If I had said to someone twenty years ago, “In twenty years there will be a way for you to say what you really think about everything related to your job, with a big audience” they would have looked at me as if I were crazy. Now, as Tyler Cowen pointed out, that’s actually the case, thanks to blogs. It’s a kind of psychological miracle. It’s due to technology, sure, but the achievement is essentially psychological.
It’s not the only psychological miracle that blogging provides. Consider this account of being in a mental hospital:
K, so since the night I got there, I would get a whiff of this nasty smell. It ‘s hard to describe, it was just nasty and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.
One day, I’m in my room with two roommates and I smell it.
“There it is again!” I yelled.
“It always smells like this.” The older lady said.
“OmG, you’ve been here so long, you’re used to it,” I said, repulsed. However, I still couldn’t figure out where it came from. Some times I would smell it, then go back to that same place and it would be gone. It was making me (excuse the pun) feel like I was going crazy.
After using the bathroom, I went to wash my hands. Maybe it was the soap? No.
Later, I took a shower and sniffed the shampoo that came out of the pump on the wall.
It was the friggin shampoo! No wonder I got a whiff here and a whiff there. Everyone in the building (32 people) had that crap in their hair!
Vivid, easy to read, even enjoyable to read. Now you know a little — very little, but more than zero — about what it’s like to be in such a place. I read Girl, Interrupted. Lots of movies include scenes in mental hospitals — as stylized as a Dove ad. I didn’t see Titicut Follies. Maybe Sylvia Plath wrote about it, I don’t know. It’s been nearly impossible — or actually impossible — to get an accurate idea of what it’s like to be in a mental hospital without actually visiting one. But now it is.
Thanks for reading my blog and stuff.