when i started writing, i didn't really know what to expect. as time has gone on, i've gotten more comfortable and presumably more fluent at the form. but now i start entries or think of entries and reject them because they're not as interesting as the stuff i've written here in the past. i feel that every subsequent entry has to live up to the standard set by the previous ones, that it has to be better than all of the previous ones.
the overall effect is that the quantity of writing goes down even as the quality of writing (in theory) goes up. this is, of course, the exact process that has happened in my so-called love life, where an increasing paralysis has been thrown over it due to the fact that i feel every relationship must be as good as or perhaps better than everything that came before it.
one could argue that i live my life to delight readers of my biography. i want everything to be more exciting than everything that came before it; also, i want everything to be new, to have new themes that capture the reader's attention, but that are still connected to what came before.
now, obviously, this isn't an airtight argument. the paralysis might be due to a general negative trend in my personality and appearance, or due to circumstances. the other problem with the parallel is that i have complete control over when i write here, while i have at best partial control over my relationships with people. (i suppose to broaden the field, i should throw in here that my friendships seem vaguely to be experiencing the same condition.)
i'm not sure how long i can keep writing here, just as i'm not sure how long i can keep dating people. this works out a lot more poorly in the sphere of the weblog, where each event is a one-time thing, as opposed to relationships which can last forever or at least longer than it takes you to read this. i see a couple of ways out of this; one is to introduce a level of uniqueness to each weblog entry, instead of having a more or less constant tone as i think i've had so far. hooks, gimmicks, et cetera. this is more or less equivalent, i think, to keeping one's personal life going by constantly picking up new social arenas, of which there are far more than i think most people conceive of there as being.
another possibility is to just start talking about my life. this won't fix the problem entirely, since those tracts will still be directly comparable for quality of writing (and it might even be worse, since this will result in a more analytic view of my life, giving me something concrete in the past to compare any given moment to, potentially resulting in nasty feedback of bad times), but it will help in the sense that i can keep writing without having to come up with new material, so to speak.
but ultimately both of these are cop-outs, just as it's (if you'll pardon the crudity) a cop-out to spice up one's romantic life by patronizing comfort women. i'll keep going trying to top every effort, just like i keep on going trying to find the perfect person for me. the likely result, if the past couple of years are any indication, is that i will not only write less often but be worse when i do write, since it'll be such a rare occurrence that i overthink the situation, make a fool of myself, and blow everything up.
i've got some column fodder from last weekend, which is the ironic part; i did things specifically because i knew they would fit into what i do here as far as writing them up. (well, not wholly because of that, but it was in the back of my mind that this would be good for writing about later.) but in trying to write about them, i realized that i could never be happy with anything regimented, because i would be forced to churn out nonstandard work. i'm aware that i'll run out of these existential meta-columns eventually, but i'm digging myself into a hole there too; if one entry is less self-aware than the last, then perhaps i have failed.
hopefully this doesn't bode too poorly for its analogue.