An aspiring writer starts a blog. Cue shock from no one.

The day has come. After all the resistance, denial, and deliberation as to how much time a blog would take away from Netflix and I’s just blossoming romance, it has begun; I’ve started a blog, and apparently, I’m going to try to amuse you with said blog.

I like to think I’m kind of funny. Granted, I’m fairly positive that all homo sapiens think themselves at least decently humorous. When a person admits to you that they are “not very funny” (usually accompanied by a sort of tinkling laugh that allows the other person to know how humble the speaker is), 99.9% of the time they’re actually thinking “I AM THE GOD OF GIGGLES.”

I will hesitantly say I don’t feel like I fall into this category. Mostly because I would never say I’m “not very funny” in the first place. However, I’m aware that I’m rather like a newborn baby deer trying to walk for the first time when humor and writing meet one another–legs all akimbo, flying out from under me, and the managing to get a footing purely accidentally the majority of the time.

See, in real life, when I’m funny, it’s a consequence of my inability to shut up. I puke words at an output greater than most of mankind. Sometimes, the people around me laugh at this verbal vomit, and I pretend like it was intentional.

But writing is intentional, and it’s a lot more fucking difficult to be funny intentionally than unintentionally.

That’s really the impetus behind starting this blog in the first place. I’d been thinking for a while that I wanted an outlet to practice my writing without the stress necessarily of school or my own nuanced, self-critiques of “YOU SUCK, THIS SUCKS” I tend to have towards my fiction. I considered quite a few different “types” of blogs.

• Style blog: No, that requires ironing and pride in my appearance.
• Travel blog: Does leaving my room count as travel?
• Food blog: Images of bringing out a camera to document each of my meals made me want to punch myself. Repeatedly.

I also thought about diving into more serious topics, like feminism, politics, social justice, etc., and I will most certainly touch on these topics on this blog. But, I also wanted to challenge myself, and I’m not used to writing consistently humorously. The themes in my fiction tend to be far weightier, striving for meaning and substance and all the things writers want readers to feel when their words make the transition from page to mind. To be blunt, in the past, I’ve been more concerned with making people cry, not laugh, when I write. That’s started to change as I have realized that constantly writing with my “this is deep shit” switch on is exhausting. And, that vanity, is not necessarily always a bad thing.

I like making people laugh. It feels ridiculously good when someone consumes a dopey little string of letters you composed and cracks a smile. Being funny is unique as it is the only kind of narcissism that really benefits others as equally as it benefits yourself.

I’m certainly going to strain over every word in order that I might cause you to positively clutch your sides and frighten the  family cat and/or small child with the veracity of your laughter. In others, I’ll say fuck it and talk about butts, and maybe you’ll still incur Mr. Whiskers’s wrath when you read it. I’ll talk about my life, comic books, religion, and my hypochondriac mother, all with a spin to make you hopefully chuckle.

Basically, I will attempt to amuse you.

And if I don’t–well. Then this is awkward.