RobertoKay's Long-Winded Ramblings

A word (well, a lot of them, actually) on the art of music.

noreply@blogger.com (RobertoKay) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:30:00 +0000

Those of you who have read my journal over the years know that there are a couple of “hot button” subjects I don't particularly like to touch on, due to their potential to cause someone to display unusual hatred towards me. One of those is politics, though I've straddled that line enough times that you almost never notice. Another is religion, though I think that's just a result of me not caring about it.

And then there's music.

Here's the problem I have with the discussion of music: though it's patently clear that everyone has their likes and dislikes in terms of bands and styles and such, the one thing that's even harder to gauge from person-to-person is what music, in general, means to a them. In other words, it's one thing to like a certain rap artist, but it's another to be so entrenched with the life and career of a rap artist, that it results in said artist having an indirect but nevertheless meaningful link to their very existence.

(I know what some of you are thinking, by the way... there can't be a fucking rap artist out there who has that kind of impact on anyone's life. It's RAP, for Christ's sake.)

But it isn't just individual artists, either... sometimes it's entire genres or... guh... scenes, that cause people to be so irrational. This is definitely true of a lot of people into punk or indie music, although that's not to say everyone who listens to punk or indie are, by nature, completely loyal devotees.

The thing is... I don't view my tastes in music so loyally.

I do believe music has the potential to be meaningful in a way that encounters with truly unique people can be meaningful, but it doesn't mean that I can't bring myself to enjoy some pop tune that I hear on the radio that was written by some Madison Avenue suit and sung by some average tart who happened to agree to go down on some Hollywood executive after being spotted at some juice bar at Universal Citywalk. I don't believe that there's such a thing as inherently bad music (except for anything that inspires people to become raging methheads) and that, hey, everything's just a matter of taste.

It's a simple way of looking at music, and yet I've encountered so many musical snobs all across the internet, that I tend to wonder from time to time if my iPod is something that can be used to persecute me as a musical retard. Not that I care; I've never removed anything from my iPod out of shame, unless it turns out that I just truly do not enjoy having it come up on Shuffle mode. I fully admit to enjoying some off-kilter acts; at the same time, I'm not against listening to anything from the Top 40 if I can tolerate it.

In general, though, musical criticism is one of those things that I just don't really think much of, if only because one person's opinion is just that: one person's opinion. Not that an opinion is harmful or anything, but I've never felt that there was such a thing as a valid music critic, unless they've absolutely listened to everything made since the beginning of time. Now, I'm sure a few people have, but they're probably not spending time with blogs or their career in print journalism. Still, you can write an opinion about music and at least succeed in making a decent point. Of course, you're never going to succeed in persuading everyone that you're the authority in music, although there have been people guilty of trying to do exactly that.

The other half of the battle is reaction. One of the things I've noticed about people who try to make rational criticisms of artists is that, even though it's pretty much clear that they're speaking for themselves, there are going to be others who will feel as though they're the ones being attacked, as if their mother had been indirectly insulted. And then there are others who read the criticism and can't accept that their favorite artist is really being criticized, so they make retaliatory statements of, “You haven't listened to their album enough times” or “You need to listen to their NEW/OLD stuff, then you'll understand what they're really about.”

The worst is when people try to evaluate your personality and your character by the stuff you do like, and turn it into an ad hominem argument against you. The only way to react to anything along those lines is, so fucking what? I'm just trying to state an opinion. I'm not trying to tell the whole world that this is what everyone should like and this is what everyone should not like. Furthermore, if you don't like my taste in music, then stop trying to analyze me through how I feel about certain artists. It's amazing how downright nasty some people can be just by knowing what you listen to.

At the end of the day, the one universal truth about all musical criticism is that NO ONE FUCKING CARES, and the only reason anyone will pay attention to the pleas of a music critic is because we, as human beings, want to have something to believe in. And if that means making an instant transition from indifference to outright contempt, it doesn't matter, because at least we're not the only ones thinking it. Because, hey, that funny guy from the blog said so, and a lot of people seem to like him, right?

