On the drive home, i was listening to NPR interview someone who apparently farted fossils.
So maybe it was me being cranky, but during the the interview i heard (barely) was that after a life well lived, he wasn't a journalist.
Ok, let me be clear here. By a journalist i don't mean a news reporter, i mean one who keeps a daily journal of their events. He reported that he had tried keeping one, but it was boring so he stopped. Needless to say, there's a fair point to be made. Journalism has seen a spike lately. Granted, they're a lot more open and don't involve quite as much scrawling in a dusty tome as much as typing into a textbox, but sure enough, a helluva lot more folks are keeping journals.
And yeah, some of them are boring.
But a surprising number aren't.
Odd thing is, even though i try to post every day, and generally comment on events occurring in my life, i don't really consider myself a journalist either. i'm just a cranky monkey with a type writer, pretty much with the same behaviors cranky potentially incontinent monkeys take toward passers by.
So, are you a journalist?
I've been having a blogging existential crisis recently, and one of the options has been to try to start journaling for lack of anything else to put up there. This is of course a bad reason to do anything (perceived notion of necessity) though the main thing stopping me is the idea that even if I were to write something, who actually cares?
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Not anymore.
What I find interesting is that I can remember the occasion when I mentally switched off thoughts of being a journalist.
Don't need to go into details, but it involved the same reason why most "social networking" sites leave me cold. What the hell is the point when the guy who spent all of fifth grade beating you up can mark you as a "friend" and there's no good way for you to "clarify that relationship"?
That was about the time when I started posting fewer of my "deep thoughts" on my own site, and started leaving them as comments on other people's blogs much more often.
It's when I stopped being a journalist, at least in my brain.