Home:Weight::College:Lightness

So, before I even read Mikey's blog, I was concerned because I too thought of how this could become just another form of a livejournal or some other pathetic, adolescent blogging hub where every fleeting emotion that should never be broadcast to the public is expressed and etched helplessly into cyberspace for the rest of eternity.  I am, however, more optimistic in light of reading around.  This could very well be used as more of a journal or daily account log, which I think this generation has sort of fallen out of touch with.  Who knows? Here's to looking on the bright side.

Part of the reason why I actually think I am starting this new blog is because I am sort of in a weird mood, which does not bode well.  It's just sort of weird being back home.  I go to school and everything is very drama-free for the most part; if there is anything that even resembles drama it is either dealt with immediately or it is blown off and acknowledged as an insignificant trifle that should not blow up into something serious.  But here at home, it's not the same.  There is still so much more weight to every friendship and relationship I have with anybody here because there are still tensions and squabbles that have yet to be resolved in any sort of mature way since high school.  It just kind of sucks because this only encompasses a minority of my friendships from home, past and present, and yet, this minority can still hold so much weight that it puts me in a bad mood for a decent amount of time.

So, judging from that small rant (which I do not want this blog to turn into a series of rants but it's been on my mind all night), I think one of the main themes that this blog will explore is the difference between light and weight (yeah, that's definitely a direct allusion to The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera - buy it and read it if you haven't).  I am at a point in my life where this duality of light and weight seems to be increasingly present and, in a way, it kind of makes things interesting to have a choice - to be able to choose between the weight of the past and the lightness that the future promises.  Coming home has just been weird for me in that sense because I feel like at school I have been moving forward to a state of lightness, but I come back home and it's as if I never left, like the weight simply falls back onto my shoulders the minute I enter my hometown.  Tonight felt like a prime example of this.

Blogging in general seems to encapsulate this idea for me as well (to expand upon Mikey's blog entry concerning his instantaneous recall that was caused by a return to blogging): to be home is to have the weight that I have always had all the way through high school, even middle school, similar to how livejournal and other similar sites reigned supreme over internet blogging.  By blogging, I feel like I have returned, in fact committed, to that feeling of weight, but all I really want to do is continue on my path toward lightness as I have been up in college.  We'll see how long I continue blogging, but hopefully I can use this as a tool to maintain a balance between the weight and lightness in my life.  

To sort of steal a good idea from Lauren, I think I will try to leave each blog with an important, and usually applicable, quotation.  Here it is:

"Without realising it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.  It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences...but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life.  For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."

- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

P.S. Blogs will usually be titled after being written.  I feel this blog title might need explanation.  I don't know if anybody else did these exercises in elementary school, but Home:Weight::College:Lightness reads "Home is to weight as college is to lightness".  It is a way of comparing concepts and ideas and relating things to one another in a logical order.  It seemed appropriate for this entry.