A word at the beginning...

I'm writing this blog to track my progress as I try to improve my fitness level. I haven't ever blogged before and probably would have led a happy and successful life without it, but it happens to be an assignment for an upper division writing class. I hope this blog will be of some use to someone. Maybe I will get some hidden reward out of spilling my guts every week. Perhaps the reward is to be found with whatever readers may stumble upon it; but before I can start there is something I need to get off my chest. 

I don't like blogging. Yeah you should know that about me to start. Blogs seem to have replaced actual literature as a hobby for hundreds of thousands. We are willing to trade the credentials of a professional for an intimate look into the lives of others. Have we become so voyeuristic as a society that we still crave the satisfaction of learning a person's inner most thoughts and feelings but are unwilling to reciprocate as an actual friendship would require? We sit in some familiar room with the clutter of life around us and crave human companionship but are unwilling to go meet one? What is it that makes blogs so popular? 

Of course this is an incomplete picture because if everyone one wanted to know about other people and were plain scared to put themselves out there then there wouldn't be anyone to write blogs either... which this and many other sites prove to be false. A desire to be acknowledged then? If people are willing to read the random spewings of my day certainly I must have value. Everyone wants to be different; everyone wants to be a unique little snowflake. Everyone. So even in our desire to be special we again affirming our place among the mediocrity of the masses. 

There are individuals with something extraordinary about them that blog too. Olympians for example possess abilities that by definition are at the pinnacle of the human ability to express. Still the idea of keeping a public journal seems somehow crass. Like in the bible when in Matthew he cautions to Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them... It seems to me that blogs are either so personal as to flay your soul bare revealing to the world and all its critics your most personal self, or a great big phony check with some charity's name on it your delivering conveniently as the press arrives...

I am not an Olympian. Nor would I call myself a writer. Like I said, I hope this blog will be of some use to someone, and for it to be, I will have to be off the mark in my assumptions. As I am exposing myself in a rather uncomfortable way, I hope to be dead wrong.