Introductory Post; Huzzah!

Why do I try to make everything ridiculously over-philosophical?  I feel like every time someone says something remotely random or off-kilter I grab onto it and try to make it a blandly prophetic statement about life or religion.  Sometimes I come up with some pretty profound stuff, but I do it almost obsessively. 

Am I trying to impress people? 

Do I honestly just enjoy it?  

Whenever I’m not trying to make things deep and poetic and resonant, I’m trying to make them funny.  I try to make everything into a joke, with differing levels of success.  If I’m feeling creative and enthusiastic, it’ll work out great and I’ll come up with a lot hilarious stuff.  If I’m not, then I spend hours looking at a sentence trying to come up with the perfect weird phrase that would make it comedic gold.  Then it looks bland and it’s obvious I’m trying too hard.  

But where is the line?  

Am I always trying to impress people, but I happen to enjoy it too?  It could be that I only do it well when I’m enjoying it and it flows, and that I only struggle and try too hard when I’m trying to make myself look good.  

But aren’t I always trying to make myself look good? 

I evaluate how well I’m doing by the reactions of the people around me, so doesn’t that mean the entire thing is just a deeply arrogant, ego-inflating exercise?  Maybe I enjoy it solely because of the attention?  

That’s depressing. 

But isn’t that what art is about?  

You try to make something beautiful, but beauty exists only as a product of people’s perceptions.  You want people to perceive it, to find the beauty and make it real.  Some artists may not care if the people recognize the creator behind the art, but aren’t they still looking for the reaction of the observer?  Is there really such a thing as art for the sake of art?  Isn’t there always an audience, even if it’s nowhere else but in the mind of the artist? 

 Here’s another thought:  maybe I’m just deflecting.  I don’t really have anything significant to say about anything really real, so I say funny and deep things.  Maybe I don’t really know myself well enough to say anything really significant about myself or what I think.  Maybe I know myself but I’m afraid to talk about myself so I philosophize and joke around in a detached way about unnecessary things, hoping that little bits of “me” will get filtered in there and find their way to a real person in spite of all the bullshit.

Whoops – there I go again.

That said, I'm going to be using this space to do some random unnecessary philosophizing.  Then we will look back on it and reflect and see if anything especially interesting or insightful happened.  Then I shall expound upon it. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Ad nauseam.

Huh. Apparently Google doesn't recognize Latin.  Let us scoff pretentiously together at Google.

*scoff scoff scoff*

(This post came out of a Creative Writing exercise involving asking questions about myself and the world around me)