Inaugural Post

So I decided to start a blog. That sentence to me sounds like the title of a terrible how-to book. One of those books that tries (poorly) to act as a replacement for a formal college education. The kind of book a celebrity businessman would write because they know they can produce it cheaply and get enough unintelligent people with low self-esteem to buy it to make a few dollars off of it.

“So I Decided to Start a Blog”
By Travis Hochsprung

            Like many people nowadays, I have succumbed to the temptation to begin publishing to the web my personal thoughts for other people to see and judge me by. Like any successful amateur blog, mine will hopefully be read by a modest number of friends and family who will send compliments for the first few weeks and then dissolve back into their regular lives in which other people’s ramblings are entirely insignificant.

           You may have picked up hints that I am not much of a blog man. You are correct. I am not. I absolutely hate writing just for the sake of writing. Not when other people do, I sometimes enjoy reading your typings. Writing myself is the problem. When the thought of just up and writing something comes into my conscience, I get infuriated. I have no clue why, but I begin to hate myself for considering it.

            But I feel a lot of pressure to start writing. So many people I know have a blog or write regularly in some other form. I even ordered a friend to start a blog a few days ago. Plus I’m supposed to graduate this December with a journalism degree. On top of that I feel more pressure because of my irrational hatred of blogging. I know it isn’t reasonable and I should get over it, thus I have put pressure on myself to change without intention to do so.

I think all this weight might be why I hate writing. Since I was little, whenever I‘ve seen a pattern, trend or mutual agreement among people, I have fought it. I can’t help it, it’s my instinct. I naturally work against everything I feel I’m nudged into. This has been a great asset at times. If not for this feeling I would have turned out like the majority of everyone else from McLeod County. But more recently, in the past 2-3 years, I have realized more and more how it has been keeping me from a lot of experiences.

Starting this blog is a part of the reversing-my-instincts process. I will try this and see what happens. If I can find the motivation to keep this going, I will. This means people like you actually reading it and telling me how much fun you had doing so. Either that, or you wholeheartedly insulting me, thus inspiring me to continue out of spite. Read this blog, add it to your RSS feed, and bookmark it. If nothing else comes of this, at least a few of you will get a good look into how I think. I’ll put my next post up in a few weeks or days probably. It will be about winter.

And yes, I still hate this.