Hi there smarty pants and smart alecks!
Greetings I am back from the place where bloggers go to for a vacation and die, lazy land and with life drama land. So let's get to it shall we!? This semester I am taking up a sociology class and for the first 3rd of the semester we will be talking about the concept of the 'self'. It's highly interesting and complex at the same time because it not only tugs on your theoretical thinking but your emotional state as well. Recently we've been learning about post modern and some constructionist ideas of the 'self' from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Anthony Giddens, Erving Goffman, to name a few. Last meeting in class were sent off with a reminder that you can't hope for genuine liberation when it comes to the issue of your identity because it is very much imbued in the society you live in but there will always be redemption and satisfaction in the act of resisting.
Today I started reading up for the next class and our topic is 'Embodiment of the Self' and while reading Cummings' 'The Trouble With Being Human Today' I fixated on a quote from Dea Birkett that's very moving and deeply reflective but instead it made me think about BLOGGING, the quote goes something like this:
'Falling in and out of love is unpredictable. Promising to love someone forever is a promise no honest person would make'
This is on the idea of subjective and rational determination, basically the whole concept of the paragraph wherein I found this quote is that our feelings do change but then again they are affected by the decisions we make. Take for example you commit to a lifestyle change wherein you do away with processed food and maintain a regular workout schedule, but one day you start craving a Mcdonald's Quarter Pounder and you pick one up for yourself. The rationale behind eating it is that you will just add in a couple more minutes on the treadmill to burn of the extra calories because you needed the satisfaction that only that juicy processed snack could give you. Then you find yourself doing it again the next time a similar craving comes up forgetting that your commitment isn't just to burning off unwanted calories through working out but to a healthy lifestyle free of processed food.
Before we get into a deeper debate on healthy eating/living and relationships let's go back to blogging. I keep making these commitments on my blog whenever I decide to go back into 'REALLY BLOGGING' but end up not fulfilling my empty promises and then feeling guilty after not posting for a really long time. I used to think I stop blogging because I don't believe in the ideas and thoughts I have plus that fact that I'm over worked in so many aspects of my life that I "don't have the time" to blog. What I realised is that I lack a rational purpose for blogging so I really gave it a thought and decided to trace the reason behind not blogging and it came down to this, it irks me not knowing if anyone is reading my posts. Yes this is a very crass thing to say but I'm just being honest, I mean people who maintain publicly accessible blogs DO WANT TO GET READ, but I guess that should not be the sole purpose. This is probably not true for all bloggers who fall out of blogging. Some people just really want to get things off of their chest or mind and to them that's strong enough a rational reason to continue blogging, and I respect that in fact I wish could care more about the health of my venting skills than my readership.
So I came up with a list of strong rational reasons, well rational for me, to keep myself blogging:
1. You get to write non-academic things that don't exist and live for the approval of your professor.
2. You get to add more posts and page views to your very sad 'blog statistics'.
[a.k.a. you get to stick it in the face of Blogger]
3. You get to use it as proof or to brag to your friends that you are 'able', despite all your activities, to maintain a blog.
Thanks for reading! Till my next post!
Wondering if someone's reading this,
-smart aleck
