Honest Navels

I just came across an interesting post at Karen Hubba's blog. Karen is a counsellor of some kind. She also describes herself as a "very intuitive person". She is sensitive to emotional vibes and can sift out the happy people from the depressed people and the very angry. And she says that she knows many people who seem to look normal outwardly but in fact are full of anger inside.

"Me feel ANGRY, Karen. Me need counselling."
How can Karen be sure that these people are really angry inside? Well, she read some of their blogs, and thereby confirmed her suspicions. Karen wrote:

"In fact, sometimes their entries get so angry and aggressive I twitch. I wished I haven't read their blogs 'cos now I have problems reconciling their different personas. I mean, how am I supposed to react to an outwardly okay person when the night before I just read an entry they wrote that was full of CAPS-angst and rumbling vulgarities and verbal bloodshed?"

Blogs, especially anonymous personal blogs, are one place where you can see what is really going on inside a person's head. If the chap is angry, then he's angry. If he's sad, he's sad. If he's happy, he's happy. There. That's honesty, as close as you'll ever come to it.

And if the vast majority of personal blogs in the world are self-absorbed, trivial and navel-gazing, well, this could be a true reflection of human nature. This is what we are, folks. No need to pretend otherwise.

Not all navels are equal. Some are more patriotic than others.
The thing is, nobody asked you to read the lousy personal blogs. You can always read the -good- personal blogs. Yes, numerically, they are much fewer than the lousy ones. But once you find a good one, you can keep coming back to it.

Good, of course, is subjective and depends on your own tastes. Personal blogs can be good for a variety of different reasons. Personally I like the ones where the blogger grapples with some serious personal problem and shows grit and determination in dealing with it. They're inspiring. Right now, I'm following one where the blogger, a man in his 40s, is dying slowly from a fatal, incurable disease called ALS.