What's in me?

"But it's all right now.  I learned my lesson well.  See, you can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself."--Rick Nelson

I just happened to notice that I went the entire month of March without posting a blog.  With everything going on and going so fast right now, it's hard for me to stop and catch my breath and pontificate upon it all long enough and write about it. 

I think it's also because I didn't really plan on blogging unless I felt I had something interesting or useful to say.  I was thinking of my audience, the readers.  I felt I should try to say something that could either relate to the reader or at the very least get them to read or comment on it. 

But as I read the other blogs of those I follow, it strikes me that all of that rather belies the point of even having a blog.  It's an online diary, for crying out loud.  Or just a sounding board for interesting or amusing stories.  Not being a parent and pretty much having no social life here in East Lansing, my humorous anecdotes are pretty much relegated to the workplace, and much of that is either inside jokes or instances where you had to be there, although saying you're open-minded to the thought of using metal cans to sanitize your crevass will ALWAYS earn you that look that asks if you've been drinking cleaner fluid again.  Again, though, you pretty much had to be there to really enjoy it.

But all that comes to the point that I realize that like being funny (steakhouse in Bloomington anybody?), I'm also usually my most interesting when I'm making no effort to be so.  Or when I'm horribly sleep-deprived, since that's when the brain filter doesn't receive its recommended allocation of oxygen to function properly... like being on Ambien, only with a marginally better chance of remembering what you said later on.

And as I read the blogs of other people, it becomes more and more clear that they're doing it for their own benefit, and not really for anyone else's.  And I realize that that is actually a challenge for me... to do it just for my own sake.  My adult life I've been so desperate to be cool, accepted, and normal.  As a child, at least up until my senior year of high school, I actually reveled in the fact that I was so different from my classmates.  Then I realized they were laughing at me and not with me, stabbing me in the back as well as to my face.  Now, I just want to fit in, to like what other people like, to have similar tastes in everything from food to movies and tv, to music.  And if you know anything about me, that quest has been a horrendous and dismal outright and abject failure at every turn.

So I can't force myself to like what I don't.  All I can do is expose myself to it, and if it doesn't expose itself back, oh well.  And this is where the voices in my head come to duke it out, not stage a performance for the amusement of others, though I still want to entertain and amuse you.  Can I be myself again?  Well, the first step is going to be wanting to do so again.  I'll keep you posted on that, I guess.  To mine own self be true.