Lessons from a Blog about Blogging about Blogging

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Finally! I just finished my final final of Sophomore year a few days ago, and I’m still bouncing off the walls! Well, not really because I was so exhausted after our two weeks of “Reading” period followed by two weeks of Finals period that after my last test/paper/presentation I walked around Cambridge with my newfound freedom and promptly fell down on my bed fast asleep. If you are also going through college, or if you remember your college years, I’m sure you remember what a drag finals period is, and how much free time you have afterwards. I haven’t been doing much but eat and sleep, and I feel like such a slob.

If that first paragraph doesn’t interest you, please bear with me; I’m trying to apply what I’ve learned from the article “Exposed“, written by Emily Gould, which I read this morning on the New York Times magazine website. I can’t believe she wrote ten pages on blogging. Basically, if one can summarize a ten page article (and I think this particular one can be summarized with only a few words), then the article reads: Sometimes when people blog, they don’t share their thoughts so much as seek gratification from strangers at the expense of their personal lives and the feelings of the people around them, some of whom they might care about and love.

I think that’s an interesting lesson, but it was still a ten page blog about blogging published in the New York Times and I sucked up every word. Later, I realized that I wasn’t upset that I had read so much about presumably nothing really important, but I learned a lot about differentiating between egoistic blogging and meaningful blogging. If nothing else, it reaffirms the lesson that it’s better to be concise. Grammar, syntax, and prose, I have to admit, were excellent!

Then I got to thinking about why I was drawn to every word in that article that she wrote. It’s because I consider myself a blogger as well and on a very basic level, I identified with her and I feel that I project some of her identity and vice versa through our common activity: blogging.

In any case, how does this apply to an Asian American literary publication? All I have to do is write something and click “publish” to have it show here, right? Presumably there will be bloggers like me who, when they encounter a blog (we can call it an “article”) about blogging, will read the blog regardless of its value. Even if it’s ten friggin pages long.

I think that there’s a lesson there that also applies to Asian American literature and meaningful Asian American cultural representations in American society, of which we all recognize there is a huge shortage. People will read it and find significance in it. It’s a way of coming together and/or learning from each other’s lessons.

One thing that I wish I had, in high school, was a way to be comfortable in my art. I was very comfortable with mock trial (some of our coaches were Asian American), politics (some of the politicians that I worked with were Asian American), community service, etc. etc. The hardest thing for me to be comfortable with myself with, was art. Here I was in an arts school theater department advanced class, playing Judge Hawthorne in The Crucible, and I wasn’t sure about myself in a way that I never was unsure of in any other field. I think it was because you don’t really see any Asian Americans in really any productions playing major roles in classic American plays. If there are, most of the populace out there isn’t aware of them, especially the population out there that would most benefit from their experience.

Like everyone here, I love the American classics. I love The Great Gatsby, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc. etc. I love how we’re all working toward supporting our own Toni Morrison, Jack Kerouac, and what have you.

I am definitely making the same mistake Ms. Gould made. This is becoming a long winded way of me blogging about how much I really appreciate the topics which I blog about. Hey, at least I had a model with which to follow. At the very least, some college student out there with too much time in his (or her) hands might be moved enough to write a blog about it.

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