The only thing I will ever openly question in musical artists is their character, and even then it's not necessarily a reflection of how I feel about their music. For instance, I find Thom Yorke to be an insufferable douchebag with a streak of pretentiousness the length of the Nile River... and yet, there's no way in hell you can separate me from the awesomeness that was In Rainbows, which I happily paid $5 bucks for, even though it was worth so much more. Likewise, there have been artists who have done many cool things for the good of the human race, but I wouldn't touch their albums if you paid for them.

So, I guess what I want to say is, if I ever make it clear on here that I like a certain artist, or even hate a certain artist, please remember that I speak for myself, and the best thing to do is just ignore me and wait until I start writing about how I felt about the latest stupid video from YouTube. I'll be as considerate towards your own efforts, as well.

But, for the record, all of you who read this have lousy taste in music. LOUSY.

City of Angels

noreply@blogger.com (RobertoKay) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:06:00 +0000

I've been told from time to time to learn to appreciate the bad hand I've been dealt by being forced to move to Reno.

The problem is, Reno is a boring place full of people I either don't like or people I can't understand.

Admittedly, it's an unfair generalization about a place that I've learned to appreciate more (well, to some degree) in the last three years-and-then-some that I've been living here. The problem lays in the fact that, from the day I was born up to the day my family (well, my father) decided to pack up and move to the land of cheap property and plentiful casino labor, I had been living in Los Angeles, that emerging area known for its moving picture industry, crime problems, and occasional earthquakes.

To me, however, L.A. was more than that. Despite the national perception of L.A. created by shameless celebrities, self-loathing movie producers, and national news people who find the rare local riot to be newsworthy, L.A. is no different than a lot of major cities in that it contains a large variety of people and activities. And, of course, with L.A. being as large as it is, we had a better variety of people and activities than most American cities could boast.

But despite my having lived in L.A. for such a long time, it wasn't until my senior year of high school that I really learned to get out and experience it.

***

One of the most embarrassing periods of my life was when I decided to leave high school at the tail end of my senior year. Not as in graduate, or even get a GED and finish early... I mean, literally, stop showing up without telling a soul. The reasons for why I decided to do such a thing are too complex in nature to accurately explain, but I think what it came down to was the fact that I didn't like going to school, and never wanted to go back. Now, I've probably written thousands of words to date on my high school experience, so I won't waste too much text explaining why I hated high school, but basically, I was consumed by an environment that seemed to think anything less than a public Ivy was wasting your life away, and my classmates were either major assholes or simply people who prioritized their college dreams over their loyal friends, and . So I responded by ditching and going wherever I could until I could come home late enough that my parents would think I had been going to school all along. The ruse ended when my friend Brian noticed I hadn't shown up for weeks, and decided to call my house when I wasn't there but my parents were. Hilarity naturally ensued.

The ditching meant going to different places every day and finding my way around a city which I had only managed to navigate through the backseat of my parents' car. (Yes, even up to when I was about 17.) It began innocently enough with me walking all the way up La Cienega Boulevard (which I lived near) to the Beverly Center, a shopping mall near Beverly Hills and West Hollywood that wasn't unlike most shopping malls, save for the prohibitively expensive neighborhood it was surrounded by. Oh, and the Souplantation. Then I started taking the bus and going much farther, albeit not too far. Santa Monica for me was a 50-cent fare and a transfer away, as were the beaches and the crowds on the Third Street Promenade. For the first time in my life, I was navigating through huge throngs of people all by myself, completely free to visit any store I wished without fear of retribution from parents who wanted to do whatever they wanted to do. I then used the bus to go different places, like Downtown to the Central Library, which ended up being my favorite haunt for many years up to the day I moved out.

