I am a perfectionist. That isn’t to say everything I do is perfect, but that I often will avoid doing things unless I know I can do them well. This makes writing a blog somewhat of a challenge. I will often think of things to blog about but either I won’t be in a position to blog at that instant or I will convince myself that the subject isn’t worth an entry. I’m sure we can all agree the excess amount of pointless blog entries out there but I would like to write a bit more than I do at the moment. So I have made a pact with myself. A pact which unfortunately you are helping me succeed in.
I am doing something that newsreaders do. They will read out the headlines and at the end they will include a little snippet of interest without really explaining what it is about, just so you sit through the rest of the news (Ellen sums this up brilliantly in this video). The worst part about this is when you are watching rolling news (á la BBC News Channel etc) you have to watch the main story – hearing everyone’s opinion on something that’s probably not that important to start with – then you get the secondary headlines (often in the style of the generic news report as explained rather well by Charlie Brooker here). Then you get the joy of the headline summary where you get to hear all that you just heard repeated back to you in slightly less detail. You are probably then treated to the sport section (my one chance to go to the toilet when the news is on) or the business or entertainment sections (not too bad in themselves but if the story’s worth listening to it’ll probably be in the main section). Finally after about 40 minutes of the same news story you get to hear the thing that you ‘just wanted to quickly see before switching the news off’ and chances are it’s a 2 minute piece you could have found out about instantly via Google. Of course by this time it is so close to the hour that you decide to keep on watching to see the headlines. Despite the fact you already know them. Of course, you then see that little teaser and so the process repeats ad infinitum until you are somehow forced to turn off the TV (powercut/hurricane/someone screaming very very loudly in your close proximity) and the cycle finishes for the day.
I think it was perhaps slightly optimistic of me to use the word ‘you’ so often in that previous paragraph but I hope that the above insanity is not just something I do although chances are that is the case. What I am doing is stalling. I mentioned the pact I made with myself earlier and I have been deliberately avoiding revealing what it was. As I said at the beginning of this entry, I am a perfectionist. I avoid writing in this blog because I fear what I write won’t be interesting enough to be worth it. So I made a pact – a pact to write a boring, mundane entry so that I could break the cycle of not writing. Unfortunately you can’t escape the fruits of this pact. You’ve just read the boring, mundane article and for that I am truly sorry. It could be worse though – I could have told you what I had for lunch today…