So, I’m a little worried about my theory of a good way to start writing. My idea that you can just start by typing about literally anything at all and then let it flow into more focused and interesting ideas is great if all you are doing is writing random thoughts. I kind of realize now though that some people might read this and not have the same idea I have about what a blog should be. Maybe they think it should be a series of articles or maybe it’s supposed to be a diary. Maybe they think blogs can be anything we want. I don’t know, I don’t read blogs. I wish I could say that I refrain from reading other people’s stuff because it would change my own vision and I want my vision to be entirely my own and not influenced. I should say that influence might not be the right word.
Influence is impossible to avoid and shouldn’t be avoided. Now that I think about it ‘influenced’ is for sure not the right word. I guess I would call it, Self Doubt. I try and avoid self doubt. That sounds right. When I see what other people are doing or especially when I see what is considered successful and “good” I start to let that create doubt in my head. I start to think of a interesting thing to write about and I think to myself, well I think alot of things to myself but one of those things is this. I think that I should dial it back a bit since it might be a little too much. Let’s take the last post I made on this blog for example. I talked about how I was comparing sports to hypothetical mountain ranges and it sits on that line of weird and interesting that my brain loves. What’s it like to live in the mountain range of Baseball? What kind of trees are there and what kind of music develops among the society? Let’s not get to deep into it but you see how my brain is making these strange connections. I don’t want to be the version of myself that tells myself to stop doing what I want to do. I don’t want to tell myself to not write the things I want to write.
When I start a post with a description of what I’m doing right at that moment, like I’m waiting for my chicken to finish baking in the oven, a casual reader who just clicked on this post to give it a few sentences maybe before judging it will click away. I mean, if you starting reading a post and it began with a boring description of my favorite cup that I use, are you really gonna feel hooked in? It’s a common rule among in writing that you wanna try and hook your audience in at the start because when they pick the book up off the shelf they’re only gonna read like half a page before making a decision. Most of the time the only thing they read is the back and writing blurbs is an entire art form in and of itself that is not really gonna do a great job of capturing the quality and feel of the book.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I will probably just make the choice to not care about drawing in an audience. I’m not saying that to be hipster or anything like I don’t care. I’m saying that because this sin’t supposed to be some great endeavor to start a career blogging. I’m not gonna sit here and try to start writing well edited and paced articles going over things. I’m not an essay writer. My college GPA ended at like 2.4 so yeah, I should definitely not focus on being well written. The only thing I have going for me is that my brain takes me to weird places of thought.
My favorite cup was given to me by some parent of one of the kids at my last job. It looks like a giant blue Solo Cup. If you try and picture a solo cup there are these little concentric lines on the cup and the cup gets a tiny bit wider at every line. They’re like little cliffs going up the cup. You might not know this but on a solo cup those lines are there as measurements. The first line from the bottom is a rough estimate of how much you should pour to get one shot’s worth of liquor. All the lines are there to help measure out drinks and that’s pretty cool. I’m about 80% sure what I just told you is true. I hope it is true that solo cups are designed that way an I know someone told me they were at some point.
Anyway, I’m not sure if the little cliffs on my blue cup signify anything. I would measure it right now by emptying it and pouring like one cup of water in and seeing if it matches up to a line but the cup is holding my drink. Should I just pour the drink out and do these tests? I’ll wait till I’m finished eating. Ok, as soon as I started doing measurements I realized that there is now way for me to figure it our exactly. You see, a solo cup is thin plastic and the little cliffs can be seen on the inside and the outside. My big blue cup is one of those cups that has a layer of air between the outside of the cup and the inside of the cup so that the cup can keep cold water cold for a longer time. The inside of the cup has no lines or markings or cliffs at all. If the inside of the cup has no lines than the it doesn’t really matter how the outside is designed. It’s gonna be no help to me. I don’t really have anything else to say about this blue cup.
I love lemons. Love to put em in water and to squeeze em on chicken. I baked two chicken breasts. One had curry seasoning and one had jerk seasoning. They were both just ok, but the worst part was that those don’t really go well with lemon, and yes I did try these with lemon on them and without. Do I just get lemon pepper seasoning and that works well with squeezed lemon. For some reason that seems to simple. Should I try and relearn how to make hollandaise sauce? I seem to remember that it was tedious to make, something about slowly adding one part to another part while you maintain a constant stir speed.
If you’re reading this than you probably are starting to wonder when my mind will veer off this topic and say something interesting. I’ve written a paragraph about a cup, that came to zero conclusions, and a paragraph about chicken and lemon that also came to no real conclusion. Maybe not having a conclusion is another problem with just writing down stuff randomly and never editing or going over it again. That’s how life is sure but that doesn’t inherently make it good. People like conclusions and closure. I used to hate open ended stories like “The Giver” and what not since I wanted to know exactly what was gonna happen.
I’m scared I might go into a whole thing about how Stephen King’s Dark Tower series’ ending helped sort of shock that old hatred of mine into the light for me to analyze and change. That would be a whole article. I gotta start making a list of all the topics I start but decide to safe to write about it later. So far I haven’t gone back and written any or them. Maybe if I kept a list I could look through the list on days where I don’t immediately have an idea and then I’ll just pick one that looks interesting to me that day. That’s how I choose what movies to watch alot of the time.
It would be great if I wrote for as much time and with as much interest and stamina as I can watch movies. I could watch good movies or TV shows for weeks at a time and I have. There was one semester where I didn’t sign up for any classes at all and in one of the months I had total free time I watched all 11 or so seasons of Friends. For another of those months I marathon’d almost all 7 seasons of Star Trek: Next Generation. I still haven’t finished watching it all and honestly I don’t really care to.
These posts are getting really long I think. I just write like two paragraphs and then switch topics again. When do I end the post?
The Mind of Joshypoo 