The Holy Grail as a pencil holder...

In a scene from a story I heard once, an archeologist was searching for a valuable chalice (cup) that supposedly possessed miraculous powers--something like the Holy Grail, but not quite on the same level. Hearing that a certain church had owned the chalice for a long time, he went to the church and asked the pastor about it. The pastor said he had never seen or heard of the chalice. Finally, the archeologist described the chalice in detail to the pastor. "Oh!" cried the pastor, "That chalice! It's in my office; I've been keeping pencils in it."

It turned out that the pastor was only joking, but that scene always makes me smile. How impossible it is that anyone could miss the value of something like the Holy Grail...but this last week, as I read about complicated rhetoric strategies, this story returned to my mind. So, I reasoned: If the English language is the Holy Grail, then the vast majority of the population is keeping pencils in it. Huh? Allow me to explain.

To most people--including myself--the English language is what you use to get fries at McDonald's, to argue with your siblings, or to answer the questions on the history exam. The English language used on the street and in homes is a highly fluid creature that morphs into whatever it needs to be for the occasion, whether correct or not. But--as evidenced by the rhetoric reading for this week--our language posesses a vast power that often remains untapped. Can you use the English language powerfully without knowing terms like "ethos", "pathos", and "logos"? Sure. It comes naturally to us. Think of a new mother who is trying to convince her husband that the crying baby really does need its diaper changed. She could perfectly naturally appeal to any of the three kinds of rhetoric, without knowing anything about them.

Logos: "Why, just yesterday I read Harvard's newest scientific poll, which found out that babies who didn't get their diapers changed regularly had a 75% higher chance of getting put in jail before the age of twenty-five!"

Pathos: "Honey, look at his poor little red face! Think how awful it must feel to have a wet diaper with no one to change it. I wish he would grow up with happier memories of his father..."

Ethos: "Look, I'm the one who spends all day every day with him. You would think I would know when his diaper needs changing by now--and it needs changing."

Our fictional mother has just employed all three tools of rhetoric to try to build a convincing argument. Even without any knowledge of rhetoric, humans are smart enough to instinctively use good rhetoric strategies when they want to convince someone of something. It's truly amazing.

So how important is it to really learn the language of rhetoric? Imagine what happens when someone is made aware of logos, pathos, and ethos and how each can be used. Imagine if we took our pencils out of the Grail, polished it, and put it in the place of honor it deserves. Wow.

Mom? Is that you?

So as I've wallowed in blog construction the past few days, a certain peculiarity has come to my notice.

Each day, I've been building my blog. Whenever I have to stop that, I've been thinking about my blog. Agonizing over names, color choices, graphics, descriptions, gadgets, etc. My mom left me sitting in front of my blog at 10:00 last night, and when she came down at 7:30 the next morning she found me in the exact same spot. (Yes, I had gone to bed in the middle, but not to all appearances) So why all the time, all the effort, for something as abstract as a blog? And this phenomenon is not limited to myself and my blog. Almost everyone has some kind of Internet presence, be it through forums, blogs, facebooks, myspaces, emailing...you get the idea. Most of these presences are meticulously constructed combinations of words, music, graphics, and ideas. Think about it: our Internet presence is us as is defined by thousands of people who will never meet us. This thought seems either scary or cool. Scary, because you must give a complete picture of yourself through a few pictures and words. Cool--admit it--because you don't actually have to give a picture of yourself.

This gives rise to the key question I started pondering yesterday. If someone met a friend or family member on the Internet, would they even recognize them? A seemingly quiet person might retreat to the web to shout at and insult others without consequence. A seemingly aggressive person might become kind and encouraging to those they cannot see face to face. Nerds can become cool, or failing students can become geniuses. Old people become young, young people grow up. People often strike a strange self-contradiction in which they hide some aspects of their character and at the same time reveal their dreams and hopes with a startling vulnerability.

It's strange to think, surfing the web, about what sort of people you really meet. Sure, your cyber classmates or the other aficionados on that unicycling forum are your best friends...but what do you really know about them? If I met my dad or mom, my siblings, my best friend, my teacher, on a blog, forum, or facebook, would I even recognize them? Would they recognize me?

I find this thought to be fascinating...and a little troubling. It has certainly made me aware of how I present myself in cyberspace. I'm ashamed to say that I have taken advantage of facelessness in the past, and strict honesty has loosened its bounds somewhat. After all, no one will ever know or care... Or will they?

Here I am...

Funny...here I am, standing (figuratively speaking) in a place I never planned to be: the world of blogdom. If it weren't for the prompting of a certain AP English class, I wouldn't be here at all. But I'm starting to like it already.

Blogging has always appeared to me to be rather a waste of time. People who don't have anything else to do sit and meticulously record every detail of their lives. They hopefully cast post after post into cyberspace, hoping that someday, someone might actually read what they write. Thousands upon thousands of bloggers do this every day...and who reads them all? If you looked hard enough--or even not that hard--you could find billions of souls laid to bare, billions of lives dissected, before nothing but an empty circuit-riddled world. And maybe one of those million rushing lives will pause for a moment to glance into someone else's quiet construction of identity. So, I had always rolled my eyes at the blog world. And yet look at me now, bouncing up and down in front of my computer, trying to imagine all the great stuff I can post. My thoughts are rushing up and down, going "I can post about that song I heard last week, and that other thing I read in philosophy the other day, and oh, I can't forget to post that poem I wrote, and I've got to send this link to everyone I know, and...and..."

Perhaps I should have kept my cynicism to myself. Or I can just have a good laugh at myself and dive in.

So, welcome to my blog. Keep an eye out for new pictures, quotes, features, and so forth, along with a steady trickle of posts. And I can always hope that someone besides the back of my computer is reading this...