In The Beginning… the word was with Dave

“So think of the things that you’re good at, what you do all the time..” my tutor said, the t’s falling from his words like ash from a cigarette. We were being instructed on how to create our blog for assessment, and encouraged to pick a niche. It seemed like it should be easy, after all, everyone in the world has a blog now, how hard could it be to find something worth writing about?

I thought, and then I thought some more, looked around me in a sort of bland panic, thought some more and within me was birthed the uncomfortable realisation that I am not actually good at anything, nor do I have any hobbies that I commit to enough to write about them in any sort of authorative voice.

I am fairly average, in most ways one can think of.

Just by way of example.. Ahem:

I own a guitar, but am always about to change the strings and start learning

I have a book collection that I am quite enamoured of, but am yet to read half of it, along with any Tolstoy or Woolfe, I’ve never even cracked the cover on Catcher in the Rye

I don’t cook

I enjoy art, but have next to no artistic talent aside from free-postcard-sticking-up-with-blutak, and I don’t even have enough technical knowledge to fill one of them

I love music, but only what I happen across. I read music reviews that are like “clearly this, his fifth album was influenced heavily by the Pixies early work..” and my brain explodes. I think I know who the Pixies are

I write, but not often and not very well

I like movies and I watch them, but have yet to enjoy David Lynch, or attend a film festival of any kind

I maintain a respectful distance from real immersion in anything that interests me that is helped by significantly poor time management and a gold fish’s attention span.

Woe. Woe is me and my too many but too few niches. Woe.

And then it hit me. The reason blogging is such a big deal, and the reason so many people do it, is because you can write whatever you want. And statistically, the majority of blogs are going to be fairly mundane,  pedestrian affairs. And so, perhaps the niche that I can appeal to COMPLETE MEDIOCRITY. I can handcraft the most extraordinarily average blog the world has ever seen!

But of course noone would read that, as would be a piece of shit.

I then decided I could record my routine journeys into fair-to-middling town, for all to read and feel better about themselves by comparison.

The Competition.

Obviously a “mediocre blog” can mean a couple of things, one being a blog that mainly focusses on an inept and terrifyingly boring author chronicling his/her/its daily sojourns to the fridge and or toilet, the other being a blog dedicated to the understanding that mediocrity is something we all face and most fear.

Mylifeisaverage.com is the latter type and exists to show up how much meaningless tripe is fed into the internet daily. As opposed to other humorous blogs, its content is generated by users of the site, who submit stories of their funny/ inane lives in the hopes  of having them read by all the other nobodies. It’s really funny a lot of the time, and some of the stories are actually anything but average. If you hit the MLIA official blog, you’ll find an homage to the wonder of the average. Attention is paid to things like toast, and socks, and how good those things are despite their inate anverageness.

I like this site, particularly the official blog, as it is a celebration of sorts of all that is normal, as opposed to the wonder of freakish parkur men, or Lady Gaga and her bandaidie outfits. What drew me to the subject matter is its necessity, and its often unsung beauty. That and my inability to do anything well. Cough. MLIA.

In terms of appearance it would certainly go against the very idea of the blog if it was anything but average, and it certainly doesn’t disappoint. Mylifeisaverage itself is smeared over a fairly inoffensive and wah grey background, it is easy to find your way around, the font is readable, if a little uggo, and the couple of ads are not too in you face and seem to appeal to a twenties to early thirties sort of crowd who for the most part would be the appropriate audience.

I found another site that seems to be about the everyday, normal stuff (shocking I know, on the www, right?!). It’s called Exceptional Mediocrity, which of course is right up my alley. This one is more of the first type of mediocre blog, in that it the charting of one man’s life and thoughts about the things that occur in it day to day. It is actually well written and interesting though. This blog obviously doesn’t have the same “everyone get on board” appeal as MLIA, so advertising isn’t an issue, and it is a Blogger blog, so it is a fairly run of the mill layout. He uses snappy headings like “Why are drug reps hot?” and “the Gay Dog” which totally gets you reading, the entries could probably stand to be shorter, but they are for the most part amusing and written with intelligence, so one wants to stick with them.

I’ll leave with a look at my fave sort of average blog. It is not average in name, really, or in its aim, but more so in its covering of such a wide variety of things that it cannot actually be a blog about anything except maybe Everything in the Sky. Ryan writes about his job(s) his dad, his walks down the street, his favorite new gadget and music he digs. He basically puts anything he thinks is rad on his site, which of course is the whole point. Ry-ry, as I have started affectionately calling him, does have technical leanings, but there is too much of a peppering of music bits and excellent photo bits to really be a techie blog. What I enjoy the most is that he is funny, really really, I’m fairly jealous of his sharp as a rapier wit, funny– but he can also turn a poised and thoughtful phrase like nobodies business.

And that my friends, is my niche. A bit of overshare, but that’s how we do.