so far, so good

I have now been a freelance professional blogger for over 24 hours. The idea is still weird. It just seems suspicious, somehow, that I might be able to make money by telling random people what I think. That's like offering to pay me for showing up to the internet. It's too easy.

I also seem to have picked up a troll already, which is odd. Why on Earth someone would pay attention to me strictly to dislike me, I dunno. It seems like such a waste of energy. They also seem to have absorbed this idea, common to the self-esteem generation, that it's a dire sin to ever think you're better than anyone else, for any reason. I'm sure there were originally good intentions behind this; the idea, I think, was to prevent an environment where only the very best were ever recognized, so that kids weren't discouraged from trying things that they couldn't be immediately good at. But it seems to have mutated over the years, to the annoying but probably harmless idea that you should find something to praise in everybody, however small, and past that to the actively destructive idea that it was verboten to publicly praise the best people at all, to prevent everyone else's feelings from being hurt.

I'm not fabulous at everything. I am, for example, a lousy basketball player, and I fail miserably at piano and guitar. On the other hand, I am a better writer than most people, and I don't think there's anything wrong with being recognized for that. The fact that I am a smart kid is just that -- a fact. I write from that viewpoint because it's something that shaped a lot of my childhood, and part of what defines who I am. Coming from a background of bullying at school and crazy family at home, I don't deal with social situations like most other people do, and I intend to continue to talk about it for as long as my audience is interested.

So far I've had quite a lot of people tell me I'm fascinating, and only a couple tell me I'm nuts, which I think speaks for itself.