the Marie Celeste doesn’t have anything like “Aliens or miscellaneous mysterious being here to kidnap us all, even though we’re halfway through dinner, brb”. It’s essentially pointless for entertainment, is what I’m trying to say here.

And that would be unfortunate even in the case of a ship’s log, but most people are not usually trying to discover the Lost Continent or fight the battles of Trafalgar, or sneak Aztec gold past the Armada or anything. Most people get up, go to work/uni, come home, relax briefly, go to bed, rinse repeat. In fact, that’s what’s particularly odd: when something fantastically interesting has happened to one, and one wishes to blog about it, these are invariably the least interesting posts to actually read (or certainly this is the case for this blog). The posts which really work are the ones where one rambles idly about some point of irrelevant thought tangentially related to one’s life. (Or this is what I tell myself, obviously).

My Very Cool Flatmate Georgia recently went to see some kind of interview/talk thing with Christian Lander, the guy who writes “Stuff White People Like” and apparently his advice for successful blogging (and man, that dude knows about successful blogging, he got a book deal within 3 months of starting his blog, or something) was above all to make your blog “about something” not just a collection of ramblings. This clearly works really well sometimes; Stuff White People Like and Cake Wrecks and Postsecret are all fantastic. But are they really blogs in the original sense? They’re kind of more like serialised articles in the newspapers of old, surely. So they’re not so much exceptions to the problem with blogs as cheating by not being really blogs per se, not attempting to record the minutiae of the lives of their writers or really “log” anything.

Also, obviously, there’s the problem of audience. I’ve blathered about this in the past (really, almost incessantly). Blogs are both 100% public - mine’s accessible to people I’ve never even heard of, let alone anyone I’ve ever met - and at the same time unlikely to be read by almost anyone. This post alone is already almost 600 words long, and with everyone on the internet constantly typing, who is there to read it all? So when you write a blog post, you need to write it such that it would be ok for anyone in the world to read it, and at the same time acknowledge to yourself that the odds are that no-one will.

Maybe that’s the problem with the content, and the reason that I keep posting this sort of thing. If interesting things happen to me, they make for very dry blog posts, and if they’re that interesting, I’m too busy doing them to blog about them. This leaves only the idle contemplation which is so often inappropriate for general publication. Thus, I’ve always fancied the idea of writing a blog post about all that fantastically pathological overanalysis which goes with being a person interacting with other people, but blogging about it would by definition make it worse.

I don’t know if anyone else does it (the overanalysis, you uinderstand) to the same extent or if I just really need to get out more, but so much do I enjoy trying to figure out who likes whom and what’s going on in everyone’s lives that sometimes I lose all concept of social normality. What’s the difference between friendly banter and flirtatiousness? I’ve never been sure (and man, not being any good at that distinction has caused awkwardness of both the obvious kinds), maybe because of having gone to a non-co-ed school. (This theory is clearly bollocks, though, since everyone else seems ok at it, probably it’s just me.) How do people tell what’s going on around them?

How, in particular, does one deal with the sort of person who pays people extravagantly insincere compliments, or playfully criticises one? That “Sunscreen” song which was so popular in about 1998 told us to “remember compliments you receive, forget the insults”, and even if it’s hard to do that without sounding ludicrously self indulgent (3 words which perfectly sum up the blogging thing, by the way), when is that appropriate? Someone the other day told me that I was “really easy to dance with, great” which was awesomely spontaneous and probably sincere, so you’d keep that in the mental file (also, awesome!). Conversely, being told that you’re “the hottest girl” in whatever category is always vaguely suspicious. Maybe this is because of some kind of deep seated insecurity, or maybe because compliments like that are so rarely sincere (indeed, the frequency of their being accurate would perforce vary inversely with the size of the category of comparison, yeah?). In this instance, the “hottest girl” category was generously expanded to include basically all the girls present pretty much straight away, which is even more of a red flag in terms of bothering to be properly pleased.

Still, obviously all such things are well meant and have a core of complimentarity to them. Even a car full of guys shouting “show us yer tits” is ultimately complimentary, even if clearly impurely motivated (not to say distressingly pointless, surely?) so maybe it’s foolish to try and weigh these things. But that, of course, is the nature of overanalysis, I guess, and everyone needs a hobby. It’s stupid, but it’s probably my favourite: overanalysis, swing dancing, craft projects. Also maybe tea?

Whoa, this post has gotten way too long, sorry guys, and well done to anyone who’s made it this far.

See? I told you I’d mention you.