Tonight's post brought to you by the letter E and the color Green
Reading blogs is a terrible addiction. I need to go to a support group or check myself into rehab or something.
Such strange little windows into the lives of people I'll never meet. Such strange and enticing windows.
Maybe the problem is that I only read popular ones, which are always the worst. They depress me. I inevitably end up comparing my own boring existence to these glossy, detailed accounts. "Oh, I have my own company and I travel all the time and I ride to the airport in a limo once a week!" "Oh, I'm a talented photograper AND and artist AND I have a real job that I love AND I got an article published in a real magazine this month because I want to be a writer too!" "I have a great house full of furniture I got for dirt cheap AND I have a cute kid I can afford to stay home with AND everyone loves me AND I had a full scholarship to graduate school!" "I quit a job people would kill for because dropping my kids off at school every morning and then going to the gym is so much more fufilling!" "I'm so hip I can barely see over my pelvis, I wear $300 shoes to the playground, and still manage to get everyone to love me for my boho sensibilities!"
And they all want to be writers. Whatever else they're doing, they want to be writers. They all want to be wordsmiths, cranking out those pithy turns of phrase, to be universally adored for what they can commit to a typed page. To which I say no no no no NO. You cannot have all that, you cannot be financially secure and happy with your life and have great jobs and talent and all that shit and be writers too. It's not fair. Leave something for the rest of us.
I know that everything I read is colored through their view, that their lives must be full of as much irritation and drama as the next person's. Nobody's life is really perfect, blah blah blah blah. To which I say fuck off. That tired shit is what your mom tells you in sixth grade because your family does not have money for $100 jeans like the popular girls have. People who say those kinds of things don't actually believe them, either. If popularity was really as disappointing as everyone's moms would have you believe, nobody would ever graduate high school. There would be nothing to spark the "I cannot wait to get the HELL out of here" feelings that drive most of us toward college and an adulthood where ostensibly we can find other people just like us. Nobody would ever write horrible teenage poetry to read at Cringe or the Salon of Shame. Moms just tell you that popular people are unhappy, too so you'll stop bugging them for $100 jeans. Nothing against moms offering comfort, mind you. It's just not true.
I'm pretty sure these people are are actually happy, they do actually have nice houses and cute kids and jobs they like and they really do get invited to SXSW and Amsterdam just to talk about themselves and their blogs. And still, they want to be writers. Fucking writers.
Not only want to be but get to be. They are getting book deals and ad revenue and giving paid talks on panels. They are getting free shit and paid airfare and otherwise compensated for cranking out sentences about the minutae of daily life. I know for every revenue-producing blog there are thousands read by only the person who wrote it and maybe their best friend from high school who got curious and started Googling people one day. But again, I make the mistake of reading popular ones, the people who get lots of traffic and get free stuff and still feel the need to write about how writing unlocks part of their soul. A part of their soul that is making them money, apparently.
And the petulant child in me whines "But it's not FAIR!" as though fair has anything to do with anything that happens in this life.
It makes me want to kick them all in the balls and run away yelling "HA HA HA ASSHOLES! WHO'S HAPPY NOW?? BLOG THIS, FUCKER!"