Feeling the post-modern condition

One of my units at university was called "Realism and Postmodernism". This rather expansively intellectual title was pretty hard slog, yet one of the most enjoyable of my degree. After being weighed down by philosophical tracts by some names as Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Cixous, and Lacan (spunk!) what be basically learned can be boiled down to one sentence: "There is no such thing as an original thought." At times, this is rather a depressing notion; at others, I am quietly satisfied. Like when I sit and stare at my overly long toenails and wonder, "Can I be bothered going to get the nail clippers or should I rather stick this dirt-covered nob in my mouth and do it myself?" I can then think, "I am no freak; others before my have asked this very same question". But then where does that leave my blogging? I have been feeling rather a crisis of confidence when it comes to writing lately. I didn't know why and I haven't had enough mental fortitude to figure it out. Then I read this by Helen Garner, one of my favourite writers, "What horrifies me about personal email is the vastness of its message field. This is chaos, the abyss. If you live alone, if you suffer at times from an anxiety that you might not exist, email tempts you to behave neurotically--to pour into its appalling infiniteness a cataract, a hemorrhage of words, bottomless, boundaryless. What feels like existential relief is in fact psychologically shallow, a dreadful and meaningless leakage of self."** Oh. My. God. She has written in one paragraph what it would take me at least a month to even compose, let alone shape cognitively in my skull. Yet it is precisely how I feel, just substitute 'email' for 'blog'. Then I wonder what I could say about reading. And then I discovered, my thoughts have already been anticipated. Bahhhhhhhhhhh! So what happens next? I could hop on a link-train and direct you to any other one of thousands of excellent bastions of thought, yet that would take you away from me. (No!) No. I'll just keep haunting my little bell tower here and ring out occasionally what news I have, come good or bad. That's what most of us do anyway, right? A thought is a thought is a thought. Am I being too abstract? Maybe. Perhaps I should go back to poo talk? **Garner, H, 'Tutto Sereno' in The Feel of Steel, Picador, 2001, pg94. You know what I love? I do a spell check and the checker comes back to me MOST ANGRY about my Garner quote. It seems her vocabulary is superior to Mr. Computer's here. He will not accept 'infinteness' or 'boundaryless'. Too bad, sirree.