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But just because you can’t have opinions about all things doesn’t mean you can’t have opinions about any things. There are some things we know for sure. These might be minor—how to treat your parents, how to grow tomatoes, how to build a house. We each have a few such things. Start there with your feet firmly planted and see how it feels. Then take a few small steps until you reach a place that still feels firm, but where nobody else is standing. Then try to make something beautiful with what you see.

Jonathan Harris writes about a new online landscape, suited for meaningful and deep human expression on “World Building in a Crazy World”. Even if you don’t care about the guy’s artistic/narrative work, the thoughts he gathers on what goals and problems its builders face make you ponder what part you play in making self-expression better for you and those for whom you care.

Tumblr, to me, is a landmark in the world he describes: it’s a freeform enough a tool that you can mix and match whatever pieces of the Internet (and of yourself) you wish to share, neither falling on the terseness and immediateness of other services nor being required to be long-winded in preset ways. The freedom to alternate a nice reblog with your (possibly boring) considerations about the world sprinkles Dashboards all around with variety and wonder, all perpetually renewed by the remixing capabilities the platform offers.

It also frees (and encourages) you to experiment with form. On Facebook and Twitter, you are usually constructing a compendium of banalities through the restricted paths they offer you; here, you’re constantly showing yourself through different lenses, allowing for implicit narratives that others can (and will) try to sew together, spellbound with how alike them, or completely opposite to them, you are. That, to me, is gold.

A year and a half after creating my account, this place maintains a nice balance between “Wooow!” and “Wow…” Seriously, guys: you make my life better in many, many sweet little ways. And even if this post remains buried among the hundreds of good stuff floating around here, I feel like thanking everyone who sweats to keep this sharp and running. Your success is nothing but deserved.

and this morning one of the little girls across the street, well she’s a teenager but a young one, came out and told me how much she likes my dress, she is always yelling compliments out across our little street about my dressing and shoes and asking where I am going.  She’s sweet and very pretty but when I ask how school is she shrugs her shoulders and looks at the ground and then says it doesn’t matter because she wants to be a singer or a model and her mother just signed her up for modeling classes and she is trying to lose a little weight.  I smile at all of this.  It seems so long ago that I was a teenager except that girl that I was at 15, 16, 17 is still inside and looking at my thick legs trying to convince me that they are fat instead of strong.  When I ask her what else would she like to do she shrugs again and says that she’ll just get married and I sigh and she sighs and she flips her long straight blond hair behind her shoulders and she really is so pretty.  I want her to know that pretty really is just as pretty does and that pretty matters so little and life is hard, it’s good, but it is so terribly hard and that all of the work she does now might maybe make it a little easier because she would have more choices and that can be easier and then I remember I am projecting a little and the other part that isn’t projecting still wants to shake her and tell her to cultivate something other than pretty and standing and posing herself into a corner but no one could tell me anything when I was young, and sometimes they still can’t.  So I don’t shake her.  I smile and she smiles back and she’s just a girl and I want to hug her now but I make a joke instead and as I turn to go inside a boy pulls up to her driveway and I walk back to my books.