Long, long ago, ca. 2004- 2007, I blogged prolifically along with the rest of the 13-to-30-year-old demographic. Oh how we loved the medium. We could be as narcissistic or confessional or soapboxy or charmingly irreverent as the internet would allow, and the internet was indeed endlessly permissive. At some point, though, I fell off the blogging wagon. It was passé, I thought; everyone was doing it; it was a pale and facile excuse for self-expression; nobody had anything to say that hadn't been articulated with greater insight in literature or journalism.
My generation seemed to concur, and around the time that I was deleting every incriminating entry to my name, there was a mass defection from the blogosphere. Now we knew better, right? The Web was a scary place where creepy voyeurs and potential employers lurked, just waiting for us to voluntarily feed information to them.
Only I'm lying; we were never really that self-aware. What actually happened was that our attention spans could no longer support lengthy discourse. With the rise of the Facebook status and the Tweet, we could still broadcast our quotidian activities, internal states, passive-aggressively veiled personal dramas, etc., to a captive audience, but now we could disperse these juicy bits in one-sentence increments! Gone was the laborious craftsmanship that blogging entailed, the multi-paragraph scheme, the dramatic trajectory, the opening hook and the concluding zinger, the pitch-perfect TITLE to unify the whole post. Now ours was a culture of quick hits-- single witticisms or Koan-like cryptic fragments. Or song lyrics.
While this mode of expression provided its own challenges, mostly it just made us stupider. And by us I mean me. I would scan half of a food blog post about creamed spinach and suddenly find myself on a FailSite, because looking at a photo of an unintentionally phallic children's toy exhausted my cognitive reserves less than did reading about the culinary properties of bechamel sauce. I couldn't sit still and read a five-paged article in TIME magazine on why powerful men are chauvinistic pigs (and I really wanted to know! It took me two days and I only retained a little bit of information.The cutesy graphs and tables helped; they always do, especially when at the expense of R. Kelly). Denser scholarly texts did not even stand a chance. And then I was really in trouble, because I decided to apply to PhD programs in Schmoozicology, an obscure corner of the humanities. Prior to this I had been on the track of Schmoozic Performance, which presented its own formidable issues of focus and self-discipline, but now I would be trying for a field the very core of which was reading, critical thinking, and LENGTHY prose composition.
Oh, it was brutal. Slogging through academic articles and dissertations was hard enough when I scarcely had the intellectual stamina to watch a complete episode of Jersey Shore (though now that I think that my occasional failure to see the Shore through to its greasy end was more a function of nameless existential dread than of ADD). But then I had to WRITE, and it had to be GOOD. I had to say things, true things, that nobody had articulated before and that people might care about knowing. I had to buttress the true things with other true things. And I had to accomplish all of this in attractive, sophisticated language for twenty-five pages.
I almost didn't make it. The sentences bloomed in my mind, nuanced, linear, full of essential truths, and then they died hard on the computer screen. Stutters and malapropisms, tortured syntax, obfuscation of meaning until I had no idea what I was even trying to argue anymore. Backspace and stare at the blinking cursor again, or dart off to a LOLsite to give my brain a break. I never updated my Facebook status so frequently; why was it so much easier to manufacture clever one-liners about my mental deterioration that to just push through the damn paper that was the cause of such?
All of this culminated in an all-nighter fueled by mate, black tea, and not enough food, in which I sat at the kitchen table/ the couch, alternately, sometimes squeezing out convoluted multi-clause German-style sentences, sometimes flying through chunks of my outline because I just got on a roll. Around 9 AM I could no longer see straight and my heart was doing a skittery little dance, like it was trying to jet over to the right side of my ribcage. I knew I had to write a few paragraphs about Hummel and his pedagogical treatise, and I knew exactly what information needed to be covered and in what order, but the computer screen hurt my eyes and I tried to form words and now my heart felt like a maraca in the grasp of a pissed-off toddler. At that point my roommate groggily emerged. "I'm so TIRED still," she said, and then surveyed me. I must have looked deranged. "Whoa, are you okay?" "..... Uh. No," I said. "I think I need... some food... or some sleep... or to go to the doctor." She shoved a cinnamon raisin bagel at me, saying that she had to go to school but to call if I needed medical attention.
To finish the rest of the story briefly: the bagel restored my equilibrium somewhat, I wrote the goddamn paper, and after a few more months of anxiety and teeth-gnashing, I was accepted to a good PhD program in a Big Exciting City with FUNDING. I wept with relief, felt elated at the dazzling future that lay before me, and then realized with leaden certainty that I would repeat the all-nighter-Yerba-Mate-cinnamon-raisin panic fest again and again for the REST OF MY LIFE if I did not change my ways. And the way that most needed changing, aside from my general procrastination and adrenaline junkie-ness, was my fluency as a writer.
So this was all a very roundabout way of saying that blogging seems like a natural stepping stone back into the kingdom of higher-order thinking and analytical writing. The public forum will ensure that I adhere to some standards of sentence construction and comprehensibility, while the casual nature of the medium will allow me some wiggle room (you know, to say things like "wiggle room" or worse. That's what she said). And so I christen this place the Schlock Academy-- "academy" because that is where I'm going, possibly never to resurface, and "Schlock" ("something of shoddy or inferior quality") because none of the writing here will be Pulitzer material or even terribly original. This is just a place to get back into the groove of thinking and typing. And, as a side effect, it's a nice way to cope with a weird, emotionally turbulent time in my life when everything is changing and I'm getting thwacked in the forehead with Life Lessons every time I just want to go to CVS or something. It's the standard Young Person story of unrest, exploration, self-absorption, option paralysis in a privileged but irremediably fractured world... the kind of story that merits more space and development that the Tweet/ Status Update/ Information Byte will allow, but that rarely aspires to literary or philosophical heights due to its well-trodden content and inherently colloquial tone. Ergo blog.
