On Having Your Own Little Corner On The Internet
By Anonymous
Having a blog is kind of like having your own little corner on the Internet. The situation is comparable to having a room in your parents’ house. You don’t actually own the room and you might even share it with one of your siblings. Nevertheless, it’s your room and thus you make the most of it. You decorate it with stacks of your favorite vinyls, too many posters, some nice and others just to cover the slightly off-white walls (read, advertisements), and bed sheets that almost match those walls.
There it is, really look at it and get an eyeful. Check it for typos and other blemishes and then refresh it again. It’s a space of your own, a sanctuary that you can always run to. In it, you can pen an angry and indignant open letter to your boss whom you will refer to as Mr. Wiggles. You can also reblog a vulgar amount of “photography” depicting bespectacled twenty somethings drinking coffee, drinking tea, looking meaningfully at pots of coffee or tea. Nevertheless, it will make you feel better because somehow you’ve managed to carefully arrange in this little corner every little thing you hate and love and aspire to be.
However, you’re not slaving away at ungodly hours, scrolling through pages of badly written fan fiction and Fitzgerald quotes (mostly either misquoted or misspelled from The Great Gatsby), to achieve some sort of magnum opus. Your blog isn’t the first nor will it be the last to describe your disillusionment with your first “real” job, the death of a loved one, the absolute agony of figuring out how you should ask your significant other if you can move in. But your blog doesn’t have to be original or groundbreaking… I mean, why should it be? Maybe you just have something important to say or maybe you have something unimportant to say that you just want to hurtle at a sounding board. Write about it, save it.
I don’t have a blog because I want to look back at it and feel a smug sense of superiority. I don’t have a blog because I want to read it to my future children and show them how insightful I thought I was as a twenty something. Far from it, I’m scared to even look at something I wrote a few months ago. But it’s good to know that I at least tried to capture what happened, that I left behind a fragment of my life I deemed important enough to save.
Perhaps one day all our blogs will be stored up in a cloud somewhere. Perhaps. If that doesn’t happen, rest assured nothing you upload onto the Internet truly disappears, or so I heard. While that reality is a bit terrifying (think, those high school Prom photos…), it’s also comforting. In a world where nothing lasts forever – friends, jobs, that new waterproof mascara that promised 24 hours wear – it’s nice to know that we’ve achieved some semblance of permanence.