The World of Stuff .com

What to say, what not to say

Yeah, so I’ve been pretty busy. I know, I tend to start a lot of posts with that, but it is true. Sometimes I actually have (gasp) homework.

But in between homework sessions, there’s this little thing called life, and things do happen to me. Some of them are interesting or even blogworthy. Those things often end up here in the blog. Often, but not always.

As I get older and more people I know are aware of my blog, I feel that there are more things I can’t say.

“What?!” you ask. “You just wrote a five-part series detailing every waking hour you spent with your special friend Kate. You kissed and told. You even mentioned that you cried.”

Okay, first of all, crying is okay sometimes, especially if it’s one’s party and one wants to. Second of all, more things happened than I mentioned in my blog posts, either because I momentarily forgot about them (for example, Kate and I played some eight-ball at the student union one day—I forget which day it was, but I remember the TVs were all tuned to sports channels, which were announcing the news of Lane Kiffin‘s move to USC) or because they just aren’t things I want to share with the world. You know?

You’ve probably heard about bloggers who got fired from their jobs because of something they said on their blog. It’s kind of like that as well. I don’t want to say anything that will make me look bad to potential employers (although I think I kind of have already, though I won’t link to any examples for obvious reasons), and once I get a full-time job, I probably won’t mention it very much as a precaution. It might also be very boring as well.

Also, have a look at the archives for September 2003, won’t you? There are a lot of minutiae in there. I don’t bother too much with the little things about my day anymore. Maybe they no longer interest me, but I think it’s mainly because I just tend toward longer, less frequent blog posts. I guess I prefer them that way because I want each of them to have a lot of substance. I want them to really be good reading.

What brought this about? My friend Andy recently mentioned in his new blog that he admired my “ability to censor [my]self enough so that [my] blog is not just random thoughts” but also “to be open enough so that [my] blog is interesting.” My initial reaction was: He doesn’t know the half of it! Boy, do I ever censor myself. I probably censor myself more than not… whatever that means. Or something like that.

What really brought this about was that last night I had a dream that one of my female friends was smooching me. I wanted to talk about it with someone to try to see what it meant, but how best to go about that? I certainly wouldn’t mention it to the girl herself. (Creep-a-leepy.) And, of course, I ruled out the blog as well. (Sort of.) I ended up talking about it with Andy.

There are many reasons for me not to mention certain things here, but if they’re really interesting, I try to remove any sensitive details (see the previous paragraph for an example). A pretty good story is better than none at all, and you deserve a good story.

Here’s a handy chart showing How the Health Care Overhaul Could Affect You. (Via Lifehacker)

The Bouba/Kiki effect suggests that people might not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily. Interesting stuff.

Failure Magazine (yes, really) presents a three-part series: Quirkiest Basketball Failures, Parts One, Two, and Three. Related: quirky football injuries.