Gotta Start Somewhere...

So... it's two in the morning, I'm staring at 36 ounces worth of empty Mountain Dew containers, my little brother has flooded the bathtub, and I'm getting the distinct sense that I'm not hip enough to have a blog.

The biggest problem is that I really have nothing to blog about. (Is "blog" a verb?) I mean, there's a certain amount of arrogance in posting your deepest thoughts on the web--you're assuming that someone will be interested in hearing them. And I'm slowly realizing that I don't have any meaningful or interesting thoughts. I'm not into politics enough to rant about that, besides which I'm a Republican, and I think Republicans aren't allowed to have trendy things like blogs. (We make up for it by sending each other mass emails with patriotic poems and stories about how a package of tampons saved the life of a marine in Iraq and links to websites with annoying streaming midis of God Bless America. I like the song, but please people, learn to turn the auto-play off...) I'd review my favorite anime shows, but there are nine million anime blogs out there, and they're all prettier than this one. Plus, I'd have to reveal my embarrassing mahou shoujo fetish. I could go off into deep and insightful philosophical musings, but then there's always the fear that I'll end up just sounding pretentious.

Honestly, I'm not really sure what the difference between insightful and pretentious is, or if they're mutually exclusive. Is it a matter of what you say, or is it just your attitude? Or maybe it depends on how much the other person agrees with what you're saying. Then again, maybe I'm not smart enough to be pretentious. I'm not even sure I know what pretentious means. Let's see, Dictionary.com says:

pre·ten·tious –adjective
1.full of pretense or pretension.

...yeah, that's helpful.

2.characterized by assumption of dignity or importance.
3.making an exaggerated outward show; ostentatious.

Okay, #2 makes sense. #3 would make sense to a person who knows what ostentatious means. (I'm gonna take a wild guess and say it means "making an exaggerated outward show.")

So I learned two words for the price of one. I also learned that pretentious in Brazillian Portugese is "presumido." And in Japanese it's "気取った" which I think is pronounced ki-something-tta...? Spiffy. Hmm, I wonder how you say spiffy in Japanese. Apparently it's "お洒落." No clue how to pronounce that except it starts with an o.

After a few minutes of playing with the online translator, I remembered that I was writing this post.

All right, I don't want to sound like I think I'm smart, because that might seem arrogant. But then again, why would I write things that I think are stupid? That's a waste of everyone's time. (That is, assuming anyone would actually read this, which is in itself a bit arrogant...) I could try to imitate what intelligent people say about politics/philosophy/esoteric academic subjects, but of course since I don't understand it I would just be a poser. The alternative is to ramble on about mindless fluff, which is a complete waste of cyberspace and an insult to the blogging community, because the words I write here should be meaningful and insightful, a service to humanity. Oh wait, that was totally pretentious.

I guess the solution would be to get a life. But that would require going into the Real World, which is scary and requires People Skills. While I am not completely incapable of pretending to be sociable (yay double negatives,) I'm not exactly the friendliest or most interesting person. And how do you go about meeting interesting people if you're not very interesting yourself? How do you force yourself to become interested in interesting things when you're really quite content with the uninteresting things you're interested in right now?

The other alternative is to just shut up and not have a blog. But darn it, I like playing with html and wanted to see if I could make a blog layout. To tell the truth, this post was mostly just to see if I could make the layout work. So I'm just going to hit the publish button and not worry about how pretentious this sounds or whether I'm using that word correctly, because nobody's going to read this anyway.