Saturday, March 04, 2006

the downside of being dumb and indecisive

i am suffering from a pratchett induced dilemma. if i post a blog and do not share the link with anyone, then am i doing meaningful communication? actually, this is not pratchett induced. i know exactly who planted this niggling thought in my mind. my seemingly compulsive blogger friend ( i say seeming, because i am amazed to see more than an expected number of blogs traceable to him, it may be an actual fetish for all i know) who thoughtfully sends me a link to his latest blog. as always, i'm susceptible to new ideas and i think link-sharing is a great thing.
but to get back to the point, is a blog to be shared with people? you know, if a tree is felled in a forest and no-one hears the noise , is it still to be called a noise or whatever? is an unshared blog meaningful? not that i care much for meaning, i think its highly overrated, but still. sometimes it feels nice to wake up feeling i'm still with the sane majority. hence, my current obsession with attaching meaning to my actions or lack thereof.
actually justifying the lack of actions is what takes up a large chunk of time. i'm naturally very lazy. i think somewhere around the evolutionary tree there was a sloth who enamoured the primate foremother and passed on his genes furtively. they have come to revisit me with vengeance. i do not do a large number of things. when confronted with my inaction , i can't provide any satisfactory explanation. in order to pretend i'm still on top of things, i retreat to sullen silence or hastily change the topic to something less fraught with danger. of late, this tactics is not working. i have to work at finding something better to say than "umm, i don't know.but here's something interesting. do you know how much an air-ticket to burma costs?"i have to think very hard, i have to make up plausible stories and sometimes i have to borrow white lies from my father.
( i'm not kidding. i usually cannot and will not lie.since i can't claim to have many principles, this is not a matter of principles, but a simple lack of skills. over my early teens, i found out that however hard i try, my lies tend to be very colorful, intricate, interesting and obviously screamingly fake. my slightly violent Gandhian father who will not lie to save himself from a house-fly, on the other hand, provides the rest of the household with beautiful, stark , minimalistic white lies, as and when required. by virtue of being parent-supplied, these, i treat as technical non-truths not amounting to falsehood.)
but the afore-mentioned parent has of late started taking an aggressive interest in my life.on a given day, i am asked about half an hour's worth of questions regarding unsent mail, undeposited cheques, uncollected medicines, unbought shoes, unanswered phonecalls and so on. and i am exhausted from the effort.things were much better when parental communication was rationed to a 10 minute phone call , that could be afforded with the aid of a skipped lunch.but anyway, i have a more pleasant life now, unrestricted access to parents is something i treasure. well, usually for two minutes in the morning, when i get my steaming cuppa. for a large part of the day however, it takes a toll on my persona. ( i do not have a personality, so i can only use the word persona.) i'm seriously considering the option of turning into a pro-active person.the kind that not only accounts for her actions , but is also responsible for them.
i thought the first step towards that could be blogging. i do not jam up people's mailboxes or their minds. i can just blog at random and leave it at that having vented quitely ( i mean swearing at the pc is cosher). then i recieve this link and i feel something in the back of my brain going crrrrrk crrrk crrrk.i am now obsessed with the question "to share or not to share".
i am in a state that can be as near zen as my volatile nature will allow me to be. i'm not hopping mad, desperately depressed or amazingly ecstatic. my current state of mind is somewhat flat, pleasant and tranquil, without a shred of strong passion threatening the equanimity. in other words, i have nothing interesting that i'm compelled to mail or tell people about.i pride myself on dishing out only the strong stuff.
the major arguements in favor of sharing are that i can explain unwritten e-mails with a link that clues people on to what exactly i'd tell them if i were to mail them, and since i'm blogging i can always evade questions of responsibility with the phrase "poetic license".
whatever. a coin- toss is in order.