Last Blog Post

In what ways can writing online be liberating?  Limiting?

      For my final blog post of the year i have decided to answer this question. I think writing online is definitely a different experience. It is sort of open, as opposed to a notebook, which is more personal.
     I think the reason blogging is more open is because it's online, so pretty much anyone can read it, and you don't necessarily know any of them, or know who's looking at your post.. Not that everyone does, but just that feeling of openness is kind of creepy, like standing in the middle of a sports stadium, while blindfolded. Writing in a notebook is more safe feeling, more controlled. It's closed off, literally. when you close your notebook, that's it no one can read it, it's shut to the world. But things online aren't like that.
     But that can also really help your writing. If it feels like every action is scrutinized and every word read by others, it pushes you to write the best you can. You can't write total crap like you might in a notebook, because others are reading and judging it. But sometimes I feel as if I don't want to write as meaningfully or as true to myself as I should, because people are reading it.
     So in the end, writing online really, for me, makes my work easier to read, more grammatically correct, and overall just better written then it would be in a notebook. But sometimes it also makes my writing less deep and emotional.

Real Life vs Fiction

      I'm reading the book A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. It is a memoir of his life as a child soldier during the Seira Leonian civil war. It is kind of horrifying, and terribly tragic. It makes me wonder how such terrible things are allowed to happen. It also makes me think about how I've never heard about such terrible things in books.
     Now maybe I'm just reading the wrong books, but I read a fair amount. I am fairly sure that most of all books written, probably even most war books, at least most I've read, don't. It makes me think about how fiction is sometimes the idealized version of life. And there are things in the real world that are worse then anyone can imagine.
     Another thing I thought is how people let this happen. I mean, obviously it would be very difficult for the people being shot at to do much, and once threatened, brainwashed, and drugged. But what about the UN? America? The EU? World powers sometimes are needed to help save people when there own governments can't. Why didn't we raise our voices in protest. I think sometimes it's just easier to do nothing. There are probably things that are going on right now that i should be going out and helping stop, when instead I'm sitting here.