How To: Account for the Nonexistent (The MetaPost!)

        It's not news to anyone that teenagers are bad at managing their time, prioritizing, and focusing on their schoolwork.  As the semester began coming to its close a week or two ago, I became increasingly aware of how my procrastination has accumulated over these past few months. Specifically for American Studies, considering the absence of a traditional grading system, the number of blogposts each of my classmates and I have published is the most easily-accessible and concrete way for us to get a feel for where we're at grade-wise in the class.
        (At this point, I would like to clarify that I am not using this meta-post as a means to make excuses for my lack of blogposts. I am simply extending a helpful arm to those of my piers who, like myself, made a sincere attempt at conquering the blogpost assignment, and were wildly unsuccessful.)
        To those in my class like Kathleen and Betsy, who are either New Trier's most disciplined students or are natural born bloggers (or quite possibly both), I commend your dedication to the task at hand. Not to say that those two are the only ones who religiously blogged every week, but I personally found Kathleen and Betsy's writing to be interesting and informative a majority of the time. As both a writer and reader of our class's blogs, I am painfully aware of how difficult that is to pull off.
      As I was blogging, I found the 'Boring Idea' to be a rampant cause of death for the hefty collection of half-finished blogposts that are now reluctantly in my possession. These ideas are typically caused by a shortage of time and inspiration, which left me desperately trying to crank out a post, regardless of its content.
        I have learned that blogposts are products that the writer is attempting to sell to all readers. Beginning with the first word of a post, the writers mission is to convince the reader that they are not wasting their time. If you're Mr. Bolos or Mr. O'Connor, you only blog about things that you're passionate about, and it keeps the reader wanting more.
        Of all the blogposts that I wrote this past semester, the ones I find the most interesting are the ones that I didn't force myself to write. It's no secret that our blogs are a weekly assignment, but I would be more proud of myself if I could write a couple of posts like Interpreting Creativity or Getting To Know Someone than a surplus of the sad excuse for a blogpost that I forced myself to write about a current event I found pretty uninteresting.
         Keep an extra pair of socks on you next semester, because my blogposts might knock them right off. And if they turn out just as boring as they were this past semester, maybe me and blogging aren't meant to be after all. We'll see.