The phrase “I’m starting a blog!” has so many preloaded connotations that even the closest friends must restrain themselves from snickering and saying, “Yeah, okay.” Everyone has a blog—some people have multiple blogs that individually get neglected and fall through the cracks to rot in the untold dregs of the internet. We could build an entire political party on the incomplete ideals of derelict blogs that have been forgotten by everyone except some God-forsaken server in Nevada that cries into its own motherboard every day saying, “Why me??” Do servers even have motherboards? I don’t know. Blogs were designed for non-technically savvy users of the internet, and this is exactly my point.
Everyone believes they are a special snowflake and the rest of the world is composed of conformist sheep. Although many of us espouse that everyone is special in their own way, the only ones who truly put this into practice are God and Larry the Cucumber. “Everyone has a story to tell, I just don’t want to hear them” seems to be the mentality that dominates our society (unless you can exaggerate their stories by putting them in a mansion with a dozen bottles of vodka, an Oedipus complex, and a camera crew), and given the vast number of stimuli coming at us in the great Age of Information, I can hardly blame us for this outlook.
And yet we long for good stories, stories we can relate to. Whether fictional or not, we want a story that’s believable in feel and unbelievable in scope. We want to live vicariously through characters that feel so real to us we want them to replace our current family. We want Frodo Bagginses, Colonel Aureliano Buendias, and Frederick Douglasses, but instead we get Kim Kardashians and Paris Hiltons. Maybe it’s our chronically short attention span, maybe it’s some malicious conspiracy to cut us off from our natural, God-given empathy, or maybe it really is all about dollars and cents scraped up by corporate Goliaths who were deprived of Huckleberry Finn and Luke Skywalker as children.
My point is this: there are real people out there in the world living the life you wish you had the courage to live. There are real characters doing real things on a real earth that exists beyond the three-hots-and-a-cot mentality of our self-inflicted, virtually-constructed prison. Don’t you wish you knew about the Malala Yousafzais, the Paul Rusesabaginas, the Jean Beliveaus, and the José Mujicas? In a perfect world wide web, blogs would connect us to people like this instead of those which willingly offend our sensibilities.
My hope, then, is that this blog becomes a place where you can walk alongside adventurers; real people in a real world you didn’t even know about.
