popularity contest

I'm feeling a massive flux of doubt, despair, futility, and borderline failure.  As if confirmation, when I searched for something descriptive of doubt, I came across this gem labeled "inspirational poster"

I'm new at this blogging business, just like I'm new at installing wood floors and driving 36 feet long vehicles and air brakes and solar power and composting toilets and metal framing and letting go of almost all our belongings, and making a film.  I looked up the 'blogs of note' and sank into a deeper despair.

I don't have an etsy account, I don't make sweet little books or dolls or hats or jewelry or twisted iron sculptures - I believe in simplicity - can get easily swept up in the cute and decorative, but would rather just keep it unbearably simple, like have 2 Saris that I wear all year or something.  I can barely wait for the imperative simplicity of the bus with three kids.  No room for un-necessaries.

I don't tweet.  I have the cheapest version of a go phone from the pharmacy.  It doesn't have a camera.  My G4's disk space is taken up.  I'm not a very good cyber-networker.  I'd prefer to be offline.

I suppose there is a general interest and genuine purpose why people are interested in blogs about etsy artists' daily lives, comedy blogs, and angry recovering alcoholics.  It has something to do with the common human thread that binds all our hearts, and comforts and reassures us that we're actually more alike then we act out In Real Life.  That is how it's so easy to be online, and for the popular blogs having  six hundred plus followers.  I thought I was doing well with ten.

The fact is, I have a thread to expose, too, but instead of a commonality that is allowable and expected only with a keyboard and some cool gadgets, some design and tech skill and a screen - this is something that we all need to take into our real lives, into our homes, out of our homes, into the fields and mountains and cities. . . there must be community first and we must take responsibility for our neighbors before we sit back with a caramel latte and chuckle at the latest cooky stunt so and so's husband played, or order the newest fuzzy dust bunny barrette by the top-visited artist.  There's time for our society to change, and there must be a change in the mirror we look into. . . hopefully someone will think this idea and my current project is worth passing on.

I know it's not the most attractive aesthetically appealing blog, there is no flash, there aren't even any videos yet, and I don't even have a bio.  I don't even post everyday.  But how many times have you seen the welfare nation rise up and say, NO MORE!  And make that change?  Actually, ask yourself, how many welfare families do you actually know?  Ours is a society moving towards a more individualized, and blindly content 'middle' class country - people who do work hard and innately look down on the welfare as lazy and incompetent, foolish, and advantageous.  Well sir, I am none of those.  And for that, I risk un-popularity, but I've been lumped into worse categories.  It won't change my plans any. . .