To seek the individual is to lose the individual.

The exact quote: "Well I guess I'll start a blog" returns 66,000 hits on Google... not sure why that's interesting to me...

I actually just lied, I know why that's interesting to me. And it's this: we all want to feel and express a sense of individuality. The irony is that we usually do this in funny ways. In fact, sometimes the harder we try to avoid conformity, the more we look conformist. "Well I guess I'll start a blog" is the expression that, "Well, I'm finally getting around to telling the world what a unique person I am, to tell my story via the blogosphere." Actually, the exact opposite is happening: you're doing what 66,000 other people have done--at a minimum

(blah blah blah, not every google "hit" represents that exact phenomenon. Yeah sure, well, I bet the actual number representing this phenomenon is much higher, I'm just too lazy to quantify it elegantly).

Look at how many wedding blogs there are, how much variation could there possibly be in planning a wedding given a sample of more than 10,000 weddings. ZOMG! you did NOT use the cyan table runners! The phrase "my wedding blog" returns 286,000 hits, and most of those are to websites that host wedding blogs. Adding the word cyan to that search nets 2300 hits. Cyan? Really? What can you really say in your wedding blog that will make you seem like an individual?

"It's not about being an individual, you a-hole! It's about chronicling my life so my friends can keep in touch!" You say.

I bet I could take any of the 50,000 or so semi-short-white-guy's grad-student-y-clever-er-than-thou-est meta-commentary blog, switch my picture to the top and it would be pretty much indistinguishable to anything I could say to set myself apart as an individual.

To be sure, some people are more unique than others, just like the girl I saw pogo-sticking to class at Santa Cruz one day. Then again, individuality is a group activity at UC Santa Cruz. In that moment, people desperately avoided giving her any attention, that bitch, how dare she be an individual in a way we didn't think of yet. I just wanted to see her get up the stairs--she did with aplomb.

So how to be an individual? It's like the Buddha always says, "To seek the Buddha is to lose the Buddha" (What's fun about that quote is exchanging any noun for the word Buddha and still seeming very profound). In other words, you lose your individuality as soon as you try to be an individual, you can be just like everyone else, but if you're owning it, that's good enough.

There are very few things I have found that are "individual" type activities that are actually as fun as people say they are. They include: Surfing, Guitar, Science (speaking of these things, when does one stop being a "beginner" and just be "not very good?"), and uh, not really that much else. Things that people love that I really don't get? Live outdoor sporting events, facebook (I think everybody actually despises facebook, but doesn't know how else to stalk people), church (sorry folks), drinking at bars without live music, and finally: blogging.