Please allow me to distinguish myself.

I am the metropolitan hipster. My skinny boy jeans are tucked into my Chukkas, and my mustache is curled at the ends. I reject conformist trends and create an identity for myself in being different, although I tend to congregate with other hipsters at hipster coffee shops, where my difference appears more like conformity. My inner-depth is reflected in my artistic lifestyle and grass-roots musical preferences. Please do not overshadow my uniqueness with your predictable suburban consumerist presence and conventional conversation topics, although this is what my uniqueness depends on.

I am the high society dweller. Do not question my ability to spend incredible amounts of money to maintain my lavish lifestyle, with which I distance myself from my less fortunate and poorer peers, except for when I surround myself with them for purposes of receiving their recognition. While most of my money is inherited, I take pride in my wealth as if I earned every penny of it scrubbing floors for minimum wage. Someone in family probably did that anyway. I will defend my right to spend money without conscience or perspective. Any suggestion that I should voluntarily share my wealth to improve the standard of living of others is Socialism, and possibly Nazism if Barrack Obama is saying it. With my money comes automatic self-importance and a place in privileged social circles, where constant comparison deprives everyone of true friendship.

I am the good Christian. I tell my agnostic and atheist friends that I will pray for them when they confide in me about difficulties or struggles in their lives, even though they have asked me not to. I occasionally will forget to close my Bible after highlighting various verses and then will leave it in a conspicuous location at home or at the office. I pray lengthily at restaurants before eating, so that those who witness my devotion may be moved to belief in God. When I'm with my fellow believers, I often go into great detail about my own spiritual failures with a rather transparent sense of false humility. I enjoy leading group prayer, where I occasionally let out a contrived sob after a particularly emotional plea to God. My faith is most real to me when recognized by other people, and I have difficulty containing the joy I feel when recalling my charitable deeds in front of friends and family. I also love telling people that I have forgiven them.

I am the mocker. Sarcasm and satire are the primary tools of my social skill set. I can demonstrate disdain for any person or idea simply with a flick of my vocal tone. When confronted with a legitimate question to which I have no legitimate answer, I make light of the subject. I make light of everything. Actually, for fear of a mocking reprisal, I rarely make any serious substantive comments of any kind. Through my constant use of sarcasm I show my boredom for the ordinary and mundane, which I hope comes across as sophistication, although I also mock sophisticated people to diminish their perception as, well, sophisticated. With my highly developed mocking abilities I wish to create the impression that I am, in fact, very intelligent, or very funny, although in reality my overbearing use of sarcasm reflects a low level of maturity where recognition among my peers for a sharp use of humor is valued more than any contribution I might make to a subject by committing to any position or idea. In my own trite little brain, I am above the things I mock, and I mock everything.


I am the individual's search for identity. I take many forms, but I am always true to my nature, which is at its essence the desire for affirmation. It is in the pursuit of identity, when the baser part of the individual is unceasingly seeking acknowledgment, where people may find true commonality.

N

Kitteh Blogger

“Some bloggers, when they know they have nothing to say, walk away and don't blog… Interesting people run interesting blogs, but it's remarkable how few of them there are.”

-The Register


OK whoa. Let me just say that I REzent that! Maybe not every blogger in the blogosphere is writing about foreign policy or quantum physics, but those blogs are boring anyway. What makes a blog interesting is up to the reader, not some ivory tower psuedollect.

I personally connect with blogs that speak to issues in my life. And boy, do I have issues. Just ask any one of my 784 Facebook friends. My lives (web and real) are cr-uh-azzyy! Speaking of Facebook…

Does anyone else hate the new, new, new (to infinity) Facebook? Every time they redo it they undo something I just learned to cope with. Quit changing it Zuckerberg! And give me a billion dollars too. LOL ha ha no seriously give it to me. And besides, I don’t need people prying into my timeline way back in 2000-whatever. Not even the closest of my 1075 Facebook friends.

