The Inaugural One

So I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while, not because of some needy sense of narcissism, but because I just wanted to write and haven't had much of a reason to since college. Then there's the fear that blogging will cause my writing to become a mess of stream of consciousness, and that writing about irrelevant subjects will quickly wear itself out. The latter may be true, can't predict that one, but hopefully it will be entertaining while it lasts. Speaking of stream of consciousness, I actually really enjoy that kind of writing (blame it on my hidden romantic side). One of my favorite authors, Milan Kundera, writes in a character-driven stream, and I absolutely love it, but it's not quite me. I'm a little bit more pragmatic and disciplined in my style of expression, and I figure that part will remain.

It seems everyone has a blog now, some for practical reasons, but many as a substitute for a diary (paper is so sadly obsolete). Whereas diaries were supposed to be secret and have keys (mine was pink in the 4th grade, I filled out 2 pages and lost the key), blogs are purposefully public, an expression of our inner voyeurism, which at the end of the day might be healthier than all that secrecy. But who cares? I'll be writing because I feel like it and if anyone reads it and it elicits a reaction (like 'this girl is ridiculous'), I guess that's cool too.

Those of us ladies who enjoy acquiring handbags (and I don't mean the ubiquitous Louis Vuitton in all shapes, but different colors and styles for different occasions) know that if you actually use various bags and transfer your essential belongings between them, some non-essentials get left behind. So if you go back to a bag you haven't used in a while you might discover things that may make you reminisce or laugh or scratch your head trying to remember why you would ever go to a Benihana and who could have coerced you to do such a thing.

Well I recently pulled out a big leather bag I used to use in college (the only one I have that fits large books), and found my moleskine notebook at the bottom. These notebooks are great little things, from the convenient size to the little elastic band that secures it. Most of all they look serious, and if you're seen scribbling in one somewhere, you look serious too. Well, like many items of this nature (the pink diary included), I was enamored with the notebook for a total of 10 pages or so, and then almost forgot about it. In those pages I had scribbled quotes that I liked from books or articles I was reading at the time - a collection of gems really. I was on a Milan Kundera run at the time, hence the mention above. I found a quote in there that is so relevant to the whole blogging phenomenon, it's almost prophetic. It's so good that it'll be my parting gift.

"One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived."
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera