Try to be Clever

I have decided that with finals quickly approaching and the bar in the not-so-distant future, I need to put more pressure on myself to be clever . . . so I started a blog. Brilliant move, right?

I'll try to make this a bit of a window into the vortex in my brain, and perhaps get some organization and outlet to my madness.

I'll review books and movies, talk about music a lot, and discuss disc golf until you can't stand it. I may complain about modern life and anything I feel like complaining about.

For a first post, I'd like to discuss blogging. I love reading my friends' blogs when I've run out of disc golf-related material on the internet. The reason I love it is that everyone waxes so stinkin' philosophical in their posts, and it is really cool to see how creative and intelligent people can be. Nobody talks like this. We've all turned into Jerry Seinfeld monologues.

I love living in the information age, as long as it doesn't get too personal. For instance, I keep my e-mail open the entire time I'm studying, and glance at it from time to time. I like chatting with people over Google's Gmail Chat or AOL. The dichotomy is that I'm dreading the day I have to carry a cell phone. It's easy to be clever and have your stuff together with text-based communication. With the cell, you're thinking on your feet, so it's really only good for quick fact-based conversations. There is something richer about text somehow because of the opportunity to really think before you have to reply. And it's easy to ignore people you don't want to talk to but are too polite to block.

I'm also addicted to Wikipedia, but that is another subject for another day.

There's one thing that annoys me with blogging, though. It's the comments. Not the content of the comments, rather the mode. For instance, it should be impossible to post an anonymous comment on a blog. If it forces you to invent a pseudonym, that's all fine and good, but there is nothing worse than reading a heated argument on some political forum between anonymous and . . . anonymous.

And the security for comments is usually annoying, too. In order to keep web bots from making obscene comments (and I consider most commercial speech obscene) the comments section has a graphic that contains letters and numbers that are not machine-readable, to ensure a real person is posting instead of some rat bastage spammer. Unfortunately, half the time I can't read the codes in the graphics, either. Is that the letter "l" or is it the number "1?" Depending on the font, they may be identical, and only your keyboard knows the difference. When I get the code wrong the first time (maybe I need a new optical prescription), red text pops up that says something like, "YOU ARE EITHER A THIEF OR AN IDIOT, AND EITHER WAY, THE PRESSURE IS ON, BECAUSE IF YOU BLOW IT AGAIN, YOUR 14 PAGES OF WITTY BANTER WILL BE FOREVER LOST." It makes me feel a bit nervous, like I'm some sort of cat burglar sneaking past the security guard, and if I don't correctly navigate the laser field, the chamber will seal and slowly fill with sarin (if you don't know what that is, look it up on Wikipedia).