Blogdar
When you can tell whether someone is gay then it is said your gaydar is working well. And certainly the civilized world wouldn’t function as well without radar revealing planes, ships, and storms we couldn’t easily see or sonar pinging an assurance that something is (or isn’t) there in the murky ocean depths. Now say hello to blogdar.
I’ve cranked out a lot of words blogging which apparently has transformed how I look at the world. Like an avid photographer who constantly carries camera on strap and snaps pictures of seemingly everything that moves (or doesn’t move), I’ve lived similarly vicariously through my viewfinder, always hoping to capture the essence of life yet missing the real moments. I’m sure I’m not alone in having vague memories of vacations spent watching my holiday pass before me through the camera’s lens.
Like the trusty radar and sonar, my blogdar (that hidden sense that tells me if something is blog worthy) is up and working well. Ever looking for what’s blog worthy, I’m rediscovering that empty feeling from not experience the moment in the moment and only becoming aware of it through reading about its blogified essence. Bummer. My blogdar seems addicted to scanning for moments that elicit a child-like “BLOG FODDER!” yell from my right brain over any situation that seems worthy of being transformed into words (or lately into all-too-easily-posted digi-pictures). Not that that’s wholly a bad thing…an obsessive one perhaps, but not as bad as knocking over banks or taking lollipops from kiddies.
But all is not lost for there is a cure for blogdar: NaNoWriMo! Nothing like the absurd challenge of forcing a 50,000 word novel out of thin air (and even thinner plot) to confuse my blogdar. Good news? Not really: blogdar off, novdar on. Sigh. Now I’m watching people interact and thinking, “Could my character act that way? Would he be that much of a jerk? Of course he would…” Thus now I’m transforming the moment into the trashpit of my NaNoWriMo novel instead of my blog: hardly an improvement but at least it’s a shift that stretches my mental legs.
The affliction of blogdar and the temporary madness of novdar are obviously sad examples of someone who needs a more interesting life, but they both support the theory if you focus on something enough it consumes your thought like an eight-year-old eats a birthday cake. Take the classic example of car shopping: If you’re in the market for, and consistently obsess and drool over, one special car you may suddenly notice a preponderance of those models on the road. Did your mental energies and hoped-for cosmic influence suddenly manifest more forest-green Mazda Miatas? We tend to see what we focus on and little else. We’re creatures of distraction and for all the evolutionary mental prowess we humans exhibit, we are simply a product of these distractions.
Here’s another, more impressive, example of this focus/perception concept: Go over to this site and watch the Flash movie. While watching, count how many times players wearing white shirts pass the basketball. That’s all you have to do: count the number of passes between white-shirted players. When you’re finished, go here. (Courtesy of Ming the Mechanic.)
It’s not surprising then that a blogger consumed with the blogging process would sooner than later develop good blogdar. With so much information flooding one’s senses, attempting to distill all of it via one’s blog would be a maddening existence. Instead, we train ourselves to look for blog fodder that falls within our blog interests. Unfortunately this becomes a bit obsessive and thus we can become minions to our blogdar. Sorry, but I have to go now because my blogdar is sensing blog fodder in the havoc I’m hearing from the kitchen and I must go investigate. It could be worse though: my novdar could have gone off instead and my son and his friend immortalized forever inside a really bad novel.
One Response to “Blogdar”
Blogdar? Novdar? Hilarious! Let me update my blog after I finished the latest 1000 words in NaNoWriMo draft….
Wait a minute