Alive for the Moment

[Stage Notes:: Cool breeze drifting through the open window]
[iTunes:: Beneath the Surface | Souljahz]

When I was coming back from class half an hour ago, my neighbor noticed me and asked how I was doing. My response was that I am alive, for the moment. He followed up by asking what I meant by that so I explained the massive amount of work I have to do by tomorrow and hinted at the possibility of it killing me before the night is through.

We all have times like this in life when we feel like it is just One of those days. One of those days that you just might, completely hypothetically speaking, knock over both of your beverages in the cafeteria in a two minute time period...One of those Days. The days where we wish the mountain in front of us really was a mole hill, but we know the truth. The most frustrating part about these days is of course that everyone around you is inevitably having a fantastic day (or at least appear to be)

As I thought about all of this, I realized something that while it may not be particularly profound, definately hit me like a proverbial Ton of Bricks. I discovered that there is a huge difference between:

Alive, for the moment.
-and-
Alive for the moment.

Yes, I know there is a grammatical difference in that one has a comma and one does not. The realization is how dramatically the comma changes the meaning. Sound it out with me. The first one is Alive PAUSE for the moment. Very good. Now lets try the second one. Alive for the moment. Remember no comma = no pause.

Anyone else catching the difference yet? (Oh dear this is sounding to sound like I am teaching a lesson....)

Alive, for the moment, implies that soon I will not be. Alive for the moment, implies being alive for each and every moment, and that is exactly what I want to be. To feel alive in every moment and fully experience every moment. I loathe how often I miss out on moments because I am tired or just plain zoned out. From this moment on I am challenging myself to be Alive for the moment.

Are you willing to challenge yourself to do the same?

Blog Culture 101

[Stage Notes:: Woot, day is almost over and it went surprisingly fast]
[Music:: All The Way Live | Thousand Foot Krutch]

I don't really know what I feel like talking about so I am just going to start, and see what happens. On my old blog, I tended to go a long time between posts mostly because I like waxing philosophical about things. I would come up with a topic that I thought the world direly needed to hear my thoughts on, spend time contemplating the weight of the issue, and come up with my synopsis and opinions. It did not help that updating was not quite as simple as typing into a little window, though considering the limitations the web space had, it was pretty darn close. Naturally I will only admit that now that I have moved to an even simpler method of posting.

It always bothered me though that after spending large amounts of energy on writing something that may or may not have ever gotten read by its intended audience, I could never get feedback from the occasional reader. Again, another reason that I wanted to make 'the switch'. However, now that I have this improved method of posting, I feel like the quality of the posts in diminishing rapidly. Take this post for instance. I am basically writing whatever comes to mind because I don't have much to say.

I think this is the current trend in the quote unquote blog-o-sphere. Initially, blogs were journals. The first site that threw itself onto my radar was LiveJournal and most people that used it exactly as the title suggested. It was the author's diary and as such, the author rarely had any concern over who read it. The author wrote the livejournal for themself, and if people read it that was just fine. Of course, eventually wars erupted over who said what about whom in their journal, causing people to either make their entries or whole journals private, or it caused people to hold back the emotion of whatever they were feeling so no one would be offended. Isn't it interesting how we take something that is uncensored and artificially impose censorship on it? Sorry that just came to mind.

Continuing on, the journaling community adopted new forms and created blogging 1.0. The difference? Well, it seems that blogging became slightly more random. These blogs either maintained a common theme like a sports team or a hobby, or they were less emotional musings about a collection of seemingly random topics. The age of short quips and anecdotes had been ushered onto the web almost like small talk being printed on a screen.

These themes merged and separated several times, but still left distinct impressions on each other and created two sort of new wave trends that I shall call micro-chapterization and pit-foruming. No you won't find those anywhere. Nope, not even in wikipedia. What do you mean, 'How do I know?' I just made up the terms that's why. Because I didn't want to call it blogging 2.0 or 1.2.42. Ok, we are way off subject.

Micro-Chapterization is in my opinion one of the best things about blogging in general in my opinion. These people are the ones that blog for the purpose of letting people know what is going on in their life. Frequently these blogs are the result of someone moving away to a remote area that has limited technological access, and this allows people to post something once that everyone can check, and then leave comments letting them know how much they are loved and missed. I love these blogs because they often have the best stories. I call it micro-chapterization because in essence you have an author writing extremely short chapters of a very large and fantastic story.

Pit-foruming on the other hand has a different focus. Rather than tell a story, these blogs often try to engage a user base and get feedback. The blog itself is a mini web forum topic that uses the comments section as the forum itself. These are fun both for the blogger and the readers because it creates a sense of community. Often these blogs have a larger reader base. I call them Pit-forums because they are basically pit stops for people. When the day or week is over, any given forum topic is forgot about while the community moves on to new topics of discussion. People can stop by quickly, fill up on the latest information, leave a comment, and move on until they need their next dose. These can also be a lot of fun because you do not need to be aware of what has happened in the rest of the person's blog.

Realistically, most blogs are a combination of the two with different levels of leaning towards one or the other.

Wow, that was rather long winded for not having anything to say. Maybe I should go back to pre-thinking the blogs. Or not. Oh, and in case you were wondering, the blog title was actually written after the blog because I didn't know what it would be about before hand. My head is spinning. I am going home now :)