Aww, here goes...

Kenan and Kel references aside (awesome show, for the record), I am properly back with you now. Christmas is over, I'm back at uni, and the major deadlines are out of the way - leaving me free to talk to all you wonderful people! Granted, I have plenty of reading to do, but I think this is as suitable an excuse as any to avoid it. Just call me King Procrastination.

I've been thinking about what to talk about in this blog. Considering it's the first one of the year, and I haven't done one in a while, I felt it should be something suitably profound. The best I've come up with is a discussion on the inner-workings of my psychological tendancies to extrapolate very long sentences, constructed from lengthy word choices that actually don't mean all that much. No? Well, fine. My other idea was a blog about blogging! Don't you wish you were me?

I hear a lot of jokes made about blogging; not the idea of it, most people are happy enough to leave bloggers to their own devices and leaving their inner thoughts viewable to entire cities (or in my case, the population of a small village in Guatemala). However, where people seem to have a problem is the idea that we're attempting to do anything other than this; I'm talking about things such as political blogs and the like. People seem to get rather antsy if someone so much as makes a simple statement regarding their political beliefs. While often the quips are somewhat amusing, I'm choosing to dispute this. Sorry Guatamalans, but it's a social democracy all the way.

I wholeheartedly agree that blogging isn't going to directly affect anything. It's very unlikely that Gordon Brown will one day stumble upon Joe Bloggs' blog complaining about the unreasonable price of peanuts, and lower all peanut taxes immediately. This, I can understand. However, I think the statement "blogging doesn't change anything" is uncorrect, as can be proven by the simple fact that people are able to make this simple claim. Yes, it's not going to directly make anything better, but it does one very important thing; it makes us think. For the blogger, it expresses a personal opinion, and exercises their use of free speech. For the readers, they exercise their own by their ability to respond, be it for whatever purpose. In the long run, a few people might read the blog, and one of those thinks "oh, yes peanuts are far too expensive!" and tells a few of his friends, who tell a few of theirs, and so on. Eventually, a suitably opinionated friend-of-a-friend might decide to write a letter to his MP, who writes one to The Browninator, who in turn decides to maybe decide to possibly do something about peanut taxes.

Ludicrously insane metaphors aside, and while it's safe to say I'm stretching my point a little, you get the idea. Now, obviously I'm joking about peanuts, and if someone really did write that blog I'd most likely just be a bit bored. There are some people that complain about needlessly pointless things. In fact, there are probably a hundred pointless, whining blogs for every interesting one (where do I fit, I wonder?). But that doesn't matter, they're still thinking. And I believe, thinking is the very essence of what makes us human. I'm going on a bit so I'll try to keep this existantial argument concise, but I think it isn't the succeeding in something that makes us grow as people, but the trying, and thinking is part of that trying. I don't think we will ever find the exact answer to life, the universe and everything...but that is no reason to stop us trying.

Some people claim that this makes life meaningless: a fair argument, if you can never succeed why bother trying, right? Well, my feelings are that if the universe kept to that law, it would not exist at all, the argument would never appear and we'd happily be walking under limbo sticks in, well limbo. Therefore it stands to reason that if the universe exists at all, it has a purpose, and though we may never find out entirely what it is, we can still try, and hope we get at least somewhere closer to finding it. Now that might just mean we discover something about ourselves as individuals, or something seemingly trivial like that. But as I said, it's never trivial when it's exercising the wonderfully complex power of the human mind.

Okay, I realise my argument is dragging a little now, so I'll stop. I hope it's been relatively interesting, and more imporantly made you think. If not, then I'm probably a twat, but if you're thinking that I am correct and therefore I win, so screw you. Anyway, I'm off to go make a start on some reading, but I'll leave you with this (political again, sorry Guatemala) though: if you are thinking, you are winning. Courtesy of Flobots.

~ Toby