Trial Run

Blogs are one of those things that can take nearly any form or shape you can think of and can have any number of purposes. Some are all about recipes. Some are a journal of sorts. I've seen one that had copious amounts of pirated sheet music (I didn't download any, for the record). Some cover one aspect of a person's life such as a passion for photography, others present the writer in all his or her glory, leaving no stone unturned from the pathways of their lives.

I've never understood how people are able to do that.

For my blogging purposes, I hope to find a happy medium. This is for several reasons, one of which being that I don't think I have any passion or interest that I could write about weekly or even biweekly for that matter. Except for maybe roller coasters. But as much as I love to read, you can only post so many recommendations or present so many interpretations of a given book. Besides, I have English classes to learn how to do that. I also couldn't imagine keeping certain aspects of my life out of a blog, such as my feelings about God and His Son Jesus Christ. I spent two full years talking to people about God and helping those who wanted to become closer and develop a relationship with Him. As this is an important and huge part of my life, I hope to be able to share appropriate thoughts and experiences related to this in addition to any other aspects of my life.

Another reason, and maybe the most important, is that keeping up a blog will exercise writing skills I need to develop. I read a quote once by Ray Bradbury where he told an aspiring writer that to become a good writer you must write 2,000 words a day. While there won't be 2,000 words a day coming out of here, it is one of my ambitions to become a good writer. And hopefully coming up with ideas about abstract subjects and putting it all together into one neat little blog post will help me send what I write into the void (or vacuum I suppose) as opposed to leaning towards certain ideas or subjects based on who might be reading. I don't think I could ever be a real author of literature because rarely do I write anything without thinking of who might read it and what their reaction might be. I would fear that I might change things based on the audience who reads the book (cough, cough, Stephenie Meyer, cough). For most of my papers for school I imagine the particular professor to whom I'll be submitting the paper, considering his or her personality and tastes as far as I have been able to see in class. On my mission, I wrote to my family each week, of course, but more importantly I thought of them when writing. Everything that I shared was geared towards them, even though I rarely sugarcoated anything.

Another reason is actually related to journals. While this won't be a day-to-day event log (how boring!), I think it will be interesting in five or ten years to see what I thought as a 21-year-old. I have also found that the side I like the most of myself is my writing side or what comes out when I write these kinds of things. 

All that being said, I still have no idea what I'm going to write about. I'm not sure my everyday experiences and interactions are all that thought-provoking, but I suppose we'll see what happens. I've thought a lot about starting a blog before for all of the above reasons but have hesitated because the last thing I want my blog to be is forced. I'm also worried about it being a failure. Have you ever seen a blog that only has three or four posts and then nothing since 2008? Talk about depressing.

There are, unfortunately, a myriad of reasons that have kept me from actually starting a blog, one of which is the name of the blog. I don't have kids and am not married so I can't very well have the blog be the name of my "family," as it were. "Mark...........and Mark." This leaves the other more common (but more difficult) option of trying to come up with a creative or clever name. Great.

Another thing is that this blog is going to be very wordy. I'm don't take pictures of my life and am not planning on inserting too many of them for the moment. 

Another obstacle is something that has already occurred in this first post. I have a tendency to ramble and give monologues. To avoid an incriminatingly long explanation about that, I'll just end this paragraph here.

So where does that leave me? Hopefully before long I'll have something either intelligent, witty, spiritual, or interesting to say for the next go-around. As of now, I'm still not sure what the goal of this blog is going to be. And that being the case, consider the trial run underway.