Resurfacing in the Blogosphere

*pushes aside cobwebs*

Well, I haven't been here in quite a while. I've got to say, there's nothing quite so humbling as reading over submissions made when you were 17. Quite a few things have changed, to say the least. I'm now at college, studying literature and journalism--closer to the end than the beginning, to be honest. I'm an aunt twice-over, which is nothing if not provocation for maturing.

That last paragraph is required when you take a four-year absence: standard catch-up and chitchat. I feel like I should post something relevant, but any eloquence I might have had is now failing me. The blogs I do read--hopefully I'll have them as a sidebar soon--they're worth reading and mulling over. I'll just have to give it my best shot.

I'm afraid for my generation. I don't like to think of myself as either an optimist or a pessimist--mostly because I can't settle on one--but I have a perpetual sense of fear for other twentysomethings. Do we even know what we're talking about? I go to a Christian school, I'm friends with people who do have a sense of surrounding and circumstance, but that's just a small fraction of the peers just in my country alone.

What do we put as the most important element of our lives? I'm not talking about lip service, here, I'm talking about what is it we spend most of our time thinking about, obsessing over, considering, playing with. For me, it's the boundless Internet: not as a method of reaching things of what we would call *real* importance, but for the frivolities and amusements it provides. Failblog, fanfiction, digg, youtube--all of it, in some sense or another, mainly serves as punchlines. Or small diversions.

What is important tend to last, or have a lasting impact. The comforts of home, the relationships you cultivate, the direction your community is taking--those should be of importance. They are the way we interact with each other, the language by which we recognize familiarity and disagreement. Nowadays, what I see are disagreements over minutiae. Those are harmless enough, if we learn to live with them and accept them. But when they overwhelm the bigger (dis)agreements, making it impossible to discern what is good and what is not--that concerns me. And I fear that is how my generation is living, with the minutiae and the details and the frivolities.