Excuse Me Miss, Do You Like Hip Hop? Do You Like Impoverished Children?!?! or, How Many Dots Does It Take to Keep You Reading?

I've always found blogging to be the most self-indulgent thing one can do on the internet since, well, everything else on the internet. But really, blogging is the worst. It is the internet's equivalent to the people who stand out on the street to accost you about saving the children and/or their hip hop CD (I say "and/or" because of yesterday's run in with the lovely man promoting his new LP, "Save the Children.") Blogs essentially say, "Hey, you, on the internet! Stop what you're doing! Read my blog! Because I have fucking THOUGHTS, OK! Thoughts that I type out on my keyboard and put up on a free website that anyone else can join! What do your thoughts do, stay in your fucking head?! Laaame."

Back to the original point, why exactly is it that nine times out of ten, the stranger who stops you on the street to talk to you (when you're ALREADY running late and you wanted to get a coffee on the way and maybe poop and then definitely poop after you drink the coffee and ohmyGod do you even really want to see Atonement, like honestly?) is going to talk to you about helping poor, starving children living in the third world, or hip hop music? I feel like the tenth person who stops you on the street is the foreign tourist asking how to get to every place ever on every episode of Somewhat Promiscuous Fun Times and the City (they straight up CENSOR SJP in most other parts of the world, which is possibly more sad than a starving child who records his own hip hop album.) And right before they ask you that, they will have commented to each other, "These New Yorkers. So hip, so chic, so worldly. They care so much about saving the children ... just as much as they care about dropping fresh beats."

I think I will now address the elephant in the blog of why I am giving into this narcissistic use of internet space and starting my own blog. Well, it's because this Lent, I decided to give up not being self indulgent. No, that's not it. That would be a serious roadblock in my plan to become Jewish by osmosis living in New York. (This is an actual plan of mine. Ugh, I hope no one from JDate is reading.) The truth is, what convinced me to have a blog is ... blogger.com. Not the fact that it's free, not the fact that it's more user friendly than AOL 65.0, not even the fact that they let me put my own name in a URL address. My own name!!!! On the world wide webs!!!! It's just like those fake Time magazine covers you can order with your own photograph and headline printed on them.

FLASHBACK:

Father's Day, 1992

DAD opens gift.

DAD
"Dad of the Year!!!" Yuck yuck yuck! Well, it's about "Time" they came around!!!

CUT TO:

Father's Day, 2007.

DAD opens gift.

DAD
Oh ... well, this doesn't seem like an adequate present for the "Time Magazine Dad of the Year 1992!!!"


It was none of these things that really hooked me. Instead, it was the vast array of blog design choices blogger.com offers to its bloggers (is it bloggers? Or maybe blogsters? Or perhaps even Blogheads.) How many choices are there, you may ask? Mmm, shh, say no more. Let me explain.

The kind folks at blogger.com have designed SIXTY-FOUR blog templates for all your blogging needs. Really, blogger.com, really? Sixty-four? Maybe the people working at blogger.com are hardcore Beatles fans and I'm not seeing the irony, but does this not seem even a tad superfluous? What do people even use blogs for, anyway? I'll tell you what: it is to promote the proverbial malnourished children in need and hip hop CDs of their lives via the internet. Except for most bloggers, their malnourished children and hip hop CDs are their like, super depressing jobs and their super depressing crushes and super depressing friends and OMG I'm so depressed, I just wanna be alone and write about it on the internet for everyone to read. Is it going to be any less super depressing/mildly amusing to read about how said blogger has "like, been listening to a lot of Elliott Smith lately, but the unreleased stuff, because it's more like my bottled up emotions" if there are multicolored dots at the top of the page as compared to a (non-denominational) star? Though the irony of said blogger choosing the star would almost be worth it. Because (cue acoustic guitar) all stars are made to burn out like me, yeah, yeah, yeeeeah.

What's more interesting is the names that have been given to these sixty-four blog templates. Some of the highlights: Minima (for Latin scholar bloggers), Minima Dark (for Latin scholar bloggers who are coming to the realization that they are Latin scholars), Sand Dollar (for free spirited bloggers writing from the imprisonment of cubicles adorned with pictures of exotic getaways that they dream of one day visiting ... when their ashes are ready to be spread), TicTac Blue (for second grader bloggers who will always have to be O!!!), No. 897 (for recently released from prison bloggers who long for the security and dependability of being incarcerated), and Stretch Denim Light (for crazies who think it's 1980 and like to wear their blogs as pants.)

None of these, however, beat my personal favorite, and the template that drove me to take the plunge, bite the bullet, pull the penis, whatever you will: the template known as Simple II. Blogger.com has found a way to take Simple and bring it to the next level. It's not just simple, it's Simple II. This blew my mind. Does it mean that it's an entirely new level of Simple, so much more simple than just plain Simple I that it takes on its own entity? Or am I missing the mark completely and Simple II is less simple than Simple I, and in being less simple, thus achieves a higher level of simplicity, warranting the name Simple II? Do you see the metaphysical mindfuck that blogger.com is bringing to the world wide web? And for free?!?!?

And that, my friends, is why I made the decision right then and there to sign up. I don't want to be self indulgent, but I certainly don't want to standing on the wrong side of the tracks when the apocalypse comes. And after discovering Simple II, I'm fairly certain it's going to be Blogger.com who's standing amongst the craziness and destruction, whispering "Hey, you, I've got some canned goods right over here. Yeah, right there. In the end of the world survival kit. Yeah, the one marked Simple II."

(But for the record, I chose Minima. Senior year AP Latin, y'all.)