Things I've learned

::subtitle:: Things I should have probably already known

1.  Never outline a blog post.

2.  Never outline a blog post and then actually type the post after 10:30 at night.

3.  Never outline a blog post and then get obsessed with hitting every point on the outline, in the order you thought of them.

4.  Never outline a blog post and cling to the outline and the conclusion you came to in the outline as though it is a term paper.  At least in my case.  I'm posting as a [very vague] form of art.  Outlines and art don't make good bedfellows.

5.  Never outline a blog post and then stop yourself from interacting further with the subject at hand.

6.  Never outline a blog post and somehow leave any kind of idea of a thesis out of the outline and out of the actual post.

7.  Just to recap, never outline a blog post.

Almost as soon as I hit post, I knew my last post was a lot of rambling, resulting from a really good idea.  Seed of an idea anyway.  I think it missed the mark on maturing into an actual idea.  The point I was trying to make was that while empathy drives many interactions and choices in each person's life, on a corporate level, I believe that a large part of great and/or popular art and literature comes to be considered great exactly because of the detachment displayed in it.  Empathy seems to me to have been relegated to secret and 'lower' realms of pain and secret desire--I am referring to these as separate entities, though I know they often intertwine.  And I don't deny that empathy has been one of it's own grave diggers (I have a book on my shelf from my depressive past titled The Journey from Abandonment to Healing in which empathy spectacularly prevents itself from being taken seriously).  It came as a shock to me to think about this, when I so want to create a reaction in viewers (or readers) through my art.  I had this great revelation of 'Hey, someone recognizes the same thing that I do!' about shared emotion, which was followed by thinking of how that would be a great basis for successful art, which was followed by the let down (similar to what I would imagine C.S. Lewis experienced in the story I referenced) of realizing that, no, reaction in not what makes art famous or memorable.  So I'm going to be fighting against the tide.  But I'm ok with that-- honestly, it was never really happy, comfortable feelings I wanted to invoke anyway.