SansPretense

Hello!  Welcome to my new blog.  First I want to explain what this blog is about, and afterwards, I’ll give a brief explanation to those who are wondering why I decided to start a new blog when I could’ve continued blogging on myspace (as I have been since around October 2007 or so) or on blogger before that.

So what’s this blog all about? I hope that the people I call friends (and even those I don’t) know by now that honesty, trustworthiness, openness, and loyalty are all traits that are very important to me. I look for those traits in the people I surround myself with, but I also strive to live them in my own life. It’s not always easy. To me, being open and honest means more than just never telling a lie, it also means being willing and able to tell someone the truth when they ask for an opinion or when they need to hear it, regardless of how scary it is for me to speak the truth. I’ll save the conversation of friends lost due to one or both of us not being honest with each other (or in some cases not handling the honesty in a pleasant way) for another day, along with the question of “does openness mean telling everyone everything?” The point is, in my personal life, I strive to be open and honest and expect the same from my friends. What that means exactly we’ll talk about later.

The idea is that when we are open and honest with others about ourselves, then there’s no need for the multiple layers of defenses separating each of us. There’s no need for pretense. We find true freedom in being ourselves without the barriers. All the insecurities and hurt are still there, but because they are shared we are able to understand each other better. We will get hurt since we are more vulnerable, but has hiding behind our defenses really made us hurt any less?

It is surely a struggle to live our personal lives without pretenses, and I am no exception. This blog is my way of helping myself do just that via discussion and expression. However, the blogosphere is also a place for the exchange of ideas on many levels. Probably the majority of my posts will be political or about society. In recent years political correctness has clouded the dialogue, filling it with the same type of pretentiousness that has enveloped much of our personal lives. Why put up with the facades? I hope anyone who reads my writing will find it intellectually stimulating, but without the bullshit and rhetoric of the mainstream media and political parties. I’ll tell you how I think it is, and if you get pissed off, that’s your problem.

With all that said, if you still don’t get the title of the blog, I have the definition of the words on the front page. I have the “motto” below the title in the header (”Brutally honest to a fault”). I’m sure you can figure it out…

Hope you enjoy! And I expect my readers to keep me in check and also to go along with the theme…

Now about why I am blogging here instead of previous places: In short, I wanted a more serious blogging tool to try and break into the blogging community in a more serious way than I could’ve elsewhere. The long version is this:

I have been blogging on and off for a couple of years now, giving a try at a somewhat serious blog without much direction on blogger, but not having the motivation to take it too seriously. Since the blog wasn’t attracting any of my friends to read it, there was little motivation to keep it up. At some point, I wanted to post some “friends only” posts to the blog and realized that there was not an easy way to do that - it was either all private or all public. Also, around the same time, in an attempt to find some pleasant distractions from things occupying my mind, I purchased a fancy camera to learn some photography, and facebook seemed inadequate for my photoalbum needs. That motivated me to finally break down and get a myspace page, which provided a method of posting pictures that I liked better, but also a way to blog where my friends can easily subscribe. I will probably continue to post “diary”-like posts to myspace, at least until I can figure out a way to separate public and private posts here in a way I like. So if you’re interested in reading about the more personal side of my life, you may want to subscribe to the myspace blog until further notice, though that doesn’t mean I won’t post personal things here. It just means that if it’s “too personal” (friends only) then it’ll be on myspace. This blog is, however, about being open, so most posts about my life will be here. Also, I’m working on finding a way to get an email list for subscriptions to this blog so that anyone interested can subscribe that way instead of RSS. In the meantime, send me an email with “subscribe” in the subject line if you want to be added to an email list that I’ll send out when I post something new.

I do want to say thanks to all of my friends who have been very supportive of me over the last several months, and have taken the time to throw ideas around on this site as well as my the projects. Also, to those who’ve been there for me in general for things - and yall know who you are and what I’m talking about. Thanks. Now let’s see if I can cause some trouble on the ‘net…