Meeting people is easy

This thing has eaten up a good serving of my spare time, as well as a nice slice of time that should belong to work. I’ve been thinking over the past few days about why I keep at it, and have concluded that there are four reasons:

There is instant writerly gratification
I went to University for Creative Writing. (Shut up. Just because it’s a subject you took when you were seven doesn’t invalidate it as a legitimate stream of academic study. Okay, so it does—but shut up anyway.) Four years later, I was neither a Hemmingway nor a Koontz, and I didn’t give up writing entirely but it wasn’t about to pay the bills or even a Tic-Tac habit. Luckily, I fell ass-backwards into a decent job and writing became an oft-neglected hobby. At present, I’ve got about three stories of which I’m not completely ashamed off, and that I’ve shopped around to maybe five lit mags. Submitting a story is arduous stuff; it takes an age to get a reply—likely a no—then you play around with your story for a bit and send it out for the next four month wait. I don’t want to be famous, just read; so here we are.

Some search terms shouldn’t lead here, but they do
People look for dumb shit on the Internet, and as I’ve written before, when it brings them here it cracks me up. Best search of the week: Chick Kalen Porter Photo. Funny and mystifying. At least with the Judo guy, I had a good idea what he was looking for. While I’ve thought up some scenarios, I’m still wondering what Chick Kalen Porter Photo man was after.

It makes me looks smarter than I am
In a debate on just about anything, in the heat of the moment, I can’t string a decent argument together to save my life. Two days afterward—watch out! Oh, that’s a zinger! A hum-DINGER, they’d say. But again, heat of the moment, not so much. However, in this forum, I can reflect, and research, and draft, and redraft, and generally appear to be a sophisticate, or a boulevardier, or at least not such a dumb ass.

It has all the trappings of extroversion without that messy having-to-meet-people business
There’s a rarer breed of introvert that wants to be left alone, but I’m the more common type; I’m an introvert who wants to be a great, screaming extrovert. I can be one at times, when I’m comfortable with just about everyone in the room and there’s only so many people present—or if I’m half in the bag—but for the most part, I’m remarkably quiet. This business of sharing things with people (and God knows we haven’t gone very deep yet, but hang in there) feels like extroversion to me, whether it is or not.