I mean really everyone knows that Facebook friends are mainly just people whose friend requests you don’t have the nerve to ignore, and then a few of your actual friends. I’m over the constant newsfeed drama anyway. I don’t need to know that you ran 12 miles because you felt fat in your size two $700 dress that your mom got you as a Good Friday present. TMI about your body dismorphia and stupid mom.

But I digrezzzz…

I mean I think what my point was is that blogs are interesting because people are interesting just being who they are! Just because your blog might consist of nothing more than a daily rambling of your latest opinions on self-interested topics, of which you write about because it gives you a chance to seem creative and complex and measure your popularity by counting comments, doesn’t mean it’s not something of substance! Thoughts that people think are substance. And if you thought it, it’s probably worth blogging about.

For instance, have you ever thought about how headphones make great homeless people-deflectors? If you work downtown like I do they are a must have. Just pop in some earbuds and you can travel safely down the avenues undisturbed. Homeless people come up to me and are like, “buuuuuhhhhhh can I have some money buuuuhhhhhhhh I’m out of cigarettes” and I’m like “What? What sorry I can’t hear you because Chris Martin is currently nailing a live version of Viva la Vida in my eardrum and I’m spacing about how good the $13 lunch was that I just ate and anyway it’s rude to talk to people when they have headphones in.” And poof! - they go away.

Blogging can be about anything or nothing at all: there are no rules. You can write about your controlling girlfriend or your new smartphone or which smartphone case you should buy or how Obama loves same-sex marriage or how Mitt Romney hates poor people. Politics are especially fun. And you don’t have to do research like you were supposed to for papers in college. You can just assert anything and it becomes part of Internet history.

Ha ha I just watched some uber hilarious American Idol tryout flops on YouTube. Oh MMMMG I’m LMAO, ROFLBNRIHELMAOAINROTFLINI (That’s “I’m laughing my a** off, rolling on floor laughing but not really I hardly ever laugh my a** off and I never roll on the floor laughing I’m not insane.”) But seriously, rofl.

So to person from The Register who thinks that there are few interesting blogs, you’re missing out on the good stuff. To every blogger out there who takes the time and energy to tell their followers about their favorite breakfast cereals, their dilemmas about what present to get their best friend for their 10 year friend anniversary, to recap the 5 best episodes of True Blood and talk about how stupid it was that Godric killed himself, or to use their blog as a photo stream for daily individual pics of themselves, keep on keepin’ on. You are my people, the life-blood of the internet that makes the web a living thing.

Shut the front door I just found out that JERMAINE PAUL WON THE VOICE!! Thank God for the American public’s ability to recognize true talent. But seriously J, stop crying so much. Less crying and more singing. If I won that contest I would tear off my shirt and punch Christina Aguilera in her fake blonde head, not cry! Ah well. All’s well that ends well I guess.

Peeeze out ma read-uhhs.

N

Freedom of Choice

Ever since I started paying more attention to politics, both people’s and the nation’s, I’ve noticed how truly polarizing the issue of religion really is. If it’s not someone’s Facebook status about the hypocrisy of religious people, it’s religious people complaining about the lack of religion in government. In social situations it’s about as taboo a topic as one’s income or stance on abortion, always threatening to lead to friction and irresolvable disagreement. It’s often a determinative issue for voters in elections. It’s an element of our identity that tends to define our social circles and can even preclude certain relationships. Unless of course you live in the South like I do, where everyone goes to church and believes in God, even when they don’t.

The reason for this, I think, is that we can’t get around the implications that our religions have for our lives. Some of us try to. Some find a way to interpret the principles of their faith so that they are all-inclusive, creating a place for everyone, regardless of lifestyle or worldview. But some of us are not so lucky. For some of us, there is, simply put, a very judgmental aspect to many of ours or others’ religious principles. Even if some of them contradict themselves, the contradiction is usually between one exclusive way of life and another. It’s difficult to ignore the call of our respective faiths to live by a set of rather narrow moral standards, where specific behaviors are often prescribed or proscribed, depending of course on who’s doing the interpreting. The polarizing effect of these varying moral standards is a result of our adoption of them as our own and the type of connection we form with them. They are, in essence, the manifestation of our beliefs on right and wrong. For many of us these beliefs are the foundation of our worldview. And ideas that contradict these beliefs threaten this foundation, and thus threaten our worldview. And it is no surprise that we are partial to our own views on the world.