But perhaps my favorite place to go during that period was a small park on La Cienega and Olympic Boulevards which sort of sat between the Beverly Hills and Los Angeles city limits. It wasn't the most extravagant thing, but it was a very comfortable public space where you could just lie on the grass or play frisbee with your dog or whatever. It was a simple park. And yet, lying on the grass there, you felt like you were inhabiting a space of great importance, one surrounded by traffic and the houses and apartments of important people making more money than I may ever see in my entire life.

These initial forays into the city I had grown up in but never properly lived in allowed me to gain a new perspective on what kind of place L.A. really was. The months passed, high school was officially over, and I ended up attending Santa Monica College for a year and a half. Going to SMC ended up being an eye-opening experience in that, in addition to allowing me to rethink education, it made me rethink what it meant to be a lone citizen among a huge, huge population. SMC, being a top-notch institution for a two-year college, had a multitude of students from all over the area, ranging from ghetto-dwellers in South L.A., to trust fund kiddies from Bel Air. It was a beautiful school, and I hate the fact that I couldn't figure out a better solution to my educational woes, as I ended up being kicked out for poor grades. But it wasn't just the people or the institution itself -- it was the surroundings of Santa Monica, an independent city which oozes with California indulgence, with its palm trees, expensive boutiques, and overpriced property. Slowly but surely, I began to start appreciating what it meant to be an Angelino.

Having lived in West L.A. for a long time, it was jarring and somewhat frightening to find out that my parents decided to move out to a house in South L.A sometime in late 2003. However, I quickly grew to appreciate the more communal feeling of a neighborhood that wasn't so bad as it was slightly decrepit and full of people who were just struggling to get by. It wasn't easy to live in a place where helicopters would regularly hover over the house every night to seek out drug dealers, but it was a humbling experience that added more perspective to my life. Plus, living in the ghetto actually meant better access to public transportation, and the occasional sight of blimps hovering over the nearby Coliseum during USC games.

L.A. in general was a life experience, and living my life on several ends of it meant learning to adapt to different environments. Meaning, I knew the difference between walking the streets on Sunset near the Strip, and walking the streets on Sunset near Vermont Avenue. Even without a stable core of friends (they were all in college, or I was avoiding them because of my little walkout incident) I could manage to live a full life just by soaking in the L.A. culture, or even going to a random place like Montclair if I felt bored enough. So when it came to a halt in December of 2004, I felt as though I had been shot in the chest, robbed of my life.

What made the move so damaging, in retrospect, wasn't so much that I moved to a smaller town as it was the fact that I moved to a suburb of a small town. I don't blame my parents for wanting to move to a neighborhood that was comparably safer, but suburbia at best really seems to be nothing more than manufactured living conditions for people who want the nicer things in life but don't mind being in an environment that suppresses individuality and character for the sake of keeping some horribly outdated fantasy alive. Living in a suburb means living amongst people who seriously care about pointless crap like property values and garages and high-definition televisions that we didn't need three years ago. As much as I hated high school, I don't think I could've handled going to a high school in a suburban community without wanting to commit ~~Harry Caray~~ hari-kari.

***

So, in general, I miss L.A. and ache to go back.

I don't understand how I can be so enamored with a place that, no matter how much rose-scented prose I can write about it, is still full of bad people, in the form of gang members, Hollywood types, and, of course, Scientologists. Living in Reno, admittedly, added more perspective to my life in that it gave me a sense of what normal people and rednecks are like, neither of whom existed in L.A. (Except for Britney Spears, who, really, is nothing more than a rich and famous version of every slightly-overweight chain-smoking mother of two or more annoying children that I run into at the bus station every day.) As a result, it caused me to realize just how friggin' weird L.A. people tend to be, even if I have many not-immediately-visible similarities with a lot of them.

It's not even a matter of not being able to go to other places and appreciate them. I've visited New York City and San Francisco, and loved them enough that I find them to be superior on several levels when compared to L.A. I've even been to a mid-size city -- Baltimore, whose suburbs some of my family reside in -- and I liked the major area enough to consider moving there someday, even if Baltimore has a high crackhead-to-mentally stable person ratio.

