Hyperbole and a Half = Awesome

I got kind of obsessed with this blog called Hyperbole and a Half a couple weeks ago. Its amazing, you should read it and follow it, because Allie Brosh is fabulous and she would love you very much if you followed her. I'm not kidding, she might draw you a picture or something.

She inspired me to start my own blog. I've tried blogging on 3 different occassions. Clearly, all my past attempts have failed. When I thought I  had nothing to write about and/or simply ignored my blogs, they curled up in the fetal position in some remote corner of the internet and cried. Every time I tried to come near them after that they just looked up at me from their respective corners, with these large pitiful eyes in their hollow tear-streaked faces, and I thought it would be too cruel to give them false hope by posting more stuff on them - I knew I was only going to forget about them again immediately afterward. So in the end, I let them be to live out their internet existences in peace.

I think I just tried too hard to write about stuff that was "interesting", or "worth talking about". But Allie Brosh helped me realize that blogs don't have to be all serious. They don't have to be boring either. They don't even have to do the "Hi, I'm sharing my journal with the world" thing, because nobody really wants to read that either. Thanks to Hyperbole and a Half, I realized that my blog could just be about me and all the random stuff in my head. And people will [potentially] actually read it!

So, when I started my blog I was thinking something like "How hard could this possibly be?" I noticed that Allie once mentioned it taking her approximately 10 hours to complete a really good post. "10 hours?!" I thought. "Even with those cool pictures, that seems like an exorbitant amount of time. It will never take me that long - probably she's just really slow." But as I started writing my own stuff, I realized how easy it would be to take 10 hours to have something worth putting out there.

This is probably what happens when Allie blogs: She gets this idea for a post, and sits down with her computer to write it [if she is anything like me, the idea is a sort of half-formed sentence flying erratically around her brain] She opens a word processor and Paintbrush - then proceeds to write a few sentences, and doodles a bit just to help her think. As she tries to catch that erratically careening idea and put it on digital paper, this giant monster comes stomping into her mind and says in this growly voice "Allie!  Write a blog post or I will eat all of your ideas!"

So then she's all like "But I'm trying to write, Monster!! If you eat my ideas I will be sad and have nothing to write about, and you will have nothing left to eat!" And that monster is kind of a jerk and is like "I don't care. I will just eat someone else's ideas when I'm done," and proceeds to stomp around her brain eating the ideas right out of her head until the only thing that she can do is draw pictures. But because her artistic genius flows so freely from someplace deeper than the birthplace of ideas, the Monster can't eat the picture-creating thoughts, and after he has eaten all the noticeable ideas, he gets bored and leaves.

But looking at her pictures gives her lots of awesome new ideas, and now her brain is uncluttered because the monster cleared some space in her head - making that flittering idea easier to catch and hang onto, and so she starts frantically writing these really fantastic new blog posts and has these cool, monster-conquering pictures to go with them!

That's how a see it in my head anyway. Those monsters are jerks. She's a monster-fighting blogging hero.  You should read her stuff. [Read her blog here! its genius.]