The art of the blog

I figured since it’s Friday, and on Fridays you tell the truth (because you’ve already sloshed down some pre-weekend booze), I’m finally going to come clean.

I am a blogger.

If my calculations are correct, I have been blogging for almost 10 years. I started when I was around 12 years old, messing around with various blogging platforms (Tabulas, Xanga… oh, the list goes on) until I settled with a Livejournal account three years later.

I’ve been blogging for so long and so much that I think the Internet is just about ready to puke out the heaps of virtual data I’ve accumulated through the years. I’ve written about my feelings about everything: government policies, makeup, English literature, and all the mean people I’ve ever wanted to throw eggs at.

I know this sounds a little ridiculous, but I maintain several blogs at a time, even now that I am legally an adult. I have a blog for my angsty emotions, a blog about books, and a blog where I write down my un-sober thoughts (it’s really disorganized, though. Obviously.) Rumor has it that I also have a One Direction blog, but I will only admit to that upon threat of water torture.

I don’t think that I’m more honest than when I’m furiously typing down a new blog entry, no holds barred. There is something so deliciously satisfying about admitting things that you dare not even say out loud but will freely write down for complete strangers to stumble upon. It’s a little lame and cheesy, but it makes me feel less alone.

But much like Jenna Hamilton in Awkward, I learned that being completely forthright in your online journal doesn’t always yield positive results.

When I was a lowly high school freshman, I got in so much trouble when my homeroom adviser found my blog. It wasn’t because I had a blog, but because I kept whining about my well-loved English teacher and how he had the grammar of “Paris Hilton in a Federico Fellini film.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been okay with letting them suspend me for a week over “character defamation” and giving me a failing deportment grade, because it was my blog and I am protected by my right to free speech. In fact, I felt borderline terrorized; I felt the weight of a thousand student handbooks falling on me as I got sent from one office to another, just to hear another teacher berate me for writing what I did.

But you know, all these rights and privileges don’t protect people from being hurt by the things I said. It was the greatest lesson I learned about journaling my life for the entire world to see—however diligently I delete traces of my detestable thoughts online, I can never erase how it made people feel.

At the same time, I can’t thank blogging enough for helping me become more sensible about many things. I am not only a better writer for it, but also a person that is more circumspect and open-minded. I only need to revisit a few of my old blog entries to understand why I (and many people in my life) feel the way we did or do.

That’s probably why I am so defensive of teenage girls today, because I was just as crazy as they are when I was their age. (But if we’re being totally honest, I still am.)

That said, one must be wondering why I attach so much misery/regret/shame over being called a blogger, when I’m clearly enamored with this occupation. After all, there are probably worse interests to have in the world, like racism or toe shoes.

From where I see it, blogging is the most maligned or judged contemporary job or hobby. (What is blogging, anyway? A job? A hobby? A jobby?) To be honest, I do understand the ire it has earned—hence the misery/regret/shame—and it’s frustrating to see how it has become a money-making, million-peso-earning industry.

I’d hate to sound like an old fogey complaining about our wretched youth, but that’s what I am, right? I’ve been around the block for so long that I feel like an antique, and it makes me a little wistful about the good old days when blogging was all about talking about your day and whining about the boy in class who keeps borrowing your scientific calculator but won’t ask you out on a date.

It’s not that I want there to be fewer fashion blogs, travel blogs, or ones that are profit-generating. What I do wish is that we give blogging back to whom it really belongs—ordinary people talking about their ordinary lives. We’re the bloggers, the ones who log in our naked truths on the web. Forget sponsored posts and paid entries, let’s all be brutally honest about how awesome or crappy things are, whether it be about ourselves or the rest of the world.

The world is already so full of glitz and glamour that I can’t help but wish for some things to remain as pure an art form as possible. Blogging seems to have conditioned us into forgetting that regardless of one’s daily site visitors, we all stink and fart just the same.

Don’t believe me? Remember, it’s Friday. And on Fridays, you tell the truth.