Friday, December 02, 2005

Apologies

I feel this morning as if I need to apologize to Marc. Quite frankly it occurred to me that I very harshly struck back at your perfectly valid ideas. You make some excellent points about blogging and how it could just be a passing fancy.

But in fairness, I tried to warn you before class. I walked directly up to you and offered a truce. You acted as if you weren't even sure what I was talking about. Prior to class I was worried that we would end up fighting and I wanted to make sure that didn't happen. I suspect Colin thought the same thing and slotted the conversation about Swarm Theory as close to 9oclock as possible. Still, tempers flared and for that I feel remorseful.

The problem is, you aren't picking on something that is an interesting academic idea, like we would normally be studying at Trinity. Instead, you're picking on something that over the recent months has become inexplicably close to my heart. Blogging is a personal, emotional and thoughtful experience for me. So when you bash blogging and talk about your own disdain for it, I can't help fighting back. It's as if you are attacking a part of me.

Blogging is not a wasteful endeavor. In my mind it is a discovery of self through pure unfiltered language. Blogging is a direct reflection of personality by demonstrating what a person chooses to write (or leave out) on a blog. There are no editors and in that sense what the blogger chooses to edit reflects on his or her own traits. So, respectfully, I appreciate your ideas. I just wish that your indictment of blogging was less personal to me. Sorry.

Now it's time to take a look at my template and figure out what's wrong with it. The class was right to lampoon it-It just doesn't fit with my personality. What type of template says boisterous, sensitive and smart at the same time?

Update: I changed my blog template earlier in the week in response to several things in my life, including the fact that I was feeling rejected. My friend Chris speculated that my unconscious rationale for it was that I needed to be placid at the time. So inherently, while it may have been incorrect, even my changing of the blog template reflected something of my personality at the time. Interesting, no?

5 comments:

Printer's Devil said...

apologize to him if you want, but i thought it was a very cool moment. i don't think anything intemperate got said. unless i missed it while i was ducking when you guys threw the Newman's peanut butter cups at each other. i think Marc was doing a very important, only-Marc-could-do-it thing, making sort of a forbidden point, and you were responding with passion, which was also very cool. you gotta have Marc, so you avoid "groupthink." you're a rhetoric guy. you think socrates and plato didn't talk a little smack most days?

Printer's Devil said...

and yes, get rid of the template. sell it to eric.
you were usch a wreck last night i didn't even dare point out that (because McLuhan was right, damn him) the template is MAKING you write stuff like:

Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching says "Since the world points up beauty as such/There is ugliness too/If goodness is taken as goodness/Wickedness enters as well" which essentially means that goodness and badness balance each other out in the world. There can be no good without bad because we wouldn't ever know the difference.

Brett E. Lassoff said...

Yeah, you're kind of right. Zen stuff really isn't forte. I just kept staring at the trees and wondering about Lao Tzu. As for me being a wreck, that's just how I am...Feel free to take advantage.

e said...

Damn that Colin. I was also biting my tongue on the MacLuhan thing last night, but you did seem a little raw. Rest assured (as you know), you're not the only one with anxieties about BlogClass coming to a close.

Btw, I don't think the templet is quite me either, but I've been meditating on some aesthetic changes, too.

Mattyd said...

I agree with Colin. No apologies needed. In fact, have you seen the Milwaukee Light commercials where the guy not acting like a guy (calling his wife in the middle of a poker hand or playing with a poodle while his buddies are checking out a car engine) gets crushed by the beer can while the announcer says, "Real men should act like real men."? Your apology borders on this type of behavior. You just had an old fashioned in-class disagreement. It made for a lively class. I've had worse arguments with my 3rd graders, man!

As for your blog style, start by finding something that will stop crashing my browser. After that, go into your closet and examine your clothing. Find the 3 colors that you wear the most and start there for a color scheme. It'll likely reflect you more than what you have now.