But for some reason, I prefer L.A. more to all those places.

You know, maybe it's as simple as the fact that it's the town I grew up in, and moving back, despite the high costs involved, would be like some sort of silent triumph to prove that I can make it in L.A. and be amongst those who live in those apartment structures that stood a few blocks from that park on La Cienega and Olympic. Maybe I just want to relive that moment of bliss from so many years ago, where I laying down on the grass in that park, staring at the sky, and realized how beautiful it is to be a minuscule part of something large and wonderful.

A Sexless Loser's Tale

noreply@blogger.com (RobertoKay) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 07:01:00 +0000

I want to start this entry by revealing a little factoid about myself: I have never had sex before in my life, consensual or otherwise.

(Too much?)

I generally tend to feel sheepish revealing that fact to people who, for the most part, I consider close friends. Not that I feel any sort of hidden obligation to interrupt a conversation with, "Hey! Have I mentioned I'm a virgin?", but it's weird when the subject matter of sex, or, for that matter, inter-gender sensual contact is brought up, and I have to stand there with an attentive expression without ever actually adding anything. Why? Because I have nothing of value to add. Mostly theoretical stuff, in the same vein of theories about the Earth being flat.

I don't know anything about relationships with women, because, well, I've never had any. I've had friendly deals with a few, but so far the ten most important people in my life who aren't members of my immediate family all seem to be male.

I have no problems with the female race. Like any man, though, I don't understand them. In this day and age, where the concept of treating women as equals in society is almost considered an accepted fact of life, we're slowly but surely realizing just how complex the female state of mind really is. Of course, the only reason why we're just finding this out right now is because every religious and political overlord since the beginning of time has attempted to suppress this fact for their own personal gain. It wasn't until the 1960s that we were beginning to discover the long-denied fact that women are born with brains, too. And they can use those brains to solve math problems that DON'T have anything to do with cooking!

But my failed efforts to understand them falls on a different level than your average frat boy who can't discern why his significant other is so upset over the fact that he forgot their anniversary, especially since The Big Game™ was on that day. Those who have read my main journals over the years already know what my childhood consisted of: many video games, and very few friends. I didn't have the average childhood of going over to a friend's house every weekend to hang out, play Street Fighter, and then go throw rocks over fences or whatever. It was mostly me, my NES, my vivid imagination, and whatever pieces of paper I could draw on. Despite the fact that it wasn't an entirely sad childhood, it was still devoid of trust in people who were not related to me.

Unfortunately, it continued all the way up through high school, and it took many years before I managed to willingly get someone to come to my house for the purpose of conversation and general fun-having. I really don't want to delve into too much information about my life, but this was the reality and the world I faced for many years. As an obese child in a very rough grade school environment (stereotypical black/Latino school in which maybe half the kids ended up going to college in one form or another) I was faced with all the taunts and names you could possibly imagine... plus more. Unfortunately, as an obese adult, I really haven't brushed off the personal and emotional trauma it caused. And, in fact, I still have several childish fears about what many may view as the simple task of approaching others.

***

But back to the fact that I haven't gotten laid.

I'm not a willing virgin by any means. It makes for a fun lie to tell people that I haven't had sex because I'm waiting until the right woman comes along. But if I were faced with a situation where an attractive woman was drunk enough by her own means, and she thought I was worth a shot, and she wasn't totally blitzed to the point that it was disgusting... well, hell, don't wait up for me. And don't leave any coffee out for me, either.

At the same time, I have something of a moral core, possibly created by living in a Catholic household, so I don't consider unfair shortcuts (like prostitutes or roofies) to be a favorable alternative. Of course, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't compensating in some form or another, and if you haven't figured out by now as to just how I compensate, you're either under 13, stupid, or a hardcore Christian.

