Blogging and IKEA

Knowing I have the opportunity to express my feelings in a blog, makes me feel content. Yes, this may seem as the perfect outlet for my thoughts. They only need some organization. Normally I would buy boxes, at the IKEA, for organization. How wonderful would it be to have your mind organized, clean and labeled. But what’s that? Putting my thoughts in writing doesn’t create the clarity I was hoping for. It actually gets me thinking in circles and it doesn’t stop! Just like a trip to the IKEA never fails to enhance me with the useless items I didn’t know I needed, writing creates thoughts out of nowhere. Do I want them? It’s rather confusing; it literally feels like I can pick one of several possible opinions in my head. I am able to talk myself into any direction.

This leads me to core question “How do blogs shape us?” which can be divided into several sub-questions, such as: “How does blogging shape us?” As a newb at blogging, I am very interested in this topic. It’s so easy to imagine how people create experiences they normally wouldn’t have in order to find something good to post. For instance, you walk past a street artist down a random alley. Your first intend could be to walk on without hesitating, like you normally would. But knowing in the back of your mind you have a space to fill, maybe even an audience to please, you stop and watch. Remembering ‘everyday is different’ (‘elke dag is anders’ is the slogan on the Dutch IKEA website but not on the UK version. Figure people in Britain just don’t fall for that). In simultaneity with the watching, you start thinking and making connections. Taking a closer, more detailed look on the matter. Ideas start brewing in your head. “I’m making a project of this: I’m going to walk this street every Monday!” On the constant outlook for targets, you’ll find yourself in a different state of awareness.

Put a piece of fabric in a frame. Blogging can make you more conscious not only on the streets, as well in the act of writing it. As the previous example can be made sense of as a putting a magnifying glass on everyday experiences, the act of writing can be seen as freezing the moment and crystallizing the experience into a yet to be shaped diamond. In the act of writing, you can pick one of countless angles to look at the event. Force your thoughts into shape. Harden it by submitting, and your page is done. Fairly fixed, quite like old media. We all know the rule, the more diamonds circulate, the less valuable they become. But that’s not our priority.

A friend of mine just started studying Russian. She was told, as she told me today, that in Russia it’s not common to express the word ‘I’ so often. As she stated, “How can you say you’ve got the flu? The flu has you!” IKEA has me.