Letter to the World

(Note, this and the two posts that follow it were originally hosted on MySpace, hence all the baffling references to MySpace.)

I have wanted for a long time to "blog," at the risk of (or perhaps for the purpose of) making a complete fool out of myself by putting my words out there for anybody to see. This is going to be one of those blogs where the guy just writes whatever the hell is in his mind, and the reader be damned (no offense).

For some reason "advanced text editor" won't work on Safari or Firefox (Anti-MacIsm, I guess), so I can't use Italics, which sucks because they are totally integral to my writing style. Without them, I feel like I felt in France, age 13, as an exchange student trying to talk to girls: like my personality is buried beneath an alien facade that in no way resembles me.

MySpace is very strange. I mean, actually it's pretty mundane. What's strange is that I and so many other seemingly reasonable people have MySpace pages. It seems like something that only 13 year old girls would be into. Actually, I joined it to post music, so that random passersby could find it. Only after creating this non-music page did I realize that there's a separate kind of MySpace music page. So I made a page there, too (www.myspace.com/jasongots). The trouble is, you can't post any of your interests to a myspace music page, so I kept this one, too.

Actually, it occurs to me now that I have no idea which of the two pages I am blogging on right now.

Ok--so--a little about me. Among other things, I'm what David Foster Wallace describes as a "SNOOD" (Syntactic Nudniks of Our Time)--one of those people who gets inordinately irritated by public misuses of grammar ("Ten Items or Less") and by those cutesy little phrases that seem to appear out of nowhere and infect advertising and public speaking with incredible virulence. Phrases like "It's a No-Brainer" and "At the end of the day,..." and neologisms like, well, "blog" for instance, drive me up a tree.

Its a very private pain, though, as nobody wants to hear about it (except for the rare fellow SNOOD one runs into occasionally). I announced to a roomful of writing tutors at the college where I work, several weeks ago, that the television ad for this college, which I had seen the day before on TV, makes the less/fewer mistake. "It says 'Twenty five students or less!' I shouted, expecting the room to collapse with laughter. Instead, everybody looked confused. 'I don't get it,' said one guy. I tried to explain the concept of countable and non-countable nouns. More silence and confusion. NOT ONE PERSON IN THAT ROOM OF PROFESSIONAL TUTORS UNDERSTOOD WHY "LESS THAN 25" IS WRONG.

Whatcha gonna do? Just sigh and prepare for the day when we end up back where we started--communicating via grunts and clicks.

Even as I write this I am aware of how impossibly snobbish it would sound to 99.9% of the English speaking world.

I wonder whether your "blogvoice" evolves over time, as you get used to the idea of sending messages out to the entire world. In reality, I have no idea how many people will read this. Most likely only a couple of my close friends. Still, this blogging is interesting--it's like writing a novel knowing that it is definitely going to be published--knowing that you have an audience. Or speaking into a microphone that is hooked up to an extended network of hidden speakers all over the world, any of which may be switched on or off at any time.

There's no question that blogging appeals to a person's vain, inner middle-schooler--that scrawny little kid who used to fill up spiral notebooks with solipsistic rants about how mean and stupid his parents and teachers were, with obscure metaphysical sonnets and creepy drawings of trees. But so does any kind of writing or act of creating something to be seen or heard publicly--it's always a tension between showing off, trying to connect, seeking approval, doing the thing for the love of doing it...there's not much sense I suppose in trying to pin down which one of those forces is dominant at any given time.

And although someone might stumble across this blog, read it, and think that it is the most boring, self-centered piece of shit imaginable, somebody else might find it entertaining or informative (or Shimmeringly Brilliant and Razor's-Edge Witty). And, basically, I'm going to do it because I feel like it.

More to come...