(City of) Delusions of Grandeur. What is The Blergh?

I’m writing this in the car and it’s a matter of minutes before I make myself carsick, so let’s get down to business.

This past weekend, I was interviewed for a college scholarship. The interview was meant to challenge us (I heard of candidates crying after theirs, and even one case of a candidate getting in a fight with their interviewers). And challenge me it did. At one point, the interviewers and I discussed how social media, with its character limits and its instant gratification via snappy retort, contributed to the decline of peoples’ ability to digest real information. Many of us opt instead for biased bites of oversimplified news. 

Biased bites. Alliteration makes me wild.

After I offered what I thought to be an eloquent rallying cry against such brainless misuse of media and information, one of my interviewers said, “Isn’t that hypocritical? With your blog and its Instagram, aren’t you doing the same thing?”

In my head, I called the guy a not-nice name. How dare you insult The Blergh.

My response went along the lines of: “While social media currently has a net negative impact on peoples’ perception of information, I believe that it can have a powerful positive impact. I’m trying to draw people back into reading through my blog. My Instagram posts are meant to hook people’s attention and lead them to the blog posts. I try to write in a manner that is engaging for my generation, so that they will keep reading and eventually read other sources too.”

But am I really doing that?

(*PSA: It's not just my generation. I was talking with my sister about this and she brought up how boomers are inflamed by mere headlines they see on Facebook without reading the actual articles to uncover the actual meaning. Apologies for singling you out, Gen Z. You’re the real ones.)

I’ve been debating the direction of The Blergh for several months now. My response to the interviewer’s question made it sound like I’m blogging about serious topics, politics and injustices and philosophy. For a while after the interview, I felt like that was what I should be blogging about, if I was supposed to be creating some sort of Grand New Age of Media Literature like I claimed. Then I said to myself, shut up, Heather. It’s your blog and you can write about whatever you want and serious things aren’t the only things that matter and stick it to the man and and who's gonna take something called "The Blergh" seriously and nobody reads it anyways.

I never intended The Blergh to be a food blog. I like making up pretty recipes is all. I don’t want to give that up. What I like to write is long, lacey descriptions of half-understood sentiments, sentences that twist and wind like rivers and tie knots around tight places inside of you. Words for their sound, taste, gravitational pull. I don’t want to give that up. I think of The Blergh as a sustainability blog, and that I especially don’t want to give up. I’m aware that the aspects of my lifestyle that I consider “sustainable” are not novel or unique, but they are less common than they should be. I will normalize environmentally-conscious living through what I write. In the doing so, I will re-normalize the written word.

for the two people that read my blog

World peace and love,
Heather <3