blog vs. vlog?

so. this is my blog.

i'm not very good at blogging. i feel like you're supposed to blog about a particular subject. like my best friend. he has a blog all about movies and his critiques of them.

so far i've blogged about memory and serial killers and humbert humbert (oh the pedophilia!). i tried to blog about the innocence and illusion of childhood, and when that failed, i posted a bunch of pictures that all applied to my life and i tried to organize them in a decent fashion, only to fail. but i do enjoy scrolling back at the pictures and smiling at them.

i feel like my jumbled up blogs don't make for good blogging. but here i am. blogging.

my next door neighbor at alma, katie greenough, vlogs. it's like... youtube blogging. where she talks at her webcam about stuff for up to ten minutes and then the world can see it. they are extremely comical and heartwarming. (my serial killer blog was definitely not either of these things.) i just watched one of her vlogs, and as usual, it was stupendous. and then i got to wondering about blogging and vlogging.

essentially, they are the same thing, but perhaps a blog is more specialized, or supposed to be. we sit in front of computers, katie far more often than me, and we rant about something or other. she talks about a very potter musical. i try to find words to describe my intense love of lion king and fail. but what's the difference?

i feel like with vlogging, there's so much more confidence. people look at you, right at your face. you speak the words out loud, and once they're out there, hell, they're out there. when i'm typing a blog, i'm hiding behind my words. if i don't like the way something sounds, i can hit backspace as many times as i want. when something slips out of katie's mouth, well, there it is.

as i have just realized, i hide. i don't mean to, unlike my boyfriend. upon this discovery, he said, "i hide in general." which is intriguing, since he's six foot four. i'm pushing five nine if not five ten, and as a female, that makes it hard for me to hide too. i'm not a person to hide even if i topped out at three foot seven and called myself a hobbit. i do a certain amount of exposure just by writing a blog, right? by having a facebook. by having the job that i have. by deciding it's cool to stand in the middle of mcintyre mall and shout MARCO and see who shouts polo. that's unhiding.

so now that i realize that i'm hiding behind typed words in a vlog vs. blog, i feel kind of lame.

i do, however, have the freedom of deception, for lack of a better term. you can call it cowardice. but with my words, i can craft myself into anyone and craft this into anything. i don't call it cowardice, i call creativity. and for the record, i haven't crafted anything in these blogs except a poem that i wrote about spoons, and that was my first post because i didn't know what i was doing, and i still don't. everything in here in genuinely me, and that's the point of a blog, right?

a blog and a vlog.

so... you don't see my face, my facial tics, my speech habits, my increasingly difficult to manage hair. but you get my words and my ideas just the same.

maybe one day i'll get good at this. words! oh the pedophilia, humbert humbert. you will forever scar my soul.

thanks for being in my blog, katie greenough.