In the Beginning...

I find blogs to be curious things. They seem to be contradictory. They are diaries. Yet the writer wants other people to read them. They want to reavel their innermost thoughts, but they only go so far because there is always something or other that the writer doesn't want the reader to know about him/her. So you never get to know what is really going on in the writer's mind. Not through blogs, anyway. I suppose it also depends on the level of the blogger's honesty. How much he really cares about what people of him.
Why do they call it a blog, anyway? I guess it's short for web log. But blogs are just journals. Or memoirs. Or diaries. Why don't they just call it an on-line journal? A letter sent over the internet is called e-mail. Why don't they call it an e-journal or e-memoir? Maybe because he word diary sounds a little girly. Maybe because journal sounds like a requirement in English class. And a memoir is what a stuffy British author writes. Does blog sound cooler? More hip? I dunno. Whatever.
On that note, I decided to start my own e-journal. Just to see where it takes me. I've tried keeping journals before. Once in book form, once on-line. They didn't last very long. I turn introspective once in a while, and I feel the need to write down my thoughts. Then once I get that out of my system, I no longer feel introspective and stop writing. So we'll see how long this lasts.
But maybe this one will last longer. My sister and a friend of mine from Game Night keep journals through blogspot.com, and they are what inspired me to start my own journal.
However, I have an internal dilemma going on about this because of what I said before in the first paragraph. Because this is an on-line journal, one which many people can freely read, namely my family, I can't reveal everything that is going on in my head. Some of the things that I am thinking can't be posted here due to their immoral nature. And yet, I desperately want to express these thoughts. Therein lies the dilemma and why I find blogs to be strange things.

I don't consider myself to be a very good writer. I don't think I'm bad. Just not that good. I wrote a few short stories in high school and college that earned A grades. But those were short stories. I could never write a novel.
One of my problems is that I'm not very verbose. I don't speak a lot. Neither do I write a lot. And I'm talking about length-wise. Whereas many people I know can monologue for ten minutes about something such as how to talk to your boss, I will say the exact same thing in one minute. I get to the point and say it. It carries over into my writing-style, as well. I read books in which the author goes into all this glorious detail and beautiful dialogue. But when I try to write, it ends up being bone-dry. No meat to make what I write enjoyable to read. Which is why I'm better at writing short stories, not actual novels.
I believe it stems from the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don't like it when someone talks for more than five minutes. It's terrible in church. After a while I start zoning out. In order to keep from falling asleep I'll start thumbing through the Bible or fiddling with my fingers or doodling in the church bulletin. After about five minutes I start to drift or get bored with the person. I don't ever want to do that to someone else. I don't want to talk for so long that I lose their interest in what I'm saying. So I just get to the point and say what it is I have to say.
I'll admit that I'm not always okay with this. There are times I wish I could talk more. My girlfriends have always been big talkers. They could talk for extended periods of time. And I would just sit there listening patiently, and sometimes inwardly impatiently, occasionally offering one or two sentence contribution to a rather one-sided conversation. And when I finally did have something substantial to add to a subject, she would always interrupt with her thoughts on what I decided to finally speak up about. And I, being the quiet gentleman that I am, would always let her continue with her interruption.
I think a major contributing factor to my short conversational skills comes from my early childhood. Just ask my mother how much of a talker I was. Which was not at all. I hardly ever spoke. In fact, I vehemently refused to utter a word. It didn't get much better as I grew up.
When my sister, four years my elder, was in junior high school, her yearbook named her the Quietest. She hardly ever spoke up in school. But when she was at home it was a different story. She would cut loose and talk our ears off. She was infamous at the dinner table, hardly letting the rest of us get a word in edge-wise.
But you know what? I didn't mind one bit. I never complained. Unless my parents started to, then I would join in just to razz on my sister because that's what little brothers do. I never complained because the more she talked, the less I had to.

I know, I seem to be contradicting myself here. I say that I don't talk a lot or write a lot. And yet this turned out to be a lengthy journal entry. But this always happens. My first entry in all my journals have been long. It happens whenever I become introspective and have a lot on my mind. So future entries will probably be not as long. We'll see.