Some odd observations

A few things I've noticed while tumbling through the blogosphere:

• Misuse of the term quarter-life crisis: The average American lifespan is 77.9 years (according to the CDC), if you divide that by four you get ~19. This seems to mean that a quarter-life crisis should not be applied after say 22, as that's a pretty ambitious lifespan. I think my real problem with the term is that people have this strange desire to give a name to the confusion and paralyzing freedom that comes after high school/college, but that already has a name: your 20's. Plus it's not really a crisis, I doubt that anyone has ever faced serious consequences because they were debating whether they wanted to completely ignore their degree in Super Accounting to become a bohemian performance artist. Slightly odd side-note: the quarter-life crisis label maybe especially misused if you believe, like some, that people will soon live to be 1000

This is Jack Kerouac, I doubt he would've said "quarter-life crisis",

• An abundance of poetry, and unfortunately Poetry: As an aspiring poet, I obviously spend a great amount of time looking for poetry, partially in order to refine my own skill and partially because I just like the stuff. That said, I find that the percentage of good poetry in existence on the blogscape is, in my opinion, about 35%. Now, that doesn't seem so bad, but if you consider the amount of bad poetry that one must read to find it (and I'm being generous with that number), it's a bit disconcerting. Part of the problem, I think is that people are taught loosely about poetry in school, meaning that everyone attempts it, and as American Idol has proven, there are plenty of people who are never made aware of their deficiencies. The result of this is a lot of people who write what a Creative Writing teacher of mine called "Poetry". In other words, the formally rigid and now-pretentious styles that were genuine products of their own time, but just come off forced and wrong when written by people who don't properly comprehend rhythm and such. I also find that I'm limited by my influences when it comes to writing 'contemporary' poetry. I might not find it terribly difficult to imp Whitman's free-flowing love for the universe, or Neruda's intimacy but the currently prevailing, off the cuff, informal styles which I have seen done very well in many places, baffles me, at least for now. Give me six months and we'll see how I feel about it.

• Am I in Iraq?: I like to learn new things, and since I don't have school for at least another two weeks, I turn to the 'net to slake my thirst. I've recently been looking at my dashboard and checking out Blogger's Blogs of Note. After I decide I'm not interested in yet another QLC blog (yeah, I just did that, and yeah, I abbreviated it), I decide to hit what strikes me as the equivalent of my iPod's Shuffle feature: the next blog button on my blogger toolbar. Occasionally, I find something cool (all but one of the blogs I currently follow came as an eventual result of this) but most of the time, I find that my search is stopped because I can't read Arabic, yes that's right Arabic. Invariably, the next blog in line is in this rich but unknown to me language, and when I click next blog, I get more Arabic. So I click yet again, and it goes back to the first illegible page, rendering it impossible for me to do any more searching, thus limiting the number of blogs on my Google Reader. It strikes me that I should almost never see a blog in a language that I likely don't understand, and that the next blog feature should be smart enough to know that I can't read an Arabic blog, since it knows where I'm from, and should definitely know what language I type in. Plus there's the whole "getting stuck between two pages" issue, especially since it's always the same two. I can only hope that by chance someone from Blogger reads this and decides to address the issue, though with my current following, that's a very slim chance. (That's your call to action folks, shill for me, and I shall reward you handsomely, with knickknacks and gewgaws aplenty when I rule the blogoverse)

Image via Wikipedia

I don't live in any of these nations, and Blogger knows this

So anyway, that's all I could think of for now. I apologize for making all of this one post, but my focus on the blog is still mainly poetry, so I wanted to take up as few archive listings as possible. Some of these will probably still be expanded on as ideas for individual posts. Though I'm still uncomfortable with the right length for a blog post, so I could have my scale all wrong. Whatevs.