So, to me, sex and sexuality are like this big, ancient mystery that has great meaning, where most people just see it as a way of life. Several societies exist that do, in fact, view it as such, but I clearly do not belong to any of them. I view myself as a single island in which I, and only I, inhabit.

My vantage point, as a result, is quite the interesting one. For one thing, sexual jokes aren't as funny. (Of course, I would bet my cousin's child that a few years of regular sex in my life won't cause them to be funnier.) For another, it's easy for me to pick out who are the truly unmoralistic heathens and who are the overly staunch and judgmental fundamentalists in a sex debate. And for another, I find that having interests in various subjects and devoting to said subjects for the majority of your free time is not an altogether bad thing.

The latter has caused in me a seething hatred for people who go after innocent individuals for being a wee bit into their hobbies by calling them virgins. What have they done to you to cause you such great indignation? All they do is express themselves freely and go outside the norm of society, instead of following restrictive social mores that attempt to make everyone the same joyless individual with no personality or flavor. Does that upset you because you wish you could be just as expressive? Or do you just hate humanity in general? Okay, congratulations, you've fucked once in your life. So has pretty much everyone else in the planet. (Except me, of course.) Here's a medal, go die in your own self-made hell now.

It reflects on one absolute belief I've held about society, which is that, over the last few years, we've been putting sexuality on a pedestal for all the wrong reasons. Is it an important reality of life? Yes. Is it sort of disappointing that I haven't even kissed a woman, much less had an intimate moment in which we expressed our love in the most passionate way? Well, yeah. But am I glad I haven't dealt with anyone who's given me shit about my penis or my lack of a history? Well, it does make life easier.

The most annoying thing about the Very Real World of Sex is that there are people who treat sex as a judgment of an individual, as though it's a vital part of interaction between two people who could otherwise have synchronized personalities. Even as an expression of love, it doesn't mean much in the large scheme of things. It's a good time, yes, but attraction between two individuals should always be about the intangibles, the things that really create love in the first place. You know why there's high divorce rates? Because instead of thinking, "Is this person compatible with me and my personality?", many people are instead asking themselves, "Wow, he/she has a pretty nice butt, all things considered."

To me, the continued existence of that treatment of sex by a small but very loud and prominent portion of society makes the whole thing feel cheap, even if it really isn't. As an impartial viewer who has yet to deal with people in general for a length of more than seven days, I really don't know what kind of mindset I'm getting when I have a partner. It makes sex all the more scary to me, as though I'm dealing with my childhood all over again, and not trying to embarrass myself for fear of name calling and taunting.

Maybe some day I won't be so skeptical. It's just a matter of finding the right kind of person, and not freaking her out by IMing her about how sad it feels to be lonely or something like that. And no, it's not like I'm a complete physical mess. I actually have a pretty decent face, all things considered.

But, you know, as long as they can endure a 90-minute lecture about HTML coding from me.

Post Numero Uno

noreply@blogger.com (RobertoKay) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 07:26:00 +0000

You know what's funny?

This post -- and, by extension, this journal -- marks my return to Blogger. I actually opened an account on Blogger in the early summer of 2001. Around that time, I was fresh out of my junior year of high school, and looking insanely forward to my senior year, thinking about college. But more than that, I was also finding acceptance for the first time in my life. For once, I felt I had trustworthy friends, people I could depend on, shoulders to cry on, real friends, like I'd never had before.

That, uh... well, that didn't turn out so well.

So yes. For the first time since 2001, I'm posting an entry using the Blogger interface, and in a way it feels reinvigorating, not unlike bathing in an oasis after spending several weeks walking through the Arabian desert. I'm now free from the restraints of being on a site that seemingly focused more on the aspect of social networking rather than journaling, or blogging.

Ugh. Social networking.