There is something even deeper though about our attachment to these beliefs. Of all the different types of beliefs that we hold, those constituting our personal morality, especially when adopted in the shadow of religious convictions, are held with a special intensity and fervor. Naturally there is a connection between moral standards and certain issues of ultimate significance for adherents of religion, such as salvation (to mention one). This explains a degree of the passion with which some religiously inclined people defend their moral positions. Logically, if a moral standard derived from religious beliefs can be invalidated, the underlying beliefs are possibly suspect. There is also a certain amount of pride in the individual judgment through which individual believers reach their faith-based conclusions about morality. Retreating from these positions could be viewed as admitting an error in judgment about such a fundamental thing as right and wrong itself. And not insignificant either are the social pressures amongst congregations to conform or fall in line with positions accepted by their church or denomination.

I believe the combination of this deeply personal stake in faith-based moral standards and the fundamentalist nature of many religious beliefs brings about a potentially destructive inability among religious followers to see the true subjectivity of their beliefs and consequent moral standards. In effect, their beliefs become truly fundamentalist—there is no other possible alternative, and any suggestions to the contrary are not only untrue, but morally wrong. This is a predictable outcome, given the particular qualities of certain major religions. In Christianity and Islam, for example, the scriptures of both are considered sacred, and viewed as infallible and exhaustive of all revealed truth by many believers. And so treated are the accepted interpretations of the scriptures within certain groups and communities. To stray from the deduced principles and rules is to risk the wrath of the Almighty, or so we’re told.

But belief in God and what this belief requires is an intensely personal and subjective thing. To be clear, this is belief in a usually invisible being occupying another realm whose supernatural status is well beyond our comprehension. The most studied scriptural commentators often come to conclude that the nature of God is a mystery. Even so, those who choose to undertake the notion of faith are often faced with the prospect of forming a relationship with their God and attempting a life of obedience. Naturally it is this area of “obedience” where moral standards come into play. For these standards to be legitimate, they must, for lack of a better term, “come” from God. For a believer to try and fulfill what God commands, they must make decisions about exactly what God does command. Enter subjectivity: the individual’s decision about what God requires of the individual. No one can make this decision except for the individual, and the decision itself is an act of faith.

But faith has become religion, and religion has become morality. People of faith forget that their belief is the condition on which their morality rests. Faith has become somewhat irrelevant really to the question - the question being whether you believe like they do. Right and wrong goes from being a personal faith-based decision to a black and white truth that should be embraced by government and citizens alike. In America, I have witnessed an alarming clash between the conservative religious demographic and the rest of the secular public, and the argument of moral superiority is fueling the fight. Even more alarming is the clamor for religion to play a more prominent role in the laws and governance of our nation. Religion is simply not democratic. What’s right and wrong in religion is not decided by popular vote, but by one all powerful being with the last word. And while some argue that our country was founded by men of faith, those men of faith founded this country on a set of principles that are subject to the democracy which they empower.

This is not to say that religion cannot or should not play a role in a person’s politics. There is a fine line though between supporting a law or policy because it conforms with your belief and wanting the government to enact laws on the basis of your belief. One only has to study the history of theocracies - where the government enacts or enforces laws based on their inherent rightness (according to an inspired and select few) rather than on the will of the people - to know how the combination of religious ideals and governance can turn for the worse. To truly believe in Democracy is to believe in the freedom to choose - but it’s hard to support this freedom when you look at those who choose differently than you as hell-bound sinners who are ruining your country.

When we ask the rest of the world to believe like we do, we are asking them to come to a decision which we arrived at through the intimate channels of our own experience and influences. Before we apply the labels of right and wrong, we must remember the distinction between a faith-based moral standard and standards born out of consensus. One is a standard we have chosen to adopt as an act of faith, and the other is (hopefully) the will of the majority. The freedom of choice is there for when the two conflict.