so much blog in my life right now...

I pretty much got what I expected out of these blogs. When I try to define my expectations of blogs, a few things come to mind. First, people I don't know complaining about things I don't care about. I'm not sure where I learned this prejudice, but it was pretty strongly rooted into my mind. I also think of advice blogs, people telling you when to plant raspberries according to your time zone (my only experience reading blogs outside of this class is limited to this subject.), people telling you where the best place is to vacation in Costa Rica (I made that one up); I guess the common theme in my idea of advice blogs is boiled down to people giving you their opinions and insisting that you agree. Kind of agressive for my liking.

As you can imagine, I was not too excited to read these blogs. I started with Jeff Howe's piece on Parkinsons. I'm glad this was the first one I read. My grandma has Parkinsons and because of the difficulty she has with walking she recently feel and fractured her spine. Just the title of this blog enticed me to read more, to maybe get another perspective to share with my grandma. The line, "Walking used to be easy money, but now it has become a game of chance...I'm never exactly sure how, or where, my foot is going to come down." resinated deeply with me. I imagine my grandma shuffling around her home, maybe in the hallway connecting the dining room and the living room; suddenly unable to lift her leg and take another step, never knowing if it will be 5 seconds or 15 minutes before she regains control, or if she won't and will fall uncontrollably onto the hardwood floor. She says its like being trapped on a desert island inside of your own body. I liked that Howe didn't use too much medical jargon and kept his writing relatable and informative without having a "poor me" type of feel to it.

The other 2 blogs were difficult for me to get through. I couldn't help but feel like there was no reason I want to read Amy Tan's procrastinations. I personally don't think too deeply about email salutations and had a hard time doing so even while reading this piece. I did enjoy the jovial, informal tone of this blog; but it was not enough to keep me engaged. What to I care how she ends or starts an email, it just doesn't matter to me, I tried to care, I really did. The only line that stood out to me was "...so this is what a writer thinks about instead of writing", I found this to be amusing but saw it as a confession of how pointless this piece was. The interview with Kunihiko Okano I also found to by dry and not at all of interest to me. The writing was very formal and was super geared towards others in the typography field. The only part of it that I enjoyed was that I had never given much thought to the creation of fonts, or thought of it as an art form and this piece changed that. Honestly though, I was not inspired enough to do any further research on the topic or to rethink my life calling.