Judo is not Food

On Blogspot, there's a little tab that says "Stats" where you can see how many hits you get over any given time frame. The numbers on this number are sad! I got more hits per day on my retired cooking blog than I've gotten over the past month on this one. Someone actually had the gall to e-mail me and tell me to "Stop writing about boring Karate stuff and write about food again! xoxo" While the xoxo provided me with some temporary comfort, I asked "Who does this person think they are?" Their comment seems to imply that I should stop writing about something I care about so I can amuse more people. That's a bit presumptuous isn't it? I don't have an obligation to entertain the masses with this, nor should people feel as though they should be entertained by this. However, I've heard this comment before... why?

My theory is that people like things that make them feel smart. Food blogs are the most popular non-celebrity gossip blogs because everybody eats- you can make something with chicken and a spice and every comment basically reads "Wow I eat chicken too! Why didn't I think of that?" There's a familiarity that people crave because they don't want to feel completely ignorant. (Yes, this is insulting.) But it's why you see some bullshit study on the Yahoo! News feed, like "Eat this! Not that!" pretty much every day. People eat that shit up (pun). I read food blogs too, I'm not saying not to. The problem comes in when people chastise publications that have no relevance to them, as though not putting those cliched articles is a failure of internet media.

I'll relate this apprehension towards unfamiliar things to a real-life example. Two of my very good friends are "athletes" in the sense that play can play 5 or so sports on the D4 high school level. I spent most of my life doing Judo, so I'm even worse that they are. However, when they go out and play football or basketball I join in for the fun of it. It's been this way for the past 7-8 years and I thought it would be fun for a change to take them into a Judo class so they could see what I've been up to the majority of my life. They literally looked at me and said "Hey man, I don't want to even try something I know I'm going to be bad at." To me, that shows a lack of open-mindedness and just a shitty attitude towards trying new things. It could also be a lack of testicles, who knows.

So here's my schtick: Judo is not food. Some people will just never be interested in what I write about, but there are people who are and their opinions matter just as much. Just bare with its existence- if you don't want to read it, don't.

Thanks for stopping by, you're alright! (sarcastic)
-Ben