Why Your Blog is my Favorite Thing on the Internet

Blogs are the eighth wonder of the world. I've been blogging since mid-2007 -- this is like, my fourth blog (and no, the first two no longer exist, so don't go looking). I feel like the height of blogging was sometime during my sophomore of high school. Everyone had a blog. Everyone was a poet. Everyone's life was a drama. Ever since early 2011, I've been sure that blogging was on the out and out. I blame Twitter -- I think that's what did it for me, at least. I blog less now than I ever have in all my years of blogging. 140 characters makes things easy.

The millennial generation gets a lot of flack for being self-involved and overly dramatic and lazy. Again, I blame Twitter. 140 characters makes broadcasting the drama of your existence to throngs of followers easy. Don't get me wrong -- I love Twitter. It's my social media of choice. Validating my narcissism in only 140 characters and I don't even have to leave my bed? Yes please. I am, evidently, the poster child of the millennial generation. Please love me.

But here's the deal, on Twitter, there's a tendency, as with all social media (and this is something I incessantly blog about (here & here), apparently) to make your life look beautiful and great, and even when there are those horribly sad and dramatic tweets, they're this tactic of being like, "My life is complicated and interesting just like I am a complicated and interesting human being." But blogs are a whole 'nother story.

Right as I thought blogs were dying once and for all, they started to come back. Everyone's on Tumblr or Blogspot or Wordpress, and you can usually find the link to their personal blog in their Twitter bio. Blogs are back, and they're here to stay. I swear to you, every single day I see someone new tweet something about "I got a blog!!! Go follow it and see the adventures of my life!" But here's where things sort of go awry: These blogs seem to be less life-glorifying and more real-live honesty. I know it's true for me, at least. I would like you people to look at my Instagram and be like, "Ah, she's so pretty and chic and fearless," or go through my Twitter and go, "Ah, she's so clever and cool and wise," and I make sure that the only things you see there are things that wouldn't ever make you think anything differently, but here? On the blog? Shiz gets real. I'm scared of the dark. I feel lonely and lost a lot. I don't do my hair. I wear sweats.

You people all have these blogs where instead of trying to be funny or look pretty or sound cool, you're sitting down and writing honestly about what it feels like to get your heart broken for the first time and what it feels like to graduate from high school or what it means to fall in love or how you feel about your best friends or why you're being angsty this week. It's amazing. Blogs, somehow, produce an honesty that I can't find anywhere else in the cyberworld. I mean, sure, we all still life-glorify and vie for attention, but blogs are different. They're special, and somewhere in between your pictures of your wedding and your vague, dramatic post about who-knows-what, two amazing things have happened:

1.) You have discovered that your feelings are valid, and
2.) I have started to genuinely care about your feelings, because I feel the same feelings.

And that's what I love about blogs. All of this crap the millennials get is, sure, in some way valid, but also it's kind of amazing. Suddenly, we have this generation who is going, "My feelings are valid! My sadness is allowed! My joy should be celebrated!" and then I read your blog and go, "Hey, my feelings are valid, too! My sadness is allowed, too! My joy should also be celebrated!" We're this amazing generation that really loves itself  and then blogs give us this incredible outlet to broadcast that love, that validity and people read them and feel less alone because they feel those things, too.

Alan Cohen, who's the guy behind those Chicken Soup for the Soul books, said, "Wouldn't it be powerful if you fell in love with yourself so deeply that you would do just about anything if you knew it would make you happy? This is precisely how much life loves you and wants you to nurture yourself. The deeper you love yourself, the more the universe will affirm your worth. You can enjoy a lifelong love affair that brings you the richest fulfillment from the inside out." And he's totally right. Loving yourself, feeling that you are this valid, wonderful being is the number one way to be fulfilled and blogs are this cool, weird, wonderful step in that direction!

So, no: I don't think you're all amazing writers, no offense. And I don't expect all of you to think I'm an amazing writer, either (even though I'd like you to think I am because again, I'm the millennial generation poster child and also because I'd like to make a living doing this (please buy my book someday)). But the point is, I LOVE YOUR MELODRAMATIC BLOGS. I LOVE YOUR OUTFIT OF THE DAY BLOGS. I LOVE YOUR LIFE ADVENTURES BLOGS. They matter to me so much. Your feelings are valid and I'm just so obsessed with all of you for discovering that because I think it's just a healthy and generally awesome thing to discover.