***

I mentioned starting this account in 2001, and I might as well explain what drove me to it, other than the need to reach to others in an attempt to compensate for my lack of actual friends (the kind I thought I was actually gaining at the time... hah!) In high school, I had several teachers who noticed I possessed something of a natural talent at writing. Having looked back at some of my high-school era writing recently, I could never understand what the hell they were gushing at. Most of my writing from that time was pretentious junk that served to appease my instructors in an overdone effort to mask my underlying stupidity. But then I gathered that most of my classmates possibly weren't as talented at writing, even though they were better at writing by-the-book five-paragraph essays with coherent points and arguments. Perhaps they were impressed that I could construct readable sentences at the tender age of 16, whereas most people go through life without knowing the difference between "there," "their," and "they're."

That kind of approval early on caused me to evaluate my own skills. As it turned out, I really was impressed with how I wrote. For many years dating back to grade school, I had made several attempts to find a creative form of expression, having once considered drawing and cartooning for an extended period. (I can barely draw a stick figure on Microsoft Paint these days.) During my years in middle school, Mystery Science Theater 3000 entered itself into my life and served as a lasting influence on my humor and my appreciation for all kinds of things. To this day, it still does. I remember reading The Amazing Colossal Episode Guide -- a supplemental episode guide written by several of the show's writers and collaborators at the time -- and thinking that was some of the funniest use of printed text on paper. An English teacher in 8th grade turned me on to writing as a form of creative expression, and, like masturbation, became one of those natural discoveries that couldn't be harnessed.

I never really wrote about my own life. At that point, video games and pro wrestling consumed my being, as did the discovery of the internet, so I just wrote about that. Not necessarily fiction, but thoughts. One of my obsessions -- even to this day, which I'm sort of ashamed to admit -- was to write great lines I had heard on TV or in the boy's locker room or wherever and repeat them ad nauseum on my notebook, or whatever piece of paper I could find, and then supplement them with random sketches -- at that point, I hadn't yet shaken off my fondness for drawing. As I became more and more acquainted with the brand new home computer that my parents had bought me one holiday season, I learned to type on my word processor (Works 4.0) and do whatever I could on that. I went as far as inserting myself into Usenet communities (the internet that existed before the internet we know and love now) and being wordy about whatever. Of course, I was (and, to some degree, still am) a complete moron and was rightly scolded for all my ridiculous ranting.

It snowballed from there, and I became more and more of a grammar Nazi each passing day, treating writing like my special paintbrush and something that I felt should not be misused or abused. It came to a point where, at the same time I was learning the ins and outs of coded web design, I learned about a service called Blogger, which allowed me to keep a running diary about stuff. So in May of 2001, I made my first official blog post.

Testing Blogger on my site for the first time. No new posts until the site is finished. Later...

Stirring stuff, no? I didn't bother writing anything substantial until two months later, when I started writing random details about my life and ranting about various things, all the while being really wordy in the only way a 16-year old prodigy wunderkind writer can be. The Blogspot experiment ended in November that same year, as more feature-heavy blogging software was made available, and I could therefore just write on my website and have post titles (Blogger didn't have them in those days) and neato page templates and other foofoo crap.

***

I continued experimenting with blogging software while also honing HTML/CSS/Photoshop skills, until I decided to join LiveJournal and do all my writing there full-time in the middle of 2003. Between the time I left Blogger and joined LiveJournal, my writing was evolving, not unlike Pokemon. (Except for Farfetch'd.) I became more and more open about myself, sometimes being a total pussy and not using the names of people I had the hots for (Sarah and Lucia come in mind -- especially you, Lucia. If you're reading this, I want to OM NOM NOM you SO BAD. Sarah... drop me an e-mail or something.) But for the most part, I was starting to be more frank about certain details of my life. At the same time, I realized that in the field of writing opinions about things that had nothing to do with me, I was eeking out 2,000-word diatribes like nobody's business. Why? Because, hey, I had something to say, and very few people were around to listen to me in real life. So I wrote, wrote, wrote, 'till daddy took the bandwidth away... or something. Basically, I made it a point to write as much as I felt and not care that 97 out of 100 people would find it too long. What mattered was when the three that did read it would be impressed and give me their thoughts.

