Typing

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This is just another blog where the ideas of another aspiring blogger types out another stream of ideas to leave another footprint on the vast virtual landscape that is the internet.  Countless hours are spent typing, each hour demanding the commitment of each finger to create the words that will portray an image of the blogger's thoughts.  Presentation of the blog depending on the accuracy of each finger... yet getting no credit or appraisal.  Once the skill and comfortable pace is attained and learned it is simply just another tool in the blogger's creative arsenal-- the keys being an extension of their hands that are unable to touch and manipulate the blog itself, letting the mind drift endlessly into the digital abyss whilst bypassing the utter reality in that their knuckles bounce up and down... fingers tingling... wrists crooked... shoulders hunched.  Physical consequences are as lost as the mind is in the digital abyss.

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Typing has become an everyday mundane activity that the blogger thinks nothing of.  Ben Highmore says in their work "Everyday Life and Cultural Theory" that an everyday activity "witnesses the absorption of the most revolutionary of inventions into the landscape of the mundane.  Radical transformations in all walks of life become 'second nature'. The new becomes traditional and the residues of the past become outmoded and available for fashionable renewal" (2).  The revolutionary invention of the keyboard has served the purpose of simply creating the mundane process of creating text on a digital platform.

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Although, this everyday activity isn't exclusive to only bloggers but ranges a demographic spanning from an early adolescent individual to an aged tech-savvy retiree. People of all types, whether working a desk job or casually e-mailing an overseas friend, partake in the activity of communicating beyond their speech.  Michael Jackson writes in his work, "Knowledge of the Body," that, "thinking and communicating through the body precede and to a great extent always remain beyond speech" (328).  An entire network of communication has been created through the act of pressing a desired finger to a desired key.  As if it were a tradition, people of different backgrounds and with different motives each partake in this same activity.

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References

Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. Web.

Jackson, Michael. Knowledge of the Body. 2nd ed. Vol. 18. N.p.: n.p., 1983. New Ser. Web. 11 Sept. 2008. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2801438>.

A Portrait of Myself

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I feel my mind go blank as the adrenaline of the moment takes over.  A typical play usually lasts no more than 5 seconds but a condensed form of all the hours of hard work I put in begins to run through my mind.  Every single step I took, I take once more.  Every running swing of my arm, I swing again.  Every bead of sweat I sweat, now take their encore.  My breath cuts off when in the blink of an eye I turn my head to find the ball already in the air approaching me.  Time has now stopped.  And I have all the time in the world to think if I will catch this ball or not.  All of my focus has drained the rest of my body to the point of entire numbness, save for the tremor of my beating heart muting all auditory stimuli into a lone rhythmic thump.

One year before I would have never imagined myself playing such a physical sport but I found my way in.  Just three months ago I saw my teammates playing their hearts out while I sat on the bench just hoping for an opportunity.  And just one minute ago I was still on that bench.  I had no time to ask myself, why me out of everyone? Am I ready for this moment? Am I going to catch the ball? 

That isn't what you do in this moment.

Because of how badly I wanted it I simply decided that this is my turn, my chance to shine.  It was a moment like this that has come to define who I am today because I will never forget that moment when I reached up and extended both arms beyond my range to clutch the football in my hands and to have never let it go.