So keep bloggin', babes. You're all the coolest.

"I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do." -Gertrude Stein
XOXOXO x infinity,
Addy

The Super Bowl is coming to New York and other cool stuff.

Hey, weirdos, it's me: Coming at you live from my bed, having just cleaned the bathroom and managing not to do laundry for the millionth day in a row. I am clearly handling adulthood brilliantly. I am the envy of the modern world.

I've officially been in school for four days (go me!) and I've learned loads. Allow me to enlighten you.

Some Stuff I've Learned Since I've Been Back At School:
1.) lots of French curse words
2.) the "pigeon hole" concept in maths
3.) how to pull a hamstring
4.) how to nurse a pulled hamstring
5.) that not having any classes before 12:30 pm is the best thing in the whole world
6.) the fact that everything I thought I knew about writing essays is apparently wrong
7.) that Ernest Hemminway was a brat
8.) how to apologize to a girl who hates you

It's been an eventful few days, basically.

I also discovered another thing, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and it's this: I think perhaps the defining trait of writers is an understanding that writing is truly the only thing they can do with their lives, even if they are capable of other things. Writers seem to understand the sense that having to write, for some reason, is inevitable. I've felt it since the fifth grade.

I went to my new creative writing class (it's three hours and fifteen minutes long (!!) and I'm so jazzed about that) and my new instructor was surprised when I told him it was both my second workshop class and my second semester in school, and he asked how long I'd been so "seduced by the thought of being a writer." The truth is I've been seduced by the idea of it my whole life and when I told him that he laughed and said, "Aren't we all?" And it's true. There's this sense that like, I could go to law school or I could be an actress or I could study architecture, but also that I can't. This is the only thing I can do or I'll just burst or something. And I don't know, maybe that's a very normal thing that everyone in the whole world feels about their specific career or life path and that writers just talk the most. That sounds like a very plausible thing.

There's this brilliant essay by Joan Didion called "Why I Write," and she ends it saying this: "...This 'I' was the voice of no author in my house. This 'I' was someone who not only knew why Charlotte went to the airport but also knew someone called “Victor.” Who was Victor? Who was this narrator? Why was this narrator telling me this story? Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel." So I'm pretty obsessed with that.

In other news, I miss my BFF soul twin sister baby Kaitlyn Lindley a lot this week. She was the queen of bloggers and we wouldn't be friends if it weren't for some weird pre-teen blogs we both kept. She's out slayin' it on an LDS mission in Philly and I miss her and her letters make me laugh always. The last one she sent me has a very long paragraph in all caps about how we used to eat frosting out of the container "even though that is so bad for our arteries."

I guess what I'm saying it that I'm still learning to deal with change. I still think a lot about what life was like when me and Kaitlyn and Avery ran the world and high school happened and how my entire universe was encapsulated inside of a little valley in Utah. I've never been great at change, and that's something I'll freely admit, so sometimes I think about how I packed up my entire life (almost 6 months ago now!) and moved to the other end of the country, and how that was just such a wild thing to do, but also it was something (sort of like writing) that I've known for my entire life that I was going to do. I can't help but be struck almost every single day by the fact that everything happens for a reason and I wouldn't go back or change it or do anything differently even if I could. There's an old Arabic proverb that is just "What is coming is better than what is gone," and I think about that a lot, because it's true. Life is about loving where you are, or you'll turn into a pillar of salt, probably.

Anyway, I guess that's about it for today. Have a happy weekend. And also enjoy this super cool song by my favorite rapper, Stromae, who's this Belgium dude who everyone's gone (understandably) nuts about lately. French rap forever.

Okay, wait you need a couple more from Stromae because he's my number one jam.

That's all. Bye, guys.

Oh, wait, happy Super Bowl weekend. Go... team. Yay sports. I have to care about this because the Super Bowl is coming to New York City (or, really, New Jersey (ugh)) and everyone here is 1000000% crazed about that and I love New York the most, so I'm also being thrilled about the world series of football because it's like my duty as a New Yorker or something -- and yes, I am a New Yorker; don't pull the whole Sex and the City, "You have to have lived in New York for 10 years to call yourself a New Yorker," because that's lame.

Okay, now we're actually done. Over and out.

"Art is what you can get away with." -Andy Warhol

xx,

Addy