What I Want to be When I Grow Up: A Blogger

During USMLE study time, I did 3 things:

1) Study.
2) Watch decade old-reruns of 90210.
3) Read ever single online publication/blog out there - the lowbrow, the middlebrow, the highbrow, the middlebrow for the high brow. From the obscure to the mainstream, I read practically everything on the World Wide Webs to avoid learning.

As a result of number 3, I came to a major conclusion: blogs are the wave of the future. A recent New York Times article was about a socialite who blogged about her married life and issues with dishwashers. If the esteemed Times could spend time waxing poetic about a blog composed mainly of uninteresting pictures, then how important had blogging become to the upper-middle class white people culture? The guy from Stuff White People Like had gotten a book deal. Julia Allison, Star Magazine's editor-at-large and the real-life version of Carrie Bradshaw, was a constant object of mockery on Gawker. Perez Hilton, formerly an unknown, chubby but snarky loser, was now a still-chubby, famous Hollywood power player.

Before the internets, artsy types hoping for a glamorous career amongst the New York literati had to be a well-connected rich kid who could hire a ghostwriter (I'm looking at you Jonathan Safran Foer...JK).

However, with the handy advent of the Internets, blogging has now democratized the entry into these formerly exclusive halls. If enough people found your thoughts were interesting, you, too, could get a book deal or sell ads at an upwards of $50,000. Maybe most of you devoted fans of this blog (all 8 of you) already realize this, but I just realized that blogging could be a legit profession literally two days ago.

Weirdly, last year, when the winter of my discontent became all-consuming, I'd ironically say I wanted to be a "blogger" when I grew up, and I laughed at the utter absurdity of such a career. After all, as a first-generation, in my world-view people got jobs as professionals. People didn't blog for a living. They wrote blogs as side projects because they were fundamentally, at heart, narcissists, who thought their unfiltered, unedited, grammatically-incorrect posts mattered to an invisible legion of kind-hearted readers.

However, blogging is merely a component of "micro-fame." It satisfies our voyeuristic sensibilities that define the current zeitgeist. After all, consider the popularity of reality crap shows like The Hills. The seemingly vapid LC's willingness to live her life out on the stage of Hollywood has granted her a certain tabloid fame, well beyond the allocated 15 minutes.

And so, we blog on, thinking that our spur of the moments thoughts matter in some small, shitty way. But now, there is this fear of "oversharing" on the internets that Emily Gould let us know about in her cover story in New York Times Magazine. She was a former gawker.com editor who would overshare about her relationships on her blog and on her posts on the website, and it came back to bit her in the ass when her ex divulged all her dirty little secrets in Page Six. So while all bloggers believe sharing is caring, I think we all know what the lesson here is: while Al Gore is an all-round do-gooder these days with his fancy Noble Peace Prize, his crazy invention of the Internet is really difficult to control. So, be careful, little lady, it ain't safe out there on them blogs.

--By Mariam, who can't figure out how Hilary Swank won two Oscars. I mean she played Steve Sanders' GIRLFRIEND on 90210.