My confusing attempt at Postmodernism

Posted in By Jordan 1 comments

Disclaimer: This blog is absolutely ridiculous. It is an attempt to just let my mind wander and try to make something out of a subject which I find nearly impenatrable. I am pretty sure that I'm way off track. The point is that now I have thought about it all long and hard, and I do believe that maybe my brain is a little bigger.

Topic of the evening: Post-Modernism (maybe?)

Here goes -

There is this woman who I have invented. She is just the right combination of a woman and a girl. She always has something witty and appropriate to say. She is pretty in a such a way that shows she doesn't care too much. She is wild and independent, but willing to surrender. She is a good mother...it comes naturally to her, but you can tell how hard she tries. She is a good friend...she knows how to make you feel good about yourself, in a real way, because she notices your subtleties. She is interested in just the right variety of cool things...nothing too superficial. She is a lover in a ridiculous sort of way. She has something important to say. She is pretty responsible. You might see her and think that she's got it all together.

You might see her on my facebook page, or in my stories, or walking around inside my mind (if you could see things like that). She is, I think (if I'm getting this Baudrillard guy right at all) a "hyperreal" version of myself. She is the me I put out there, the person I want you to see. But there is a problem. You see, the hyperreal is not the real at all. The hyperreal kills the real. It represents something that was never there (I think I'm going off track here. Sorry, Mr. Baudrillard, if this is not what you meant at all. This is where the non-real, hyper-something, whoever I am floated when I read your essay). In trying to be, I no longer am. I become a hollowed-out shell/mask of nonexistent, unattainable nothingness. This is the problem with the world today. We become the sum of our status updates and "about me" paragraphs. We end up as nothing more than the face we put on. Real life doesn't work this way. Reality is more of a string of actions and choices and thoughts than a state of being. Reality is a shifting something that could never be encapsulated in a thousand volumes of words.

The person that I described to you earlier is not real. She is a figment of my imagination. She is wishful thinking. This is what is real: a girl who drank too much coffee and can't sleep is staying up too late to type a blog that could very possibly make no sense whatsoever. She is almost too full of self-doubt to post it. She didn't finish her homework, and her house, car, and life are in various states of disarray (in a good way). She wants so bad to be good at life...to be smart...to be valid. She is real...or, at least, she was real for a moment. But I think in describing her, I may have just made her hyperreal.
And on that note of ridiculousness, I think it is important that I go to bed...