LiveJournal slowly changed my attitude about that.

Joining LiveJournal was not a matter of finding the software superior, or anything of that nature. I did so because it had one major advantage -- whereas my blog on a standalone site would need word-of-mouth and various other methods (pinging and what-have-you) in order to direct attention to it, LiveJournal guaranteed that I had an immediate network of people who would, in theory, keep track of my writings, and comment accordingly using their public identity. That, to me, seemed like a good reason to move all my business there, going so far as to import all my blog entries since the Blogger days to the site.

It began innocently enough... but then, the internet as a whole changed.

At the time I joined, there were two methods of joining -- either you received an invitation from a friend (in my case, my account was opened thanks to an invite from my friend John J., Sentro in my book) or by paying for an account that included extra super-duper features. This was done to curb the insane amount of server traffic that resulted from its initial popularity. At some point, LJ acquired enough extra resources that it could no longer justify being such a closed-door community, so the closed-door policy ended and now anyone could join.

Anyone.

What happened was... well, it was the first example of the evils of social networking, which Max Goldberg of YTMND described in brutal detail in a news entry he posted a while back. In summary, as communities grow larger, so too does the amount of content that flows through it. But the thing about mass amounts of user-created content on an untamed wilderness like the internet is that the majority of it is, to say the least, crap, and not enjoyable crap at that. Whereas the initial wave of LJ users (such as myself) were interested in connecting with words, the next wave consisted of self-absorbed individuals using their LJs as attention-getters, in an effort to become e-famous, at a time when the only memes in existence since the ARPANET link was established were Mahir, the Dancing Baby, and All Your Base Are Belong To Us. LJ entries of substance were replaced with useless "WHAT FRIENDS CHARACTER ARE YOU?" and "HOW RELIGIOUS ARE YOU?" quizzes. Most people went with the flow, as expressions of thoughts and feelings became clichéd in the minds of the ADD-stricken, fast and furious majority.

I wanted to adjust, but I never felt right doing so, so I trudged along. At some point, I started becoming self-conscious about my own e-popularity, worrying that I would end up meeting the same fate as I already had in the real world of flesh and sunlight -- an outsider who represents the older, more pathetic cliches of the internet. So I became less wordy in an attempt to cater to an audience that didn't consist of me. The self-conscious attitude never wavered after that point, as I became too afraid to post at length about anything that might offend other people. Politics became a taboo subject for me, after noticing that others (usually liberals) had posted more well-informed opinion pieces on deeper political issues, while I simply looked like a ranting old man in contrast who wrote letters to the newspaper without reading them. My biggest failure, and ultimately the death of my political opinion, was when I expressed a desire for man-woman marriage over same-sex marriage, not realizing until too late that my opinion was actually based on a desire to see marriage as a practice end for everyone.

Ultimately, MySpace entered the scene, took off wildly, and, as a result, made me even more bitter, as it represented the worst of social networking in one big clusterfuck. Only, unlike LJ, it was an inferior system that somehow became the most popular thing in the universe since color television. And everyone was using it.

Ugh.

***

Coming back to Blogger after all these years was a result of deciding to return to my website-based roots and realizing that I didn't want to be part of anything larger. I remain on LJ in a limited role doing what I admit I enjoyed doing in the last days, posting short entries about random thoughts, but with the added advantage of not getting anxious over failing to write something more substantial. I don't own a MySpace or a Facebook because I refuse to put myself in a situation where people I don't know or care about can connect with me in an effort to bolster their own ego. On this website, I call the shots, and, as far as I'm concerned, this is my blog, a place where I write the way I was meant to write, without worrying about appeasing some internet majority that laughs at written pieces longer than 100 words.

Welcome.