The Perfect Blogger
I spend a lot of time thinking about blogging; about my own blog and those of the people I read regularly and the ones I discover as I explore. Every once in a while I discover a real gem where someone's efforts are all at once entertaining, thought provoking, inspiring and original. I'll often be stricken with a pang of jealousy. "I want to write like that", I'll tell myself, knowing that I won't. Alas, I write like me. I might get some inspiration or an idea for a day's entry from one of my favorite bloggers, but I'm never going to be them.
The writing I like the best is the personal kind. I like knowing what makes people tick. As much as I like reading well written technical pieces that tell me how to do cool things with my MacBook and my iPhone, I like it best when I find out what it is that inspires people or what doesn't inspire them, either one can be interesting. When someone tells a story from their past with a few personal details to illustrate a point, I feel like that's the essence of blogging as opposed to journalism, which surely has its place too, but it's different.
Opinions are the bread and butter of blogging. The hotter the takes, the more I like it. State your position and make your case. I'm all ears. I want a bit of controversy. Donald Trump likes to tell people that water is wet. He'd make a terrible blogger. I love it when a bit of emotion enters into the mix. In fact, I like it when a lot of emotion gets displayed. Some days it can be tough. The people who write regularly occasionally have bad days and lo and behold, they write about them. They write about job interviews that didn't go well about being overwhelmed at work and about taking care of aging parents. It can be a bit gut-wrenching sometimes. Good! Make me feel something.
The perfect blogger can take a mundane event and make it interesting. I'd read about their trip to the supermarket in a minute because they make things relatable. They find our common humanity in the everyday events we all experience. Andy Warhol became a zillionaire by painting Campbell Soup cans. Ain't nobody gonna do that blogging, calm down, but they can still reach people just by describing things we can kick ourselves for not noticing first. My friend, Jedda recently wrote a piece on it being OK to not finish a book that we've started reading. It was full of common sense and common feelings. It was good stuff. Just about all of us have reached the point as we've been plowing through an uninteresting tome, where we start debating whether to pull the plug. Reading Jedda's feeling on the topic made me feel so much less guilty for being the occasional quitter.
It's not that I want to see myself in every blogger, quite the contrary. I want to read women bloggers, trans bloggers, POC, millennials, Gen Z, international writers. I want to make my world bigger. I've lived in the same city since the 70s and I may well die here, but before that happens, I'm depending on all of y'all to take me and my imagination everywhere. I'm happy with how my views have evolved in a lot of areas but I want nothing more than to keep on growing with the help of people who have a knack of explaining things I haven't even thought about.
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